RELIGIOUS MANIAC. National Review torture enthusiast Andy McCarthy really wants America to learn that Islam is the enemy, but nice Muslim just won't cooperate. No mater, he's got an answer:

I just watched the latest installment of Peter's intriguing interview of Fouad Ajami. I'm sure Mark will have his own take on it, but, despite my admiration for Mr. Ajami, I was unimpressed. He seems to make Mark's point that there are moderate Muslims but not a moderate Islam. In purporting to refute this notion, Mr. Ajami basically says that he was brought up as a moderate Muslim in a family that was similarly "secular" and moderate. OK, but Islam is certainly not secular — that's a contradiction. If Ajami is saying that his family chose to live in a secular fashion that did not incorporate many Muslim traditions (he mentions that women in his family did not wear the veil), that means they were resistant to various tenets, not that those tenets are not part of Islam.

I understand why he might feel this way. In my darker moments I feel that Christians who have been taught by their mullahs that abortion is murder are similarly a menace to society. Just because they seem to conform to our way of life doesn't mean there aren't many Scott Roeders out there, sleeper cells waiting to kill us because they hate our freedoms.

But then I remember that while some of them are indeed homicidal maniacs, the overwhelming majority of American Christians, thank God, don't take their religion that seriously. And if you believe in America at all, you must expect American Muslims to similarly assimilate into our pluralistic society.

Unless what you're really against is pluralism, and what you're really for is diligently stirring the shit in hopes of making this a truly Christian nation at last, with blood and thunder.

UPDATE. In response, Mark Steyn is his usual raghead-hating self (while professing "respect" for Mr. Ajami, who must by now be wondering what they mean by that word).

But Mark Krikorian is, amazingly, even worse: He mentions one Hispanic writer who suggested that white people leave his people alone and watch out for Muslim-Americans instead, then adds, "I suspect lots of apologists for mass immigration would like to make this argument explicitly, but refrain because they know it would disrupt their united front with Islamic groups." This is really unfair; Think how nativists would object if I tarred them all with the ravings of Mark Krikorian.

Krikorian also points with pride to his own earlier post in which he said "Look, I understand why conservatives get irritated by the leftist whining of so many black 'leaders,' and even much of the black public..." and a bunch of other stuff that normal people would prefer to have covered up.

WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME. How does a wingnut start his day? Some start by thumbing through new legislation with sinister-sounding titles. Like the "Healthy Choices Act" -- ooh, that must be double Hitler at least!

No need to work too hard, let's just skim the top, where the bill orders something added to the section of the U.S. Public Health Service Act that says vaccinations should be reported to the Federal Government (already Hitler, of course, but let's take it one outrage at a time). The Healthy Choices Act would amend this to also require the health professionals who administer the vaccines to report the following:

the age, gender, height, and weight of each person vaccinated to calculate the body mass index of such person

Skree! The Feds will also give grants to "ensure that BMI measurements will be recorded for children ages 2 through 18." Skree! And if your kid's a blimp, the Feds will stomp on your parental rights by providing you with "information on how to lower BMI and information on state and local obesity prevention programs." Providing information! Why, it might as well say "brainwashing"!

And if you don't give up your precious BMI, the Feds will jackboot your face by not giving you the federal grant! And how's a tea partyin' man supposed to Live Free or Die without federal grants?

SKREEE!

Watch Out for the Fat Police..

I guess in the age of socialized medicine everyone's lifestyle is everyone else's business. Except for promiscuous behavior of course. Women can sleep around all they want and the only thing men can do is pay for the abortions. Don't even think about what homosexuals do in public parks and restrooms.

SKREEEE!

The OP(formerly the GOP) wing of the socialist Republicrat party working with the RAT wing to push more of their unconstitutional, socialist agenda on the people. It's time to hammer Congress once again by contacting them folks! Keep up the pressure! Don't let up!

... have to keep the livestock in good market condition...

SKREEEE!

When are we going to start demanding government get out of our lives? Does no one lese see how this bill, an offshoot of Obama-Care (probably mandated by Obama-Care) will have the government telling us what we ALL can eat and when...

SKREEEEEEEEE!

How about we start by having Michelle Obama tell us what her BMI is? Dare I suggest the number would be appallingly high? Seriosuly, this Big Brother crap has to stop.

The punch line is, I'm not entirely sure the program is a good use of government funds and would like to see a reasonable debate on the matter. Unfortunately the only debate going right now is between supporters of a public health proposal and delusional, paranoid idiots.

UPDATE. The American Frozen Food Institute supports the bill. The American Frozen Food Institute! People, do I have to spell it out for you?

UPDATE 2. Biggest SKREEEEE of the day:

If we don't put a stop to this insanity on November we're doomed as a nation.

I would award Babalu Blog the Golden Straitjacket right now, but maybe one of them will declare that the Healthy Choices Act will blow up the planet Earth or destroy the universe or something. They're competitive that way.

UPDATE 3. Commenter Nathan sees the thin end of the wedge: "This will only lead to Crisconacht."

UPDATE 4. Trust RedState to bring the crazy! After headlining that "Ron Kind (D-WI-3) Wants The Government To Track How Much Your Daughter Weighs" -- your virginal, innocent daughter, America! -- spokesbuffoon Dan McLaughlin declares that the Federal health Nazis will be "ogling [your] children." My God, that's why they want those kids to slim down -- so they'll be model-thin for their child sex camps! Forbid it, almighty God!

Of course, if you could get these people to change their mental picture of the health Nazis' subjects to Gabourey Sidibe, they'd be demanding a mandatory national diet plan.

UPDATE 5. The Lonely Conservative expects that under the new law, the Feds will "send the kids to fat camp" or "make them do 'volunteer' work" -- but then mentions that New York already has a similar program, and does not report that local children in consequence attend fat camps or engage in forced volunteerism.

But he still has a complaint:

I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve been told their kids are obese based on the Body Mass Index, but anyone with eyes can tell the children aren’t even overweight.

So -- the kids have to bear the stigma of an inaccurate body mass index. And there's no court of appeals for that, my friends! If the other children ever find out, Junior's middle school career is over! And even if they never find out (a safe bet, considering how health records work), the bureaucrats will know, and the faux-fatties will be the first ones in the ovens!

It's becoming clearer why this particular Conservative is so Lonely.

TRAITORS UNMASKED! Paul Cella, previously self-revealed as an insufferable pedant, now shows himself to be a nut. In some rightwing strokebook, he rails against the "open society" doctrine he claims has been adopted by his fellow conservatives as well as by liberals. America's strength, he says, is not that it has a free marketplace of ideas, but a restricted one, in which "seditious" ideas are banned lest they grow and gut-rot the Republic.

Well, surely he means genuinely treasonous notions, yes?

Conservatives have in past commonly stood foursquare in defense of this American tradition. And when one reflects on the fate of other nations, where particularly odious seditious movements gained political power, one is inclined to adjudge the conservative stance as a wise one. John Adams the conservative signed the Sedition Act of 1798; the liberalizing French King Louis XVI lost his head.

Why, even the Tea Party people would be offended by this, if they were capable of understanding what Cella is talking about.

It's been a while since I've seen anyone defend the Alien and Sedition Acts who was not drunk or kidding. But Cella never kids, and if he drinks I imagine he only does it when he's writing.

Cella is also enthusiastic for McCarthyism, and if you object to the blacklisting of many people whose worst crime was believing in Communism (and many others who were merely mistaken for them because they were liberals), he responds that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were guilty. He also says 9/11 and Fort Hood show that "diversity" is "nothing but a degraded version of the open society doctrine, despite the disastrous paralysis it produced, which cost us the blood of our finest." So I guess we have to ban that, too -- maybe he wants the Civil Rights Act repealed?

Cella fails to inform us whether he believes the music of Dave Matthews, on which he has previously raved ("Scripture tells us that the truth will set you free; Matthews’s lyrics provide the obverse"), rises to the level of sedition. It seems to meet his standard of proof (i.e., he doesn't like it).

The punch line? This gibberish is taken seriously by Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg.

The country's going to hell, but this conservative intellectual revival should be good for a few laughs before Armageddon.

FREEPERS SEE RED. When Paul Godat told me about this, I assumed it was some kind of hack. Even the mouthbreathers at Free Republic, I thought, couldn't be so deranged as to get after Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for putting free tampons in the Harvard Law ladies' rooms when she was Dean.

But they are, Blanche, they are:

Nothing is "free." Someone always has to pay for it.
Whether it be health care, food, your mortgage, coffee, or tampons.

What a nightmare this woman is.

Excellent post. Thank you.
This Communist needs to be stopped

Free Tampons! Someone tell Rahm (”Take out your f****** tampon . . .”) Emannuel.

Lots of talk about her being a "bulldyke" and such like, too.

Kagan hasn't been my favorite nomination, but the wingnuts' internal combustion over her may make it so.

UPDATE. They also reference the bullshit ban-speech story. I used to think they all got morning memos, but now I think it's more like Slip Mahoney yelling "OK fellas, Routine 12!" at the Bowery Boys.

SHORTER RAMESH PONNURU: I think I can explain away the higher illegitimacy rates in red vs. blue states: Black people! They're like little blue states inside the red states, and so can't be held against white folk like us.

REPUBLICANS CONTINUE TO WORK ON GAINING THE WOMEN'S VOTE. Theblogprof criticizes TV food person Rachael Ray* for working with Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow on child nutrition and obesity. Because, said theblogprof, Stabenow is "obsese" Also:

Rachel Ray who herself has likely never been referred to as slim made it by being promoted by an obese woman (Oprah), works for the Food Network that both promotes eating and is staffed by obese cooks...

Theblogprof is a bodybuilder, which may explain his rage against non-buff female forms.

I've tried to keep my mind clear of the reductive attitude that conservatives are just assholes, but some days it's tough. (Speaking of which, linked by the Ole Perfesser, who -- to disclose a trade secret -- is a very reliable source for nut links.)

*UPDATE. Fixed spelling of Rachael Ray's name. (Thanks Vern.) Why was I relying on theblogprof's word on anything?

UPDATE. Oh, like you wouldn't hit it.

LIBERTARIAN BULLSHIT OF THE DAY. Elena Kagan is apparently averse to answering direct questions about specific legal cases in her Senate hearings. At Reason Jesse Walker headlines his pick-up of the Daily Caller story "Free Speech for Thee, But Not for Me." Walker was going for a subtle joke here, but you couldn't tell it by the commenters, who gobble up the slam on the liberty-hating socialist Obama and other aspects of modern life that displease them:

Fat Jewish lesbians need a voice too, you insensitive clod. Especially if that voice sounds exactly the same as every other liberal from Harvard.

That was mean of me, she's a woman, not an "it". But then, the tests results have not come back yet....

My favorite part is when some of the brethren make fun of Nixon's disrespect for the Constitution, and an Old Guard type comes in to remind them that bastard Lincoln started it.

No wait -- this is my favorite:

Could we just exclude anyone who has worked as an attorney for the current administration from consideration? I think this is a reasonable standard that in no way constrains the Executive branch from putting their kind of people on the Supreme Court (which is definitely the administration's Constitutional privilege).

I believe there is precedent for this in the Court of Narnia Under My Sheets With A Flashlight.

(Revised to be less dumb.)

UPDATE. Making everything worse as usual, Megan McArdle:

I haven't generated great interest in the Elena Kagan nomination.

Why was she trying to generate interest in the Kagan nomination? Oh, right: Words, meaning, Humpty Dumpty, etc.

But I do think that David Brooks is onto something when he notes that her relentless careerism, her pitch-perfect blandness, are a little creepy... the driven, hyperachieving spawn of the Ivy League meritocracy...

What's disturbing is that this is what our nomination process now selects for: someone who appears to be in favor of nothing except self-advancement.

Rich as this was from Brooks, from McArdle it's a fucking tub of Double Devon Cream.

"What say you, Weenie? Shall we be vegan today? It would be rawther uplifting."

I'm sitting here writing this in my underwear in goddamn Texas, and Eloise at the Atlantic is talking about careerism. Fuck me.

COURT JESTER. The Ole Perfesser pretends to approve of the Kagan appointment. (In his current Alinksy-triple-agent mode, he can't be expected to make judgments on any basis but perceived advantage for his team, even in his alleged field of expertise, so who knows what he really thinks.) Key passage:

That said, however, there is little doubt in my mind that if the president were unconstrained, he would have picked someone more in keeping with his own ideological leanings — which is to say someone considerably to the left of Kagan.

Reynolds has been hanging out with Tea Partiers too long, and has come to believe that normal people will buy their vision of Obama as a dangerous radical who would appoint the corpse of William O. Douglas but that he trembles with fear at his impending removal by honkies in tricorners.

I think that a President who bails out Wall Street, moves but trepidatiously on gay rights and WOT justice issues, etc., may reasonably be considered a centrist and thus inclined toward an MOR Court pick. I also suspect that Obama sees the political advantage in giving conservative Republicans the opportunity to act like fucking nuts about it, which they are only too eager to do.

UPDATE. Jesus Christ -- imagine Bobo Brooks criticizing anyone for being a gutless careerist!

THE FEAST OF UNREASON. In 2008, enraged by untoward election results, RedState's Erick Erickson announced "Operation Leper," for the purpose of "tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others" so that, when they were caught, Erickson and his colleagues might "make these few people political lepers."

In 2009, when Doug Hoffman screwed the pooch in NY-23, Erickson roared:

The GOP Establishment Must Be Purged as the GOP Loses in NY-23...

I am, however, serious that the GOP must purge its staff and leaders who have decided to always go with the liberal. In particular, the NRCC, NRSC, and RNC need some wholesale job terminations of senior staff.

(All typographic peculiarities in the original.) Now that -- at Erickson's urging -- insufficiently rightwing Utah GOP Senator Bob Bennett has been defenestrated by his own party, Erickson has declared new realities in effect. None of this "purge" stuff! Erickson has found a longer and more sonorous keyword, so listen up, "you media types who look for great meaning in all things considered":

Your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not. As you struggle to interpret what the tea parties do and do not mean, you media types and others are getting Utah all wrong.

It’s not about a purge. It’s about an insurrection.

Actually "insurrection" doesn't even cover the great scope of it:

Now, the great disentangling of conservatism has begun.

If the next big Tea Party win comes soon and big enough, "great disentangling" will remain the password; if not, after some screaming for heads to roll, we will get a "grand expostulation" or a "disembraining" (Hurrah, arse-horns, long live King Erick!).

People who go in for purges, manifestos, battle flags, and fanciful names for their own movements are either genuine revolutionaries, emotional cripples, or both. The odds that Erickson is another George Washington are very, very, very slim.

UPDATE. I'm always impressed with the mockery innovations of my commenters ("get with the pogrom," "Gollum as interpreted by Gilbert Gottfried," etc). They also notice that Erickson's "your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not" is, in the words of one reader, "irredeemably douchey."

Yeah, when they get into the Forsooth and Zounds lingo it's always a little creepy. Most rightbloggers are aware of poetic conventions -- from Gor novels, if nowhere else -- but, being propagandists rather than poets, they see only one purpose for them: To throw a little reverb on their spiel so's they sound scary and sepulchral-like. It's meant, I believe, as a signal for the punters to further suspend their disbelief. Though, the way they're acting these days, I'd say all of them have already gone the full limit.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Nashville flood that is offered by rightbloggers as evidence that Obama hates honkeys. Me, I'm still waiting for that fucking Whitey tape.

I'd like to be more circumspect about accusing people of racism than I have become, but life's too fucking short. I'm about thisclose to calling everyone Nazis again.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, PART 6,620. Over at libertarian flagship Reason, Tim Cavanaugh demands Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano be fired for burning little babies to a crisp at Waco.

Ha ha! Kidding! Cavanaugh actually wants her canned because she once claimed there was such a thing as rightwing terrorists, and because she isn't tough enough on the War on Terror to suit his libertarian tastes. Here's his Roger L. Simon impersonation:

...if you believe in the necessity of a Homeland Security Department, every day Napolitano is in charge of it creates an actual risk to life and property. Napolitano has a positive burden of proof: She needs to demonstrate some understanding of how to do her job, or she needs to be fired, for the security of the United States and the safety of the American people.

The True Sons of Liberty in Reason's comments are a joy ("This administration is incompetent re foreign affairs and the prosecution of the war on terror [yes, i'll call it that]...").

Refresh my memory: Why are they even pretending to be something other than conservatives again? Does it have something to do with Nick Gillespie's leather jacket, or Matt Welch's awesome new glasses?

UPDATE: To paraphrase Yoda (because, let's be honest, any comments box at Reason is pretty much a Comic-Con plus agoraphobia), better it gets:

Ray | 5.9.10 @ 4:03PM | #

Obama is scared shitless he will lose white women still mad that Hillary got beat. He won't be firing Napolitano come hell or high water.

Eminent Threat | 5.9.10 @ 6:13PM | #

Napolitano is a woman?

Plus she's a big lesbian! No, really, read a few of them. It'll put the Libertarian Purity Test out of business.

TOXIC DUMP. The Ole Perfesser is spreading bullshit about DDT, claiming that liberal enviroweenies are keeping it from New York bedbug sufferers because of ObamaHitler, as if there were no scientific reason to restrict its use. A useful antidote may be found in Kim Larsen's 2008 article "Bad Blood." A highlights:

DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back then. Resistance to DDT was first detected in Italy, in houseflies, in 1947!"...

After Berenbaum published the article, she said, she was barraged by e-mails demanding that she support her claims. "To get them off my back, I finally culled a list of peer-reviewed articles documenting resistance to DDT and other pesticides in pockets all over Africa. This is not my life's work. I spent 10 minutes--10 minutes--and I found 15 articles. What would I have found if I'd spent an hour?"

I've known New Yorkers who have solved their bedbug problems with commercial remedies that did not include DDT. It's difficult but it can be done. The Perfesser is full of shit.

Remember: These people are not uninformed, but uninterested in the truth.

WHAT TO DO ON THOSE RARE OCCASIONS WHEN LIBERTARIANS FEEL BAD ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE. Megan McArdle's heartstrings (or, perhaps more accurately, heartthreads, or body-cavity-strings) are tugged by some well-circulated and absolutely horrible footage of cops storm-troopering a family home in pursuit of a drug bust. She characterizes the folly of drug war justifications thus :

Have you ever had one of those arguments in a bar that start around eleven and wind up when the bartender kicks you out? It starts off on some perfectly reasonable topic, but as the hours and the drinks mount up, the participants are forced to stake out some clear logical positions, and in doing so, crawl farther and farther out along the limb they are defending . . . until suddenly you reach a point at which one of the debaters can either abandon their initial committment, or endorse the slaughter of 30,000 Guatamalan orphans. And there's this long pause, and then he says, "Look, it's not like I want to kill those orphans . . . "

This reminded me of the Iraq War, in which thousands of people were killed, often under conditions similar to those portrayed in the tape, or worse. (And some of them might have been orphans -- at least, for a few minutes before they expired.)

McArdle was on the other end of the barroom justification then. Later she admitted she might have been wrong about it (though, she insisted, that didn't mean the anti-war hippies were right). In subsequent posts she saw that Iraq was "improving," which she suggested meant the carnage may have been worth it:

The improvement may not last. And even if it does, there's still a fine argument to be made that the suffering which preceded it made the invasion a terrible, terrible idea. But the current strategy of ignoring the news from Iraq, or quibbling with it, doesn't lay a sound foundation for making that argument.

Maybe someone from Conservatarian HQ can ease her mind by explaining that even inappropriate drug raids help lift property values, and make neighborhoods more attractive to members of the Producer class. In libertarian land, there's a solution for every problem -- so long as the problem is how you feel about something horrible happening to someone else. And it always is.

Oh, almost forgot:

As an empirical matter, I believe that national health care is going to kill a lot more people every year than the Iraq War when fully realized.

CONSERVATIVE WISDOM ON THE STOCK MARKET DIPSY DOODLE: "Oh great, will Democrats look to use a stupid stock purchase stock error as a way to get more government control over the Stock Market? How about we just teach people the difference between a 'B' and an 'M'?" -- Scared Monkeys. When all you have is a monomania, every problem looks like an ObamaHitler.

On the other hand, it was a pleasure to watch the Randian supermen who populate comments at Megan McArdle's blog immediately start bragging about the gold and armament they'd laid in for the coming Galt-Go -- though not nearly as pleasurable as one response to them:

I grew up on a farm in Minnesota. Guys from Minneapolis in their big, beautiful, 4-wheel drive trucks used to drive down on the weekends. They knew a lot about their guns, but they didn't know shit about hunting. Also, any kind of real deer hunting was too cold for them, so they mostly sat in the coffee shops in town and spun bullshit to each other about how awesome their guns were...

That actually shut them up. Maybe glibertarians have some shame, after all!

ANN ALTHOUSE DOES BATTLE WITH... THE ONION. I shit you not.

At first glance this satire appears to be vigorously pro-free-speech, but I suspect that it's only pro-liberal speech. Maybe my suspicion is wrong, but I'd find The Onion a lot funnier if its satire caused its readers a little pain, instead of nudging them to laugh at people they already hold in contempt.

No doubt she would find it funnier, if by "find it funnier" you mean "howl 'what a hoot!' and point at doll wearing 'liberal elite' sign."

Althouse previously yelled at comedians whom she found "traitors to your craft" because they weren't making enough Obama jokes to suit her. (At that time she also called me "dumb or dishonest" for referring to her as a rightblogger, and probably thinks I mostly leave her alone these days because I fear her stinging wit.)

Thank God America has a Truth Squad at the ready to explain why this so-called "humor" isn't funny!

RELATED: The Truth Squad also finds that a planned Comedy Central Jesus show might be funny, but is the act of "cowards" and thus has no place on a comedy channel.

You know, I actually do miss Bush -- when he was President, they told us we could show our patriotism just by going shopping. Now, to show our love of country, we're expected not to laugh at "the kind of comedy that makes you comfortable" -- as opposed to the comedy stylings of, say, Andrew Klavan, with which we doubt most Comedy Central customers would be comfortable, though not for ideological reasons. A grim business, this War on Whatchamacallit.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is bitching about the fucking Machete trailer.

Oh, and no, just for the record, I don't think this is actually inciting violence. But that's a lot more slack than liberals cut, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck. And they don't even wield machetes.

If it were anyone else in the universe (except Althouse) I'd say he had to be joking.

Between this and the Michael Moriarty Hitler movie, it's clearer than ever: With these guys, the culture war is a war on culture.

CULTURE WAR: INCOMING! Whaaaaa...



Well, I love Michael Moriarty's acting (see him in Who'll Stop the Rain or Larry Cohen's Q sometime), so who knows. And (perhaps this is related) I also have a soft spot for Hitler movies. (Max, for example. It's pretty silly at times, but it has lines like "You're a hard man to like, Hitler." Now how can you pass on that?)

But the Big Hollywood review of Hitler Meets Christ (God, the name sounds like a South Park episode) is not encouraging. For one thing, reviewer Joe Bendel refers to "the thankless role of Hitler." Is he kidding? Hitler's like Frankenstein's Monster -- just walk onstage and people go crazy! Fortinbras -- now there's a "thankless" role. Also:

Relocated from New York, the delusional Hitler and Christ now encounter each other in the seedier environs of Vancouver.

Stop giggling, people are trying to read.

The contrast between them is immediately striking. The Christ figure is neatly dressed, and essentially rational in his discourse, aside from his obvious identity crisis. By contrast, Hitler is slovenly, crude, and erratic. While on one level it makes sense their outward appearance would reflect the relative peace of their souls, one would expect the exact opposite from most “indie” films. It would be the martial Hitler who would be clean and presentable, whereas the Christ would be unkempt and widely emotional in his arguments. Yet, Moriarty has more surprises in store for the viewer.

I'll bet he does. Found via Balloon Juice, where a commenter supplies a winning antidote:

SHORTY OTD. Reason teases anti-Mexican bigots; in comments, its readers take offense.

NET NEUTRALITY: THE NEW WINGNUT FRONTIER. With an FCC ruling pending, the Net Neutrality issue is heating up. Tech people are generally in favor of it (so am I, after seeing what the rat bastard telecoms are capable of); most of the business press coverage positions it as a battle over whether telecommunications companies can cut off bandwidth arbitrarily.

Most Wall Street Journal commenters follow that line of thought, but some holler like this:

I'm sure Pelosi and Reid are dancing in the aisles up at the pollit bureau meetings over this one. Novemebr can't get here fast enough for me! Palin / Quayle 2012!!!!!!!!!!!

Huh what? To see where this is coming from, check out RedState:

Should the tens of millions of Americans on the Internet, we who make a living or keep in touch with friends and family, have our fate determined by a small band of fringe neo-Marxist radicals, or self-seeking lobbyists at Google? I say no...

Hands off our Internet, FCC. End the power grab now.

Yes, it's an actual wingnut talking point: Gummint mess with mah intanet! And they don't just mean the pipes: RedState commenters warn of the day "when Obama censors Facebook, and limits texting." Michele Bachmann agrees Net Neutrality is "censorship of the Internet." None of them can point to a Net Neutrality provision that supports any such claim but, to be fair, Obama Hitler Gadsden Cold Dead Hands Skreee.

I thought at first the ringleaders at least were paid off by the telecoms; I still haven't ruled that out. But I've come to the conclusion that by now any government action provokes this reflex in them -- now that it's run by Democrats, that is. I expect that when sanitation trucks come to pick up their garbage they peer from behind curtains with a shotgun at the ready, praying for the election of President Palin to allow them to finally get some sleep.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, AND NEVER DID. The idea that Obama is covering for Muslim jihadists in the Times Square unexplosion seems to have been adopted by libertarians. Obama and other statists are defending "fundamentalist Islam," David Harsanyi suggests, in order to persecute libertarians' friends in the tea parties and Israel.

Between this and their traditional commitment to freeing the weed, I think libertarians are a good bet to become the regnant movement of the post-apocalyptic hellscape I'm increasingly worried I won't die soon enough to miss.

WORLD WAR IV MORE YEARS! In response to a Bret Stephens let's-keep-our-nukes column, National Review's Michael Anton strongly suggests that rogue states (Iran, the subject of Stephens' column, is clearly on Anton's mind) will at least give a hand to terrorists who will explode nuclear weapons in the U.S., "especially if they calculate that their role in the act will appear sufficiently ambiguous to minimize the chance of American retaliation." (He might as well just say that Iran is preemptively responsible, Minority Report style.)

Then he talks about deterrence, by which he seems to mean publicly threatening to blow up Iran if something blows up here:

Declaratory policy is what nations say about how and when and why they might retaliate in various circumstances. The purpose — and hope — is that by making terrible threats, we can make follow-through on those threats unnecessary by staying the hand of those whose hatred can never be assuaged but whose innate senses of self-preservation, rationality, and (yes) fear can be leveraged in our favor. Conventional wisdom and official policy alike hold that declaratory policy has no relevance or role to play in the fight against terror.

This is an unexamined assumption — a reflex or, better, a recoiling from where the inquiry, not to say the conclusion, must lead. It is understandable that no one wishes to wander into that dark, monster-infested forest — nor, worse, to be seen to do so. But sooner rather than later, someone — several of us — must. Stephens is saying: Let’s get on with it. He’s right.

This is, I guess, the sort of thing you can say when your readers think Obama is Hitler plus Stalin, hates America, and cannot be trusted to retaliate against people who attack the United States. Because that's the only way it makes sense.

Even if you despise Obama (and this can apply to Ahmadinejad as well as to wingnuts), you have to know that in such a scenario political expediency alone would demand of him some futile, belligerent gesture. The last guy invaded Iraq, for Christ's sake -- what sense did that make? And this time we wouldn't have to go through the charade of hunting for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either, because they'll already have blown up, in Times Square or somewhere nearby. The idea that no one's getting his ass kicked after such an incident is pure fantasy.

But only the punters are supposed to take this seriously, as Anton's doomy if, God forbid language indicates. If you let him and his buddies back in power, they'll blow up Iran one way or the other.

Extra points to Anton for pretending this offer to find diplomatic language for blanket nuclear threats is an act of great bravery. ("To discuss these matters is to risk one’s reputation and perhaps livelihood" -- as if these guys can't always get a job!)