THE PARTY OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH. I noticed back in October of 2008 when Regnery unleashed The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, a "joyful myth-busting rebel yell" full of fun speculation for conservatives and their kin-folk like "If there had been no Civil War, the South would have abolished slavery peaceably." This sort of reasoning has spread like wild-fahr, as we saw from Rand Paul's argument that without the Civil Rights Act, folks would have jes' naturally started serving the white and the colored at the same lunch counter, and George Wallace would have stepped out of the schoolhouse door and cried, "Come and be learned, my African-American friends."

Now I see from Wonkette and TPM that Human Events is using the thing as a subscribers' premium.

If that doesn't work, they can always try The Turner Diaries, or perhaps a new Politically Incorrect Guide to Thurgood Marshall.

Will these rebs never be Reconstructed?

UPDATE. Today in "Conservative Will Tell You Who the Real Racist Is": Michelle Malkin*, who claims a New York Times "whitewash" of Robert Byrd's Klan past based on a headline, because that's as far as most of her readers ever get before realizing there's no cartoon or sudoku. (The Times article is explicit on Byrd's past.)

Back when Paul the Younger was thought-experimenting with the Civil Rights Act, BTW, Malkin got LaShawn Barber to pen a "Segregation: not cool, but still better than statism!" article. That woman will never miss a meal.

* That post is actually written by Doug Powers. (Thanx Q.) Does Malkin always use ringers for this loathsome duty?

QUACKS. American Thinker, heretofore better known as the freak show engaging the world's youngest rightwing pundit, is apparently working on its credentials as a long-distance psychotherapy practice specializing in Barack Obama.

First up, alleged shrink Robin of Berkeley:

Did Obama ever have a head injury? His stepfather in Indonesia was purportedly an alcoholic abuser. Was Obama subject to any physical abuse?...

Obama admits to a history of drug use in his youth. Did his usage cause some damage? Does Obama still use?

Also: Asperger's Syndrome, Schizotypal Disorder, and pedophiliac butt-fucking. If you think she's kidding, you don't know Robin of Berkeley! She also thinks everyone who voted for Obama is nuts, too, which could explain the urgency of her prose, as she might imagine that, with so many against her, she may be seized at any moment and put in a nuthouse. I for one wouldn't be surprised.

But it's not all bad news, for though the madman Obama has concealed his multiple illnesses from his slavish supporters, soon enough he will crack. Fellow "Thinker" Bruce Walker amplifies:

As Robin of Berkeley observed in her truly scary article, Barack Hussein Obama may well be have been a traumatized victim in his youth, perhaps of sexual abuse. If he is, then Obama will have personality disorders which simply cannot be cured (read Robin's article for the details). If Robin is right, then at some point, the true, hopelessly sick Obama will show himself before a horrified nation. Average Americans will no longer like the president. They will, instead, be saddened and repelled -- and they will emphatically expel Obama and his supporters from power or influence in our lives.

It'll be like Deke O'Malley's comeuppance at the Apollo in Cotton Comes to Harlem -- only this time, the white people will clean up!

Today Selwyn Duke tells us Obama has ADD. Again, the uninitiated may at first think this is just a rhetorical trope. But then one reads the thing and encounters Duke's diagnostic questions ("Can he grasp that if an oil gusher was spewing oil into the ocean yesterday, and the hole hasn't been plugged, that it will spew oil into the ocean today?") and the collapse of his argument halfway through into inchoate yelling about Marxism and such like, and realizes that Duke may in fact be an expert in ADD, at least from the patient side.

Still, maybe they'd better leave this sort of thing to the professionals.

UPDATE. Commenter Amok92 does me the favor of asking after Dr. Sanity, another of the Right's long-distance diagnosticians with whom we've had some fun in the past. She was going along pretty hot and heavy for a while, and a few months ago was raging at "the left's vivid (and psychotic) imagination, feverishly working overtime to reverse all those unwelcome facts and painful truths so they can remain in an endless childhood," etc. On April 8, alas, she reported she was "taking a break from blogging for a few months to take care of some personal issues and complete some projects." Get well soon, Doc!

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. The Fed rounded up an alleged Russian spy ring that had been in operation for about a decade! Surely this is good news? National Review:

President Obama apparently knew that the FBI was about to arrest the members of the spy ring but did not raise the subject with Medvedev. This was a serious mistake. It reflects an unwillingness to face the truth about Russian actions and allows the Russians to perpetuate the notion that despite human-rights abuses, cooperation with Iran, and anti-American propaganda, there is harmony in its relationship with the U.S.

I'm not sure how failing to tip off Medvedev maintains the dastardly fiction of U.S.-Russian comity -- particularly in the face of a widely-publicized arrest of several alleged Russian spies. I am sure that if the Federal Government under Obama invented a perpetual motion machine, National Review would soon tell us it was a plot to destroy America's work ethic.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH: Oh, Jesus:

Let me instead say this: I think many of my conservative colleagues are far too gingerly when it comes to liberal media bias. Far too timid, delicate, and forgiving. For a long time, complaining about media bias has been seen as uncouth. It’s something we all need to learn to live with, like death, taxes, and mosquitoes. Don’t be uncool by bitching about it, man.

The only thing that could make the idiocy more self-evident is if it were cross-posted at Sarah Palin's Facebook, Big Journalism, TimesWatch, Media Research Center, NewsBusters, or any other of the hundreds of other sites devoted to exposing the Lamestream Liberal Media. Even by the regular standards of conservative eternal-victimhood, this is rich.

I haven't been keeping up with the Nordlinger Senility Watch, BTW, because even when he lays out a beauty like this "Sigh, I Wish the IDF Could Walk Through Walls Like Back When I Was 60" post, I know he'll come up with something just as dotarded later, and it makes me lazy.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINES. Michael Kinsley does somebody a favor, I guess, revisiting the debate over Originalism, but the point he fails to address about Kagan critic Robert Bork is that he is a miserable old bigot who should never have been let out of the dustbin.

But I couldn't help but notice this bit:

[Bork] is an embittered man who will be even more disconcerted than I was to learn that the very bright and well-educated, but young, editors of The Atlantic Wire had never heard of him.

I thought The Kids from McArdle was a fluke, but apparently they're all about 12 over there and get their American history from flash cards. Maybe The Atlantic should rebrand itself as the new CosmoGirl.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER. Megadittos to Camille Paglia, who agrees with me that liberals suffer sexually from their devotion to sterile corporate life, while we conservatives thrive in the me-Tarzan-you-Jane world of academia! Which reminds me of a paid advertising link...

THE LOST CAUSE. At first I wondered why Dave Weigel even bothered going on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government to explain himself to the rightwing hoi polloi. I hear they don't pay that well. And he gets the kind of reaction anyone could have predicted ahead of time:

This guys career can go south with the rest of the Main stream media.........he got what he deserved........he is just trying to save his own @ss

Man, I am happy that I never had to share a foxhole with you!

Dude, if you are pro G A Y Marriage, Open Borders, and Voted for ObaMao the ONE thing you are NOT is conservative. You may not even qualify as a RINO.

What I learned from this: You're ugly. You're an idiot. Lots of "libertarians" are really just leftists.

Meet a real journalist David [link to Lew Rockwell]

And those are the kind ones! But upon reflection, I guess the whole crazy conservative reaction to his case must be galling to Weigel. His career makes (or used to make) conservatism look classy. He worked hard and quoted accurately -- hell, he went out and talked to people worth quoting, which is unusual in itself. He was genuinely even-handed, as opposed to a difference-splitting Borderbot. He made the sometimes obscure tropes of wingerdom comprehensible to general readers.

Any sane conservative would see that the Democratic electoral strategy going forward will be to remind America about the birthers, the Joe Bartons, and the Rand Pauls of the world and make them the face of the conservative movement. It might have seemed useful to have one or two conservatives in the public eye who didn't seem totally insane or malignant. Well, that's all over now. It'll be Obama Iz Hitler and Debbie Schlussel-Cassy Fiano catfights all the way to the Convention. We'll see how it works.

A LITTLE RESPECT. Senator Byrd has died, and the usual assholes remind us that he used to be a Klansman, but neglect to mention that he changed his mind about it and apologized, representing a progress exactly the opposite of that made by the Republican Party, which is really why they hated at him. (UPDATE: Also this. The man had balls.)

Among Byrd's last acts was to hold the feet of the coal industry to the fire in the wake of disaster, rather than apologizing to that industry for such actions, which is the Republican way to do things.

Though there are drawbacks to the reflexive grubbing for bacon that was the hallmark of Byrd's generation of politicians, he at least brought some home to his constituents, rather than transferring it all directly to corporations. Some old ways were indeed the best ways.

UPDATE. You're going to see a lot of this sort of thing today: "Meanwhile, let’s try to refrain from trashing Senator Byrd too much and stay respectful. This isn’t the Democratic Underground, after all. We’re above that. I will, however... [torrent of abuse]." Mourning doesn't become them.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger Gay Pride coverage. It offers some rare good news: The wingnuts appear to be keeping quieter during Pride. They're still wrong, and the smarter ones are disingenuous -- this weekend we had Kyle Smith suggesting an "end of the culture wars," which in his world means the rise of "Chris Christie and Scott Brown, libertarian-ish Republicans who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative." (Brown's against gay marriage, and Christie promised to veto gay marriage if it were passed in Jersey. Maybe that's what Smith means by libertarian-ish.) But at least we get fewer of their noxious gases this time of year.

The thing ran long, and one of my saddest cuts was Esther Green's "To My Liberal Relative." Green apparently likes to bug her relatives with rightwing bullshit, and one of them, a gay man, finally sent her a short note asking, "Seriously, can we please just agree to disagree?" Some people would have switched topics to the weather or something, but Green sent back an 858-word harangue, explaining that

It is precisely because you and ____ are gay that Obama scares me. He surrounds himself with people who are true believers in sharia law (Rashid Khalidi, Dalia Mogahed, and Rashad Hussain). Sharia law clearly states that gays are to be stoned.

Later, perhaps hoping that this will have softened her gay relative up, Green tells him that Obama is a Muslim. Bet the Green family is going to be very careful about its Christmas invitations this year.

MINOR OFFENSE. Wingnuts love their child prodigies. (Easy to program, and they have no trouble internalizing the philosophy, having learned all about it in their anal stage of development.)

Richard Brookhiser was 15 when he started at the National Review; Kyle Williams was 13 when he was enlisted by World Net Daily. And anyone recall the name of that little kid who wrote a book about virtue or something six or seven years ago, and was briefly their teen heartthrob?

Their most recent child star, 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, was a hit at the last CPAC, but he hasn't been getting much ink lately -- at least, not the right kind -- so apparently someone at American Thinker thought it was time to roll out a new conservakid.

Behold:

My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school.

It's a dream come true -- only 11, and already he's learned his Conservative Victimization Tables!

The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool [italics his - ed.] where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher."

Goddamn liberal bitches, always infantilizing our pre-schoolers!

The whole thing's like that, all commie thought police and suspiciously big words:

At Beverly Vista, my first teacher was a full-time misandrist and global warming wacko.

Some of you may suspect a hoax -- either because the kid's too young (especially for the Feminazi stuff, which usually doesn't hit conservatives until their first prostatitis episode), or because it sounds like a parody. Don't underestimate these people. I thought Mytheos Holt, who proposed at Big Hollywood that the brethren bring down Obama with parody websites and 4chan, was some kind of joke, but commenters proved him a true specimen.

If Besserman's a fake, the American Thinker commenters certainly haven't caught on. Remember: Just because they're increasingly ridiculous doesn't mean they're not serious.

(Thanks to Nancy Nall for the tip.)

UPDATE. Holy shit, R. Porrofatto found a video! Young Besserman appears on camera, but he doesn't use any big words. (Who'd like to see the outtakes video?) He does report that the bullies all yelled "Global warming is real" at him. Bullies sure have changed since I was a kid; maybe in Bev Hills they all get subscriptions to The Nation for their tenth birthday.

HAPPY PRIDE. It's small, but it's progress:

The adventurous Stanley Cup will make its first appearance in a gay-themed event this weekend.

The Chicago Gay Hockey Association invited the Blackhawks to join Sunday's Gay Pride Parade -- and the team said yes. So did the Chicago Cubs, who will have their own float for the first time.

I don't usually post feel-good items, but I wanted to do what I could to increase the possibility that this news would be seen by some bigot asshole wingnuts.

Like this one:

SODOMY IS SOURCE OF PRIDE, SEXUAL REPRODUCTION IS NOT!...

If Chicago's professional sports teams will be represented, I don't think Ernie Banks and the Blackhawks' Brent Sopel should be the only participants. I think in the spirit of having one's backfield in motion, the Chicago Bears should send a tight end and a wide receiver....

Who says pro athletes aren't role models for our children? If more big name athletes get involved in peddling "Gay Pride" more 10 year old might be inspired to become "Gay Pride" grand marshals. This is critical because some young people think it is alright or even cool to be straight.

I think this is supposed to be funny, despite the rhetorical hoarseness. Remember that line by The Replacements? "Kewpie dolls and urine stalls/Will be laughed at/The way you're laughed at now."

Yeah, this day gets better and better.

UPDATE. In comments, montag: "I think Moses would have gotten a double hernia carrying down all the commandments these guys want."

BATTING 1.000. Matt Lewis gets a statement on Dave Weigel from the American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell:

"I thought he was a liberal. He had no sense of humor. Yet he did his job diligently."

No sense of humor! Good to see that Tyrrell -- a buffoon of long standing who for years invited comparison of himself to H. L. Mencken via an imitative byline photo and a constipated emulation of HLM's prose style, then declared, "I know thee not, old man" -- has not lost his gift of being wrong 100 percent of the time

U WERE DOIN IT RITE.



Whiny ass titty babies.

The problem with covering conservatives is: There's no way to do it without being offensive -- at least in the bar after work, or its email equivalent. Which is apparently a resignation-accepting offense at the Post.

They've run this country for most of the past thirty years. I don't see why we should continue to treat wingnuts like special needs children who have to be shielded from criticism.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. For years most of my own work has been online, and the subject by which most of my readers know me has been the blogosphere. I know as well as the rest of you that online is not only the present, but also The Future, because it is tirelessly presented as such by people like Jeff Jarvis on websites and in well-compensated speeches.

I've always been annoyed by that kind of talk, and most of the time if you ask me why I'll say it's because I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who likes newsprint and daguerreotypes and LPs, and for whom everything has to be old and in black and white. But that isn't wholly true, as this Reason article by up-and-coming libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward and some interns reminds me.

The article is a kind of guide to online stuff, a popular favorite -- why, I've done that sort of thing myself, pimping mostly small local blogs of diverse agenda.

But the premise here is that these Randian super-genii will instruct you in "kicking your dead tree habit." No, there's no Kindle promo tie-in -- the object of ridicule here is not longform dead tree, but newspapers. The intro is all ha-ha-stupid-foolscap-people:

Newspaper. Personally, I never touch the stuff. But rumor has it there is a certain amount of distress about the impending doom of the news-on-dead-tree industry...

We assumed for the sake of the experiment that The New York Times would be the last to go. Since I refuse to sully my delicate hands with filthy newsprint, Jesse and Robby paged through Wednesday’s edition in search of facts and insights that would need replacing in the event that print news goes kaput.

Though I don't know much about mockery myself, the tone seems a little forced to me -- as if KMW were not trying to summon a new audience of strangers not yet educated to the superiority of the internet, but instead trying to stroke and signal the usual true believers, who are always up for a round of ragging on paper-pushers.

It reminds me of the preemptive gloating of folks like Roger L. Simon, who tells his readers all the time that the MSM is a dinosaur, dying, on the ropes, in extremis, etc. (We're still waiting for the body to fall, but never mind.) For years this has been one of the key tropes of the rightwing online community -- which came out of the rightwing offline community's contempt for the offline equivalent, the impudent snobs of the lying liberal media, usually short-handed as the New York Times.

The Times, it just so happens, is mentioned several times in Mangu-Ward's article, mostly derisively ("New York real estate obsessives have long since left the Times behind... the Times tech reviewer, appropriately enough, senses his own irrelevance...").

Mangu-Ward does give the online edition a left-handed head-pat at the end, though. Clearly the Times and whatever it represents will be part of The Future -- just not so big a part. If years of yap have yet to completely displace the Times, they have opened up some space for an alterna-press which, like alt and indie vendors since time immemorial, not only hopes but asserts that it's The Future, your future. And they mean it, man!

In reality, when the smoke clears you are likely to find that the main effect of such a revolution has been to transfer some power -- not so much to you, though, as to those who have positioned themselves to profit from revolutionary sentiment. Here's who Mangu-Ward recommends for opinion journalism:

As for the Opinion pages, Reason should meet your needs there. But if you must, it could be supplemented with the columns aggregated at RealClearPolitics, or you could enjoy a firehose of opinion at Huffington Post or Daily Kos. Want to come back over and over to a name you trust? Hit up brand name bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and more.

Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle! That's some groovy revolution right there.

That's the real reason this stuff bugs me. It's not that I like the Times and newsprint so much. I don't, really. And I like the internet fine. But I've also seen some come-ons in my time, and The Future is one that never gets old.

SHORTER JOSEPH BOTTUM: Higher education is a liberal conspiracy to fuck your daughter.

UPDATE. Bottum's commenters are a joy for the expected reasons -- I particularly like the one who warns the Opus Dei wannabes who read First Things about the scourge of Jesuitism at Georgetown, and the one who thinks the knocked-up heroine did right to keep her baby because now she'll have someone to open jars for her in her old age. But my very favorite is the one who asks:

How do the girls who don't get to college get knocked up?

HE SAID SHE SAID. Moe Lane sniffs sex scandal!

Fun game for your morning: see how far you get into this report before you develop this sudden and burning need to go find a rock, and throw it at Al Gore. I personally made it to page 13.

Of course it's very different when something like this happens to a respected figure like Nikki Haley.

IT'S ARTHUR JENSEN'S WORLD -- WE JUST LIVE IN IT. Grab yer shootin' ahrns, morons -- Rupert Murdoch wants to make them Mescans legal so's they can bundle his papers or sumpin'!

In a model the AP compares to his coalition against gun violence, [NYC Mayor Mike] Bloomberg is rolling out a group of big city mayors and powerful CEOs called the Partnership for a New American Economy. The group will lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, arguing they need amnesty for those here illegally in order to run their cities and businesses effectively.

This won't play well with the Tea Party, but Mayor Mike is being joined by big business CEOs, and Republicans hate telling the heads of HP, Boeing, Disney and even News Corp. that they don't know what's good for America. Rupert Murdoch is on board, and he and Bloomberg even went on Fox News to hawk their plan this morning. (Murdoch may be the boss over there, but he's smart enough not to roll out this position on Glenn Beck or Hannity.)

The Castillo Chronicles has already bitten:

Murdoch the traitor who prefers to coddle illegals instead of help Americans take back their country especially since he has the bully pulpit to make a difference.

They can't grasp that while the ringmaster of the Fox News circus is happy to keep them riled up with titrated doses of jingoism, Uncle Rupert is not so much a citizen of the United States or of the (snort) "Anglosphere" as he is a citizen of the world -- as much at home in Red China as in Mexico City, provided his accommodations are suitably luxe.

But they'll forget about it soon enough. Psychologically they'll have to. We now live in a world where Lonesome Rhodes' unmasking would cause only about one or two news-cycles' worth of outrage before everyone began talking about his comeback. And anyway, most of the rubes think not at all about the men behind the cameras and the presses; they remain convinced that the guys and gals on the sets and in the byline photos are making it up as they go along.

UPDATE. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

THE KIDS FROM GLEE IN THEIR DEGENERATE PHASE. The most productive McArdle Summer Replacement wonders why we should care about American ironing board manufacture gone to China:

Econ 101 aside, though, there's a more compelling moral reason to condemn this kind of tariff that should help break deadlocks like Matt's: Jobs lost at home are usually jobs created elsewhere, typically in poorer countries. If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won't be created here. If that's your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs.

I examined this from every angle, and find no evidence of a joke (which is not Ms. Mangu-Ward's strong suit in any case). She really thinks local (that is to say, American) suckers will just have to tough out a creative destruction phase, in which the Chinese get their jobs at a fraction of their wages, and the suckers get unemployment for a while and then whatever they can scrounge up. Some (okay, many) of them aren't going to make it, but who wants them around anyway -- they're not on Twitter and Foursquare and wouldn't have fun things to say if they were. But many of their kids will probably become New Technocrats. That should be some consolation to their parents in the hobo camps!

And as to them being Americans? There are no nations, there are no peoples; there is only money.

I'm beginning to think Mangu-Ward was raised in a Skinner box.

UPDATE. In comments, Freshly Squeezed Cynic explicates Mangu-Ward's use of Whataboutery; AC in BC suggests, "Surely the Atlantic can find an Indian to write something this stupid at one quarter the cost?"

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Farrrrrrrrt.

Jesus, the guy keeps topping himself. And he keeps announcing, basically, that he doesn't know what he's saying ("This isn't the best comparison because Petraues is no dictator") -- and yet keeps going.

This passage in particular will live in the annals of dumbassery:

Maybe a better comparison is to the experienced sergeant who may be formally outranked by the new lieutenant, but when the bullets fly, everyone looks to the sergeant for leadership.

Yes, Goldberg is explaining the Petraeus assignment with old WWII movies. Hopefully the General will bring a major offensive, so Goldberg can enact it on YouTube with Army Mens.

Also among my favorites: "Petraeus is a servant to his nation and history at this point" -- as opposed to, I don't know, when he was seven. And the ending! You have to imagine it followed by the stage collapsing and Goldberg climbing up out of the wreckage with a flowerpot on his head, hollering, "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-os!"

You know the drill.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, reader Donald alerts me that Jonah Goldberg is reviving the old Megan McArdle "you never had it so good" routine (i.e., you have iPods, why are you complaining?). I guess he didn't get the memo that they're supposed to shut up about this now that Obama is President.

I eagerly await a counter-post by one of his colleagues explaining that the Obama recession has destroyed capitalism, and Goldberg's 2,000 word walkback.