THE LEVEL OF DEBATE THE INTERNET DESERVES. Jonah Goldberg declares victory!

That sort of language clearly rankles my friend Will Wilkinson. I discussed the merits and shortcomings of patriotism with him for a special Independence Day edition of Bloggingheads. I found it to be a largely un-worthwhile discussion. Knowing in advance that Will is utterly immune to any romantic or sentimental arguments (as he might characterize them) for love of country, we were forced to restrict our conversation to sociological and other strategic rationalizations for patriotism. It was kind of like debating love of country with a Vulcan. Except, ironically enough, at the end of the day, I think it's pretty clear that Will is the one letting his emotions get the better of him.

Being your best friend, I briefly scanned the Bloggingheads in question to see whether Goldberg actually made Wilkinson flip out.

My data is incomplete. I could only stand a few minutes. I've heard there are people who have watched entire episodes of Bloggingheads, but I find it hard to believe such supermen exist. What human being could withstand such a punishing assault on their eyes and ears without willfully puncturing them with whatever sharp object was at hand in defense of their own sanity?

I did see Wilkinson ask Goldberg if the War for Independence was justified, and a flummoxed Goldberg reply, "The ends justify the means." Wilkinson gets into the why-not-secession theme, and Goldberg talks about a "Whiggish danger in going over these grievances," perhaps meaning "Wiggish," meaning he was thinking of the powdered wigs the Founders wore in paintings before returning to his customary reverie of a ham sandwich. His closer, characteristically: "This is something I've not spent a lot of time on, but I think it's an interesting distinction and I've always wanted to sort of learn more about it."

Despite retinal bleeding, I skimmed the rest and could not find the Wilkinson meltdown to which Goldberg refers, though before everything went black I did hear Wilkinson theorize that "wars are almost always bad," and Goldberg tell Wilkinson that you can't blame patriotism for war any more than you can blame oil for it. But I may have just hallucinated that.

Perhaps a Corner "reader" will "write in" to request proof, spurring Goldberg to point to 49:01, where Wilkinson blinks rapidly, proving his discombobulation before the mighty reasoning skills of his opponent. Till then I will have to assume Goldberg means that Wilkinson generally seemed to care about what he was saying and whether his argument made any sense, whereas Goldberg was digesting an entire pork butt and couldn't rouse himself to anything like full attention. Now, back to the decompression chamber!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Robert Byrd obsequies and how rightbloggers tried to make it about the endemic racist of Democrats. This "the real racists" bit never fails to remind me of Wile E. Coyote, hurtling into the canyon with a detached rock ledge in pursuit.

HAPPY FOURTH. Maybe you were wondering what the anti-abortion movement was up to lately. Here's the latest outrage from Jill Stanek:

The youth pro-life activist group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is picketing comedian Jimmy Kimmel's Los Angeles home as I type (read to end) and will be picketing his studio on Hollywood Blvd later today.

The group is demanding an apology, and here's why...

At some point the crew became aggravated by the pro-life activists because they refused to move along and turned one of the hot spotlights on Survivor Ryan Bueler...

Yes: A spotlight. The Hollyweird bastards attacked the fetus-defenders with star power!

Bueler refused to move and for 15 minutes there was a stand-off, during which time a bracelet he was wearing and his sign were partially melted, although he escaped uncooked.

Plus his Gummi Bears were totally ruined. Later Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust (great name for a band, BTW) infiltrated the audience at a Jimmy Kimmel taping and disrupted the show ("Apologize for burning teenagers with high-powered lamps!").



We celebrate our nation's birthday, not just because freedom is precious, but also because it is hilarious.

UPDATE. Not everyone loves America like I do: Here's The Anchoress lamenting the decline of public education from back in the days when she walked ten miles to school and had to live at the bottom of the lake, and proving her point with... an episode of "Jaywalking." Oh, hell, it's a holiday -- let even the developmentally challenged have fireworks! In fact, give them the M-80s and a blowtorch.

NEW CONSERVATIVE WISDOM: RACISM TAKES GUTS. Jonah Goldberg's latest mouth-fart is about reformed Klansman Robert Byrd:

Robert Byrd was a complicated man, but the explanation for the outsized celebration of his career strikes me as far more simple. He was a powerful man who abandoned his bigoted principles in order to keep power. And his party loved him for it.

Of course, if a Democrat of Byrd's era wanted to retain his bigoted principles, he could always become a Republican.

Given the hot new conservative trend toward neo-Confederacy, this may become a talking point: "All you liberals just like black people cuz it's popular. Only conservatives are tuff enuff to be bigots! That's why we keep Derbyshire."

SHORTER JOHN J. MILLER. I previously praised the work of new Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin, but since I learned that Merwin said bad things about George W. Bush, I realize that he is actually wrongthink and doubleplusungood.

UPDATE. In comments, Doghouse Riley does the longer shorter: "In conclusion, Paul McCartney, the Dixie Chicks, and Ward Churchill. Thank you."

HOW COME THEY CAN CALL EACH OTHER FAGGOT AND WE CAN'T? PART 56,232. Now isn't that nice? To make up for civil-unioned gay employees' shortfall in tax benefits versus married straight employees, Google is giving them a pay raise to cover the discrepancy. Conservatives should approve: No public funds expended and, after all, the new conservatism is enlightened and tolerant, not like those liberals have been trying to --

How many straight Google employees will go all “Chuck & Larry” just to make Google pay them a little extra money?

Google’s straight workers last seen practicing their lisps and learning show tunes…

What would happen if a company decided to pay heterosexuals employees more money based on their sexuality? I guess in this upside down progressive liberal world I shouldn’t even bother wondering anymore.

EVIL.

This discriminates against the straights for their "lifestyle" choice and they can sue for it. They can also claim that marriage has been devalued by the continued attempts to allow people who insist on labeling themselves with terms that differentiate themselves from the rest of society, yet demand to share the word that has always represented a union between a man and a woman.

What if a Muslim declared that his religion required him to have 3 wives and skree skree skreeeeee...

Never mind. I was right the first time -- they're just a bunch of deranged asshole bigots who haven't felt a pang for the underprivileged since Allan Bakke and who are flipping the fuck out because a few gay people are finally getting an even break.

UPDATE. Thanks, in comments, to Doc Amazing: "If they had any sense, they'd come out as bisexual and double-bill."

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.