ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, SMURF EDITION. Okay, Kulturkampfers, what are you on about this time? Sesame Street? The Easter Parade? Law & Order: Criminal Intent? Nope -- communist Smurfs, apparently:

As Papa Smurf and friends re-enter the cultural atmosphere, there’s no dodging the question: Are the Smurfs now, or they have ever been … communist?...

“They have a dictatorlike leader, and they all have defined roles,” said Technorati.com editor Curtis Silver, who wrote about the psychology of the Smurfs for Wired magazine’s website. “When it comes to their day-to-day life, they’re like a Communistic group.”

Please don't tell them about the matriarchal syndicalist cell known as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Now, consider life in the Smurfs’ village: Residents live in identical mushroom houses. Everyone dresses alike. They sing the same group song, over and over. They have no apparent deity.

Washington Times reporter Patrick Hruby's 1,279-word (!) article is inspired in part by a pre-existing silly debate among French intellectuals, and he does include a few voices of sanity and a cheeky conclusion. Also it smells of ripe link-bait. So maybe it's meant as a mere bagatelle.

But in the current conservative environment, even nonsense will serve to stuff the cannon. Nancy French at National Review:

Hollywood’s newest offering is a film version of the iconic 1980s television show, which ran for nine years on NBC. The little blue guys — and one girl! — are back.

And guess what? They are no longer Commu-Smurfs.

You didn’t have to be Joseph McCarthy to see the red undertones of the blue Smurf society...

She goes on like that, observably tickled -- but, one realizes with horror, it's not the very idea than anyone would be crazy enough to take this guff seriously that tickles her; no, French seems genuinely pleased that the Smurfs have been reeducated: "If the 1980s cartoon was some hidden message about how communism beats capitalism each and every episode, then this movie’s philosophical shift is a very welcome change in deed."

(Consonant with French's previous deep thoughts on feminism, illegitimate children, and premarital sex, she also offers this: "Though it’s wonderful she expressed more of her personality, beware that the Katie Perry-voiced Smurf does utter the sentence, 'I kissed a Smurf and I liked it.'" Though cartoon communism has been purged, can we accept this implicit comfort with lesbianism as a trade-off? Find out in French's next column!)

John Hawkins at Right Wing News at first seems relatively sane on the subject:

In the Smurfs’ case, sure, they should probably have Smurfberry famines caused by Papa Smurf’s meddling and Smurfs locked up in prison for speaking out against the government, but since when have cartoons ever been accurate? All in all, the show has a good message, its been around forever, and there haven’t been any waves of kids basing their economic beliefs on the Smurfs, so I think parents are safe to let their kids watch.

But then it hits you: wait a minute -- we're actually having a conversation about whether or not the Smurfs' obvious communist content is acceptable for children. Just because the author decides that, on balance, it's okay (though I suppose some concerned parents will arrange a Very Special Talk with their astonished kids afterward) doesn't mean the premise isn't batshit.

As a middle-aged American I'm sadly accustomed to seeing the ridiculous turn into the acceptable, but the mainstreaming process seems to be going much faster now. I've known for a while that some people will believe anything, but I worry that events will force me to the conclusion that some folks have a vested interest not only in the specific lunacies they disseminate, but in the destruction of reason itself.

UPDATE. Comments are as usual choice, but o'ercrowned today by mortimer's: "Hayek warned about all this in The Road to Smurfdom."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger coverage of the debt ceiling fight. Some squawked, some chest-bumped, but in the end, it would seem, they got what they wanted. Not enough of it, of course -- it's never enough. And that's the secret of their success.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Shorter Joe Klein: So what if Obama got walked over -- at least he wasn't impolite! I guess Klein thinks if Obama gets tough, it's like Mookie throwing a trash can through Sal's window, and black neighborhoods will erupt in riots.

UPDATE 2. All the comments are, guess what, great, but I have to pull up cleter's: "Obama should have told Geithner to mint a trillion dollar coin with Reagan's face on it. Republicans would have been powerless to stop such a thing."

NO COMPROMISE. I don't have high hopes for the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis, particularly with the addition of a balanced budget amendment to the Boehner plan. Our opinion leaders appear to see the situation as this New York Daily News cover portrays it -- two sides being unreasonable. But it's the Republicans who are proposing big changes consonant with the agenda of their most radical constituents. And while the GOP jumps to please its Tea Party peeps, Democrats don't seem to hear their further-left members at all; the Reid plan is basically a softcore version of the Republicans'.

In other words, all the movement has been in the Republicans' direction, as the cannier conservatives have noted. If the Democrats really believe that massive cuts will further weaken the economy, they're doing a great job of concealing it. The situation offers little hope that significant new tax revenue from our wealthiest fellow-citizens will be included in whatever deal gets done. All the burden will be borne out here in Little People Land.

So a desperate GOP, holding only the House and strongly influenced by its fringe, yet pulls the country further right; and the Democrats, with the Senate and the White House, follow along, dragging their feet a little. Things may change, but they'd have to go awfully far in reverse before this becomes anything like what is traditionally called a compromise.

SHORTER KATHRYN J. LOPEZ: Dollywood told this lesbian to turn her "marriage is so gay" shirt inside-out. She complied, but brazenly persisted in being gay. Moral: I hate fags, I mean tyranny.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE RANDIAN SUPERMEN? Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser reacts to the inclusion of apple slices in McDonalds' Happy Meals:

Great, I’m allergic to apples as are many people because of the pollen allergy. I have a friend who has very low sodium levels and when she goes to restaurants in New York City where she lives, she actually needs the salt. Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to ban salt leave my friend frustrated and annoyed. I wonder how many kids have apple and/or pollen allergies? Human physiology varies from person to person. One person’s apples are another’s poison. Are regulators and perhaps Michelle Obama trying to kill me with their “good intentions”? And don’t they care about the children?

It is unsurprising that our would-be Galtian overlords sense great personal danger in a change in the McDonalds menu. But "frustrated and annoyed" by a possible reduction of salt in prepared foods? Someone tell Dagny Taggart one of the things on the table with holes on top is filled with salt. They don't want you to know!

UPDATE. Patriot Update tried to warn us back in January -- Walmart was the thin end of the wedge!

Michelle Obama and nutrition czar Sam Kass have taken the Food Police nationwide. Last week Wal-Mart announced that it is joining the first lady’s anti-obesity campaign by reducing the salt and sugar content of the food it sells.

As perfectly staged as Thursday’s White House-Wal-Mart press conference was, it is clear that this is not Wal-Mart’s doing. Wal-Mart has been coerced into complying. I kept looking for the Wal-Mart spokesman to flash a silent “distress” signal during the press conference.

Imagine those poor top Walmart execs living under such conditions! And to add insult to injury, Democrats want them to pay more taxes.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Doghouse Riley: "I have a friend who insists his spinach salad has never tasted the same since they made 'em wash the E. coli off." And Mark B thinks DMOP "should partner with [Megan McArdle] so they can negotiate with Mickey D's to put Pink Himalayan salt in the Happy Meals." Good idea -- it will help drive all the Poors out of McDonalds, and they can go eat in those outer-borough taquerias or whatever they call their food-hovels.

Several commenters wonder why DMOP hates the free market, but as Patriot Update showed, these corporation heads only appear to be making business choices based on market realities; they are in fact mind-control slaves of the Kenyan Pretender. When liberated by the Republicans, they will burn down the FDA and sprinkle bacon bits on your frozen yogurt.

UPDATE 3. Roger Ailes asks the burning question: Who is John Salt?

CHUTZPAH. An anti-circumcision bill is under consideration in San Francisco. The local ACLU has come out against it, there's a lawsuit against it, some Democratic state assembly members are trying to head it off, and the polling doesn't look good for it.

Still, dare to dream, Dennis Prager:

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left.

Maybe Prager can try an "Operation Chaos"-style vote freep to get it passed. Won't Rush be impressed if it works!

Can't leave Prager without noting this:

The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Many of the youths who survived the [Norway] massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

I must say, sticking somewhat to the subject, that it takes some balls to find an anti-Israel angle in the story of an Islamophobic mass murderer.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to Anders Breivik's Norwegian rampage. As is customary with these guys, they imagine themselves the aggrieved party, put upon by liberals who connect their politics with Breivik's just because -- well, their politics are Breivik's. If my local ward-heeler went on a mass-murder rampage, I wouldn't feel obliged to explain to the world that not all Democrats are mass murderers, especially on such thin evidence of slander as rightbloggers present. For a bunch of internet tough guys they sure are pissy and defensive.

Oh, and it strikes me that in all their complaining, they don't have a lot to say about the dozens of people who were murdered in cold blood. It's as if victims only become worthy of their interest when they're killed by Muslims.

UPDATE. Comments brilliant as usual; I especially appreciate BigHank53 linking to Charles P. Pierce's story on the Spokane would-be MLK Parade bomber, and other right-wing nutcases.

Meanwhile rightbloggers, including big ones like the Ole Perfesser Instapundit, continue to insist that they're the real victims here. The various defenses of Jennifer Rubin genuinely surprise me; Rubin was clearly, spectacularly wrong, yet her comrades echo her belligerent response that even non-Muslim violence is a reminder of Muslim violence as if it were a home truth rather than a non-sequitur. And Mark Steyn actually disappoints me; the incident seems to have spooked him off his usual stylish insouciance, and thrown him back upon gooberisms more appropriate to dimwits like Jonah Goldberg.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder.

The killer explained at length that he considered leftists responsible for the Islamification of his country, and then he went out and killed a bunch of them. He clearly despises liberals and Muslims, and mass murder is his preferred mode of self-expression. It's easy to see why Norwegians worry that some other nut -- possibly also quoting Mark Steyn -- might decide to cut out the middleman.

PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE) In preparation for what is expected to be the first legal gay wedding in New York State, Niagara Falls (courtesy of @LanceBass):


Goddamn, I'm proud to be an American.

I'M SORRY, AMY WINEHOUSE. Back when I was crushing copy for the Voice, I sometimes had a bit of fun with the antics of Amy Winehouse. Her bizarre behavior and drug escapades made for good copy.

As you may imagine, I feel kind of bad about it now.

It's a bitter kind of amusement to joke about musicians headed for an early death, and musicians sometimes play along. Lou Reed once finished neck-and-neck with Keith Richards in a poll of likely casualties, and Reed deadpanned that he was proud to be mentioned in the same breath as Keef, "a real rock star." To an extent this is whistling in the dark. Sometimes people who dance on the edge successfully complete the performance and move to firmer ground, and the examples of the survivors (like Reed and Richards) insulate us from the possibility that the dancer may take a very hard fall. It's all fun and games until someone loses a life.

I make a joke now and again about the possibility of my own untimely demise (though it's getting a little late for that). This is a leftover from my punk rock days, when I was living a good deal harder than I do now, and more inclined to romantic, Wertherian broodings. (The title of the unfinished third Reverb Motherfuckers album was Goodbye Cruel World, and I blush to think of some of the lyrics I wrote for it.) When you tend that way, you don't always know how serious you are about it until life gives you a clue. The examples of some people who went all the way helped convince me that in matters of self-destruction I was a mere poseur. Now, though I sometimes sink into despair, I'm less likely to act it out. But the pose has stayed with me in the domesticated form of a writer's schtick. Does everything seem ridiculous and beyond hope? Well, then, there's always oblivion, a good card to play when nothing else seems to work.

It's easy to forget that some of us aren't playing. All I really know about Winehouse is that she was ferociously talented, a very good songwriter and a great singer. I like Back in Black but only ever owned Frank, which I'm listening to now. Her idiom was old-fashioned but she inhabited it fully; it was the product of great craft but also wholly natural; you can hear her taking pleasure in her own sound without abandoning the meaning of her songs. Her work always had more than one thing going on in it. When the songs were moody, her pleasure lifted them; when they were playful, her craft gave them ballast. ("Fuck Me Pumps" would sound much cheaper without it.)

As a million second-rate chanteuses have shown, this is no mean feat. It's the kind of mastery that makes you believe the singer can do anything. When she started to fall, some of us thought it was something her talent, or some innate respect for it, would pull her back from. When she stayed down, some of us still couldn't take it seriously. Now the seriousness is inescapably proven, and along with the regret that comes with the passing of any major artist, I feel regret that it took this to convince me. Celebrities aren't friends, and we're not obliged to act as if they were. In fact it's presumptuous to do so. But, generally speaking, it's never a good thing to treat the sufferings of another human being as if they were unimportant.

UPDATE. All of the comments are good, but I would draw your attention to that of BigHank53. Go look; I won't do it the violence of excerption.

UPDATE 2. Great tribute by Maura Johnston at Sound of the City.

UPDATE 3. I'm taking What Would Tyler Durden Do off the blogroll. I've long appreciated his harshness, but this is bullshit.

AROUND THE HORN. I know, it's hot. But as someone who was born in July and spent a summer in east Texas, I advise that you screw your courage to a sticky place, and try not to look at the thermometer. Heat waves are unpleasant but, making allowances for the medically vulnerable, they're unlikely to kill you, while internalizing the endless newsbreaks about them could make you crazy enough to kill yourself. Like a lot of what's on the TV news, those stories use endless repetition and alarmism to keep you twitching. Ignore them. Stay mentally chill, and hydrate.

Speaking of crazy, Peggy Noonan endorses the Gang of Six plan, and says the only thing standing in its way is... Barack Obama, who talks too much and should instead "stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility." In reality, conservatives have been screaming bloody murder about the plan ("[Brent] Bozell: Republicans who support Gang of Six proposal ‘will walk the plank’'; National Review, "Worst Plan So Far"; etc). But they scream bloody murder about everything and then when it's done, whatever is done, declare victory. Noonan wants Obama locked in his office so he won't be at the champagne party when the inevitable agreement is reached. Given that said agreement will probably be awful, maybe Obama is well-advised in that respect.

My old Voice pal Steven Thrasher has an interview with Kitty Lambert who is expected to pop the cherry on New York's marriage equality act and be legally wed to Cheryle Rudd on Monday "in front of the specially rainbow lit Niagara Falls," thus destroying the institution of marriage and Maggie Gallagher's digestion in the most spectacular way possible. Yay!

BLEW PERIOD. Some sissy in a beret must have made him look bad, because Ace O'Spades is on about the artist menace:

The Police song -- Synchronicity I, I think -- goes...

Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, Contestants in a suicidal race.

That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.

You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea -- the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life -- in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don't win Oscars a lot.

Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.

Spades prefers Tommy Boy, because "the heroes actually made good quality car parts so that people could fix their cars."

To each his own, you might say. Spades talks about these things as if only their allegedly bourgeois-hating creators could enjoy them -- because they "could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call 'a normal life,'" he says, "and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles." (Never heard of Wallace Stevens, I guess.)

But Synchronicity II*, American Beauty, Death of a Salesman et alia were hits. They weren't only patronized by scribblers and dabblers. Even people who make good quality car parts dug them.

It never crosses Spades' mind to ask why ordinary people sometimes go for songs, plays, and movies that suggest their lives might not be all they'd hoped. He doesn't know what art's for. In his view it's always about self-affirmation, always being told that you're right and that other possibilities would inevitably be worse. In other words, it's like his own political propaganda, only with tom rolls and explosions.

Among the essay's more poignant moments:

I don't begrudge them that. As someone who's wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself.

Pause to imagine Spades in Bohemian limbo: sharing a garret with other disaffected rightbloggers, deranging their senses with Mountain Dew and discussing 24 deep into the night. Then Spades made the big time, and it looked like he and his buddies were going to really change things; it would be Montparnasse all over again! Alas, inevitably came the disenchantment.

The rest is mostly bitching about those damned artists and their superior attitudes, but I have to point this out:

In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can't make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.

This is so obvious, isn't it?

So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?

As usual Spades is projecting massively. But as a conservative, he should have considered this answer: if that one percent of artists has succeeded financially despite overwhelming odds, why wouldn't they have contempt for people who hadn't made it, or were unmotivated to try? Here, this may help: try imagining them as investment bankers or captains of industry who consider themselves producers and everyone else looters and parasites.

*UPDATE. Commenters point out that Ace got this title wrong, so I fixed it. Some of them also draw a connection between Spades' peculiar idea of art and the Soviets', which, I have sometimes noted here, is increasingly adopted by American conservatives. Not every philistine is a would-be commissar, but with these guys you have every reason to be nervous, as they talk so much about lifestyle issues these days, and their Will to Power is so fierce.

kth notices that Jay-Z provides the kind of business-friendly messaging Spades could get with -- actually a lot of rappers do -- but that would require Spades to adopt an idiom with which I suspect he would not be comfortable.

UPDATE 2. Ed Driscoll puts his oar in:

Actually, it’s not artists; it’s leftists... a few months ago when I spent a week in Texas, I listened to several hours worth of songs celebrating working hard, living on a farm, patriotism, and essentially being a grown-up.

I spent six months in Texas. Maybe Driscoll's handlers played him nothing but Toby Keith and told him he was from Texas. Surely they didn't play him any Ray Wylie Hubbard. Or Brian Keane: "When you sing about your Wrangler jeans/Pickup trucks and Dairy Queens/You make the place I love seem like a bad cartoon..."

A COUPLE OF WHITE GUYS SITTING AROUND TALKING. Jonah Goldberg is puzzled that a private school and a journalists' convention are promoting "diversity" as selling points. I'm puzzled by Goldberg. Isn't he a capitalist? It should no more bother him that services are peddled with diversity than if they were peddled with HD, 9.0 megapixels, electronic brake-force distribution, or whatever. Hell, Violet from Peanuts bought a bracelet because it was hi-fi. Just because Goldberg doesn't want it doesn't mean other high-end consumers won't.

Maybe Goldberg thinks the proliferation of diversity talk is bad for America in some way. Will he grasp the nettle?

Whether you think that’s a good thing or bad — or a mix of the two — is a topic for another day.

Goldberg never fails to come down to our expectations.

John Derbyshire jumps in to make everything worse:

Last week the whole Derb family went to an Open House at the college our daughter will be attending this Fall. As part of the presentation there was a promotional movie for the college. One of the first words spoken in the movie was “Diversity.” I think it may actually have been the very first: “Diversity is our highest goal here at . . .” or some such.

Or maybe it said, "Your daughter will meet attractive black men"; with the blood pounding in his ears, Derbyshire may have misheard. Also, unlike Goldberg, Derbyshire is willing to say where he stands on the whole diversity racket:

The U.S.A. was born diverse and we have never had any choice but to cope with that original Diversity as best we can.

Just so: along with the Brits, Germans, et alia, hundreds of thousands of black people somehow wound up in America in the 18th Century, and it's been nothing but trouble ever since. I believe Charles Murray wrote a book about it.

Still, if managing Diversity demands such commitment of time, resources, and effort, above and beyond what is ordinarily required to keep a civilization going and an economy humming, isn’t it foolish to be taking on more Diversity? Especially in a world where, as one of your commenters points out, we are in rivalry with big nations that have no Diversity overhead at all?

Well, there's an exciting new theory of America's economic doldrums: we face a disastrous racial purity gap. Maybe one day Derbyshire will explain his plan for addressing it. I expect it will involve driving African-Americans out of the country with dialect humor.

UPDATE. Another classic Goldberg-Derbyshire tag team on the subject. (And another.)

UPDATE 2. Right out of the comments box: "What'ya mean 'we,' lime-sucker? Get your rotten-toothed, queen-humping arse back to Old Blighty and leave America to us Americans." You're the real racist, Roger.

UPDATE 3. Ha S,N!

RACE CARD. Rep. Allen West called Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz “vile,” “despicable” and “not a Lady," which is unusually pointed language for intramural Congressional squabbles, and the Democrats are making hay of it. Perfesser Instapundit interprets the situation thus:

RACISTS: Democrats Demand Allen West Apologize For Criticizing White Woman. I guess they figure he doesn’t know his place.

Hey, I didn’t make the racial rules for political discourse. I’m just following their previous application.

Ann Althouse gets in on it:

What's with West? Is he — as Think Progress would have it — into "making outrageous statements just to provoke a reaction"? Or have media folk on the other side of that "ideological clash" decided that the way to ruin Allen West's potential for a brilliant career is to portray him as hotheaded and irrational?

Portray? West's comments were impolitic, as even West seemed to realize, albeit briefly. Althouse adds:

In this context, let's remember all the discussion about how Barack Obama had to fend off the "angry black man" stereotype:

And she excerpts a year-old article with some quotes about Obama's rhetorical mildness, e.g.: "Rev. Wright almost cost [Obama] his run for the presidency because of fears of the angry black man... He is Mr. Equanimity and Mr. Consolation... That's how he negotiated his way through multiple worlds, and reached out across bridges." Trying to figure out what Althouse means is often an unrewarding chore, but the idea seems to be that because Obama's publicly even temper has been noted, noticing West's less-even temper is... shit, I don't know; again I rely on the Perfesser to interpret:

ARE THE MEDIA TRYING TO TAR ALLEN WEST with the “angry black man” stereotype?

Because I’m pretty sure that makes them racist.

Further down the food chain, we get stuff like this: "WOW, I think the DNC chair is a racist. She’s going after Allen West because he’s black. That’s the only reason for the issue. IF a white man had said what Allen West said it would have been overlooked. I’m sure of it.. Debbie Wuzhernamesmuck is a RACIST!" Not to speak of the commentary at the plankton level.

Having recently been confronted by unambiguous racists -- the kind who use "nigger" without irony -- I am perhaps more sensitive than I might be to this kind of thing. Their claims are unserious -- I assume even they realize that normal people would find them ridiculous, were they to stumble upon them. But they're still disturbing, because they presume that any claims of racism (except the kind made against black people) are phony and meaningless, so why shouldn't they have some fun with them, too? It would be nice to think they're doing this in hopes that, by laughing it off, we can get past the absurdity of racism itself. But I expect that if they need some base-shoring in 2012, we'll find that they're hoping for something entirely different.

NEAREST THE MERCHANT'S HEART. At Andrew Sullivan's site, a discussion of that flogging-for-prison thing I talked about earlier. Here's one conservative's reaction:


Maybe we should take this to its logical conclusion, and allow inmates to, say, cut off a hand to get out of two years of prison. Or maybe a leg to get out of five. Similarly, borrowers should be allowed to put up a pound of flesh if they default on a loan. Hey, it's their choice, right?

When did this sort of thing become debatable?

UPDATE. Among our brilliant commenters, with their references to Larry Niven and fafblog and so forth, Gerald Fnord comes out of the gate with "the problem with a system that will let you buy anything is that everything will be for sale... at which point no right is inalienable."

Quite so. The follow-ups by aimai et alia about kidney harvesting further remind me of those libertarian-style conservatives who want to let living citizens put their vital organs on the open market; they usually say it's Because Freedom, but I suspect they see it as a kind of extreme welfare reform -- instead of subsidizing the desperately impoverished, why not give them the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own ureters? Rich people have the need, and poor people have the kidneys -- problem solved!

When you get used to thinking this way, the idea of letting prisoners trade their own torture for early dismissal from prison seems like a no-brainer. These are the sort of people who go in for bland cost-benefit analyses of torture and, when the local school calls to report that their sons have been bullying other kids, breathe sighs of relief and satisfaction.

TAKNG THE PLEDGE.

No Time for Real Time
By Kathryn Jean Lopez

On this weekend’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host presided over a discussion of imagined violent sex with two presidential candidates (Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum), courtesy of Air America’s Marc Maron and Dan Savage (who we last heard from on the joys of non-monogamy).

What a repulsive conversation. And it is not a first there.

Can we all agree to avoid that show? To avoid going on it. To avoid watching it.

The idea of Lopez looking for high-fives while all the fame-hungry Conerites pretend to tie their shoes is pretty funny, but no match for her next line:

I’d like to think most try to enter conversations on television hoping to bring something new and different but uplifting and constructive, that might move the conversation forward.

I guess whenever Jonah Goldberg goes before the cameras, the National Review interns jam Lopez's transmission, and secretly replace Goldberg's actual burblings with old tapes of Malcolm Muggeridge.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the debut of the Sarah Palin hagio-doc The Undefeated and the grand claims for it made by rightbloggers. Basically, they opened the thing in a couple of cowtowns, and it's supposed to be the biggest sleeper since Easy Rider. Those of us living in civilization will have to wait to see how good it is, but the bullshit of the Palin promoters remains ripe as ever.

Not included in the column is the review by Ben Howe of RedState, wherein he abhors and repents his prior lack of Palin worship.

I didn’t think she’d really done much in Alaska, or if she had, that it was enough to act like she was the second coming of Reagan. I thought that her contributions when being interviewed were bubble-gum and lacking of any real substance. I would never finish hearing a story about her and think, “Wow, I never thought of that before.” I just didn’t see that she had that much to offer.

But then he saw the movie --

I pride myself on my ability to know when something is baloney, almost instinctively. On Sarah Palin, I was so incredibly hoodwinked that the one word that my wife and I agreed described how we felt after watching it, was shame. Yes of course invigoration, satisfaction and all the other things you experience when watching a good film, but about how we had handled our vetting of Mrs. Palin, shame was the word that best described it.

Shame for not bothering to look up her record. Shame for not reading her story. Shame for turning the channel when she came on the tv. Shame for not listening to people that we had a great deal of respect for like Andrew Breitbart, Tammy Bruce, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Keep in mind, this is a guy from RedState saying this. I tried to think of possible equivalents -- like a Daily Kos poster tearing his shirt and groveling because he never really appreciated Joe Biden -- but I think you'd have to go back to the Middle Ages, or to the Salem Witch Trials, to find such a (in the words of the padre in A Clockwork Orange) grotesque act of self-abasement. Maybe this is how these people keep the poor fish in their ranks from converting -- by offering conversion opportunities internally.

Well, read the column anyway, before the comments box gets taken over by racist lunatics.

THE FUTURE OF ECHO CHAMBERS. As most of my posts are about politics, I guess I qualify as a political blogger. But it's not really politics as such that motivates me. I don't see myself promoting any political agenda, and would be very surprised to hear that anyone had changed their party affiliation or views on an important subject because of what I've written.

In fact, for years I tried as hard as I could to avoid politics. But with the dawn of the blog era, it became hard to even take the online equivalent of a Sunday stroll without being confronted by politics in its most degenerate form. So was I spurred; but not by offenses to my politics so much as by offenses to my reason.

I can countenance and even be swayed by conservative arguments, but much of what I read by rightbloggers has less to do with argumentation than with propaganda, noise-making, and just plain bullshit. And, by whatever accident of my upbringing, that sort of thing just grates on my nerves.

Take the subjects of some of my recent posts. Their politics are obnoxious to me, but my complaints have mainly been against the sloppy and even deranged thinking with which they attempt to promote them: the focus on irrelevant detail, the projection of political import onto trivialities, the mistaking of racist slurs for arguments, the false assumption of victim status, etc.

And that's mostly what they've got. When you survey memeorandum or Blogrunner, what you see doesn't resemble Plato's Symposium so much as the mob of crackpot messiahs howling in the public square in Monty Python's Life of Brian. And it gets worse all the time.

I got some idea of where this may go next from the comments to my recent Voice column.

The topic was rightblogger promotion of the idea that America suffers from a black crime wave. After a few rounds of the usual lively back-and-forth, one commenter started frenetically cutting-and-pasting stories about crimes with black perps -- hundreds of them, sometimes with commentary like "MASSIVE CHIMP-OUT" -- and claiming they were "evidence" that the "libtards" were wrong and that blacks were terrorizing America.

I pointed out to him that hundreds of thousands of violent crimes are reported in America every year, and that his cut-and-pastes don't prove anything; his reaction was to scream obscene insults and to call for my death. (Other commenters tried to engage him and got the same thing.) He even brought aboard a couple of other commenters to yell insults at me, and at black people in general.

They've been at it for days now. And they're all very pleased because now they're the only ones left in that combox, leaving them free to beat their chests and holler undisturbed. They aren't reaching anyone who isn't already convinced, as they are, that black people are inferior, but that apparently doesn't matter as much to them as their reign over a tiny corner of the Voice website.

This occupation by racist psychos is an extreme case, but as spaces in which actual discussion may take place shrivel away -- and the very idea of discussion falls into desuetude -- I expect you'll see more of this kind of thing. Because when reason is no longer meaningful, the only standard left is force -- how many words you can paste, how many all-caps insults you can inflict; freeping writ large. People like Rupert Murdoch have always been able to do this to the venues they own, of course, but in our electronic age, any dedicated (that is, insane) party may do it to other people's venues; having no other model for the propagation of his ideas, he has no reason not to.

Maybe a new kind of content farm will emerge, dedicated to flooding every available space with propaganda instead of advertising. In fact, as our billionaires get further into political outreach, maybe that kind of advertising will outstrip the other kinds. What the hell, when they're that brainwashed, they'll buy anything.

In any event, it doesn't look like an improvement. Thanks again, internet!

UPDATE. The psychopath seems to have invaded these comments, too. My regular commenters seem to know how to handle him, but I'm still going to block him when I get home, so if you want your last licks, take them now.

UPDATE 2. OK, I've blocked him -- not something I like to do, but the guy's clearly deranged. Sigh. Isn't it strange that anyone would choose to so misuse his time on earth?

I feel like one of those cops on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, coming home to his family after a long day of dealing with the criminally insane.

FOCUSING ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT. Obama says "don't call my bluff," and the shirt-retuckers at National Review raise a point of order:

Will no one call Obama on his tough-sounding “Don’t call my bluff”? What kind of threat is “Don’t call my bluff”? In saying that, Obama is admitting he’s bluffing. A sensible threat might be, “Don’t assume I’m bluffing!” But no...

Soon they'll tell us that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, and get a wedgie.

Meanwhile Randall Hoven offers "The Speech Boehner Should Give" if by some magic spell the nation becomes remotely interested in what Boehner has to say. My favorite bit:

It has become clear to my House colleagues that the time for closed-door meetings and extra-constitutional commissions is over. We need to get back to the kinds of government processes we all learned in grade school civics.

Grade school civics! If we really wanted to teach the kids what goes on in our legislatures, we would just show them selected episodes of The Wire.

TURN OFF THE DAMN TV AND GO OUTSIDE. It's time for some deepthink on TV cop shows:

In all, then, I think it’s clear that the show sends a consistent and obvious message, conveyed through the central characters’ continual physical, psychological, and legal intimidation of people not convicted of any crime or even under formal arrest.

It is this: we are living in a police state, a society in which the government has unlimited authority over the individual. And this, the producers appear strongly to suggest, is a good thing, as it results in the restoration of order at the end of each episode (albeit with the occasional cheesy irony or fashionable ambiguity), as mysteries tend to do. The fact that this “order” involves the reduction of citizens into subjects, of taxpayers into servants of a privileged elite through the continual threat of violence by police, seems of little consequence to the producers, as it is never dealt with fundamentally and critically in the show’s story lines.

So who wrote this crap? The Derrida Professor for Semiotics at some fancy-pants college, talking about Dragnet? No, it's by credentialed culture warrior S.T. Karnick, talking at Big Hollywood about Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Why would a conservative bitch about cops muscling suspects on TV? There's a simple explanation: The interrogations on L&O:CI are not the manly sort Jack Bauer dished out on 24, they're clear examples of liberal fascism. No, I'm not even kidding:

Both characters [Bobby Goren and Alex Eames] annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view firmly based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism.

Karnick finds Vincent D'Onofrio, the big guy with the weird interrogation methods, an "unappealing character type." That I can buy, but then Karnick tells us where else he finds this particular type:

...it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their presence.

I dislike Starbucks because the coffee is crap, not because the baristas tower over me and read back my order in a halting, urgent whisper. What the hell is Karnick talking about?

Though he also doesn't like the lieberal storylines -- too many guilty businessmen; Karnick would prefer the shows be about "the usual domestic violence or street crimes that most murders result from," which sounds like a ratings goldmine -- Karnick mainly finds evidence of liberal fascism in the way the actors pull faces:

The progressive-authoritarian political agenda was strongly evident in the story lines and dialogue throughout the run of the series, but D’Onofrio and Erbe added much to the effect by conveying it continually through their facial expressions, gestures, and vocal inflections. The smug looks they passed to each other during their interrogations of suspects were downright insufferable, given the enormous power these detectives were given to detain people, subject them to intense questioning, and manipulate them psychologically in the attempt to send them to prison for felonies.

And not only do they evince liberal fascism by giving suspects That Look and taking That Tone, they're prejudiced -- there are certain suspects they exempt from physiognomological oppression:

...D’Onofrio was notable for his habit of looming into an individual’s personal space by edging ever-closer to the person, using his size (he is tall, bulky, and pudgy) to intimidate them. This was something Goren seemed particularly inclined to do to wealthy, successful people. The poor, by contrast, didn’t usually get that sort of treatment. Of course, since the latter were seldom actual suspects and had little sense of personal power, he had less desire to intimidate them, as he seemed well aware that the crimes he was chosen to investigate were always committed by the rich and powerful, and in particular those from the private sector, not government.

Clearly conservatives should hold a tea party in TV Land to demand a fairer distribution of smug faces on cop shows.

There are plenty of other things wrong with their culture-war obsession, but really, these guys are mostly hurting themselves. You'd think their friends would tell them that obsessively analyzing such things as Vincent D'Onofrio's eyeballs and facial muscles is turning them into total dinks. Those people aren't real, S.T. -- they're characters, and if they're weird it's because they're on TV, and viewers like unusual people.

Oh Christ, I've said too much -- now his next essay will be about Monk, and how obsessive-compulsive liberal fascists gesturally oppress him at theater benefits and Panera.

(h/t Dan Coyle.)


UPDATE. Great comments. Though I still advise he play outside, Gocart Mozart has another Kulturkampf case for Karnick to get on:

Batman and Superman always went after Galtian super villians like the Joker or Lex luther. They never beat up on the crack heads. Fuckin' liberal fascists!

That'll keep the rightdorks' comboxes hopping like they haven't since Revenge of the Sith.

VOX POPULI. My most recent Voice column drew a number of top minds to the comments box:

I know it hurts your liberal feelings that these 'ooga boogas' can't behave and act somewhat human...

American blacks need to be encouraged to immigrate to Africa, where they can be among their own and create their own civilization. Let’s face it…blacks are unfit to live among humans in human civilization...

Maybe miscegenation is the answer for your daughter, sugerpuff. I'm sure you're evolved enough it won't bother you at all. Until the black dude leaves her a single mother, and you can't get him to pay child support...

But this is what diversity is like for the rest of us: chaos, violence, fear, distrust, theft, assault, battery, rape, murder, gangs, declining property values...

Black folks: Is there nothing they can't blame on white folks?...

Let us know when your daughter has neighbors of feral fatherless young black males. Until then your words are of no value...

Etc. One of them directed me to American Thinker, where John T. Bennett tells readers that the liberal media is covering up a black crime wave.

We face the nightmarish reality of low-level ethnic conflict. If these violent mob attacks worsen, they will be a precursor to severe racial tension.

On the evidence I'd say that, among a select group, "severe racial tension" is already in effect.

These flash mobs already constitute the worst acts of racist violence in recent American history.

That's an interesting assertion. In any given era in this great land of ours, you'll find cases of black people fucking up white people, and some commentators (like Selwyn Duke in this 2007 WND article) will extrapolate from these familiar conclusions ("Often, hatred toward whites isn't lamented, but lauded as the attitude of a racial patriot toward 'oppressors'"). Here's one from the Sydney Morning Herald (!), published in 1995, claiming that "for the past 30 years a large segment of black America has waged a war of violent retribution against white America."

Usually these perorations don't get much traction, but the latest batch of "worst acts of racist violence in recent American history" is receiving generous play among the belligerati, despite the relatively low crime levels nationwide. You don't suppose politics has anything to do with it, do you?