HOW JONAH GOLDBERG FILLS THE IDLE HOURS BETWEEN 9 A.M. AND 5 P.M.

Repeated verbatim:

TMI
By Jonah Goldberg

I have no problem with a gay man playing in the NFL. I have no problem with Michael Sam coming out of the closet. Good for him if that makes him happy. I even understand why it’s considered such a big deal, even if I suspect there’s more public relations spin at work here than an eager media will acknowledge. But I still can’t bring myself to care all that much. I certainly didn’t need to know that Sam told his father he was gay via text message. Nor did I need to know that his father helped one of his other sons lose his virginity in Mexico. Why is this any of our business?

I am tempted to call it a perfect Goldberg post -- it has several classic attributes, including the breathless eight-year-old-explaining-a-broken-cookie-jar tone,  a piss-dance between two contradictory points of view (I guess it's newsworthy, also I guess it's non-news planted by the gayist media), and a lengthy profession of disinterest in which you can almost hear his rising squeal. That it lacks a request that readers do his work for him should not be counted against it, because Goldberg's recent work shows absolutely no need for even second-hand research.

I guess we can just give it the traditional rating.

WE REGRET THE ERROR.

Jonah Goldberg:

I haven’t read the whole New York Times profile of Sarah Palin... in part because I have some more pressing things on my calendar (clean out the drier lint, stare vacantly into space) and in part because I resent the transparent effort to make Sarah Palin into an intriguing or compelling personality. It’s all so manufactured, like they have a checklist she’s got to work through before she can be one of Barbara Walters’ “Most Fascinating People,” despite losing an election. I give it 50-50 she has a daytime syndicated talk show by the end of the decade.

Oops, sorry, I have misquoted Goldberg here -- please substitute "Wendy Davis" for "Sarah Palin" in every instance, and add "farrrrrrt" randomly throughout the passage.

UPDATE. The whole NRO Corner is especially nuts today. There's another Goldberg essay, about some book he hasn't read, that is literally incomprehensible. Can one of you tell me what that rap about "America, or liberals, or Jews — or all three!" is about?  Also, here's increasingly mad torture enthusiast Andrew C. McCarthy's money shot for the day:

So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality.

For embarrassing-to-conservatives-in-retrospect-and-to-everyone-else-right-now, this is almost at an "Is Shirley Temple a Communist?" level. Also, assuming Obama evades arrest by the Freedom Commandos and continues to serve as President without actually declaring martial law, where can McCarthy go rhetorically from here? "Obama, like his dark lord Satan...." "In emulation of his best friend and spiritual twin Adolph Hitler..." "Commissar Obama... " Whoa, actually the National Review editorial board already got there in 2008. Maybe I only imagined they weren't always this bad.

UPDATE 2. Commenters, commenters, I'm only one man! I can't possibly address all the National Review crazitude (though if someone wants to pay me to do that, I'm all ears) but I do appreciate it being brought to my attention -- for example, Victor Davis Hanson's ode to Vladimir Putin, which coozledad encapsulates as "shirtless Putin is more honest than metrosexual golfer Obama," which is fair though it does miss some of the rhapsodic nuances of Hanson's prose; for example, Hanson finds "value" (Greek for "schwing," I guess) in Putin's "confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means," like how he kills dogs and does other lovable-dictator stuff, and though Hanson tee-hees that Putin is "what we should not be," his eyes say yes, we should! Balloon Juice captures it best: "Victor Davis Hanson channels his inner bottom."

Jack Fowler dishing out the institutional self-pity is also mentioned, and I must say his claim that Politico never "called" National Review for its story on them (Rich Lowry was interviewed by email) establishes new frontiers in hackdom. But I am grateful to him for bestowing on NR the slogan I shall associate with it henceforth: "a magazine that has lost money for 58 years."

UPDATE 3. Speaking of ObamaHitler, Bloomberg reports the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. has reversed a federal law that would have required tax preparers "pass a certification exam, pay annual fees and complete at least 15 hours of education courses annually." Here's how Charles C.W. Cooke plays it:

Court Slaps Down IRS Power Grab  

More often than not, conversations about the Obama administration’s executive overreach end up with apologists asking, petulantly, “well, what are you going to do about it anyway"...

I bet when his parents give him a hard time, Cooke mutters "Whatever you say, Hitler."

GOLDBERG GETS RESULTS! (OR: THE WAR ON POETRY!)

My throwaway statement in the update to yesterday's post seems prescient now. To recap: In 2010 Nancy Pelosi said something about the Affordable Care Act: That citizens who'd been keeping jobs (first, second, or third) just so they could keep health insurance that went with it would, thanks to the ACA, have a chance to drop it and try to become "an artist or a photographer or a writer."

Pelosi also said Obamacare left citizens free to "start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk," but none of the brethren heard that -- their brains were too inflamed by visions of dirty bohemians spending their taxpayer dollars on Gauloises, Moleskins, and beret cleaner. Look up "Nancy Pelosi" and "musicians" on Google and mind the bullshit avalanche that tumbles forth.

But the recent CBO report concerning Obamacare's effect on job-lock brought the Pelosi art attack back -- and Jonah Goldberg offered an improvement. "[Pelosi's] been mocked for years now," claimed Goldberg, "for her repeated claims that Obamacare is an entrepreneurial bill because it would let Americans quit their jobs to, among other things, 'write poetry.'" He then made a bunch of horrible jokes about it ("spending $1.2 trillion just so we could liberate the Job-Locked Poets!") and reiterated the riff in another column ("When Nancy Pelosi says that Obamacare is entrepreneurial because it will let people quit their jobs to become poets, you can see the campus utopianism coming through").

Other wingnut outlets carried the news that Obama fucked Pelosi to make poets, and I imagined David French's otherwise incomprehensible spasm about Wendy Sherman and poetry yesterday was an unconsciously sympathetic response to a gathering meme. Today in The Hill:

Democrats pushing poetry over jobs?

...Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), say that the law allows workers to alleviate themselves from “job-lock”... 

[Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey] Gowdy honed in on the remarks, saying they are part of a larger effort to smooth over flaws with the healthcare reform law and its rollout during an election year. 

“What the liberals and the Democrats want you to believe is, ‘Well, but you’ll have time to write poetry,’ ” Gowdy said. “Well, that’s great until you try and buy your grandkid a birthday present or you try and pay the heating bill.”

Made it up to Congress already! I expect some apparatchik will soon present an argument that poetry itself is anti-American. Some of it don't even rhyme!

UPDATE. AEI scholar Stan Veuger at The National Interest says this "pivot to leisure" is just spin to distract America from the Obamacare sharknado: "You declare employment 'job lock,'" he writes, "and claim that workers faced with massive new work disincentives" -- big, scary disincentives! -- "are 'choosing' to spend more time cooking, composing lyrical poetry, and becoming entrepreneurs, as Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, a prominent Obama advisor on these issues, did in the LA Times a few days ago." Hmm, now they're blaming the poetry on Gruber; I'd like to see a source for that.

At Forbes, Kyle Smith sneers that the CBO report proves "The Obama Administration Doesn't Care Whether You Work Or Not," and by caving in to people who would "leave the workforce willingly in order to 'pursue their dreams,'" Obama is abandoning them to this dark future:

...the psychic devastation and desolation that come with losing one’s connection to the economic networks that mean much to us — socially and even spiritually. Work doesn’t just give us a paycheck, it gives us meaning and purpose.

Think of losing the spiritually meaningful moments of chat about Game of Thrones with your cubicle neighbor! And if that doesn't scare you, think of what else you'll lose -- to poetry!

Each person who decides she’d rather translate ancient Babylonian poetry than hold an entry-level office job is foregoing not only the drab cubicle but also the corner office that might have been hers 25 years of diligence later.

Yes, Smith actually brings up job security to Forbes readers -- who know at least as well as everyone else that it hasn't existed for years. He might have offered the more realistic goal of holding a drab cubicle until the company is sold out from under you and you go to work for Walmart -- but at least then you'd be uncontaminated by poetry!

UPDATE 2. Charlie Pierce: "Trey Gowdy, who gets a base salary of $174,000, will work a total of 113 days in formal session this year, in which he will do very little. I happen to know several poets, and I can say with authority that every one of them works harder than does Trey Gowdy, that Philistine meathead, largely because most of them are working two or more jobs, none of which provide benefits."

UPDATE 3. Late in the day, but there is some fine versifying by world-be Obamacare welfare Fairie Queenes in comments. These range from limericks ("There once was a fellow named Gowdy...") to loftier parodies ("My intern goes after what my eyes cannot reach/With the twirl of my tongue I encompass cheetos and volumes of cheetos...").

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the CBO finding that, since Obamacare lets Americans quit jobs they no longer need for insurance, 2.3 million of them might do so, and the outrage this engenders among rightbloggers. Yes, freedom's just another word for -- actually, at this point, who knows?

UPDATE. Related to the brethren's highly negative reaction, noted in my column, to Nancy Pelosi's old quote about Obamacare's effect on musicians and writers -- which they elide to "poets" cuz poets iz faggy  -- National Review's David French, after raving about how liberals win all the Grammys, turns his inchoate rage on Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, in part because she's "a social worker and pro-abortion activist," which naturally leads him to this:

Ah well, if Iran gets a nuke, she can probably win a poetry award lamenting the fears of the children of Tel Aviv. Not that she’s written poetry, but EMILY’s List prepares one for anything.

In French's imagining, the evil of abortion leads naturally to poetry! I think French is mad all the time because, in schools across America, literary magazines and drama clubs are getting the respect he thinks rightfully belongs to bullies.

NEW REALITIES.

Remember when conservatives considered Costco as American as cheeseburgers and credit default swaps? Some, like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, preferred Sam's Club, but I assume that was for onomatopoetic reasons -- the basic idea was, large stores selling large lots at large discounts was what excited the Common Man and that was what conservatism was all about. (Rick Santorum tried to split the difference in his last Witchfinder General campaign by calling his chosen people "Sam's Club and Costco folks.")

National Review writers certainly knew the metaphoric weight of Costco. Back in the old days, NROniks like Jennifer Graham sneered at a feminist who didn't want to have kids and wind up shopping at Costco; Shannen Coffin piled on, "Costco would have been Bloomingdales to us back" when she was potential abortion fodder. Carrie Lukas defended the chain against claims of gender discrimination by its female employees, Greg Pollowitz cheered its resistance to foofy electric cars, etc.

It was a valuable signifier. In 2004 Larry Kudlow protested John Kerry's NAFTA stance as "trade protectionism" that "undermines the living standards of the near 135 million Americans who shop at Wal-Mart, Kmart, Costco, Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy."

This schtick persisted into the early Obama era. In 2009 NR's Jim Powell added Costco to the honor roll of big companies "in Obama’s crosshairs" for high socialist taxation. Wingnut bottom feeders announced that Americans "are buying physical gold and silver in an attempt to shelter themselves when the U.S. dollar becomes worthless. Now retail giant Costco is getting in on the action by selling survival kits of dehydrated food in preparation for Obamageddon." Mitt and Ann Romney went shopping at Costco and gushed about all the stuff they'd bought and would keep in a shed till the election was over and they could quietly get rid of it.

But this week, National Review's Alec Torres headlines,

Costco: The Arugula of Chain Stores

Arugula -- the most dreaded of conservative curse-words! Their membership fees are apparently elitist: Costco, Torres has discovered, "is largely found in middle-class and affluent communities, where residents can afford to front $55 to $110 before purchasing a single item."

What happened? The answer's in Torres' subhed:

Obama's choice for shopping is great if you don't know any non-rich non-liberals

Since the President and others started pointing out that Costco pays its workers okay and still makes money, and wingnuts have had to devote precious propaganda resources to explaining why we can't let that kind of thing get out of hand, the company has apparently lost its cred with the community.

I look forward to the 2016 speeches when Republicans are instructed to refer to real Americans who only shop at dollar stores, Rent-a-Centers, and payday loan outfits.

UPDATE. Chris Walker from 2nd Vote -- the "revolutionary new app that keeps your spending aligned with your conservative values" -- writes, "2nd Vote classifies Costco as 'Passively Liberal' but, after taking a second look at Costco’s CEO activism, it is safe to say we will be updating their score and moving them into the 'Actively Liberal' category." Gasp! From the boards at Free Republic, though, it appears the brethren are already enlightened to Costco's econotreason; I assume they'll just shop there on the down-low.

LINE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR).

My favorite wingnut line of the week -- and possibly of the month or year, though I'm sure the competition will as always be fierce -- comes from Andrew Klavan, normally one of conservatism's comedy stylists but dead serious in a PJ Media column about, get this, how the right can win over gays and the straights who don't want to see gays boiled alive.

The essay starts with colloquy between two great conservative intellects, Roger L. Simon and Bryan Preston. Simon basically says that liberals use gay marriage "fairly or not, to paint the right as bigots" to the young people, and maybe conservatives should keep their rage over it on the QT and strictly hush-hush. Preston basically says aargh blargh, fags make Christians take pitchers of their so-called weddings, young people are stupid but will learn to hate gays with age, Sharpton has a "hot young thang," under Gay Hitler "the state will feel free to crush what’s left of Christian faith in America under its boot. Go ahead and scoff. It’s coming," etc. (He also calls himself a "libertarian-leaning social conservative," which hilariously conforms with what we know about libertarians.)

Klavan tries to split the difference:

I don’t think Catholic adoption agencies should have to cater to gay couples, and I certainly don’t think a religious photographer should be forced to photograph a gay wedding.

On the other hand:

Either sex is an expression of love that involves the whole person (not just his body parts) or it is a purely mechanical operation. If it is purely mechanical, then you’ll have to explain to me why one robotic sexual action is any more sinful than another. Penises don’t sin, after all; people do.

Believe it or not, the penis line is not my line of the week. It's this one, about how conservatives should talk nice about gays so they can get votes:

So often, the left wins debates by a flagrant and self-serving display of compassion.

There's something  beautiful about this, and applicable to many occasions. Liberals don't want the unemployed to starve? Well, what do you expect -- they're always flaunting  their compassion like a bunch of show-offs. Real Americans find it difficult to show empathy; not to say they don't have it, but they have to save it up for the next time someone makes fun of Sarah Palin.

UPDATE. Comments (a joy as always) contain more than a few references to the Piranha Brothers. "He used compassion," scripts Spaghetti Lee. "He knew all the tricks. Empathy, sympathy, love, brotherhood, caring..." Susan of Texas wonders how far up the chain this compassion racket goes: "let's look at Jesus, the flaming compassionista. Throwing his selfish unselfishness in people's faces..." I look forward to the day when conservatives bitch about The Religious Left like it was the Moral Majority, and start referring to Unitarians as "Yoonies."

STORY APPEAL.

I'm on a few mailing lists, so I got this thing from Eugene Delgaudio, "The Public Advocate of the United States," an office which I'm guessing is even less well-budgeted than New York City's Public Advocate. Delgaudio also has a more official position in Loudon Country, Virginia, but from what I read in the papers it may not last.

Dear Roy, 

President Obama claims you support homosexual "marriage."

Well, I get so many requests for testimonials, I just can't keep up.

He and his ultra-liberal media allies brag that you're demanding special job preferences for homosexuals and teaching so-called "alternative" lifestyles in school.

Is it true? What do you say? 

That is why I've prepared a nation-wide American Morality Survey.

The survey has questions like "Should decisions about morality and sexuality be taken away from parents, in order for radical teachers and counselors to promote the homosexual lifestyle in schools?" And it wants your email, presumably so someone can send you ads for gold and survival foods.

But the beauty part is the narrative portion of the pitch:

One stormy night, I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I'd heard something was up and wanted to see for myself. 

As I rounded the final turn, my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses. 

Trembling with worry, I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined. 

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling. 

(Issue with verisimilitude here -- wouldn't homosexuals pack boxes more neatly?)

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press. 

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, “Delgaudio, what are you doing here?” Dozens of men began moving toward me. I'd been recognized.

Well, of course. He's the Public Advocate of the United States.

 As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, “This time, Delgaudio, we can't lose!”

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Homosexual Lobby could win it all.

There's a lot about this gig that's depressing, but thanks to prose stylists like Delgaudio it is not without its compensations.

UPDATE. My commenters are as usual one up on me: smut clyde informs that Delgaudio's been telling this specific story since 2010 at least. But don't despair, Delgaudio's no one-trick pony -- TGuerrant finds him elsewhere warning that "the Homosexual Lobby hoards vast treasuries" and requesting donations to counteract their power; also, assuring suckers/patriots that the struggle against gays "has driven me on many lonely road trips, spending days and weeks at a time far from my loving family to face the hatred of rabid anti-Family, anti-Christian activists." There's a road movie I'd like to see! Too bad the title The Straight Story has already been taken.

Lots of smart-aleck remarks, too, e.g. Spaghetti Lee: "Oh no, not the gays! NOT THE GAYS! AAAAH! AAAAAGHGGHH! AHHHRRGGH!"

UPDATE 2. More comments: "Ok, that settles it," says JennOfArk. "If this deranged tool is making $150K per year with this kind of fantasy dreck, then there's no reason for me to put off writing my monster porn opus." Don't dream it, be it!

FREEDUMMIES.

In the latest attempt by wingnuts to make more of America as miserable as they are, some folks want to carve California into six separate states so at least a few of them will be Red/impoverished. (One of the new states would be called "Jefferson" because freedom.) This Washington Times puffer doesn't even try to conceal it:

Revenue from sales and property taxes also would be distributed unevenly among the six states. Jefferson and Central California have the lowest personal income taxes and the lowest sales and property tax bases, although Jefferson would become a net exporter of water. 

[Rich guy Tim] Draper said support for the six-state concept is highest in Central California and Jefferson because “the existing state is not working for them.” 

"Of course, we expect all six states to get richer because governments will be more in touch with their citizens,” Mr. Draper said... 

They may be smaller and poorer but they'll have responsive government, unlike those Silicon Valley statists. Folks'll naturally prefer their water-power computers to those powered by communism!

For [secessionist Mark] Baird, that’s the beauty of the six Californias proposal: bringing government closer to the people it represents. 

“When you ask people here about this, they tell you, ‘If I could live in a free state, I’d live with a few more potholes and some used equipment,’” said Mr. Baird. “We need representation. We’ll figure the rest of it out."

I assume Draper's got some land- and power-grab scheme in mind -- his home base, the Sovereign State of Silicon Valley, would become the richest in the country under this plan -- and that Baird, if he's not merely deluded, would try to use the threat of dehydration or deliberate flooding to end gay marriage in neighboring states in the name of the Lord, until a team of assassins financed by the Siliconians took him out and replaced him with a puppet regime. (Maybe by then Gary Sinise will be ready for a governorship.)

It makes sense, if you're of a cynical turn of mind, that as soon as Jerry Brown successfully un-fucked the state's finances after years of calamitous Republican rule -- and Californians decided they liked the change --  conservatives would try to flip the chessboard like this.

I'm put in mind of "Rule or Ruin," except with these guys it's always Rule and Ruin. Get a load of Human Rights Watch's report on the trend toward privatized, "offender-funded" probation services in some states -- the result of which is what anyone with a brain would expect: massive rip-offs and persecution of the poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

In Georgia, Thomas Barrett pled guilty to stealing a can of beer from a convenience store and was fined US$200. He was ultimately jailed for failing to pay over a thousand dollars in fees to his probation company, even though his entire income—money he earned by selling his own blood plasma—was less than what he was being charged in monthly probation fees...

Most courts do not even track and do not know how much their probation companies collect in fees from the probationers they assign to them. Companies treat those figures as a trade secret and refuse to publish them. Human Rights Watch estimates that in Georgia alone, probation companies take in at least $40 million in revenues from fees they charge to probationers

The report is mostly based on "interviews conducted with people in the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi" -- three states where, you may be sure, the tax bases are low but the "freedom" is high, as evidenced by the innovative ways they've found to sell out their own people.

UPDATE. Good to see Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic is getting in on the privatized probation scam story. "The perils of private probation isn't a bigger national story, I reckon," writes Cohen, "because it does not impact the rich and powerful nearly as much as it impacts the poor and powerless." No shit.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT KRISTALLNACHT!

Did you know complaining about income disparities is kinda sorta anti-Semitic? Ruth R. Wisse explains at your Rich People Kristallnacht clearing house, the Wall Street Journal:

Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives' war on the "one percent." For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced. 

But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's most successful and least understood political movement.

Basically: The racist Wilhelm Marr was "originally a man of the left," and Karl Marx once used an unfortunate metaphor. This proves progressives are anti-Semitic, just as the Jamaican bobsled team proves that Caribbeans are natural winter athletes.

Also, today we have an "anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions," not because people (including plenty of Jews) are troubled by the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but because they all hate Jews and just needed a more exotic focus for their hatred now that Nazi rallies are unfashionable.

Wisse continues:

The ranks of those harping on "unfairly" high earners include figures in American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of our open society; in channeling blame for today's deep-rooted and seemingly intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society's competitive freedoms, they are playing with fire...

...says the lady equating mainstream liberals with Hitler. Would it be anti-Semitic to tell her to go fuck herself?

UPDATE. Commenters catch the anti-Semitic bug! "Tl;dr, alt: If you don't have anything nice to say, you're Hitler," offers whetstone. Jeffrey_Kramer kicks it up a notch:

It turns out that anything can be equated with Hitler if you keep the association abstract enough. Flip through the dictionary and come up with a random word: I got scrum. So, "Is it not at the very heart of Nazism to join arms mindlessly in an attempt to crush the enemy into submission?" Flip again: crayon. "The opposing team's suggestion that children be given crayons is redolent of the Nazi love for gaudy propaganda which dazzled its followers with colorful phrases while bypassing the intellect"....

Etc. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard posits "Cristalnacht," because "now [the rich] can't drink their overpriced champagne in peace." Jay B recognizes that because he wants the 1% "taxed at a reasonable level and maybe several dozen of them in prison," he is "the Gregor Strasser of Liberal Fascism or something. We've already established that Roy is the Ezra Pound." Hmmph! I'll be Celine or nothing.

A DYING RACE.

Thanks Nancy Nall for tipping me to Alicia Colon, whose work as a professional Kathryn J. Lopez impersonator at the old New York Sun I had noted, but whose more recent career at American Thinker I had missed.  Her latest is about how people think they like homosexuals only because they don't envision buttsecks whenever they look at them, as she apparently does. Sample:

Those lovable characters in the sitcoms are robustly healthy and affluent, cuddly folks who never even hint at any of the negative consequences that follow on a lifetime of practicing anal intercourse. Nobody wears Depends, nobody deals with feces-borne diseases, and the devastation of AIDS is left for a few feature films that generate sympathy for the victims without addressing the behavioral component of the disease vector.

Colon obviously missed that very special Will & Grace episode, "Giardia is Not a River in Italy." Colon does approve of gay Catholics who do not have anal intercourse, and hopes a book her friend is writing about them "may enlighten others and be helpful to Catholic gays as Bill W's book was for alcoholics."

It's almost charming that such people still exist; they're like bigot Shakers. I wonder if they ever perceive the irony of the likelihood that the carriers of the Gay Plague will outlast them.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Obama's reference in the State of the Union to income inequality, and the rightblogger rage thereby engendered.

GO AHEAD, TRY IT THAT WAY.

Love seeing headlines like this at the Washington Times:

Is the GOP deliberately trying to sabotage the 2014 midterms?

The author is Tammy Bruce, a radio nut, whose complaint is that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the first of 57 official Republican respondents to Tuesday's State of the Union, did not froth at the mouth:

Criticism of the content of the GOP response has also been well-deserved. Within the first two minutes, the Republicans assured Americans that Mr. Obama (like the GOP) wants what’s best for everyone. Really? There are many people who legitimately have every reason to not believe that.

Among the reasons Bruce thinks Obama hates America and is "sending this nation off a cliff": Obummercare, Benghazi, and skree.

She also thinks Mia Love should have been selected to do the speech, because she has attained the exalted position of Mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah,  and can froth with the best of them, but Love was kibboshed and Bruce suspects it's because the Republicans don't want to win in 2014:

Perhaps the current GOP leadership prefers things as they are: not enough power to do anything conservative of consequence, while watching (and applauding as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor did during the State of the Union) the liberal agenda, including de facto amnesty, become the law of the land...

Well, beats workin'. And if your emoluments of office aren't what they would be if you ruled absolutely, you can pick up the slack with advertising scams --  like the ad cluster that pops up when you go to Bruce's story at WashTimes.

We’re in this mess for a reason, and it’s because GOP leaders either doesn’t understand the conservative ideal (which is why they can’t articulate it), or they do understand it and simply don’t like it.

If that's true, it's probably the only thing "GOP leaders" and the American people have in common. Nonetheless I support Bruce's scheme to seize power by telling voters that the people most of them voted for are traitors. It's gotta work! And if it doesn't, well, can we interest you good people in Goldline?

UPDATE. smut clyde in comments: "Next year the official alternative SOTU speech will be delivered by a Siamese cat walking randomly on the keyboard of Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer."

BUT SOME ARE MORE UNEQUAL THAN OTHERS.

Some yap from Ace of Spades about "social inequality," which is what liberals (all of whom, one would surmise from this essay, light their American Spirits with hundred-dollar bills) are really up to with their Class Warfare:

It is weaponized for politics. Sarah Palin quite plainly is not dismissed by the New Class merely because they disagree with her beliefs. Their disdain has a nasty personal edge to it -- they disapprove of her and the class she hails from. The New Class is not to content itself with disparaging Palin. They actively wish to include millions of Americans they've never even met inside the broad circle of their angry, arrogant disdain. The fact that they are not just attacking Palin but attacking millions of other people is not a bug, but a feature. The additional casualties of the attack are not regrettable collateral damage, but rather bonus damage to be celebrated.

However heartbreakingly unfair this may be to her, I suppose Palin consoles herself with money, of which she has tons. As for those "millions of other people," Spades apparently hopes to excite in them a rooting interest in Sarah Palin of the sort they might also hold for, say, the Seattle Seahawks against the Denver Broncos, or Team Edward against Team Jacob.

We who have free souls know these struggles are only really meaningful to shareholders in the respective franchises.  But under present economic conditions, a growing number of Americans are out of sympathy with rich fucks of any sort, and will pick a side between them not out of fellow-feeling but on the theory that one bunch of rich fucks is less likely to leave them to starve than the other.

And the only reason we're having this ridiculous discussion is that Spades' team isn't doing well in that regard.  The State of the Union wasn't much of a speech, but it was very good politics, and Spades' panic gives a clue as to why.

UPDATE. Some commenters see the relevance of the Duck Dynasty racket to Spades' social-equality blubbering; like Palin, the Dynasts are rich fake backwoodsmen whom the suckers are inveighed to support against somebody who failed to treat the fakes with the proper respect -- and by so doing, they assure their marks, they are disrespecting you, too.

Jeffrey_Kramer subjects Spades to some admirable textual analysis -- and while that sounds like something fancy-pants liberal academic elitists would do, even a lumpenprole such as myself can enjoy it:

Notice the negligible degree of fact which has to be provided, in order to fuel the ragegasm. Ace declares:

...that the New Class has dismissed Palin!
...that they are nasty and personal in their disdain for her!
...that they have most contumaciously disapproved of her and her class!
...that this New Class is not content to disparage but arrogantly disdains!
...that they attack not only Palin but millions of others!

It's like he's writing a Declaration of Independence from the Liberal Elites, but without any content whatsoever.

Finally, regarding another missing piece, DocAmazing: "As Ace of Play-doh opposes social inequality, I suggest that we find out where he lives, and throw a big party. I'll invite all my friends from East Oakland and the Mission District. We'll all have a splendid time, and Ace can enjoy the company of those of a different social caste." No, Doc, you don't understand: Black people are part of the Social Inequality Oppression forces -- that is, when conservatives slur them, people get offended, which is totally unfair.

NOT WORTHY OF OUR TIME.

Looking in on Rod Dreher just to see if he's still awful. Here's one about (groan) evolution where he says fancy-pants liberals

who love to put the Darwin fish on their cars and rail against fundagelicals who want to teach Creationism in public schools should be honest with themselves and admit that they don’t really want to teach Science and nothing but either.

Because if they were being honest, they'd accept his idea of science, which is that black people are inferior. He demonstrates this via a Steve Sailer link that pulls the cheap parlor trick of never mentioning American blacks (except indirectly, e.g. "Darwin wouldn't be surprised to learn which race had invented rap music") while maintaining Darwin proves races are unequal; for the missing pieces, you just have to look at the rest of Sailer's career. Plus there's the old nudge-wink from Dreher:

One of the things that keeps drawing me to Steve Sailer’s writing is that his beliefs on human biodiversity sometimes lead him to point out inconvenient truths about ideologies informing our common life.

[pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip]

I don’t read him often enough to say for sure...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, Dreher says it's cool, libs, we all ignore reality sometimes:

Unless you believe that plans for building atomic bombs and how to poison a city’s water supply with ricin should be distributed freely on the Internet, then you too believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.

This is comparable to Jonah Goldberg's schtick of saying you liberals are in favor of censorship just like me because no one wants spread beaver on children's TV. The thing is, while you might entertain these logic games from someone who offers them in good faith, Goldberg and his crew have over the years so convincingly proven themselves first-class enemies of human liberty that there's no need to say anything back except, "Sure, make it Adventure Time for real, what the hell I don't have kids." It's even worse with Dreher, who ably represents centuries of theocratic suppression; the idea that inquisitors like him now stand outside our discourse, hiding pots of flaming pitch behind their backs, and say may I point out your hypocrisy is just too rich to bear.

Fuck 'em. Call me a liberal fascist, but I say Torquemada doesn't deserve a second chance.

HE WHO FEELS IT, KNOWS IT.

There'll be a lot of garbage talked about Pete Seeger's politics today. (At the moment there's a post-mortem hush, and even Ann Althouse is gracious, but the assholes are already crawling out.) There'll probably be some cavilling about the quality of Seeger's ethnomusicology, too, and about appropriation and authenticity and all that shit.

But today I'm thinking of him as a player -- because though he has a fat political legacy on which others can speak eloquently, he was also, I would say foremost, a musician, someone in love with songs and sounds who had the gift to transmit that love to large groups of people. He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music, and if his diction was a little sharper than was traditional, you could still tell he felt it. His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.

"Wimoweh" starts about 1:35 in this clip from Wasn't That a Time, the doc about The Weavers' 1980 reunion. Watch Pete. He's possessed by the sound, as much a raver and a wailer as that other great appropriator, Buddy Holly.



At the time he was 60 years old, and he kept right on going till the end. Music is so much more important than politics, really.

UPDATE. Charlie Pierce understands. Many good lines:

He loved the country and its people and the idea of it that outlasted so many attempts to hijack it for other purposes. Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise. That is the only real qualification. It gets more dear as the years go by.

UPDATE 2. Somebody called Howard Husock at National Review:

In other words, Pete Seeger led the way in devising the formula that pushed popular culture leftward: the music (or the movies) had to work as art and must avoid heavy-handedness.

Yes -- the art had to work as art! Ingenious, these communists! No wonder, as Husock complains, "the cultural Right has long, and unsuccessfully, been trying to match his example" -- they don't even know that art and politics are different things. What miserable lives they must have.

UPDATE 3. Donald Douglas goes into comments, calls one of the other commenters a "cum-receptacle"; said another commenter wonders if his employer would like to see that comment; Douglas puts up a post called "@Edroso Commenter Threatens Workplace Harassment Over Pete Seeger Communist Blogging." Later, he comes back and threatens another commenter. I've banned him; he can issue his Cries For Help elsewhere. What is it with these people?

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:

Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).

The very next goddamn sentence:

But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.

This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:

I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 

lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 

Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 

(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)

Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the ways liberals are persecuting conservatives these days, from the progressive Kristallnacht to poor Dinesh D'Souza. I don't know about you, but I never dreamed I had so much power.

UPDATE. Here's a cartoon that didn't make the cut:

I'm not sure why Uncle Sam looks so blasé. Maybe he's thinking, "Well, at least it's not a Puerto Rican." Or maybe witnessing over decades the slow destruction of the American Dream has turned his brain into harmless goo, and death comes as a blessing.

UPDATE. Ole Perfesser Instapundit has not one but two posts denouncing the "LEFTIES" who "WERE ALL OVER TWITTER RIDICULING" Tom Perkins' ridiculous assertion that a progressive Kristallnacht is coming. Apparently a bunch of nuts protested at a Google engineer's house, and someone threw a rock at a Google bus; no casualties, but "could things get worse?" Questions... remain! 

Plus Obama is mean to rich people, "the basic political thuggishness for which Chicago politicians are known," yadda yadda. There's a FEMA coffin with your name on it, sheeple!

For some people, The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a how-to book.

STUPIDEST, WRITTEN, GOLDBERG, AGAIN*.

There are several things that are not good for Jonah Goldberg's arguments -- challenges, logic, a light rain -- but the worst results come when he tries to go off-road, i.e. abandons the simplest right-wing verities and tries to think for himself.

Case in point: The Satan statue that was proposed to make a point about religious imagery on public property in Oklahoma. Maybe what led Goldberg astray was that he noticed people were having lulz over it, and he didn't want to be the scold wagging his finger about Satan; long before he became a Professor of Liberal Fasciology at the Bulk-Order School of Conserviatrics, Goldberg was what passed in Republican circles for a comedy act, and funsies remain part of his Brand.

So Goldberg bravely eases his jalopy off the asphalt and into the sand. He acknowledges the statue is "a stunt — a clever one — exploiting the constitutional injunction against governmental favoritism towards religion" and that

...if you want to argue that erecting a tribute to Lucifer on public property is a bad idea, the Constitution is pretty useless. That’s no knock on the Constitution, mind you. Lots of wonderful things are of little utility in fighting Satan. Puppies, ice cream, the warranty on a Ford Pinto: These are as helpful in fighting Satan as a winning smile is in putting out a house fire.

(Did you catch the thing about the Ford Pinto? Years ago someone taught Goldberg the Rule of Three, and one of these days he's going to get it right.)

Unprotected by Constitutional argh-blargh, Goldberg floors it into the desert.

The Satan statue controversy is of course absurd, but absurdities are often useful in illuminating more substantial issues.

Uh oh.

America is becoming vastly more diverse — ethnically, culturally, religiously, and morally. In a great many ways that’s a good thing. But in this life, no good thing comes without a downside.

Double uh-oh. Here's where Goldberg may have begun to feel his wheels spinning. Being too lazy to rewrite, he had obliged himself to explain what, exactly, is bad about diversity. He couldn't just go "haw, diversity, amirite" like he usually does.

Consider immigration, historically a boon to America. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam (a liberal in good standing) found that increased immigration hurts “social trust,” causing people to “hunker down” within their own bands of friends or alone in front of the TV.  Everything from trust in political leaders and the political process — both of which are at or near all-time lows, by the way — to voting and carpooling drops precipitously as more strangers move into a community.

By "immigration" I'm guessing he doesn't mean Satanists, and by "strangers" I'm guessing he doesn't mean that nice fratboy on a career track who moved into the condo next door. Since it came out six years ago, Putnam's cohesion study (and the gloat that Putnam's a liberal) has been required screeding for rightwing racists, but practitioners like Daniel Henninger and Rod Dreher can just stand there, go Ooga-Booga for three minutes, and disappear in a puff of smoke -- Goldberg's still got to get back to Satan without being any dumber than he's already been. Alas, there was no intern around to tell him to shut up about diversity:

Conversely, people increasingly look more to government — the police, local politicians, and bureaucrats — to solve problems that once could have been worked out in a neighborly conversation. This reliance on legal authority and entitlements further crowds out the charitable mechanisms and institutions of civil society, inviting yet more government intrusions.

So when we didn't have all these blacks and foreigners we didn't need cops? Here comes the flop sweat and the first, high-lonesome squeals of anxiety farting --

By the way, Putnam explicitly rejects racism as the culprit here.

-- which builds to a crescendo:

Rather, the cause is a breakdown in shared norms, customs, language, and the other often invisible and intangible but no less real sinews that bind a community together.

It was Cheetos, not chitlins,  we all knew where we stood!

Family breakdown, the decline in good blue-collar jobs, the decline of organized religion, etc., are all equally good or better examples of things sapping the strength from social trust and cohesion and encouraging government to pick up the slack...

It's big government, big government's to blame, I didn't mean black people shut up shut up FARRRRRRRRRRT.

From there it's Goldberg crawling out of the overheated wreck and across the blazing sands gasping "Funyuns... Funyuns..." and this pathetic denouement:

The unraveling of the old cultural, moral, and religious consensus has been a boon to individual freedom in myriad ways. But you can say this for the old civilizational confidence: It didn’t lack for arguments against state-sponsored devil worship.

Satan target achieved -- a lack of cultural consensus leads to devil worship, and since the Constitution can't stop it, we should get back to "civilizational confidence," which I guess means figuring out which Oscar-winning movies are conservative and following their example.

* Sorry, but I do get tired writing it all over again sometimes.

THE SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILDREN OF ZHDANOV.

Try and imagine being Jonah Goldberg:

As for the liberal bias thing. I absolutely agree there’s an enormous amount of leftwing bias in Hollywood, including often at the Oscars. But it’s hardly the case that pro-war or pro-American movies never get nominated. Last year, recall, Argo won best picture (to the dismay of some on the left). It beat out Zero Dark Thirty​, which was even more hated by the left but nonetheless received four nominations. The “Hurt Locker,” a more ambivalent war movie but hardly anti-American, won three years before that (it also won best director, a huge snub to her ex-husband, James Cameron, who directed Avatar). ​ ”Saving Private Ryan” was nominated for 11 Oscars and won five including Best Director — not exactly an anti-military or anti-American movie. 

There are certainly movies that benefited from being on the left. “Crash” didn’t deserve Best Picture. “American Beauty” is wildly overrated. But if the academy was really so leftwing in its tastes, it’s hard to see “Braveheart,” “Forrest Gump,” or even “Gladiator” beating out their competition.Warren Beatty certainly didn’t deserve an Oscar for “Reds,” a piece of soporific agitprop about American Communist John Reed. I think you can make a case for Oliver Stone getting the Oscar for “Platoon” without the benefit of politics, but not for “Born on the Fourth of July"...

That is to say, imagine that you are obsessed with politics but too stupid to say anything interesting about it, and so associate your crackpot ideas with things you do understand, barely, though they have nothing to do with politics -- such as one's choice of football teams, music videos, TV shows, and female body type -- and say things like "great novels are, by nature, conservative" with a straight face.

This is really why we have a "culture war." It's not a categorical imperative; it's a make-work program for unskilled wingnut dilettantes.

UPDATE. Goldberg's previous low-water mark as a kulturkampfer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Ellis Weiner focuses on Goldberg's murky adverbial phrase "to the dismay of some on the left," which he finds

about as full of meaning and import as a teenager's "like." You can use it anywhere and not be entirely wrong. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should--to the dismay of some on the left." "I AM your father, Luke--to the dismay of some on the left." "A specter is haunting Europe--to the," etc.

Other commenters come up with their own versions ("Baby, everything is all right, uptight, [and] clean out of sight (to the dismay of some on the left)"). And whetstone reminds us of John Rogers'/Kung Fu Monkey's definitive rebuke to anyone who seeks to anthropomorphize Hollywood as anything but an anteater that eats money instead of ants.

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I see the Washington Post has formed some kind of alliance with The Volokh Conspiracy. For those of you unacquainted with these guys, here are some leaves from my notebook on them:

Eugene Volokh has expressed interesting feelings about bringing pain and death upon his fellow man: In 2002 he at least considered the "slippery slope" argument against torture ("Once torture is legitimized in principle to save thousands, it becomes much easier to urge it to save one important person...") before telling us that "abstract arguments about moral high grounds or stooping to the enemy's level do more to weaken the argument against torture than to strengthen it." But by 2005 he was ready to let his freak flag fly:

…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging… 

…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.

In an update he relented, and thereafter devoted himself to more humanitarian causes, like promoting the death penalty.

Perhaps definitely related, Volokh got very pissy when someone suggested Rudy Giuliani was "milking" the 9/11 thing in 2007 (I know, right?). "Imagine a surgeon who, in the wake of some disaster, does what many see as a superb job of saving many patients," sniffed Volokh. "...Would we fault him because 'milking [his] reputation [formed during a deadly disaster] for crass [careerist] gain is, obviously, despicable'?" Considering that this surgeon found on the worst possible day that the super-special operating room he'd built at great expense to the hospital for such occasions was completely useless, I'd say so, and Giuliani's subsequent experiences suggest everyone thought so except Volokh.

And here's Volokh on Obama not wearing a flag pin:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument... Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. 

The message is clear -- Obama no longer loves America! (Wingnut rejoinder: He never did!) Oh, and yeah, Volokh thinks homosexuals are trying to recruit.

As for his Conspirators: From 2007, here's Ilya Somin discussing "Dating Across Ideological Lines," which sounds like it could be a fun topic until Somin actually outlines his argument -- "I. Why People Overestimate the Undesirability of Cross-Ideological Dating" and "II. Defensible Limits of Political Tolerance in Dating" -- and dishes out passages like

Whether or not such pragmatic considerations are weighty enough to prevent a relationship will vary from case to case. However, it is important to recognize that they should in fact be judged on a case by case basis.

There's a guy who never got enough wedgies as a kid. Also, Somin frets about socialism (which he links, via Hugo Chavez, to Hitler): "The spectre that once haunted Europe and the world may have been defeated and discredited. But we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through its heart." If only capitalism hadn't taken a header into the loo!

Then we have David Bernstein, a reliable Bush bagman back in the day ("W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise"), though by the beginning of the Obama era he was telling everyone Bush v. Gore? No one I know agreed with that! And you might get a kick out of his argument with Kevin Drum over whether or not he said the term "Likudnik" had become an anti-Semitic slur (spoiler: he did). Bernstein used to wonder a lot  "why Jews tend to despise Republicans," but maybe they were just embarrassed by Republican Jews like Bernstein. (Or by Volokh, who, when Howard Dean said the Democratic Party was comfortable with Jews because Dems believed "there are no bars to heaven for anybody," spent hundreds of words arguing that surely there must be some "traditionalist Christians" in the Party who disagreed. No, baby, we had Andy Cuomo run 'em all out!)

As for Orin Kerr, here's my favorite quote:

Now, I wouldn’t in a million years compare torture and wiretapping with gay rights. Obviously, the subject matter is totally and completely different. But...

These guys are often described as libertarians; I think it's the gay and torture things. Anyway, congrats on the new assignment.

UPDATE. In comments, Jon tells me "I know Orin Kerr sorta well (we're both law professors), and notwithstanding that he hangs out with some really questionable folk at VC, Orin is not a nut." Good news! brandonrg asks why I didn't mention Todd Zywicki. OK, here are two old alicublog posts that touch upon his considerable mendacity.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Vatnisse asks: "Isn't [Conspirator Ilya] Somin the guy that got all pissy and defensive after not scoring all that well on Charles Murray's absurd manliness test?" Why, yes, yes he is ("I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions").

Ann Althouse thinks your humble interlocutor is a "hack" because I lack "the grace to say you know, these guys pretty much are libertarians." Who said they weren't? My disrespect extends to them and to libertarianism, which is just a niche brand of conservatism for people with social anxieties anyway. There's no conflict between their beliefs and those of any other advocate of Maximum Freedom for the Rich.