LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM.

Remember when those Obama Joker posters were supposed to be A Thing, and not just something Grandpa wears to the Bundy Ranch? No? How about that one billboard in Wyoming? No? How about the Bush "Miss Me Yet?" posters? Oh, you do remember them? Embarrassing, weren't they?

Well, never mind those, because here's a real culture war coup:

Parody Obama Movie Posters Arrive in L.A. for President’s Visit
‘Saving Barack Obama: A Steven Spielberg Ploy’

The idea apparently is that Obama and Spielberg hate the Jews, and the Real Grown Ups across the internet are ecstatic. Let those communists have Hollywood, Broadway and the museums -- we have a couple of posters in Los Angeles, which will be rechristened Breitbartberg comes Der Tag.

Speaking of Breitbart:

The artwork is part of a larger campaign by street artists who are filling cities with political messages in opposition to the current administration. In February of this year, posters declaring President Obama to be “subpar” covered the streets of Santa Monica, California. The appearance of the posters coincided with the PGA Tour and poked fun at the president’s multiple golf outings.

Surely this will move the sheeple! Benghazi will be avenged!

For some reason I'm put in mind of Hitler's watercolors.

WHAT IS MY JACKBOOT DOING ON MY NECK?

Jonah Goldberg in 2003:

What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right... 

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today... 

When they denounce McCarythism, they are working on the clear assumption that McCarthyism victimized only innocent people. That is a lie. And it also a lie that the USA Patriot Act is being used solely to punish innocent people. 

Ah, those were the days, when conservatives thought defending unpopular ideas was objectively pro-commie and objectively pro-Saddam. Things have changed. This week in USA Today, Goldberg tells us that when college students let it be known that they don't want rightwing political figures to speak at their own graduation, it's a liberal fascist "thought-crime crackdown."

Like the older column, Goldberg's new one is a wretched mess -- he denounces "the so-called 'Red Scare' of the World War I era," which is basically denouncing "the so-called atrocity I am asserting," and compares the Red Scare prosecutions of and assaults on alleged communists to Harry Reid calling the Koch Brothers un-American. (I'm sure Convict No. 9653 would have traded places with the Kochs any day of the week.)

But while autopsying Goldberg's prose is fun, let's not miss the point: while the conservative schtick-of-the-moment about liberals oppressing them is hilarious in several ways, it is useful to remember that these people are natural bullies. As in Goldberg's case, they demonstrated this in their writing back when their tide was high -- and they demonstrate it still on people over whom they still have control, namely the poor, whom they punish sadistically every chance they get. I'd say their bullshit about being oppressed is the result of guilty consciences, if I thought they had consciences.

UPDATE. Comments are glorious. To this particularly Goldberg blubberburst over liberalfascist oppression of racist billionaires --

I have no sympathy for disgraced L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling's views about race, but there's something troubling about how so many people are comfortable with vilifying a man for something he said in private, possibly even during couples' counseling.

-- mortimer2000 has a nice rejoinder:

There's a Ms. Lewinsky calling on the "safe" line, Mr. Goldberg.

Picking up the same theme (the launch of Goldberg's career on his mother's Clinton espionage, if you didn't click the link), smut clyde highlights Goldberg's reference to "vilifying a man for something he said in private" and adds, "Yep, if Jonah wants to maintain this new-found moral principle, it could make for an awkward Mothers' Day conversation."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Benghazi Round Which One Is It I Lost Track. Nonetheless it's fascinating to see them work variations on the theme, in a sort of late-Bowery-Boys sort of way.

UPDATE. In comments, AGoodQuestion responds to Roger L. Simon's pep talk to the troops ("Every one of us has to stay the course on Benghazi until this gets sorted out... Remember, even OJ didn't get away with it in the end"): "So the plan is to keep bitching about Benghazi until Obama slips up and steals back some of his sports memorabilia?" I think he's got it!

UPDATE 2. I've got a great idea for the Benghazi guys -- collectively sponsor a NASCAR vehicle, like Reddit Dogecoin enthusiasts did at Talladega. Then, if their car wins, the guy can go to the mike and dedicate his victory to those four brave men Obama and Hillary murdered. Hell, why not have Soros and the Kochs buy up all the sponsorships and make every victory an occasion for political speech? This country's finished anyways.

GAS CHAMBER.

The Oklahoma execution debacle was horrible -- maybe even worse than Jonah Goldberg's mouthfarts on the subject. But it's close. First Goldberg basically said he was okay with torturing Clayton Lockett to death because Lockett's horrific crime merited such treatment. I don't know why he decided to come back and make it worse -- laziness, I suppose; he already had done the research -- but yeesh:

Many of these convicts no doubt deserve worse in the cosmic sense, but it’s not the place of the state to deliver worse. I am strongly for the death penalty but I have no desire to go down the path to medieval forms of execution where we are expected to take pleasure in someone’s final extravagantly choreographed agonies. Moreover, as a political matter, embracing that kind of thing will ultimately undermine the death penalty itself.

If we torture more of these guys to death, we may lose the voters! Oh, and get a load of this:

Of course there’s considerable hypocrisy at work when death penalty opponents do everything they can to block more humane and efficient means of execution — i.e. the old drug cocktail — and then complain that the remaining or new techniques are unconstitutional. You can make the case that the Lockett fiasco was a forced error by opponents of the death penalty.

See what you stupid libtards did? You made us go to the black market for our killin' drugs. What did you want us to do, wait?

But, I should say, I respect many opponents of the death penalty (even if I recoil at some of their tactics).

Goldberg has transformed the pee-dance into a rhetorical form.

Which brings us to the ridiculous claim that the botched execution was cruel and unusual punishment because it was “torture.” I see that Andy beat me to the punch in noting that, as a legal matter, you can’t torture someone by accident.

Holy shit, just when you think nothing could be worse, Goldberg enlists National Review's foremost torture enthusiast, Andrew McCarthy, and his legalistic determination as to how guilty people should feel about this disaster (unsurprisingly, not at all).

Onward:

But let me put it another way: Lockett wasn’t sentenced to a botched execution. He was sentenced to be executed. Think of it this way: Last night a Pensacola jail blew up because of a gas leak. At least two people died. We don’t know yet whether they were inmates. But, let’s assume they were. Moreover let’s assume they were being held for petty crimes. Their deaths would not amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” even though most reasonable people would agree that stealing a candy bar or urinating in public shouldn’t be crimes punishable by death. That’s because the explosion was an accident.

And this is just like the accident that happened while Oklahoma was trying to kill a guy.

Goldberg ends by yelling at Will McAvoy, which is just perfect.

UPDATE. Regarding Goldberg's objection to death penalty opponents' "tactics," mds comments, "Like what? Picketing courthouses while holding up photos of grisly executions? Loudly berating anyone who goes in, even for a traffic violation, as being complicit in murder? Yeah, I could see how a principled conservative might find such behavior offensive."

IF I DON'T WIN AN AWARD IT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE ALL PREJUMADICED.

Shorter Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: Some writers said mean things about another writer, which can only be explained by liberal fascism.

I wonder if he or this Correia guy know that when John Lennon gave back his MBE "as a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts," he was joking.

What a bunch of whiners. They're like the unpopular kid in high school who thinks girls don't like him because they only like jerks, so he'll just be a jerk then and see how they like it.  

P.S., here's some background on this from someone who is not nuts, but I bet some of my readers have lots more to add. 

UPDATE. I should have mentioned for the benefit of non-devotees of the genre that this is all based on a Hugo Award publicity stunt by some authors of the conservative persuasion. (And to that I have no objection -- swindle, comrades! What bugs me is the promulgation of this "we're being oppressed by liberals who won't vote for us" bullshit by the Perfesser and others as a serious free-speech issue.)

But that's okay -- among my readers are many sci-fi fans, and this milkshake brings all the nerds to the yard. (I say that with love, folks.)

On the fact-based tip, Spaghetti Lee notes that "[Orson Scott] Card won [a Hugo] twice in a row, in fact, and [Robert] Heinlein 4 times. And David Brin. And Vernor Vinge. And Dan Simmons. Anyone who thinks that conservatives or libertarians are being shut out has either done no research or is a petulant idiot, or both."

Others just have a laugh at the wounded-dork routine. "I have to give my fellow Zhdanovites on the left credit for this brilliant scheme," says whetstone. "Instead of merely disappearing Correia from the Hugos altogether, you nominate him... and then don't let him win!!!... Just think about how much longer various repressive regimes would have survived if they'd just strung along dissidents by short-listing them instead of disappearing them."

Satch breaks it down:

All this just goes to show how conservative whiners have managed to civilize public discourse... at least for conservatives. We should all be thankful that when conservatives are "lynched" or "martyred", they are no longer required to actually die. Being shipped off in cattle cars to re-education camps, which used to be the same as eye-rolling mockery, has been downgraded from literal to figurative. And soul-crushing injustice has been smoothed out to now mean "Being Nominated For, But Not Winning, A Hugo Award". I, for one, think that we are doing conservatives no favors by subjecting them to the soft bigotry of watered-down metaphors.

THE LEFT IS ATTACKING THE CITY: A REVIVAL.

I see conservatives are already blaming The Left for ousting racist billionaire Clippers Owner DonaldSterling:

So the norm should be that people who make ill advised and embarrassing comments in private should "fall"? What a lovely state the left is building.

I said this when a corporation fired Paula Deen and when a board of directors fired Brendan Eich, but let's try again to make it nice and sparkling clear for the hard-of-thinking:

I'm reminded of what Menachim Begin said when Lebanese Christians massacred Palestinians and Sharon and the IDF were accused of taking part: "The goyim kill the goyim, and then run to hang the Jews."

All of the principals in these dramas, protagonists and antagonists, are rich fucks, and their decisions have much more to do with perceived shareholder value than with the U.S. Constitution. The rich fucks fucked the rich fucks, and then ran to hang The Left.

I see some of you rightwing guys are sore about it. Well, go ahead, be sore, life's tough all over. But don't insult my intelligence by saying it's because you care deeply about civil rights, or you'd have been weeping over the scoutmaster whose troop got dumped because he's gay, too, and I sure didn't see that happening.  You're just sore about these guys because the charge on their warrants was bigotry, and instead of the rich fucks laughing and saying, oh come on, how could anyone take such a thing seriously, can't you charge 'em with moral turpitude or something -- instead the rich fucks in charge said yes indeed, it was indeed serious, and pitched them out.

I don't care about the alleged victims one way or the other. They're rich and can afford to buy their own sympathy, or contempt if that's what they go for. Their speech will always be free, indeed worth more than mine because they can put a million bucks behind every word. But I must say I get a kick out of your discomfort. Like the song says, it's a different world from where you come from; you can't entirely count on being white and straight to spare you now, and you're shitting your pants. As someone who comes from the poor side of the white-straight family, and could never count on those breaks, I get a kick out of that. (I also get a kick out of professional hairsplitters trying explain why one rich-fuck prosecution is more righteous than another, or at least more suitable to their carefully cultivated contrarian brand equity. Coming up with new, lawyerly explanations of the moral meanings in rich-fuck battles royale must be exhausting.)

I'm an old man and resigned that the tumbrels may never get here, but at least I get to see you squirm a bit, and that's some consolation. I don't even mind you screaming that it's my fault. I'm used to it, and anyway we both know the truth.

(Title inspired by this.)

UPDATE. Inevitably, in libertarian land: Statists are the real racists!

THE SMILER WITH THE KNIFE.

There's been some interesting commentary on Sarah Palin's grisly joke about waterboarding as baptism for terrorists (and, in Tbogg's case, on the godly folk who find sacrilege more worrisome than torture). However...

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and ‘Torture’ 

Patrick, Sarah Palin’s comparison of waterboarding to baptism, even in jest, was bad judgment. If I were Gov. Palin, I’d lose all the baptism jokes, since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists. But I think it is a mistake so off-handedly to agree with the Left’s political and hypocritical claim that waterboarding, as applied by the CIA to three high-value al Qaeda detainees under careful (albeit controversial) guidelines, amounted to “torture.”

...it's always a good time to reflect on what a horrible monster Andrew C. McCarthy is.

Waterboarding the way the CIA executed was highly uncomfortable, but it did not cause severe pain, it was of short duration, and it did not cause fear of imminent death (the detainees were told that they were not going to be killed).

If you can't trust your torturer, who can you trust?

People who want a categorical ban on such tactics constantly avoid addressing the ticking-bomb scenario and similar questions that bring the logic of their position into stark relief: forced to choose, they would prefer the occurrence of a preventable atrocity and the loss of perhaps thousands of lives to interrogation that harms a hair on the head of a culpable terrorist.

Remember the early '00s, when everybody was Jack Bauer on 24? McCarthy's still back there. When he's not dreaming of don't-call-it-torture, and of the fun he could have offering terrified prisoners waterboarding in exchange for years off their sentences (though to be fair, he was against the "court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo"), he's denouncing the condition of the poor in this country -- because it's too good  ("flat-screen TVs, iPods, X-boxes and the scores of other extravagances that the 'poor' in America manage to score without government mandates"), and telling us how Don Imus making fun of Rush Limbaugh presages an Obamafascist state, etc. He was a cryptobirther, too.

This will give you some idea of how awful McCarthy is -- he attempts to enlist Rod Dreher in his defense, and I feel outraged for Rod Dreher.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 3.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger's significance is outsize here. The woman who interrupts Don's meeting with Dave Wooster to give him her hotel room location only exists, I'm sure, as a narrative red herring, to set up the shock cut when the hotel room door opens and Roger's on the other side. One moment Don's about to move on -- just as Lane told his father he'd done a few seasons back -- and then boom, he's bursting in on his surrogate father and telling him, "I would never do that to you."

Some people have asked, in titles even, "Why did Don agree to return to SC&P?" One thing: Don has never worked anywhere else. Earlier this season they rubbed that in our faces: when Don said he'd almost worked at Y&R twice, Wooster pointed out that, nonetheless, he'd never actually done it. But Roger is also part of the reason. That Roger showed up late for their big meeting at the agency, apparently unclear on what he and Don had agreed on the night before, flashed me straight back to how a similar Roger brown-to-blackout first got Don in the door at the agency years earlier. Through Don's whole career Roger has been his guru as well as his partner in crime, and from the way Roger's been acting lately I'm sure he's sincere when he says he misses Don. But as I realized a year or so back when Roger was weeping over that shoe shine kit -- the sort of scene that's Screenwriting 101 for a reason -- Roger isn't even a surrogate father to Don; he's more of an aging Skimpole, and I fear Don hasn't figured that out yet.

So: Why did Don agree to return to SC&P? At the moment, it looks like he didn't have the guts to leave. ("Guts" in the broadest sense: Clearly it'll take effort and pain to make anything out of the shit-moat the partners have put him behind, but a trapped man will put up with a lot to make his prison glorious. Don tells Megan he's going to "make it right" by going back, and clearly saving their relationship isn't what he means by that.)

I wish I had a gif of Peggy and Don in this episode: "I can't say that we missed you." "Thank you, Peggy." Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm ate the worm. Take a good hard look at how far we've come from The Suitcase. Let alone from "It will shock you how much it never happened." The road to this scene is a series all by itself.

Why is Betty on Bobby's field trip the parallel stream? Because Don was an abused child and Betty is showing us how that's done in the generation that followed, among people who no longer live in whorehouses. At least that's what I got from January Jones' monolithic-minimalistic performance. Jones' vanishing voice and sour-apple-on-stupid-vanilla expressions are so epic, I'm beginning to suspect she's a drag queen.

Dawn and Shirley are turning into Solange and Claire.

UPDATE. In comments, JennOfArk says the Betty-Bobby plot

seems to build on a theme that started way back in the beginning, Betty-as-child. Remember the neighbor kid with the crush? Betty has been portrayed all along as this cossetted creature whose growth has been stunted by a life that expects nothing from her except that she look pretty.

That would explain her specific abuse, which is to treat her child as if he has adult responsibilities to her that trump her parental responsibilities to him.

I must also mention: Don going to the movies reminds me that though we see him sometimes relaxing with movies and even literature (including, preposterously, Dante), and reacting to art he doesn't like (The Beatles, Jean-Claude van Itallie), these experiences never seem to reach him or inform anything he does. His advertising copy is just good advertising copy, and that includes his open letter. What we've heard of his journal entries is pap. It's interesting that the great "creative" mind of the Mad Men universe is a perfect philistine.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the fallout from Cliven Bundy's speech on The Negro and his condition. The rightblogger reaction was varied and hilarious, but I explain how in the end this is good news for John McCain.

One thing I didn't have room for was the conversion of Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. Once the Bundy tape came out, Morrisey decided that "the federal government may own too much land, but that’s an issue for the states to fight in court, not ranchers with guns."

Yet less than a week earlier, Morrissey was arguing that Harry Reid was a "demagogue" because Reid said threatening force against the United States, as Bundy had, was terrorism.

"Primarily, no act of violence took place, although some of the protesters were armed," said Morrissey. "In the end, this was a non-violent action, although still dangerous for those involved." By this definition, any armed robbery in which nobody actually gets shot should be downgraded from a felony. Morrissey did generously allow that "one could make the argument that the armed faction at the Bundy ranch was a show of force that coerced the BLM into retreat, and that would meet that definition... in a strictly literal sense."

Remember when conservatives were law-and-order types? No? Well, it was a long time ago, before The Negro became President.

SELDOM IS HEARD A DISCOURAGING WORD.

A lot of liberals are laughing because Cliven Bundy, the cowboy at war with the U.S. government and secessionist poster boy of the Right, made some of those insane comments about black people that have become a conservative specialty ("I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro... They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves...").

Don't laugh too soon. Insane comments about black people became a conservative specialty for a reason.

At Raw Story the headline on Arturo Garcia's story says "Conservatives begin backing away after Cliven Bundy’s remarks disparaging 'the Negro,'" but Garcia himself merely asserts that "Republican politicians began backtracking on their support" -- which is wise, because conservatives as such are mostly keeping quiet about it.

A couple have taken the opportunity to embarrass themselves; Dana Loesch, for example, is all over the place, softening Bundy's comments ("big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity"), then implying Bundy was misquoted ("it’s justified to have a healthy suspicion of the New York Times"), then trying to change the subject ("what exactly does that have to do with the BLM?"). But mostly the brethren seem to hope we can get past this unfortunate business, and back to the war on the U.S. government, which they think is a winning position.

For conservatives -- and we're talking about the not-totally-insane contingent that acknowledges the existence of racism -- the subject is kind of an eat-your-vegetables thing. The ooga-booga stuff is so much more fun, and keeps the troops energized. Normally I don't like to drag rightblogger commenters into these things because of the high noise-to-signal ratio in their portrayal of conservative consensus, but it is depressingly expected that when National Review's Michael Potemra criticizes a racist rant  (of the passive-aggressive, what's-wrong-with-racism, "humans like to be among their own kind" variety -- you know, Rod Dreher stuff), nearly all of his commenters defend the racist (e.g., "an article saying what is essentially common sense and well known to be true by pretty much everyone is somehow considered out of bounds in our Orwellian culture"). These are the bitter-enders to which most of the top-shelf conservative writers aim their pep talks, and most of them know better than to get on their wrong side.

UPDATE. In what I expect will become a model for the genre, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson points out that sometimes liberators such as Gandhi have foolish ideas -- which is common sense, except that he seems to think Bundy is such a liberator. He also compares the Bundy standoff to John Brown at Harpers Ferry, which under the current circumstances is especially funny. Why Williamson isn't at the Ranch with a musket if he really believes all this -- wait, I think I answered my own question.

UPDATE 2. I was wondering when the libertarians would come stumbling in. Jonathan Chait having noticed that Where Secessionists Go, Racist Trouble Follows, Reason's J.D. Tuccille first assures everyone he's no racist, then:

[Bundy's comments are] contemptible stuff. It was also contemptible when progressives merged pseudo-scientific racist notions with their ideology...

Yes, Tuccille goes straight for "Woodrow Wilson was a liberal fascist, your argument is invalid." Also, Robert Byrd was a Klansman, just like all statists! After the history lecture, Tuccille goes for Routine 12, aka Blame the Media:

"Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists?" asks Chait. Maybe it's because the cameras and journalists focus on one loudmouth on horseback, even as representatives of nine state governments meet in Salt Lake City at the Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands.

Maybe it was because the summitteers didn't threaten federal agents with guns, which has long been a sure-fire way to get in the papers. Come to think of it, why didn't the rest of Bundy's live-free-or-kill squad announce "Screw it, Salt Lake City is where the action is" days ago? Could it be that the promise of separatist violence is a big part of the draw?

UPDATE 3. Bryan Preston, I think you have a little spittle in the corner of your mouth:

Wanting people to be free, independent and self-reliant, and hoping for a government that fosters those values, equals racism now? Today it does, tomorrow it won’t, as soon as some prog hero talks good about working their way up from nothing without even having to resort to fake claiming to be a minority to further their academic career, or falsifying a wartime military career.

Libtards are all born rich and spend their days lying and draft-dodging. Say, maybe I've had George W. Bush wrong all this time!

Bundy’s remarks will have fewer real-world consequences than many uttered by Margaret Sanger, yet today she’s a progressive hero...

Again with the liberal fascism history lectures. Someone invent a time machine so these guys can feel superior somewhere besides the holodeck.

BIG SCIENCE IS TRYING TO KILL ME WITH BIG SCIENCE!

Jamelle Bouie's essay on "conservative tribalism" -- the tendency of right-wingers to adopt (some) positions just to be on the other side of positions liberals have taken --  rings pretty true. I think the problem goes deeper than he knows, though. Dropping a position you used to hold just to get on the right or left of the opposition is an understandable political maneuver.  But when you see conservatives reacting to, for example, Michelle Obama's drink-more-water campaign by exposing the lie that water is good for you, you know things have gotten weird.

Here's a more recent example from the Rasputin of ressentiment, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: Reynolds quotes a New York Times story about how judgments on what foods are good for you have changed over time, as one would expect in a era of active research ("trying to tweeze feeble effects from a tangle of variables, many of them unknown, inevitably leads to a tug of war of contradictory reports"). Many of us would appreciate the reminder of the need for perspective and factor it into our dietary decisions. Here's Reynolds' reaction:

Yet all the nutritional commands — like the command to avoid sunlight — have been issued in the Voice Of Authority, with doubters and skeptics condemned as disrespecters of science. There’s even the suggestion that the war on tobacco caused people who quit smoking to gain weight, with more cancers resulting from obesity than from cigarettes. If that proves out, will the anti-smoking folks be targeted like the tobacco companies were?

Kind of tempts you to tell him liberals "command" everyone to avoid running their lawn mowers over live power lines, doesn't it? Actually there's no point: He's not going to live out the freedom-from-science dream. That's for his readers to do, poor bastards.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 2.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger has left the orgy and it becomes clear that Don is who he pines for. His disappointment at the way Lou Avery, who has taken Don's office, receives his story about being called a kike is bad enough, but his own reaction to the news that Ogilvy picked up the Hershey account that Don blew is positively mournful. His misery trails him all through the episode -- it suffuses his "would it matter?" to Joan -- and into the elevator with Jim Cutler at the end of the day. It is my perhaps paranoid impression that Cutler is not dishing out human kindness when he suggests Joan drop office management and move up to the executive suite; I think he's exploiting a weakness in Roger's relationship with her, and the same office-warrior spirit animates his veiled warning to Roger about not wanting to have an adversary. I thought at first that Cutler was dull, but now I suspect he's just been lying doggo.

I might not have noticed Cutler's cuts had it not been for Joan's very different reasons for doing kindness in the episode. I doubt she's consciously fighting the bigotry behind the various idiotic reactions to the black secretaries in the office -- her line to Bert about firing Dawn for the color of her skin was not outrage but warning. She is sticking up for them, but Joan has neither the time nor the taste for crusades; she's being kind to them because no one else there deserves her kindness. Helping Dawn is justice to Joan, but not the kind toward which the arc of history bends. Joan reminds me in this episode of many people I've known who were monsters to everyone except a few people whom they unaccountably elevated. I think this is what she will become.

Whereas Peggy may just become a monster. Maybe they all will. It wouldn't be the first time a big-time series went that way. They aren't looking very good lately, these characters -- more or less happy, depending, but shits, basically. Maybe that's why Weiner let Dawn and Shirley talk so much. They're a refreshing change of pace.

Is Don an exception? So far he's just managed to tell his daughter a little bit of truth, looking like he just swallowed shit. I wasn't as impressed as some people with their scenes in this episode. The most disappointing thing about Don for years has been how little payoff there is to his self-examination. And he doesn't have much time left.

Which may be why I wonder: Will Pete ever actually listen to a woman he's fucking?

ATTENTION CONSERVATIVES WHO WERE OUTRAGED OVER BRENDAN EICH:

If you thought it was liberal fascism for the Mozilla board to oust its CEO for an anti-gay contribution, now's your chance to show us it was all about principle: The Boy Scouts are revoking a charter over a gay scoutmaster. Go tell 'em they're Hitler!

UPDATE. "Oh Roy," says commenter keta. "You've a better chance of bottling a fart in a whirlwind than getting a conservative to remain consistent on 'principle.'" Yes, and you know, I was originally going to give this one a miss because I like to keep the tu quoque low in the mix. But it's a slow day. Also, I do have a fart in a bottle, harvested during a whirlwind, and its value just keeps going up.

UPDATE 2. Ah, serendipity -- ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© points out that Crooked Timber's John Quiggin just recently addressed the conservative tendency to make up bogus tu quoque arguments -- for instance, that "the left is just as anti-science as the right," a moronic claim that's become part of conservative theology.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the new Obamacare numbers and the brethren's sour reaction to them.

From the outtakes (because you know this stuff is rigorously edited), a further gloss on C. Christopher Agee's rant about the new Census health care questions at Western Journalism: Agee claimed "policy experts and journalists, many of whom are notoriously unsympathetic to conservative sentiments, have expressed outrage over the partisan move." In defense of this point Agee  cited... one guy: "Noah Rothman of the left-leaning Mediaite." Here are some headlines relevant to Rothman's unsympathy to conservative sentiments:

Rothman: The Intolerant Left’s Losing Streak
Rothman: MSNBC’s Most Embarrassing Mockery of Romney’s Russia Warnings
Mediate's Noah Rothman Roasts All Of MSNBC
Noah Rothman: Mainstream Media Unfairly Blame Right for Violence
Noah Rothman: Candy Crowley’s Debate Moderation Exemplifies Why Americans Do Not Trust Their Media

Etc. (I bet Mickey Kaus is reading this right now and thinking, "Yeah, so?")

EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE OF FREEBIES IS NO VICE.

When I wrote last weekend about the Bundy Ranch situation -- in which Sagebrush Rebels threatened U.S. federal officers with violence -- I noticed that though conservatives generally applauded the gunmen, the higher-placed ones tried to be cute about it, praising the revolutionary sentiments which they know animate the tricorns-and-treason segment of their base while briefly admitting that Bundy has broken and is flouting the law.

An interesting angle has been to excuse Bundy as a freedom fighter whose duty is higher than legal niceties. National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, for example, compares Bundy to Gandhi and George Washington. I don't remember Gandhi pulling a gun on his enemies, but I fell asleep in the middle of that long Ben Kingsley movie, so maybe I missed that part. As for Washington, I believe he was fighting tyrants to found a nation, to which he colleagues had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their scared honor, whereas Bundy just wants something for nothing.

Williamson does attach a cause to Bundy's freeloading, suggesting the response should be "legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process." So Bundyism in his view is about taking resources that belong to all Americans and giving them to rich people -- that is, traditional conservatism -- and, in lieu of getting enough votes to do it legally, threatening violence -- that is, next-wave conservatism, otherwise known as fascism.

But the best so far is former Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes:

At the Bundy ranch: A 'Rosa Parks moment'?

Again, I didn't know Rosa Parks refused to pay her bus fare for 20 years and whipped out a gun when challenged, but I'm sure I don't read the same history books as they do.

A SIMPLE DESULTORY PHILIPPIC (OR HOW I WAS ANITA BRYANT'D INTO SUBMISSION).

These are great days for conservative paranoia. All days are, of course, but in the past after each bitter moan about liberal fascism there has usually been a concomitant mood-swing into delusional grandeur. Lately, however, it's all slave narratives from conservatives crushed under the heel of ObamaHitler. Yesterday we had the PJ Media guys telling us scientists are censoring them in furtherance of a liberal plot, and today I found a wild one in Stella Morabito at The Federalist, one of the right's shinier new meth labs.

In "Cults In Our Midst: Patty Hearst And The Brainwashing Of America," Morabito starts by lengthily recounting the horrible Hearst story: kidnapping, isolation, repeated rape, and "a coarse Maoist style program of indoctrination and re-education" in which she was told "that 'Amerikkka' was a racist and evil society, repeatedly calling her a privileged 'bourgeoise bitch' and her father a 'pig' of the 'corporate fascist state,'" which broke Hearst and turned her into Tania.

Regular readers will have already guessed that Morabito connects the closet-rape-Maoist-Amerikkka-fascist state program to mainstream Democratic values. Ah, but how she does it, that's the thing! Her first move is to link Hearst's brainwashing to that time "the White House launched a 'behavioral insights team' assigned with the task of 'improving policies' through insights into human behavior." I covered that "nudge squad" thing last year -- if that's mind-control, then so is advertising. Norabito seems to anticipate that normal people might feel that way, and so goes for the neckrub-that-becomes-a-headlock rhetorical twist:

We take as a given that political persuasion is part of public life. But likewise we take as a given that deliberate government manipulation of the populace using the techniques of unwitting or coercive persuasion represents a grave threat to our freedoms.

Tomato, to-mah-to. Later Norabito lists Margaret Thaler Singer's "six conditions that create an atmosphere conducive to coercive persuasion":

• Keep the person unaware that there is an agenda to control or change the person and their thoughts
• Control time and physical environment
• Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency
• Suppress old behavior and attitudes
• Instill new behavior and attitudes
• Put forth a closed system of logic.

And guess where she sees them at work:

The frightening realization is that these techniques work on mass audiences as well. We can see hints in the phenomenon we call “political correctness"...

No, wait, it gets better:

The seismic and manufactured public opinion “shift” on same sex marriage in the past several of years is a glaring example of how coercive persuasion works.

That's right -- America has been brainwashed gay-friendly. And you thought Will & Grace was just a funny TV show!

Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a "hater," a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

I hope she'll follow up by telling us how the same techniques turned a brainwashed nation against racial segregation. I mean, it can't have been anything else, right?

Conservatives are presently inclined to attribute any election they lose to America's majority of "low information voters." But Norabito points in a new direction: Maybe now when they lose, even in opinion polls, they'll tell themselves it's not because voters are stupid, it's because they're brainwashed! The real fun will come when try deprogramming the voters.

UPDATE. In comments, Roger Ailes and satch confess their gay brainwashing started with The Hollywood Squares. "Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly were not only funny," says satch, "but persuasive, making them early 'Choice Architects.' Damn those subversive game shows!!!"

Similarly, says coozledad, "I was a conservative until Hawkeye Pierce made Frank Burns look like an asshole."

Meanwhile mortimer finds a Morabito essay on Cosmos. Excerpt:

This is propaganda of the crudest sort, reminiscent of how Stalin’s Soviet Union characterized non-communists, or how the Hutus of Rwanda characterized the Tutsis, or, most famously, how the Third Reich characterized Jews.

I'd say, "I'll have to start following Morabito," but I fear she wouldn't accept I meant this in the traditional sense of reading her work as it comes out, and assume that I was tailing her for ObamaHitler.

NOTHING MEANS NOTHING ANYMORE.

At PJ Media, Rand Simberg headlines,

We are all scientists

and uses a cute, familiar routine to demonstrate this ("If you’ve ever gone through a thought process like that in dealing with a life situation, congratulations! You are a scientist"). But Simberg isn't really trying to make his readers appreciate the scientific method: He's mainly running a new angle on the traditional conservative argument that scientists who see a trend toward climate change that should be addressed are all just lying for liberalism.

Simberg says a sentence (!) in a USA Today story about some environmental official who tweeted a climate skeptic message "would seem to imply that only 'scientists' (however the reporter defines it) are allowed to be skeptical about scientific theories" -- though the story implies no such thing. Taking off from this overwrought imputation of censorship, he really starts working the dry ice machine and thunder sheets:

When we are not allowed to discuss issues that involve policy actions that could have devastating effects on the world’s economy because we are not part of an apparently credentialed priesthood, we are not being allowed to even debate science, let alone deny it. We are instead apparently apostates in a new non-theistic, but very powerful religion, complete with believers, heretics, sin and indulgences, who must be silenced.

Many, many climate skeptics publish in the popular press, and in fact one of our two major parties has gone total climate-change denialist, despite the embargo of the liberal-fascist scientists. Yet Simberg concludes:

Which simply shows that sometimes, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, science can be too important to be left to the “scientists.”

Elsewhere in the same venue Frank J. Fleming, an alleged humorist (Jonah Goldberg is a fan, which tells all), headlines

There Are No Such Things as 'Scientists'

The ensuing article is more or less the same as Simberg's except with something resembling jokes. It begins with a similar exercise to Simberg's ("Find a book. Hold it over the floor. Now release it. Write down what you observe. Boom! You’ve just become a scientist") and proceeds  to the conclusion that you can't trust guys who snootily insist they're using empirical data to form rational conclusions about the physical universe:

Now all of this isn’t meant to belittle science, which is a great process by which we discover facts about the world around us; you should probably make use of it yourself. This is, though, meant to belittle scientists, who are just people, and if you’ve ever been around people, you know they’re easily biased and prone to arrogance and error, and thus everything they say should be taken with a grain of salt.

These articles demonstrate how far conservative thought has come on this subject. It's not just promoting the idea that a cadre of whitecoats is trying to destroy America with false, liberal information, perversely ignoring the far greater bribes oil and gas companies can offer them. It further suggests that any time some guy with a sheepskin tries to tell you what's what, you should mistrust him as a matter of course, because he's no more likely than any other snake-oil salesman to be telling the truth. Why should he? They only spend years in school so they can collect Obamabribes and sneer at good folk like you 'n' me. Once upon a time, when they were taking us to the moon and inventing boner pills, scientists could be trusted; but now that most of them have come to conclusions that are injurious to Republican campaign donors' interests, they're just another bunch of moochers.

And they wonder why kids aren't taking STEM classes.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 1.

(Mild spoilers.) Don Draper remains a rock with a few cracks. I thought his breakdown at the Hershey pitch presaged a big change, and maybe it will turn out to have done. But this episode only suggests a change in his tactics: he's still copywriting, albeit sub rosa, which suits his hidden nature; he's still opaque with everyone; the only observable change is he hasn't balled anyone he isn't married to yet, and it's not entirely clear that he won't. I don't think his turndown of the widow on the plane (Neve Campbell, perfectly modish and intriguingly abstracted) was a sign of maturity. (Don can always talk to women.) I just think he couldn't take the distraction. I like that he says "I have to go to work" so often -- for one thing it reminds me of "Batdance"; for another, it makes me interested in his plan, which I'm guessing is bigger than sharing freelance money with Freddie; and for another, it's interesting that Don has always been better off in his work than at the agency -- now that the agency won't have him, maybe he'll do something interesting.

Have I just been mystified by the Don/Megan relationship too long, or are they supposed to be absolutely unsuited to one another?

Pete Campbell gets more interesting all the time. It makes sense that he's dressing like an ambitious casting assistant and talking about vibrations; he's always a little strained about finding his bliss. When's his orgy?

Speaking of which, I think Roger's pleasure chamber is looking a little sepulchral. He said something once about being a curious child. I sense him running out of curiosities. If his daughter's cult conversion doesn't do something profound to him I'll be disappointed.

I hope the Joan arc isn't "men are pigs" all season long.

Isn't it something that Peggy is so miserable, and looks for relief by selling a pitch she doesn't know is Don's? And that her and Don's miseries end the episode?

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES.

John Hinderaker further explains his support for the Bundy Ranch.

Some have claimed that Harry Reid is behind the BLM’s war against Cliven Bundy, on the theory that he wants the land for a solar project in which his son Rory is involved, along with the Chinese. I don’t believe this is correct. The solar projects are located north of Las Vegas, 30 miles or so from the area where Bundy ranches.

But the connection is nevertheless important in two respects.

Stop to take that in for a moment: Hinderaker says the militiamen's argument is insupportable, but now Hinderaker is going to tell you why the argument nonetheless remains relevant.

First, he says, the government's favored tortoise-protection area is where Bundy wants to graze without paying; "So it is possible that the federal government is driving Bundy off federal lands to make way for mitigation activities that enable the solar energy development to the north. But I don’t think it is necessary to go there." ("Don’t think it is necessary to go there," by the way, is Lawyerly for "I withdraw the question, I just wanted to smear the witness within the hearing of the jury.")

"The second and more important point," per Hinderaker:

...it is obvious that some activities are favored by the Obama administration’s BLM, and others are disfavored. The favored developments include solar and wind projects. No surprise there: the developers of such projects are invariably major Democratic Party donors. Wind and solar energy survive only by virtue of federal subsidies, so influencing people like Barack Obama and Harry Reid is fundamental to the developers’ business plans. Ranchers, on the other hand, ask nothing from the federal government other than the continuation of their historic rights. It is a safe bet that Cliven Bundy is not an Obama or Reid contributor.

So though there's no proof that Obama and Reid illegally rigged it so Bundy would lose his access to the government land, the fact that something happened that Obama and Reid would like is proof of... well, that something happened that Cliven Bundy and John Hinderaker don't like.

The remainder is just old-fashioned ressentiment: "And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps... They aren’t illegal immigrants," etc. In the end, this argument isn't based on the law -- nor even, oddly, on the legitimate idea that the law should be changed -- but on the notion that if some rightwing sovereign-citizen nut dressed as Ronald Reagan feels bad about something, that proves America has gone all to hell.

I'm surprised that allegedly respectable writers (Time's Blog of the Year back in 1964) are embarrassing themselves this way. Maybe they think they'd better be nice to the nuts because they're all they have left.

UPDATE. Comments have gotten pretty good, with one fellow coming in to lay some Hard Truth on everybody -- apparently it's really all about water rights, which Bundy himself hasn't asserted (he's more voluble about not recognizing the authority of the U.S. government). As you might expect, the fellow winds up yelling about Al Sharpton and telling other commenters to "get on yer knees and do what ya do best." These guys really don't like being laughed at.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Bundy Ranch shenanigans and rightblogger reactions. I'm not sure which is the most fun part: watching the smaller bloggers holler for moar armed insurrection, or watching the top dogs trying not to get too far ahead of the curve lest they lose their shot at a walled garden at the Washington Post after this whole thing blows over.