NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the situation in Ferguson and the related rightblogger identity crisis: Should they let their lipstick libertarian experimentation go beyond the vanilla stuff, and into kinky places that might outrage Jennifer Rubin? Questions remain!

Lots of excess material here: In the section about rightbloggers claiming Ferguson has something to do with Second Amendment rights -- as if America would tolerate black citizens open-carrying en masse; forbid it almighty Reagan! -- I'd hoped to include this Tim Cavanaugh rant at National Review, in which Cavanaugh is so enraged that Tom Toles alluded in a disparaging manner to the NRA in a Ferguson cartoon that he starts emitting stank from every hole -- calling Toles "The Worst Cartoonist In America," snarling about "cheap and half-baked premises" and "barnacle-encrusted clichés," comparing Toles to "monstrous dictators," saying he "keeps his finger right on the pulse of 1979," calling his draftsmanship "visually repulsive" (not aurally repulsive, I guess)... it's so unhinged that Cavanaugh's lack of a coherent point doesn't explain it. Maybe it's a Nast/Tweed or a Goebbels/revolver thing?

UPDATE. If you want some idea of how the Ooga-Booga Squad is whipping the Lipstick Libertarians among conservatives, look at The Corner at National Review this morning. Samples:

• "Ferguson Protester to Cop: ‘F*** You, N*****’." (The protester is black and the cop is white, so you can imagine how this will enrage your typical NatRev reader.)
• Victor Davis Hanson: "The gratuitous looting and street violence, the almost instantaneous rush to blast the police by soon to be presidential candidate Rand Paul; the arrival of the usual demagogues — Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson ('state execution'), and the New Black Panther Party... so reminiscent of the Trayvon Martin Case..." If you're playing the Racist Pundit Talking Point Drinking Game, that's four stiff shots right there.
• Jay Nordlinger: "Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops." Once again white people get the short end of the stick! Also: "Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting" -- which is to say, from Nordlinger's perspective, not at all.

FERGUSON FRAUDS, CONTINUED.

Glad to see things look a bit calmer in Ferguson. Meantime the conservative festival of bad faith continues -- Here's the loathsome Ben Domenech, trying to get with the lipstick-libertarian program at The Federalist:

This isn’t to say that only libertarians are suspicious of cops. There has always been a strain of conservatism very skeptical of government power...

Whereas liberals love cops. Remember Chicago in '68, where they were hugging their nightsticks?

The officer draws his gun and fires. The youth flees. He is apparently shot dead in the back from a distance. The story does not look good, at all. As my colleague Sean Davis noted yesterday, if a civilian had done this – even one who had truly been assaulted and feared for his life – they would be in jail right now waiting prosecution as opposed to on paid leave funded by the taxpayers.

Well, if he were white, maybe -- a black guy would just be dead, like Michael Brown. Moving on to secondary targets. Domenech acknowledges it was bad that the cops bullied the press in Ferguson, sort of, theoretically, but...

Journalists love nothing more than to write about themselves, and particularly to write about themselves as martyrs or heroes. So you can bet they’ll be paying attention, and writing some more pieces about their harsh abuse, as the streets descend into further violence. It’s not that your rights don’t matter, of course, it’s just that their rights, you see, are just more important. Some people are more equal than others.

Reporters aren't the only ones who are asking for it:

But have no fear, good people of Ferguson – the tragedy there has done nothing to interrupt the party in Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama toasted Vernon Jordan and danced the night away. It is good to know that no matter what troubles the populace endures, the monarch’s show goes on.

The real villains of Ferguson: Reporters and Obama. If you really want you head tied in knots, go see Mollie Hemingway talk about how Ferguson shows the value of the Second Amendment -- as if any black person who showed up packing during Ferguson's hot nights wouldn't have had his head blown off. I wonder if Hemingway even remembers what her hero Ronald Reagan did about black folks with guns. Christ, what a passel of frauds.

UPDATE. Comments are lovely. Whetstone:

I expect that Ben Domenech would be whistling a different tune if cops tear-gassed people who looted others' prose.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, FERGUSON EDITION.

I'll have more on Ferguson, MO this weekend, but here's a good template for how it's going down with conservatives, from Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at Right Wing News: First, you lay out all sorts of they're-just-animals stuff --

As far as it is being told, Brown, who was a big boy, resisted arrest as he was being put in the cruiser. A tussle ensued where Brown tried to get a hold of the officer’s weapon. He then fled the scene and the cop pursued him...

The real festivities began after the shooting as riots began. Store owners stood outside their businesses with baseball bats and guns to protect their livelihoods. Which explains in part the quadrupled sales in guns across the St. Louis area – looks like the good residents there have a lot more God-given sense than previously thought... 

Rob at Joshuapundit astutely put it: “There’s nothing that says ‘social justice’ like smashing up and looting a convenience store, a grocery or a Wal-Mart.” Indeed. It’s a free for all baby and the crowd is into letting it burn, while yelling “death to all cops"... 

The guy pulled a gun on the officer and was shot for it. No tears here, but it will escalate things. Nearby, a woman was shot in the head in a drive-by. She’ll live, but if this keeps up, the bodies will start to pile up. Let the protests begin.

-- then, having mollified your ooga-booga constituents with this miserable display, you suddenly change gears and pitch it to the up-and-coming "libertarian" crowd (because it's their moment, y'know) --

As awful as the shootings and the senseless waste of life is, the underlying story lies with the police force itself in my eyes...

This is the evil gift of Obama’s governmental control fetish. He has facilitated police forces whose attire is fashioned after the US Marine Corps MARPAT camouflage pattern...

Not very professional conduct on the officer’s part and not how I choose to remember the men in blue who I have looked up to my whole life. I’m not sure when all of this morphed into the police turning into Obama’s new army.

This is not to excuse Obama, whose approach to the issue of cop-militarization expert Radley Balko calls "more of the same, and in some cases worse," but the police have been turning into mini-militaries for decades. Calling it "Obama's new army" is like calling it Obama's Iraq War -- which of course they've also been doing.

To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.

RETURN TO LIBERTY ISLAND!

We've had some fun with Adam Bellow's band of merry rightwing littérateurs at Liberty Island, and now they're having some fun with us -- their current lead item is announced on the front page as "Liberty Island Makes 'Em Crazy -- A Sampling of Liberals Being Driven to Incoherence by Our Eloquence and Moxie." They link to our and others' bad reviews and say what silly liberals we all are. Good for them, though I must say Norman Mailer did it better.

They're still turning out unique material. Here are some passages from "The Enforcement of Happiness" by Jamie Wilson, which as you'd never guess is about some dystopian future OR IS IT when Gummint micromanages everything about us:

"We're from the Racial Relations Council? Health and Human Services?" The slight young man stepped in hesitantly, followed by a tiny Hispanic woman in a sensible black suit and an older black man wearing a pristine white lab coat. Marcus held his smile, though his forehead wrinkled a bit in confusion. What, he wondered, was up with the entourage? 

"I understand you needed to talk to me about racial compliance. As you have no doubt seen for yourself, our hiring patterns are--" 

Smith waved him off. "We have your records, sir. Blue Screen International has done a stellar job of racio-sexual/gender/ethno balancing."

Spoiler, Lloyd Marcus twist:

"And your wife is Mrs. Leticia Jackson, born in Biloxi, Mississippi. You yourself were born in Harlem?" 

"My parents worked hard to get me out of Harlem," Marcus said almost reflexively. 

The semi-autonomous Harlem, effectively a gang state, had a very bad name these days...

Damn liberals ruined that Harlem. You probably don't need or want any more hints, but here:

"So we're here as a courtesy. We would be happy to provide you with our new free government service, Racial Reassignment Treatment. One quick little prick--" he chuckled, "--and your insides match your outsides. It's tragic that pseudo-African-American people like Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice did not have this option. It would have made their lives so much easier."...

The dark-skinned man in the lab coat leaned over Marcus. "Race traitor," he whispered. "Oreo. Uncle Tom."

It's the good black people versus the bad black people, which you have to admit is pretty classic.

THE FUGS.

Latest new thing to criticize about Obama: He doesn't know how to swear. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line:

After reviewing a transcript of President Nixon’s secret tapes, Norman Mailer commented in The New Yorker, “He lacks the simple New York smart to keep the obscenities in. . . We still do not know if he even swears well.”

As for President Obama, we now know that he doesn’t...

For the record, and trust me on this, “horseshit” means bad; “bullshit” means wrong.

To be fair, Mirengoff updated:

I’m getting push back on my definition of horseshit. It seems that these days, the two words — bullshit and horseshit — have become closer in meaning...

You can't go too far wrong if you have a poetic sensibility and righteous indignation.

UPDATE. Elsewhere on the "They try -- man, how they try!" beat, Obama spoke at a fundraiser on Martha's Vineyard and joked about how the water was colder there than in Hawaii. Here's how Breitbart.com headlined it:

AT MARTHA'S VINEYARD, OBAMA COMPLAINS ABOUT COLD OCEAN

It's like a variation on the old Can't Swim joke. And, per the rule of three, here's a link to really ruin your day: Something called "Truesbury," in which some guy takes old Doonesbury strips about Republican Presidents and, I'm not kidding, sticks references to Obama into the world balloons. Who says conservatives can't do culture?

WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?

"Chuck Todd To Replace David Gregory? Mike Allen and Dylan Byers say it looks that way. Full disclosure: I am friendly with Chuck Todd (and my wife worked with him years ago). I know he has his detractors on the right (and on the left!) and I’ve certainly had my disagreements with him. But I remain a fan. He’s a true student of politics and he sincerely tries to call ‘em like he sees him." -- Jonah Goldberg.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about that New York Times Magazine story on libertarians we discussed the other day, and rightblogger reactions to it.

This one has loads of director's-cut extras. For example, I wanted to include a bit about how libertarians sometimes propose something less vicious than usual in a touching attempt to appear human; but word count was getting out of hand. So I include the excised section below for you late-night real-people:

True, sometimes a libertarian will try to stir the pot with ideas that are not just straight-up starve-the-poor: For example, Charles Murray, the Cato Institute, and others have floated the idea of a national guaranteed income, on the grounds that it would remove the disincentives of traditional welfare. (Part of the irony here is that the statist Martin Luther King, Jr. also wanted a national guaranteed income; by the way, last MLK Day, Reason's Nick Gillespie honored the Reverend's memory with "Ending the War on Pot Would Help Complete Martin Luther King's Call for Civil Rights," which is just about as libertarian a headline as one can possibly imagine.) 

At Reason Matthew Feeney talked this up, though, he nervously allowed as how "those who are not fans of Murray’s guaranteed income may be more open to Milton Friedman’s negative income tax," since libertarians, like other conservatives, love anything that looks like tax reform.  

But alas, guaranteed income looks like a non-starter among the libertarian rank and file. "Libertarians don't need to dream up anti-libertarian crap to promote," cried Thomas Knapp. "We've already got people who are willing and able to do that. They're called statists and they are perfectly well-qualified to vomit up nonsense like [Cato's guaranteed income argument]..." Even more to the point, take a quick look at Feeney's commenters, and you will see many ripe examples of the dominant attitude among libertarians toward giving the moochers anything at all, e.g., "Personally, if it were up to me, SNAP would only purchase some sort of horrid nutritional gruel," etc.

By the way, if you think the libertarian cartoons we used in the column were wacky, you should see this.

UPDATE. Not that I want to take attention away from our subjects (let alone my column -- please click, they beat us if no one clicks) -- but I found so many numbskulls while researching this that I am compelled to share, and one of my favorites is Sheldon Richman -- remember him from that amazing "How to Talk to Non-Libertarians" article, which is right up there with Lenny Bruce's "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties"*? Well, now he has one at Reason called "Can't Help But Be a Libertarian" and holy shit:

It's not easy being a libertarian. I am not looking for sympathy when I say that.

<laugh></pretend weep><laugh></pretend weep>

I just mean to point out that rejecting the conventional wisdom on virtually (do I really need this adverb?) every political question, current and historical, can be wearying. Life could be so much simpler if it were otherwise. No doubt about that. I really don't like conflict, especially when it can quickly turn personal, as it so often does. (I embrace the advice that one can disagree without being disagreeable.) But for a libertarian, disagreement with most people is not an option — we can't help it.

<beats tiny fists> Oh, if only I could be a littlebrain!</beats tiny fists>  But alas, wonderful conversational gambits like "if you follow the steps of an algebraic problem and see why X=4, do you have a choice about whether to believe that X=4?" aren't working for him. "If you grasp that an inference logically follows from factual premises and self-evident axioms, can you really elect to disbelieve it?" he blubbers. "I don't see how." Please, invite this poor schlub to your next party -- for freedom!

* "What the hell is that guy -- the guy on the Cream of Wheat box?" is one of my favorite things in thingdom. 

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•  At National Review the ever-excitable David French has a post called "Why Do Liberals Have Trouble Understanding the Pure Evil of Jihad?" Excerpts:

I continue to be discouraged by how few Americans — and especially how few of my friends on the left — truly understand (or even try to understand) what the world faces... 

Why is this the case? Why can’t so many liberals understand the pure evil of Islamic jihad? I can think of three reasons: 

First, they’re often in the grip of a strange kind of moral relativism. I say “strange” because it’s not true moral relativism.

Not even true relativism! That's how bogus these leftist friends of David French are.

Second, relativism drives the quest for justifications. Since there is no way that Western culture can be superior to Middle Eastern cultures...

Third, the quest for justification drives deception and willful ignorance.

To me the big question here, besides "why do I even read this shit," is: David French has "friends on the left"? I've treated this phenomenon before, and am surprised at its persistence: They express the most bitter contempt for them, yet refer to them as friends. I wonder if it's a little trick they're taught at Propagandist Academy, the purpose of which is to make them seem reasonable, despite the evidence of their ideas. Look, we have liberal friends! We have them over for tongue-lashings on Thursday evenings.

•  Usually around this time of the week I start thinking about what the Voice column's going to be about. One obvious choice is the U.S. mission to aid the Yazidi in Iraq, but I'm not sure I can work up the enthusiasm for it. On the one hand, there's something grimly funny, at least, about conservatives demanding action in the very hellhole that made them unelectable, and then looking stupid when the Administration actually provides it. But the big joke of our foreign policy in general is that we can no longer afford to do things the way we used to. One explanation for Obama's quietism in the Middle East is that he's figured: if things are going to be fucked up, why spend trillions to make sure it's fucked up the way we prefer -- especially since that seems not to work anyway? As much as the prospect of the next Republican Administration's economic policies fills me with cold dread, I worry more about its foreign policy, because whatever moron is installed will probably have Billy Kristol and other such vampires pushing him to bomb someplace just to show how butch he is, and not enough sense to resist. (I wouldn't be surprised, BTW, if our Iran Avenger didn't turn out to be Rand Paul, a fraud from start to finish.)

•  I'm torn. I'm against this ridiculous, ginned-up de Blasio bashing on principle. But if it drives the toffs out and makes New York affordable to me again, I say swindle, comrades! Hell, let's get Larry "Wild Man" Hogue out of retirement, fuck shit up, and drive the hipsters back to Syosset.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.

There are plenty of yuks -- in both the vaudeville and the visceral sense --in the NYT Magazine story, "Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?" First of all, the Libertarian Moment question gets raised every couple of years. This is not to say it can't ever happen -- after all, New York magazine started really pushing Williamsburg in 1992, and eventually they got it to break (though with great help from economics and geography, neither of which will be any help to libertarians). But should the Libertarian Moment arrive, it will be either 1.)  a reactionary catastrophe as a bankrupt America retreats into a pre-Civil-War heritage fantasy devolving to a feudal hellscape, or 2.) a fraud -- conservatism with a laissez-faire cherry on top. Probably the latter.

There's always a certain joy-popper perspective to these stories, and this one's no exception: author Robert Draper barely mentions the only relevant aspect of libertarian policy, which is the one its super-rich backers are paying for: Removing all restraints and social obligations from the rich. Draper's round-up is mostly about foreign policy, freeing the weed, and other such distractions. A real Libertarian Moment would involve looting the public treasury on a fall-of-Baghdad level, but it's not worth any of Draper's subjects' time to discuss it, for reasons you can guess.

But there are compensations. The segment on "self-identified libertarian" (and me-identified hack) Mollie Hemingway is rich:

When I asked Hemingway what she thought of extending rights to gay couples, she replied carefully: “Well, I have always thought that government should be so small that it doesn’t have a role in giving benefits. It’s interesting to me that libertarians see government redefining the institution as something that will maximize liberty. And I am very skeptical about that.” She added that while “people should be free to organize their own lifestyle,” the state had a unique interest in protecting heterosexual marriage, because it was “the relationship that’s ordered to producing children.” 

This was a familiar point — but for social conservatives like Rick Santorum, not for libertarians. When I pressed her on it, Hemingway said: “Do I think the state should change the definition of marriage to allow same-sex couples? I think people should be free to organize their own lives however they wish. I’m skeptical about the way we’re accomplishing this. I don’t know. I feel like I need to think about it more.”

Think about it more! This means Hemingway will consult with the Blessed Virgin, who will tell her to keep shoveling.

This is my favorite segment, though, starring Nick Gillespie, whom Draper compares to Lou Reed (congrats Nick, the leather jacket finally paid off!):

Arrayed before Gillespie were several boxes of exotically flavored Pop-Tarts that he had purchased at the Lancaster grocery store. He held them up as evidence that individualism was flourishing and choices were in abundance or, as he put it, “The libertarian moment is now.” 

Sweet freedom! Wait'll these kids find out how many dollars in scrip it takes to buy a box of Pop-Tarts at the company store.

UPDATE. Just in case you don't get my point about Hemingway, here's something she posted this week:

Kneel Before Zod: On Celebrating Obama’s Birthday 

This is really not the biggest deal in the world, but every year on August 4, I’m reminded of something kind of creepy in the Cult of Obama...

Also, some people actually put bumper stickers bearing Obama's name on their cars! CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING.

WINGNUT ARTS & CRAFTS NIGHT.

Speaking of kulturkampfers gone wild, Rod Dreher has a post called "A Case For Why Conservatives Make Better Art":

["a blogger called Staffan"] goes on to claim that the fact that Hollywood keeps making movies that rely on archetypes that go against contemporary liberal dogma means that despite the individualism and anti-traditionalism of our culture relative to the rest of the world, it is very difficult to tell stories that speak to people as they actually are without relying on archetypes — which is to say, without using the full spectrum of moral intuitions, including so-called retrograde ones that people like Richard Cooper call “fascist.” Staffan says that these filmmakers have to lie to themselves about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, for the same reason that certain liberals will, for example, profess to favor diverse public schools, but pay a lot of money to send their children to all-white private schools.

Sure all those Hollyweird homos are liberal, but their art is conservative and they're all hypocrites, Oh, did I mention that the "art" Dreher is talking about in this post is superhero movies?

The "blogger called Staffan" guy he quotes, though, is slightly more expansive: though understandably fixated on comic books, he also mentions The Kids Are Alright, "written and directed by archliberal Lisa Cholodenko," and how that lesbo Julianne Moore played really did need a man, "and as soon as Paul is out of the picture Cholodenko hastily wraps things up since the archetypal energy is gone... No wonder these guys need therapy. Or superman."

I imagine these dummies playing Ultimate Artistic Symposium with He-Man and Skeletor dolls.

CHEW ON THIS AWHILE.

Sorry I've been off the grid due to some "vacation" related bullshit, but will fill the tank tomorrow with some fresh/hot -- including a few grafs on this moronic New Republic thing, "Liberals Are Killing Art: How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty," my response to which, based on years of bitter experience with actual kulturkampfers, is basically WTFingF. For the moment I will only mention that author Jed Perl cites absolutely no allegedly art-killing liberals of the present time that you've ever heard of,  and that his first references are to Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint (1993) and Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950), which basically makes me want to say, why don't you and Roger Kimball go back in time and fuck each other on a pile of old New Criterions?

Meantime, please enjoy this image courtesy of @randlechris:

This douchenozzle has a future at Galt's Gulch Square as a Ross Douthat impersonation.

UPDATE. Perl's thing is full of stuff like this:

What is certain is that in our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun.

So when, in centuries past, young rich men and ladies were sent or taken on the Grand Tour so they might poetaste of the Arts in a properly luxe setting,  it wasn't because art had already been commodified to hell in Europe and America, it was because these poor toffs had been zapped by mind-rays through a crack in the time-space continuum with the poison of our own data- and metrics-obsessed era, and turned into proto-hipsters and -feminists for the duration.

The whole question is so painful and so difficult that I have frankly hesitated to tackle it.

O better you had forborne, Percy Dovetonsils! Now you must suffer to be wedgied in effigy by the corrupt liberal artsmeisters of Obama's America.

UPDATE 2. To go on a bit more about it: Perl mentions some Alex Ross comments on Valery Gergiev and Richard Strauss (see whetstone in comments for some explication) and, instead of accepting the implicit challenge to discuss the relationship of art and politics, Perl lets us know these comments have given him the vapors ("I suppose it is the casualness with which that freestanding power can now be dismissed..."). From this and some more antique criticism Perl extrapolates all sorts of mad ideas that are allegedly shared by liberals like a secret handshake ("It is also, so I believe, a grave mistake to imagine that because art has so often been placed in the service of governments or religions that it is somehow essentially a medium through which political or social or religious beliefs are to be conveyed...").

One reason beyond the sloppy reasoning that I have so little patience for this nonsense is that there are plenty of people out there who really do believe -- and say so, out loud and in your face -- what Perl says liberals believe, that the arts are a mere tool of politics -- and they're busy doing it -- like Rick Santorum with his Christian movie studio. "Politicians didn’t change the culture," cried Santorum, "the popular culture changed America," and he aims to change it back with movies. I've turned over hundreds of examples of this sort of thing; as if that weren't enough, there are oceans of evidence that capitalism has done far more to transmogrify the arts than any other non-aesthetic impulse; yet Perl thinks it's "the liberal-spirited critic" who is to blame.

UPDATE 3 (8/10/14): In Update 2 I referred to Perl as "Lund" throughout -- not sure why. I have corrected that.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the impeachment bullshit and I have to say, I think I found something new to say about it -- but you tell me.

UPDATE. In comments, hellslittlestangel: "While Republicans aren't calling for Obama to be impeached now, just wait until they find out he lied about WMD to get us into a war in Iraq."

UPDATE 2. Also:

It's amazing what them Yankees -- er, those Democrats -- will do to slander the Cause!

UPDATE 3. The future of the impeachment schtick may be seen in this post by Power Line's John Hinderaker called, honest to God, "IS BARACK OBAMA PLOTTING A COUP?"

That seems like an awfully strong word, but it is the term that distinguished law professor Glenn Reynolds, no hysteric...

(He's talking about this guy.)

...uses to describe the Obama administration’s oft-reported plan to issue executive amnesty to five or six million illegal immigrants in violation of federal law. Glenn’s characterization is a fair one. When a tyrant asserts the right to rule by decree in a state that has formerly been subject to the rule of law, he is commonly described as carrying out a coup d’etat.

So if Obama does an EO on immigration, whatever its scale, expect screaming rightbloggers, weeping eagles, an Army of Bob Owenses trying to take down the power grid and their arrests portrayed as Triple Hitler. My favorite part:

When Obama changed the Affordable Care Act by decree -- to name just one example, substituting “2014″ for “2013″ in a critical provision of the statute -- he acted as a tyrant.

Just like Hitler did. And yet the sheeple sleep, so weep, eagle, weep!

TODAY IN MRA RAGEWANKS.

Shorter Glenn Reynolds: You just don't like #WomenAgainstFeminism cuz you're old and ugly, bitch.

Fave literal passage:

To a certain class of women in the media, it’s always about them, and their various mucous membranes.

Try to imagine that coming from a normal human being. This is a rare long post from the Perfesser; the subject clearly excites him. I wonder if he has a spin-off in mind -- the missus has already built a customer base, and frankly edumacated misogyny is probably a better long-term investment, suckers-wise, than politics.

THE HUSTLER.

OK, so you're a former Bush Administration factotum and now National Review's foremost torture enthusiast. You like to keep abreast of wingnut trends, so when you observe a heavy flow of impeachment gibberish in the movement, you step up with a book called Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, promoted even now at Amazon thus:

In Faithless Execution, McCarthy weighs the political dynamics as he builds a case, assembling a litany of abuses that add up to one overarching offense: the president’s willful violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully. The “fundamental transformation” he promised involves concentrating power into his own hands by flouting law—statutes, judicial rulings, the Constitution itself—and essentially daring the other branches of government to stop him. McCarthy contends that our elected representative are duty-bound to take up the dare.

Oooh, impeachment goosebumps!  You promote your book at your home base with articles like "It’s Not Crazy to Talk about Impeachment" (August 2013), in which you tell people that Obama "has usurped the lawmaking power of Congress by unilaterally amending some statutes and expressly refusing to enforce others... His Justice Department openly and notoriously flouts the Constitution by enforcing the civil-rights laws in a racially discriminatory manner. His administration has knowingly transferred firearms to murderous Mexican criminal enterprises," etc. and including a whole paragraph on #Benghazi, and then insist that the only reason this master criminal has not been brought before the bar of justice is because "the votes are not there."

But the clear hope you're living on is that there will be votes enough if we keep electing Republicans and telling readers what a high-crime-and-misdemeanory bastard Obama is. Throughout the year you keep the drumbeat up: Just last month you said the Bergdahl trade, guess what, "surely is an impeachable offense... it involves the commander-in-chief’s dereliction of duty..."

Well, times change, and this week the racket is "Impeachment? Who, us? Obama's making it up to make us look bad." And there's you, Andrew C. McCarthy, with a fat impeachment book hanging around your neck. So what do you tell the world?

To be clear, neither Bill, I, nor most Obama critics, nor any elected Republicans that I know of, are calling for the president’s impeachment at this point...

For word games like "at this point" to work, though, you're supposed to plant them before anyone notices you're full of shit, and when the time is right pull them out like trump cards. Now you look like Franz Liebkind in the trial scene of The Producers, singing "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" through a full body cast. You're the guy with the impeachment book, and you have to make it look like the "(no) impeachment (at this point)" book or go into hiding for several months.

Oh, you have help: Your pals at National Review and Fox News back you up with items like "McCarthy: Dems Wrongly Claiming My Book Argues for Obama’s Impeachment," in which Megan Fox or whatever her name is interviews you and sets you up as a Wronged Party as best she can:

The Democrats are already trying to fundraise off of the "I" word, right? And they use books like yours --

(Which, I remind readers, is called  Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.)

-- to say, "Look at the lunatic right wing fringe'" -- which you are not! But they would have them believe -- "They want to impeach President Obama." But, here's a little fact check for you, that's not what your book argues, and they continue to use it to say, "You see?" Explain! 

And you do, but to people who aren't watching your performance with special Fox glasses and earplugs, it just looks like more bullshit:

The reason impeachment is crazy is because his guys will protect him. It's not that he hasn't done anything lawless... The more there's talk about impeachment, the more the focus is gonna be that this isn't a manufactured claim -- impeachment is in the air because the President does a lot of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I've made it sound more pathetic than it is -- McCarthy knows what he's being paid for, and I doubt he feels any more than a slight discomfort at these trimming duties. But until Satan gets him, this is amusement enough.

PUTTING OUT MORE STATIST FIRES.

In 2012 Virginia Postrel wrote an item called "Case Against More Job Security? It’s Academic." In a poll she'd seen, 86 percent of respondents had said that to be middle class, one had to "have 'a secure job,'" noted Postrel. "Not 'steady work' or 'a reliable income' but 'a secure job.'" As a libertarian (or rather a futurist, which basically means a libertarian who gets published in consumer magazines), Postrel found this ridic:

It seems to exclude from the middle class everyone who doesn’t draw a regular paycheck from a single organization -- the self-employed (about 11 percent of the workforce), the retired, housewives, students -- as well as employees on limited-term contracts. As a self-employed writer who doesn’t have “a job,” let alone a secure one, I found the word choice striking.

Don't these littlebrains know this is Freelance Nation, where freedom rules and it's "fire 'em all, let Galt sort 'em out"? Postrel worried that policy makers might "decide to follow the polls and try to guarantee everyone 'a secure job' in order to promote the middle class... regulations, for example, to make it harder to fire long-term employees."

You can see why this would be horrible, and if you can't, Postrel explained, one sector of American life was already doing this with imperfect results. She didn't use the example of unionized jobs -- perhaps because people had already heard enough libertarian rants on unions that it wasn't working anymore -- but chose instead academia, which libertarians (and conservatives who don't bother to call themselves libertarians) had already been trained to hate (she even called it "the professoriate" to make it sound extra Marxy. Ah, those Romney-ready days of '12!). Fewer than a third of professors got tenure and the perks that go with, she reported, while the rest got shit and sometimes had to work other jobs, creating a "two-tiered system that depends heavily on people whose main jobs are doing something else." Not like capitalism at all! And that "is what you get when you guarantee permanent employment but need flexibility as conditions change."

So the moral of the story was: Things suck but whatever you do don't try and make it better with worker protections.

This week Postrel offers another post on a similar subject. Since we are now in the age of conservatarian reform and the brethren are obliged to affect solicitude for the peons, it is not called "Case Against Job Security Part II," but "Why Being a Part-Time Worker Is Miserable." Bosses are apparently scheduling people who don't "draw a regular paycheck from a single organization" -- people like Postrel, except much poorer -- in such a way as to maximize profits but minimize the workers' ability to schedule other jobs, leading to inescapable poverty. (As what I can only imagine is a private joke, Postrel brings in Megan McArdle to help her weep over this.)

Again, this, too, is nothing like capitalism. And guess what Postrel's main concern is:

....employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.

Goddamn Gummint! Her point of comparison this time is the pharmacy: All those lucky pharmacists making a median wage of $58/hr (many of them women!), while "many clerks and cashiers, by contrast, make minimum wage." (Funny, she didn't see this as a problem when she commended the example of lady pharmacists in 2011.) And get this: those clerks' and cashiers' wages "can’t legally go any lower. Even those who make more than the legal minimum often have wages tied to it." So they're caught in a tap where they can't work for quarters and loose cigarettes, and the boss is caught in a trap where he has to use those cruel flex-time schedules -- the market demands it.

So the moral of the story is: Things suck but whatever you don't try and make it better with a higher minimum wage. Go sell a kidney or something.

Libertarians, conservatives, vampires -- what's the difference again?

PRE-EMPTIVE SHRIEK.

The conservative impeachment crusade is metastasizing thus -- Rich Lowry at National Review:

Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached? 

...The White House may consider the unilateral amnesty a winning move on several different levels: it gets its policy goal; it satisfies an important part of its base; and if there is any serious move toward impeachment, it rallies the entirety of the Democratic base in a way we haven’t seen since 2008 and — assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans — drives the middle away from the GOP. An administration that is fast entering its dotage could consider this one of the few potential positive game-changers that it has direct control over — the Constitution and the rule of law be damned.

Daily Caller:

Rep. Scalise Calls Out Obama: ‘First White House In History Trying To Start Narrative Of Impeachment’

Glenn Beck:

“Who wants [impeachment]? The president does,” Beck argued. “Because then he’ll be able to say, ‘I demand justice.’ The birther thing is over, the Black thing is over. So now he needs to be able to call for justice.”

Etc. etc. etc.

As I have chronicled, conservatives have been plotting Obama's impeachment since 2009, and it's only getting worse: Try Googling "impeach" and "Benghazi" and see what you get. But now they're peddling the story that it's Obama who's trying to get impeached, based on the fact that Democrats are fundraising off the threat of a new Republican Senate railroading the President.

It reminds me of what happened in the endgame of the Obama birth certificate fiasco -- remember the afterbirthers, and how they tried to tell the world that Obama had set them up by pretending to be from Kenya? For example, John Hinderaker of Power Line, May 2012:

We know for sure that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, because it was announced in a local newspaper. But we also now know that for sixteen years, his literary agent circulated a bio that said he was born in Kenya. That statement must have come from Obama himself; or, at a bare minimum, it certainly was known to him. So: why? Why would Obama put it out that he was born in Kenya if he was actually born in Hawaii? 

Over at PJ Media, CEO Roger Simon, a mystery writer by trade, put his mind to the puzzle and came up with an intriguing theory...

I'll spare you -- the upshot, in this case as in all of them, was that their extensive birther self-embarrassments weren't really their fault. Something similar's happening here, except it's isn't just salve for their blistered egos this time: They're hoping citizens who are balking at voting in an impeachment tribunal this November may be convinced that Republicans would never do anything like that, it's just something the wily Democrats are making up.

I'd like to think the Republicans' record of running the federal government like a demolition derby would keep people from believing them, but they're champeen hustlers and Americans can be suckers for a hard sell. We'll see.

UPDATE: In comments, Shakezula: "Remember, the Republican battle cry is LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!"

Also, Neddy Merrill reminds us that less than a year before he started blaming Obama for impeaching himself, Glenn Beck was calling for his impeachment. Rich Lowry was hinting at the same thing just the other day -- for dealing with Obama's "constitutional deformation" of the Presidency, he said, "the Constitution equips [Congress] with its own tools to fight such battles, especially the power of the purse and impeachment." But Lowry took pains to preserve his plausible deniability with slippery language; since Beck's audience is mostly Alzheimer's sufferers and aphasics who don't remember what their Leader said from one day to the other, he didn't need to.

Shameless or shady, it's doesn't matter: Thus have the brethren promoted this bullshit into the mainstream. Probably in the middle of impeachment itself, they'll be sitting in the press box shaking their heads and going, "Wow, Obama's taking this thing further than I thought he would!"

UPDATE 2. Ha ha ha ha.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...and this time it is indeed about Israel and Gaza. Depressing and fraught as the subject is, historically-minded as I am, I felt I had to touch on it. Let the accusations of anti-Semitism commence! (Ah, who am I kidding -- as i've said before, you're nobody in this business until David Horowitz has called you an anti-Semite, and I've already had that, so everything else is gravy.)

WORD GAMES.

Now conservatives are fighting with dictionaries and thesauri.

In June, Betsy Rothstein at The Daily Caller was outraged that a display definition of the word "bigotry" on Google included the sentence "the report reveals racism and right-wing bigotry." Rothstein demanded answers from Google, who told her they got it from Oxford Dictionaries. "We hear Google plans to reach out to Oxford Dictionary to flag the above 'right-wing bigotry' sentence as inappropriate," claimed Rothstein. (When I search the word on Google now, I get no sentence at all; perhaps Google put it on their "Dinesh D'Souza possible nuisance lawsuit/Congressional investigation" list.)

Rothstein's investigation into the liberal lexicographical conspiracy didn't end there: This week she reports, "Well, it seems Merriam-Webster also thinks conservatives are bigots." Webster's listed "liberalism" as an antonym of "bigotry" -- and as if that weren't bad enough (couldn't they have at least made it "classically liberal"?), two of their "related words" were "conservatism" and "illiberalism"! Webster's gave her a perfectly sensible answer, which the publisher tactfully began with "I apologize for the unfortunate juxtaposition," so Rothstein headlined her item "Merriam-Webster Editor Apologizes For Bigotry Association to Conservatism (Sort Of)," since conservatives love a little whiff of victory with their persecution mania.

Now at National Review Andrew Johnson is following Rothstein's lead, attacking Roget's Thesaurus: "Thesaurus Synonyms for ‘Obstructionist’ Include ‘Right-winger,’ ‘Rightist,’ ‘Tory,’" he cries. Imagine! Where'd this slanderous idea that conservatism is about standing athwart history, crying "Stop!" come from?

Next they'll denounce common sense for always making them look bad.

UPDATE.  In comments, Derelict reminds us that when conservatives didn't like Wikipedia making them look bad, they created Conservapedia. So maybe now they'll create their own dictionaries and thesauri. whetstone proposes "The Oxford Gibberish Dictionary or Reagan's Thesaurus," which would include

peace (n.); synonyms: war; ongoing futile occupation
bigot (n.); synonym: persecuted free-thinker
libertarian (n.); antonym: pants-crapping authoritarian NO IT'S TRUE SHUT UP

sharculese gets the big picture: "They get that the internet is powerful, and that they don't control it the way they'd like to, but they also fundamentally have no clue how it works, so they've invented their own personal Fairness Doctrine, enforced not by federal jackboot but by careening a metric dongload of poutrage at anyone they find insufficiently deferential."

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE GAY-BASHERS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT, BECAUSE I WAS NOT A GAY-BASHER....

Columnist Josh Barro:

Fundie queen Mollie Hemingway.

Other mooks on the thread agreed: "After reading that, in my mind's eye were jack-booted thugs, enormous rallies, and broken glass." Later more of them ran to Barro's Twitter to yell, "Seig heil!" and tell him "Keep calling for murdering those who don't agree with you... don't be surprised with dissent Douch," " You can't take it? After calling for death to those who have dissenting views? Punk ass bitch. Wake up," "He's doing like other #LGBT leaders and calling for deaths," etc.

Good thing he didn't call for stamping out racism, too. Then he'd be Hitler and Mussolini.

(During the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, by the way, Hemingway was delighted to hear that she might have gotten a reporter fired for saying mean things about the chicken chain on Facebook. That's how devoted to freedom she is!)

UPDATE. Making everything dumber, Erick Erickson at RedState:

Certainly I’d like to think Barro doesn’t have extermination of the religious at mind, but then King Henry never said to kill Thomas a Becket. He just openly pondered about who would rid him of that turbulent priest.

I suppose he imagines Josh Barro openly-pondering this in an MSNBC green room, and Ezra Klein going, "Uh, so you're saying I guess kill the Christians? Because I could totally do that" while Amanda Marcotte stirs a cauldron of latte and cackles. (Oops, I forgot the armbands!)

UPDATE 2. Comments are already a joy. "First they came for the attitudes," intoned Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard, "but I did nothing, for I was not an intangible mental state." But Shakezula counters: "Attitudes are in my head. And so to stamp out an attitude you'd have to stamp on my head." Boo-yah, liberal fascists!

GIBBERISH FOR JESUS.

The University of Chicago has an online guide to "Accessing Abortion in Illinois," and Ian Tuttle, one of National Review's cadre of Jesus freaks (K-Lo's Kids, we might call them), is enraged:

...the abguide is a narrowly tailored resource: Only those determined to counsel women not to seek an alternative to terminating their pregnancy need peruse.

I wonder if women who want an abortion for themselves can peruse it, too?  This convoluted sentence is an early tip-off that Tuttle is too angry to write clearly, at least without yelling "slut" and "whore" at frequent intervals, yet he persists, determined, it would seem, to find an intellectual angle on anti-abortion discourse so it doesn't look so much like "because Jesus said so, in code" (though it is).

Tuttle's willing to work, though; he finds a reference from the guide to a "foundational document," and tears at that a while:

[The ACRJ's] “A New Vision,” with its Port Huron–era complaints (“imperialism,” “cultural hegemony,” “White supremacy”), is a twelve-page repurposing of Marx — albeit less proletariat, more Pretty Woman — except that in lieu of “liberation” and a classless society comes “justice.”

Not only does Tuttle get to make fun of Marx and hippies, he also hits on that bugbear "justice" -- why, Dinesh D'Souza agrees with him that the Left is all about this so-called justice, while conservatives are all about freedom! (That reminds me -- isn't D'Souza due before the bar of so-called justice soon, whereby he may lose his freedom? Must create a Google alert.) So Tuttle digs in:

So successfully has the Left commandeered this ancient ideal that it has become a byword of political southpaws the way “freedom” is a byword of conservatives. That dichotomy is wrong, but it is pervasive, and “justice” is regularly spliced to a variety of niche progressive concerns to give them moral purchase: reproductive justice, environmental justice, social justice.

The problem with all of these, though, is that they are fundamentally contentless.

Foolish leftists! There is no justice without the Lord, as is proven by Tuttle's quotes from Moses and Russell Kirk. And conservatives still have freedom, neener neener.

But reproductive justice does not strive to accord with any order of things outside itself — not even, evidently, biological fact. Nowhere does the ACRJ envision concretely what reproductive justice would look like, any more than Marx dwelt on the specifics of a classless society. Reproductive justice thus means nothing more than reproductive freedom,

BIG GASP. Justice is nothing but freedom! But freedom in the non-D'Souzan sense, therefore bad.

By the way, that paragraph does indeed end with a comma in the original, because why not.

If you were wondering where the Jonah Goldbergs of tomorrow will come from, look to the Bible Camps.