HOW TO PISS OFF A PROPAGANDIST.

As reported by Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog, retired Air Force colonel Morris Davis, who's sick of wingnuts pretending Obama's a traitor ("battling faux patriots" is one of his hobbies), posted a tweet tailor-made to attract that crowd: It claimed Nixon and Bush had attended the funerals of generals killed in action, and Obama was breaking tradition by skipping the funeral of Major General Harold Greene, who was recently shot dead in Afghanistan. Turned out the claim wasn't true, and Davis had only made it to prove a point I make here all the time: that for many conservatives "too good to check" and "stop the presses" are pretty much the same thing.

Steve's got his own angle, but for me the most interesting thing about the incident was the reaction of Byron York, who got stung by the colonel's tweet. In his column York describes the evolution of the story at length, and gets very stiff whenever discussing Davis:

On Sunday, I sent a note to Davis asking why, given the credibility that comes with his military career and law school position, he had distributed information he knew to be false. As he had in his earlier tweet, Davis claimed the falsehood was "sarcasm"...

Here's York's closing graf:

There are several lessons to be drawn from the affair. The first, and most important, is to be skeptical about everything one sees on the Internet and make a good-faith effort to ensure that information one passes on is accurate. I will certainly redouble my efforts on that score in the future. The second lesson is that when one makes a mistake, correct it as quickly as possible, more than once if necessary. And the final lesson, narrower but still important, is: Never trust a word Morris Davis says; it might be "sarcasm."

Now, York's one of the more high-class conservatives when it comes to this sort of thing -- that is, rather than just circulating any old bullshit, as so many of the low-rent types do, York prefers to explain why hearsay and innuendo is sort of okay if it's for his side, as in this classic bit:

Rick -- Sure there were lunatic preoccupations in the Clinton years. The boys on the tracks story, for example, was a peculiar fascination at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Mena was something similar for The American Spectator. There were others, although most conservative publications simply ignored things like the "Clinton Chronicles." Clinton himself found some of that stuff useful, and cited it in his public remarks, because it allowed him to cast his opponents as nuts. Hillary used it too -- in the famous "vast right-wing conspiracy" appearance on the "Today" show in 1998, she world-wearily said that the right was "accusing my husband of committing murder, of drug running." 

On the other hand, what about the stories that were grisly but true? Clinton led a colorful life and hung out with colorful people. Troopergate was probably the most bitterly denounced of all the anti-Clinton stories, and some of Clinton's defenders wrote off anybody who took it seriously as a hater and a kook. But the core allegation of the story -- that Clinton used his Arkansas security team to facilitate his philandering -- was true, and the story was, in retrospect, the most accurate predictor of the kind of behavior that Clinton so disastrously exhibited in the White House in the Lewinsky matter. So the haters and the kooks were right on that one.

This kind of classy mendacity, however, is a world away from circulating Snopes-worthy falsehoods -- especially when you're duped into it and then caught at it.

That would make York mad enough, but I think he was extra pissed off because he had been burned by someone with "the credibility that comes with [a] military career and law school position" -- that is, the kind of brass hat a conservative should be able to count on to provide York and his buddies with solid anti-Obama ordnance.  Once a wingnut could just accept on faith that all the uniformed types were on their side, but now each one must be vetted before York can trust him. Think how discouraging a thing like that must be!

UPDATE. Forgot this other York classic: "I didn't intend to rekindle the old [Vince] Foster-suicide questions... But I do agree that the Clintons did everything in their power to make it look suspicious." That's how the pros do it, folks! Original posts here and here.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Obama's golfing and how it's destroying America. The brethren have been on about this since 2009, of course, but for various reasons it's a hot topic right now.

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Hey, guess who got in on Ferguson: Maggie Gallagher. I'm not kidding! If you know her work as head of the Anti-Sex League, you'll know her passive-aggressive style, which she replicates here: A lot of shit about Michael Brown ("'That Indian clerk he roughed up was so small. He must have been so scared'") and love for the cops,  followed by a bullshit plea for tolerance:

We have to find a way out of tribalism, back to America.

During my years leading the fight against gay marriage, there were so many efforts to paint a picture of me as motivated by anti-gay hatred, and there were so many people hoping I would respond in kind. Some who opposed gay marriage even criticized me for refusing to strike back. They saw my gestures of respect for gay-marriage advocates as a desperate attempt to placate, rather than as a refusal to become the caricature my opponents hoped to make me.

To make something good improbably come out of Ferguson will require work from both sides of the racial and political divide.

If this were a vaudeville sketch, this is where the cops and the protesters would stop fighting and unite to beat up Maggie Gallagher. Also in the article: "I don’t want to respond with tit-for-tat stories about race," followed by tit-for-tat stories about race, and many other such examples of the Gallagher method which lead me to believe that even the racists won't be returning her calls.

•  At The Federalist, Daniel Payne is disgusted that Richmond, Virginia joined the National School Lunch Program so those little moochers statists like to call "children" will get free food:

It’s bad enough that we’ll have more students belly up to the government food trough (if you’ve never had a taste of “free” government lunch, consider yourself lucky); instead, consider RPS Superintendent Dana Bedden’s positive gushing about the new program: “I like it for the health and nutrition aspect, but this also removes the stigma of free lunch. Everyone can eat.” 

Ah, “stigma:” one of the last great impediments to full-blown government dependency.

Whereas if we had the little bastards clean toilets for their gruel, it'd be morally-educational. Alas,  "The Left wants the citizenry as dependent upon government as possible," says Payne. Because what other possible reason would they have for using tax dollars to feed children?

•  The strenuous efforts of Reason editors to pump up their moment in the media spotlight despite the avalanche of demurrers and protests from the conservatives on whom they rely for coalition -- here's the latest one from lawn-order scold John Podhoretz -- have convinced me that the Libertarian Moment is something  like the Summer of George.

HOW THE SHITTY HAVE FALLEN.

Since George F. Will got a gig as a Fox correspondent, his standards (such as they are) have certainly dropped:

In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields. Its political corollary is the Cupcake Postulate, which explains everything, from Missouri to Iraq, concerning Americans’ comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government at all levels and all areas of activity. 

Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet..

[Blah blah food police Moochelle broccoli argh blargh]

What has this to do with police, from Ferguson, Mo., to your home town, toting marksman rifles, fighting knives, grenade launchers and other combat gear? Swollen government has a shriveled brain: By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence. So it smears mine-resistant armored vehicles and other military marvels across 435 congressional districts because it can.

So, the explanation is: The connection between these two things is that they are stupid, and so is Big Gummint.

Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences.

"Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences." Maybe he's just going senile?

THE WORLD IS SO FULL OF A NUMBER OF THINGS...

Since that Robert Tracinski column about Ayn Rand's heroes looking for love I've been checking out his venue, The Federalist, and I must say it's a treasure-trove of old-fashioned virtues-'n'-values nonsense, with titles like "If Millennials Want Liberty, They Need Virtue Too." (Author Rachel Lu promotes something called "virtue-interested libertarians," or as we call them around here "the worst of both worlds.")

I could go on about it all day, and I'll certainly have more later, but for the moment I'll just leave you with this wonderful passage by D.C. McAllister:

If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?

The title of this essay is "Stop Pretending Sex Never Hurts." Amazingly, there's no cross-promotion with Astroglide.

I have to say I'm enjoying the conservative movement's Libertarian Moment much more than I expected.

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED.

When we last paid attention to Robert Tracinski in 2013, he was telling the GOP how to be winners again. The whole piece is ridic, but Tracinski got a little interesting (that is to say, heated) when he talked about a certain author:

Yet the biggest failure of the right is that it has lost the economy’s technological elite. Admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels can immediately grasp why this is so important... 

Today’s John Galts and Hank Reardens are not in a valley in Colorado. They’re in a valley in California. The Hank Rearden of Silicon Valley, an innovator who started out in a garage and built a company which became the most valuable in the world, was Steve Jobs. But Jobs was—let’s be honest here—kind of a hippie. He had many of the virtues of an Ayn Rand hero, but a very different personal philosophy...

He never did finish this thought, probably because the vision of turtlenecked Producers transported him. Anyway, Traciniski's back at The Federalist, and he's really letting his Rand flag fly in something entitled "All An Ayn Rand Hero Really Wants Is Love." I have read the whole thing and I'm pretty sure it's not a joke.

His big point is: you littlebrains think Rand was for the rich and against the poor, but nuh-uh, because several Atlas Shrugged characters renounce their wealth  and go Galt -- and get rich again, but on their terms because they're naturally superior to the horrible statists like you. [retucks shirt]

Edifying as this lecture and its presumed effect on the crowds on his bedroom wall may have been for Tracinski, he seems unsatisfied, so he goes One Step Beyond and tries to us tell us not only that these characters are better at life and inventing and managerizing than the sheeple, but also that they are better at emotions:

...one of the very first things we learn about these tough, pitiless Ayn Rand heroes is their emotional vulnerability. One of the big themes that drives the plot throughout Part 1 is the loneliness of the producers.

The Loneliness of the Producers should definitely be the name of a slashfic site.

The novel projects a culture in which what they do is not recognized, valued, or rewarded. Or rather, since both Dagny and Rearden have been very successful in economic terms, they have been rewarded only with money, and they treat that as if it is the least important reward.

You even see them sighing and weeping sometimes, but eventually they find and form "family" with a bunch of other rich fucks and they all live productively ever after. They are so not cheesy antique wish-fulfillment objects for the little children inside who never got over their playmates' laughter.

The punch line? Tracinski's working on a reader's guide to Atlas Shrugged, and directs us to another site where, now that he has our attention...

My target is to raise $25,000 to buy back more of my time from other projects and focus on completing my Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged in the next few months. Please, if you think this project is valuable, go to www.TracinskiLetter.com/subscribe to contribute. 

This is the kind of project that might normally be funded by a think tank or foundation, but my readers know that I have always been an independent voice.

By my life and my love of it, that's rich! When next I'm out on the street, I'll front my begging bowl with a sign that says INDEPENDENT VOICE SEEKS CROWDFUNDING, see how that works, and recalibrate my opinion of mankind accordingly.

UPDATE. In comments, cleter has a brainstorm:

"No amount of car elevators could fill the emptiness in Mitt Romney's heart. He didn't need more wealth, all he needed was love. And there, standing next to his Mercedes, he wept. All he wanted was slightly over 50% of America's love...."
From "Atlas Shrugged II: The Secret of Romney's Gold," by Brian Herbert and Ayn Rand Jr.

IT ONLY TAKES A MOMENT.

This week has pretty much clarified what "the libertarian moment" really is: While that Times article  portrayed it as a historical moment, events show that it has become an actual moment -- something lasting only briefly, but calculated to have a long-term effect.

Take, for example,  "Why the ‘War on Journalists’ in Ferguson?" by Rick Moran. Readers of his impeccably rightwing venue, the PJ Tatler, may from the headline expect one of those columns featuring, in the words Timothy P. Carney, "wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives" -- that is, conservatives of both kinds united to fight the power of Big Police.

However, Moran is actually with the cops:

It is unrealistic for reporters to think that police approach anyone not wearing blue during a riot with anything but suspicion. This is especially true when they are under gun fire, and Molotov Cocktails and rocks are being thrown at them. It appears that many of the detentions have occurred when reporters either got in the way or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And on and on like that. But! Then Moran drops this:

On the other hand, there have been some questionable actions by police directed at reporters, like the incident mentioned above at the McDonald’s last week where two reporters were roughed up and dragged off to jail.

That done, it's back to stuff like

Do reporters think they should have free rein to run around a riot ignorantly, putting themselves and the police who try to assist them in danger?... That ignorance is going to get one of them killed unless they’re more careful.

That "on the other hand" section may seem to normal readers like a weird hiccup -- only there because of a nervous editor, perhaps, or a debilitating stroke.

But that was the actually the column's "libertarian moment" -- that is, the short part of it where the conservative writer pays homage to this libertarian thing they're all supposed to get with.

You can see something similar in Jonah Goldberg's latest. Mostly it's a fist-shaking fart-cloud about stupid liberals and black people who are always rioting for reasons he can't understand. It might have been written after an Abner Louima demonstration, that's how old-school this joint is -- Goldberg even namechecks the Nation of Islam, and the column is illustrated with a photo of Al Sharpton! But you don't get to be a top Professor of Liberal Fasciology by ignoring what the new breed is up to, and in his summation Goldberg makes room for the trope du jour:

Nearly everything about this story is ugly: the gleeful ideological and bureaucratic point-scoring, the spectacle of a militarized police force and bunkered police leadership, the self-congratulatory advocacy journalism, the Molotov cocktails and despondent victims of looting, the feeding frenzy of Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and countless lesser activist remoras, and — perhaps most of all — the constant soul-corrupting rationalizations of lawlessness that come with seeing the right “context.” (Context! Is there nothing it can’t do?)

See? He got the militarized police in there, nestled among the usual bullshit, so you New Age types can enjoy your racism and authoritarianism with a clear conscience.

You'll be seeing many such libertarian moments sitting on many conservative columns, like cherries on shit sundaes, until this whole thing blows over.

UPDATE. In comments, Bizarro Mike: "Maybe they could sell Libertarian Moments™ collectible figurines. You know, like Precious Moments™, but standing on their own, facing off the tax man come to make them pay grazing fees."

A DREAM DEFERRED.

In my Voice column I mentioned some folks who thought Ferguson would prove a libertarian inflection point for conservatives, and I see some of them are still at it. Under the headline "Ferguson Is The Beginning Of The End For Conservatives’ 'War On Crime,'" BuzzFeed's Evan McMorris-Santoro offers the testimony of Grover Norquist and Chuck DeVore, two conservative factota who think they see an opening here:

“On the crime stuff, a Republican can stand up and challenge the aggressiveness of the cops,” said Grover Norquist, top dog at Americans For Tax Reform and a supporter of criminal justice changes. “Democrats are surrounded by the images of people who defend Mumia or whoever that guy is who killed those cops"... 

“If our policies were in place,” DeVore said, Ferguson might not have the some of the divides he sees as at the root of the turmoil this week. 

“Perhaps there would be lower unemployment,” he said. “Perhaps there would be more two-parent households.”

The opportunistic tone, at least, is convincing. But I fear the moment is passing. As I said yesterday, take a look at National Review to see which way the stagnant wind blows. Charles C.W. Cooke, who has been among NR's stronger civil-libertarian voices on this subject, has retreated to his comfort zone -- i.e., nuh-uh-you-stupid-liberals, America still rules  -- as his colleagues go full lawn-order all around him.

The latest such salvo comes from Victor Davis Hanson, who is enraged that some measure of order was brought to Ferguson's streets, because it was New Black Panther Malik Shabazz who brought it. Imagine, when Jesse Jackson freed Navy Airman Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, even Ronald Reagan said "you can't argue with success" -- but for Hanson, Shabazz's assist represents "at least a partial erosion of legal authority in Ferguson," which he finds "emblematic of our times in which the sanctity of established law exists only to the degree that it is considered useful in promoting a more egalitarian agenda. In the matter of the recent influx at the southern border..." You can smell it coming: the lawless-Obama shtick, and how all his crimes from Benghazi to immigration have led to this moment:

And so we get the disreputable Malik Shabazz as a Robespierre-like street arbitrator of calm or violence in Ferguson, various ethnic pressure groups as de facto legislators adjudicating who will be granted access to the United States, and the current administration able to pick and choose which particular existing federal law is deemed fair and useful and which discriminatory and counter-productive — and rendered therefore null and void. 

In all these cases, any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice — and so it can be replaced immediately by a sort of revolutionary justice with the full backing of the administrative state.

Did I miss something? Was the cop who shot Michael Brown lynched? Or even arrested?

If none of that means anything, then let's just make it this:

Blacks and whites have sharply different reactions to the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., and the protests and violence that followed. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say that the shooting of Michael Brown “raises important issues about race that need to be discussed"... 

Reactions to last week’s events in Ferguson divide the public by partisan affiliation and age, as well as by race. Fully 68% of Democrats (including 62% of white Democrats) think the Brown case raises important issues about race that merit discussion. Just 21% of Democrats (including 25% of white Democrats) say questions of race are getting more attention than they deserve. Among Republicans, opinion is almost the reverse – 61% say the issue of race has gotten too much attention while 22% say the case has raised important racial issues that need to be discussed.

Contra Norquist, "challenging the aggressiveness of the cops" has got nothing to do with it. The plain fact is, Republicans (and the conservatives for whom they serve as avatars) can't back off law-and-order because their cracker constituency demands it.

But don't worry -- you'll hear all these arguments again, only louder and unanimously, if someone tries to arrest Cliven Bundy.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B responds to Hanson's fantasy that under the Kenyan Pretender "any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice":

What law was judged obsolete and by whom? The people of Ferguson, who believed in the Right to Assembly and Free Speech only to meet with the Hermann Goering Division, Mayberry Company? Or the cops themselves, who saw fit to murder a kid, then go ballistic on the people who got mad about it? Doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of law left at the particular moment, but thanks for being racist, VDH. It's clarifying. 

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!