THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART FOUR.

(Here's the fourth and last installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Read 'em and weep!)

2. Germ warfare. It seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when a fatal case of Ebola in Dallas was portrayed as the harbinger of nationwide plague and doom. Yet it was only October when Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed, and besides him in the U.S. the virus has claimed… one life. This shouldn’t seem surprising, because this country has the illustrious Centers for Disease Control and thousands of dedicated scientists and epidemiologists with whom to fight Ebola. It also has wingnuts, alas, who did their best impersonation of a hayseed trying to keep a doctor from practicing his witchcraft on a young’un.

Listen here, they said, CDC’s just Big Gummint, and so-called “scientists” and epi-whatchamacallits are just a bunch of pointy-heads trying to get more o’ that Big Gummint money for their global-warming hoax, and fer t’ help out the coloreds in Africa! Besides, Obama’s in charge, so natchurly everything’s gotta be a disaster!

When CDC declined to seal America’s borders, citing the best science, conservatives declared this was part of Obama’s one-world agenda to unite the globe in disease and misery. (Heather Mac Donald of City Journal actually claimed the “public-health establishment” wouldn’t quarantine other countries because it was “awash in social-justice ideology” and “influenced as much by belief in America’s responsibility for the postcolonial oppression of Africa, and suspicion of American border enforcement, as it is by a commitment to public-health principles of containment and control.”) They ramped up their own custom science: Rand Paul told us you could get Ebola from being in the same room as an Ebola person. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, whose degree is not in medicine, wondered aloud “if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.”

At the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti actually wrote a column called “The Case for Panic… Incompetent government + corrupt elite = disaster.” Everyone knows you can’t trust Big Gummint, said Continetti, so if they say don’t panic, you should panic! It’s just logic! Plus the only reason Obama wasn’t quarantining everybody was that “doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate.”

Reliable everything-worsener Jonah Goldberg found a frame of reference for Ebola... in a disaster movie that showed millions of Americans dying. “We now have our own version of Contagion playing out in real time,” burbled Goldberg. Scientists couldn’t save us — “they keep telling us they know what can’t happen right up until the moment it happens,” shivered Goldberg. Time for pitchforks and witch-trials!

And of course there was the usual bullshit from Jim Hoft.

As fear started to subside, some of the brethren began whistling and trying to look innocent (“The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses” — Tim Cavanaugh, National Review). News cycles being what they are, people have probably already forgotten that a bunch of conservatives actually tried to promote a national panic during a medical crisis. But maybe by now they've done enough pants-wetting over Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and other alleged world-destroyers that their fellow citizens will at least begin to form an appropriate character judgment.

1. Cons, cops, and the end of the “libertarian moment." After eight years of big-government projects such as unfunded foreign wars and Medicare Part D under George W. Bush, conservatives took advantage of the Obama era to play at being anti-government again. The Tea Party, with its molon-labe watering-the-tree-of-liberty lingo, was the most visible example (hey, whatever happened to them?); some public officials even played with nullification of federal laws. The more intellectual of the brethren were pleased to call this flavor of conservatism “libertarian” for, though it does not promise freedom for all (women who want to get an abortion are excluded, for example), it does promote hostility to government, which has served the conservative movement well since the days of Reagan.

This theme reached a sort of climax in April at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where an old white rancher refused to pay his legally-owed user fees and, surrounded by armed supporters, defied federal authorities’ right to collect his property in restitution. Bundy was celebrated not just by survivalist nuts, but also by elected officials such as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, and by mainstream pundits such as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, in an essay called “The Case for a Little Sedition,” “Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition…” Lest his neckless readers accuse him of siding with a half-naked fakir, Williamson also compared Bundy to the Founding Fathers, not to mention the architects of the previous year’s government shutdown, in which “every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.” Moving barricades, pointing rifles at federal agents — same diff!

Power Line’s John Hinderaker cheered as “PHOTO OF THE YEAR” a picture of "Bundy supporters, on horseback and, I assume, armed,” telling “federal agents that they were surrounded and had better give back the cattle they had confiscated”; later, Hinderaker explained “WHY YOU SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TOWARD CLIVEN BUNDY” (basically because “you” share his typical rightwing resentments — “[The Bundys] don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps” — and disapprove any law, or enforcement thereof, that discomfits rich wingnuts).

Most of these rebellion joy-poppers sidled away from Bundy when he made some peculiar racial remarks — which is ironic, as conservatives next got to display their libertarian cred when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed in confrontations with police, and black people and their allies started complaining about the suspicious circumstances, the lack of arrests, and the regularity with which this sort of thing seemed to happen.

At first some of the brethren agreed that this, too, required a Bundy-style show of solidarity; National Review even ran a story called “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.” At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney said that, though there had been "guffaws" from "many liberals and a few conservatives" when the New York Times Magazine earlier that month suggested a new "libertarian moment" was upon us, the Ferguson case had brought needed attention to the growing militarization of police in the United States, and he expected a consensus across ideological lines against this "insane armament." He added:

There's another problem in Ferguson that calls up some wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives: When you consider the police shooting of Michael Brown, the riots that followed, the crackdown in response, and the heightened protests after that, the whole situation between the town and the police was one of Us vs. Them.

But the part these guys never got is that the protest over the killings had something to do with the troubled relationship between black Americans and the cops. Indeed, they probably can't get this, because for conservatives racism only exists in its reverse variety, engaged in by "race pimps."

Some of the brethren, reluctant to lose their libertarian props, looked for ways around this issue: many blamed the cigarette tax law Garner was allegedly evading (Big Gummint strikes again!) rather than racism or police overreaction.

The waves of protesters who rose in the wake of these deaths did not see it that way; when some nut killed two NYPD officers, even such expedients as this were abandoned. Most conservatives raged that the protesters, a small segment of whom had called for killing cops, were all “anti-police” and thus to blame for the murders — as was Mayor de Blasio, because he told his black son to be careful around police — and that America must now coalesce behind its Blue Knights and cease to complain about their tactics.

In this they agreed with the NYPD union leadership, with whose apparent encouragement City cops have affected a reverse ticket blitz, reducing their quality-of-life enforcement. National Review's Ian Tuttle applauded -- "when your mayor takes advice from Al Sharpton... it is hard to blame officers who might try to minimize the protecting and serving they have to do." Yes, a writer for a prominent conservative publication was cheering a municipal union work slowdown -- which should give you some idea of how important this was to the brethren. The meaning of "Us vs. Them" was becoming clear.

After a few feints at a personal-responsibility argument that the guy to blame for the murder was actually the murderer, not the protesters, Williamson, that friend of Bundy's "little sedition," got with the program — “The mobs in New York, Ferguson, and elsewhere are not calling for metaphorical murders of policemen, but literal ones,” he wrote, and proposed as a solution… more aggressive policing: “the reality is that what causes American murders is our national failure to adequately monitor, restrict, or rehabilitate violent offenders with sub-homicidal criminal careers…”

This particular libertarian moment, I think we can safely say, is over. especially with a Presidential election coming up.  But never fear: it wasn't the first such moment promoted, and won't be the last. Conservatives like to portray themselves as freedom-lovers when nothing’s on the line, but they know by instinct that their best shot when it's time to woo voters is straight, law-and-order authoritarianism. In fact, if the past fourteen years are any indication, it’s pretty much all they have to offer.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART THREE.

(Here's the third installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. The previous installments are here and here. Read 'em and weep!)

4. The Eternal ObamaHitler. In January Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit addressed some Obama conspiracy theories: “…that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.”

Yeah, you might shrug, there are plenty such crazy notions out there. But Reynolds went on: “A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.”

Reynolds’ main theme was the IRS “scandal,” one of a long series on alleged wheels-within-wheels Obamaspiracies that have not gotten the traction he and his colleagues think they deserve. But it’s his idea that crackpot theories about Obama are somehow legit because of other crackpot theories about Obama that’s really interesting. There are many conservatives on the internet who sound as if they’re writing from survivalist treehouses where they wait, gun at the ready, for UN troops to try and put them in FEMA camps; you expect such people to peddle every daffy Obama story that churns up. But Reynolds’ theory may help explain why the ones who manage to hold down jobs in the non-tinfoil world also circulate them; perhaps they do so more in sorrow than in psychotic rage, clucking (as Reynolds did recently, in a column speculating that a Congressional spending billing passed “because NSA has ‘dirt’ on John Boehner”), “Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.”

Or it may be that they’re just political operatives who’ll throw any shit that comes to hand. But I try to be generous.

You may know that GM had an ignition-switch problem that it handled badly, possibly causing dozens of deaths. But did you know, as PJ Media’s Bryan Preston reported, “the Obama administration may have been covering up union shop GM’s deadly ignition switch flaw”? Wake up sheeple! Fox News’ Eric Bolling went so far as to suggest that the Obama White House “bankrupted GM" -- that is, bailed them out -- "...to make sure that the old GM was responsible for these deaths because they knew they had a problem and the new GM could go on with business as usual and then they would look like heroes.” “Did GM Bailout Cost Lives?” asked wingnut foundation the National Legal and Policy Foundation. “Congress needs to take a very close look at this — and perhaps the newly-Republican Senate will do so after January,” said Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. Maybe they can work it in between #Benghazi hearings.

But it’s not all tyrannizing and murdering in this Obama alt-reality universe: There’s also Obama playing pool, which became a thing (“WHILE THE WORLD BURNS, OBAMA FIDDLES, GOLFS, AND SHOOTS POOL”). Also Obama saluting a Marine with a cup of tea in his hand, ditto (“speaks volumes about President Obama, not only concerning his underlying disdain for our military, but also as regards basic decency”). And that tan suit business which, Jesus, I’m looking at it now and I still can’t figure it out. And golf, but that’s sort of an evergreen with them by now.

As seen by the brethren, Obama’s villainy informs everything he says and does; it’s so complete it’s mythic, like the strength of Paul Bunyan or the wiles of Br'er Rabbit. If Obama skips a military funeral, for example, it suddenly becomes unprecedented, even though other Presidents have done it. The most outrageous statements may be attributed to Obama and they will be believed, even without evidence. When his friends celebrate his birthday, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist explains, it pollutes the very institution of birthdays (“One, it’s childish. Birthdays are for kids”). Why, he commits treason even when he frees an American P.O.W. — that’s how twisted he is!

Despite this superhuman power, it goes without saying that Obama is also wrong about everything — for example, he says “horseshit” when he clearly should have said “bullshit” (this from Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, a master of both).

Given this view, it should come as no surprise that their rhetoric verges on the hysterical when they discuss him — see National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy (“So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality”) and Deroy Murdock (“Obama now rules by decree… Obama’s predecessors have signed executive orders and, more or less, left it at that. But Obama pounds his chest as he does so”), Politico’s Rich Lowry (“Barack Obama, American Caudillo”), the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen ("Is Obama considering surrendering to the Taliban?”), Rod Dreher ("as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism”), former Texas GOP Senate candidate Darren Yancy (“a 6 year reign of terror against Christianity, liberty, the Constitution, self responsibility, employment, and economic opportunity”), actual Congressmembers Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC (“he has declared war, and not just on Congress but the American people”) and Rep. Randy Weber, R-TX (“On floor of house waitin on 'Kommandant-In-Chef"'... the Socialistic dictator who's been feeding US a line or is it 'A-Lying?’”), et alia.

Pundits like to tell us that political mudslinging isn’t anything new — look at Adams and Jefferson, etc. But with all respect to James Callender, the Founders lived in a simpler time before rapid-response teams, social media, and vast armies of citizen journalists who have turned what used to be quadrennial mudslinging into a constant, suffocating shitstorm.

3. Torture as an American value. I’m not sure how old you have to be to remember when torturing prisoners was something the United States simply didn’t do. As a lad I, like many Americans, was shocked to learn about the My Lai massacre; if I had been then told that Lt. William Calley also waterboarded and hung from chains his Vietnamese victims, whether they were Viet Cong or not, I’m sure I would have been even more shocked. Maybe Dirty Harry did that shit, but not John Wayne.

I am old and jaded now, but I must admit, when after the Senate released the torture report in December a number of Americans, including a former Vice-President of the United States, told us that torture was great and it was actually the citizens who balked at it that were anti-American, I was still a little shocked.

It’s not that I expected better of the cheerleaders. The Republican response to the Senate Report, for example, was just the kind of ass-covering that could have been predicted from members of that august Party. “The rendition, detention, and interrogation program [the CIA] created, of which enhanced interrogation was only a small part,” they said, “enabled a stream of collection and intelligence validation that was unprecedented.” That is, we haven’t been attacked since, so it stands to reason everything we did, including the 13th Century barbarities, must have helped.

And I can’t say I was exactly surprised by those conservatives who don’t belong to any Congressional committees who nevertheless jumped up and said torture, what’s the problem? Like Commentary’s Max Boot, who seethed that “the release of the Senate report will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills” — as if the torture weren’t worse than people finding out about it; as if in fact the citizens of the nations we conquered weren't already well aware and we, the American people, weren’t the last to find out.

There was the libertarian perspective from Reason’s Scott Shackford: The torture itself wasn’t the problem — the problem was Big Gummint. “Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program,” Shackford shrugged, and offered what he must have thought was a brilliant correlative: “Was the Department of Health and Human Services honest with those charged with oversight about the state of Obamacare health insurance exchanges prior to their launch, and has it succeeded in providing affordable health insurance? It's the same argument.” Obamacare is torture too, basically, but you don’t see Democrats complaining about that!

About the attempted deep thoughts on the subject by Jonah Goldberg (“In other words, we have the moral vocabulary to talk about kinds of killing — from euthanasia and abortion to capital punishment, involuntary manslaughter and, of course, murder — but we don’t have a similar lexicon when it comes to kinds of torture”), the less said the better.

There were also straight-up psychos like the person who wrote “Yes, Christians Can Support Torture” for The Federalist. (Depressingly representative quote: “Prolonged torture designed to crush the spirit of an individual is different from interrogation techniques, even ones that inflict pain.”) Probably the nadir, though, is represented by internet tough guy Steve Hayward of Power Line, who snarled at “the handwringing of the media and liberals” and suggested in future we just take the detainees (whom he took care to call “terrorists,” although a significant number of them had no proven connection with terrorism — that’s how professional propagandists work, folks) out of CIA custody and “hand them over to the Hells’ Angels,” haw haw.

The most interesting (in the clinical sense) part of Hayward’s essay addressed the reasonable conclusion that if we torture, we’re not better than other totalitarian regimes; nonsense, Hayward huffed, American exceptionalism “does not and has never meant that the United States is above or immune to the basic rules of political life, especially the basic instinct to defend itself against enemies. The fact that we do so without apology (except from liberals) is a good part of what makes the U.S. exceptional today…” So this is the conservative defense of a practice condemned by civilization for centuries: That we torture, but we’re still better because we do so with an all-American sneer on our faces.

The surprise wasn’t that these people would lie about torture and, when the lie was exposed, just laugh about it — I’ve known that about these people for a long time. I guess what shocked me was the confidence they showed that ordinary Americans would agree with them, and that their confidence might be justified.

(More later.)

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART TWO.

(Here's the second installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. The first installment is here. Read 'em and weep!)

7. Impeachment for the hell of it. Conservatives have been threatening to impeach Obama since 2009. You’d think the schtick would have gotten tiresome even to them by now, particularly when their favorite impeachable offenses, like #Benghazi, keep going belly-up in their own Congressional committees.

But it’s a key part of the job of professional propagandists to tart up old schtick. In 2014 National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, previously best known as a torture enthusiast, published Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. Impeachment, he explained elsewhere, “is not a legal matter; it is a political remedy.” The Founders left “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” vague for that reason; presumably there were no impeachments before Andrew Johnson’s because all our earlier Presidents, including national-bank-buster Andrew Jackson, were scrupulous about the Constitutional order, unlike Obama -- whom we can’t get at, sighed McCarthy, because nowadays “we put our faith in law, not judgment, and it becomes a ready-made excuse for inaction while the lawyers temporize.” Another black crook works the system!

This may be why top conservatives such as Sarah Palin, Joe Miller and Rep. Steve King felt free to rev up the impeachotron without coherent legal justifications when Obama announced executive action on immigration last summer. When Democrats began to notice and comment on this impeachment chatter, however, conservatives changed direction, suggesting Obama was actually trying to get impeached, despite their best efforts to stop him.  This "might be the first White House in history trying to start the narrative of impeaching their own president," cried GOP House Whip Steve Scalise. "Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached?" asked National Review's Rich Lowry. "Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical," look-who's-talkinged Charles Krauthammer.

Fox News even recruited McCarthy to tell viewers that his book — which, I remind you, is called Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment — isn’t an argument for impeaching Obama.

Assuming this isn't a misguided effort to get Obama's supporters on board, this seems to be conservatives' way of coping with memories of the disastrous Clinton impeachment while leaving their options open. If they can pretend that, should impeachment come, it really won't have anything to do with what they actually want, maybe they won't get the same treatment Newt Gingrich got when, unable to resist their new majorities in both houses of Congress, they finally succumb to temptation.

6. The Gruber maneuver. We’re at a strange place in the history of Obamacare: conservatives hate it and insist no one wants it, but insurance-starved citizens are rushing to obtain it. Republicans are understandably scared to repeal it, and hope like hell the Supreme Court will do it for them with the mother of all nuisance lawsuits, or one of the others they have lined up.

If SCOTUS doesn’t oblige, the new GOP two-house majority may not have the balls to return America to its old Pay or Die healthcare system without serious backup. So, in the absence of a believable Republican alternative, conservatives seek ways to make the program look so bad voters won’t mind when it croaks. Most of their 2014 arguments in that line — for example, that Obamacare is bad because it lets people quit jobs they don’t want, or that the long lines of people waiting for Obamacare remind them of “Venezuelans waiting in bread lines” — didn’t get very far.

But then some guy circulated some tapes of one Jonathan Gruber referring to the role of voter ignorance in getting Obamacare passed, and the brethren hit the battlements, denouncing Gruber and convincing House Republicans to get up a committee to yell at him.

What government position does Gruber occupy? None; he’s a freelance policy expert who helped the Democrats build the ACA (and helped Mitt Romney build You-Know-Who-care in Massachusetts). But Gruber had an unofficial title — Architect of Obamacare! When the shit hit the fan, this led to the following hilarious Google News results:

If that weren’t enough, investigative outfits like Breitbart.com dug up more connections between Gruber and the Feds — for example, “OBAMA CLAIMED TO HAVE 'STOLEN IDEAS' FROM GRUBER IN 2006.” He was practically a member of the family!

Why all this effort just to elevate an enemy consultant? I mean, even Alger Hiss had a real government job. Well, like Hiss, Gruber is a pointy-head with much book-larnin’. Plus, he had suggested, in his muttering way, that Americans were stupid, and one of the pillars of conservatism (along with tax breaks for the wealthy and persecution of minorities) is resentment against them high-toned liberals who look down on you, Mr. and Mrs. America, and your simple ways. Connect that with Obamacare and you’ve got something.

Thus, we got headlines like “Obamacare Architect: Yeah, We Lied to The ‘Stupid’ American People to Get It Passed” and “Gruber Got 24 Times the Average ‘Stupid’ American’s Salary for Obamacare Work” (he’s hoity-toity and rich — prob’ly cosmopolitan and rootless, too!). “So the left has disdain for average Americans?” said Flopping Aces. “Tell me something we don’t already know.” Ah, but soon the whole world would know, thanks to the rhetorical genius of Trey Gowdy!

Gruber testified, and for the brethren it was Watergate all over again, only this time a real bad guy was under siege. “At critical points, of course, Gruber couldn’t recall,” reported Scott Johnson of Power Line. “He couldn’t recall if he had heard his friends in the Obama administration discuss the need to conceal the Obamacare tax on health insurance… When Gruber says, ‘I honestly do not recall,’ the ‘honestly’ puts screaming exclamation points on his lying.” “For those keeping track, that is not a ‘no,’” scrupled Noah Rothman of Hot Air. Sounds like Gruber was in real danger of losing his imaginary job!

When insulted Americans did not descend on Washington with pitchforks, conservatives bitched that the press was engaged in a Gruber cover-up (“Besieged by stupid Americans, Media circles the wagons around Gruber,” headlined Hot Air), notwithstanding the hundreds of thousands of videos of Gruber available on the internet. Breitbart.com actually attacked the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column on Gruber’s testimony, not because they defended Gruber, but because they “really should have bumped their rating from 2 to 3 Pinocchios,” and offered 1,538 words in defense of this proposition.

It seems like another wash-out — but Judge Andrew Napolitano, frequent Fox News guest nut, holds out hope that the Gruber maneuver will convince someone, at least: “Now we all know this was done intentionally, and guess what?” he told NewsMax. “The Supreme Court now knows this as well… If this phrase, this admission by this professor, gets before the Supreme Court, Obamacare loses." Now who thinks other people are stupid?

5. All the free speech money can buy. In 2014, conservatives were very concerned about free speech. Not everyone’s free speech, of course — for example, if you recently protested police brutality, Rudolph Giuliani and others said at year’s end, your speech caused two NYPD officers to be killed, so shut up. No, they were mostly concerned, as they usually are, with the rights of the wealthy and the powerful.

There was a big uproar in the spring, for instance, when seniors at some colleges decided they didn’t want conservatives to speak at their commencement ceremonies. Some people might imagine that was their call to make — after all, no one has a Constitutional right to a well-paid speaking engagement before an unwilling audience. But conservatives felt differently: “Critics rail against liberal bias for commencement speakers,” reported the Washington Times, quoting an activist who complained of “a severe bias against conservative viewpoints.” The expected follow-up, in which the Times revealed that DJs at graduation parties were biased against country music, was never published.

“Liberal bias at America’s universities is on display more than ever during this year’s commencement season,” reported Claire E. Healey at TownHall. For instance: “Robert Birgeneau, a chancellor at the University of California when police broke up an Occupy protest, refused to attend Haverford College’s ceremony to receive an honorary degree when students and faculty made objections.” The nerve of the guy!

Their biggest upset was saved for former Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was deprived of $35,000 from Rutgers University when students squawked. “Mob rule,” cried Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon; “Censorship 1, Condoleezza Rice 0,” tallied Dick Polman. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg actually compared Rice not getting the gig to the Palmer Raids of the early 20th Century, and huffed that on campus “social or administrative policing of thought crimes is all the rage.” (“Social” policing means people just don’t want to listen to you, I guess, which is Liberal Fascism farrrt.)

When both the free-speaker and the organization that didn’t want to hear it were rich and powerful, conservatives split the difference and took the side of… well, see if you can figure it out:

In April Brendan Eich was dismissed as Mozilla CEO after the company’s Board of Directors learned he’d supported an anti-gay-marriage drive. It’s not as if the brethren were saying that corporations couldn’t fire people for their speech — perish the thought! In fact, one Eich defender, PJ Media’s Bryan Preston, originally demanded that Mozilla employees who said they wanted Eich gone be “fired summarily,” before exploding with rage when the board instead dumped Eich.

No, it was the gay angle that turned Eich’s dismissal, in the eyes of some, from acceptable corporate behavior to an attack on straightness and on Christian morality itself. Imagine, firing an CEO for insulting homosexuals, which once was de rigueur for a successful exec! Why, soon they’ll be purging Klansmen from the C-suites… whoops, that already happened, or so it seemed, with the Donald Sterling fiasco in the NBA. Yes, a few dozen billionaires desired to disassociate from a team owner who had made racist statements, and once again conservatives rushed to defend the defenestratee.

You’ve probably figured it out: Conservatives reliably defend the powerful against the powerless but, when both parties are powerful, they side against the one that associates with the powerless. This, by the way, also explains the modern Democratic and Republican Parties.

(More later.)

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART ONE.

(Here's the first installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. Read 'em and weep!)

10. Dunhamania! Culture war, as we call the unpleasant ruckus that ensues when political obsessives blunder among the muses, had another big year, with conservatives shaking their fists at everything from opera to comic books. Rather than survey all these cases, let’s focus on the instructive example of the one cultural artifact that seems most reliably to excite them: That marketing phenomenon known as Lena Dunham.

Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce. The brethren hate other entertainment professionals, of course, but Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics.

This reached critical mass late in the year when Dunham released a celebrity memoir containing (as tell-all tradition demands) salacious details, including the news that, when Dunham was seven, she looked inside her one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina and found she had stuffed pebbles in there. Truth Revolt reported that Dunham was seventeen years old at the time (later correcting this “typo”) under the headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.”

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson dug in -- “Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it… There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode” -- even though he found the story “especially suspicious” — which just made it worse; imagine, lying in a celebrity memoir! When Dunham complained of this rough treatment — ensuring more press — the investigators of her celebrity memoir high-fived each other. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,” gurgled Don Surber while strangling a pillow.

Then Breitbart.com investigated another Dunham story about a college Republican named Barry who took advantage of her, and found that -- get this! -- some details were not verifiable (“A longtime employee at the Oberlin library could not recall working with any student with a flamboyant mustache”). A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too. “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…” The publisher instead agreed to add “a disclaimer that explains that the Barry described by Dunham was not really named Barry” and pay court costs, per Fox News.

There followed much popping of rightwing corks. "LENA DUNHAM WALKS BACK FABRICATED RAPE CLAIM" unh-unh-unhed John Hinderaker at Power Line. RedState called Dunham part of a “Rape Accusation-Industrial Complex” of women who habitually lie about sexual assault in order to advance a “victimization narrative.” The American Spectator’s Ross Kaminsky went further, tying the case to what he called the “lie” that Michael Brown didn’t deserve to be gunned down, and declaring that the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.” Ann Coulter added that Dunham, like all women who disclosed sexual assault after an interval, was just “trying to get attention.”

Despite their best efforts, or perhaps partly due to them, Dunham remains on the best seller list — without resorting to bulk sales to think tanks, imagine that! — and in the celebrity pantheon. Conservatives, for their part, maintain their place at the wrong side of a peephole, banging on the fence with one hand and doing God knows what with the other. Between the sexual rage, the rolling-out of big guns to prosecute a flimsy piece of pop-art crap, and the ultimate, flaccid ineffectuality of their efforts, could there be a more perfect example of culture war?

9. The right comes out for income inequality. The term is relatively new to common discourse, and in years past was mainly engaged by wingnut think-tankers to explain why such a thing didn’t exist. But Piketty’s big book and Obama’s mention of income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union led lumpen conservatives to modify their argument to: income inequality doesn’t exist, and so what if it does.

When rich guys complained the poor were giving them stink-eye, conservatives rushed to comfort them the best way they knew how: By associating their opponents with Nazis. At the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Peters compared resentment of the rich to Kristallnacht; in the same venue, Ruth R. Wisse asked, “Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them?” and answered yes, because anti-Semites often complain about wealthy Jews, which makes any complaint against American oligarchs, despite the impressive number of goyim among them, a veritable Blood Libel.

Daniel Henninger (also at WSJ — these guys know their audience!) suggested that Putin was getting belligerent because he “surely noticed” that “the nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality,” and were too busy coddling paupers to trouble with the Ukraine. Ace of Spades protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.

And forget about trying to level the field with a higher minimum wage — that’s socialism. If you asked why the current minimum wage isn't already socialism, the brighter bulbs would tell you, you’re right, it is — let’s get rid of it altogether! Libertarian Virginia Postrel wept over all the folks out there with multiple jobs — not because they had the work multiple jobs, but because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.” The injustice of it! In fact, if you complained about getting your tiny wages ripped off by your boss, that too was socialism, or at least rather petty of you.

The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech, who attributed any concerns over the ginormous 99%-1% gap to “jealousy… in real life, the money doesn’t stay in Scrooge McDuck’s vault, it goes into investments which pay more people to do more things.” Scrooge McDuck may someday build a condo, and you may get to clean its hallways, which along with your others job(s) may permit you to rent a hovel. Now stop complaining, anti-Richite!

8. Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

But never mind those details -- the real issue for conservatives was less geopolitical than psychographic — rightwing pundits, however pencil-necked, worship butchness and reflexively attribute it to their heroes, such as former cheerleader George “he’s got two of ‘em” W. Bush, while portraying their opponents as sissies.

Judging from conservatives’ previous investigations of Obama’s wearing of mom jeans while pretend-shooting and bike-riding, not mention his unwillingness to punch down on the poor, clearly the President fits their definition of a sissy. But it’s hard to identify a domestic conservative with whose roughness they can creditably contrast Obama’s affect. Mike Huckabee? Newt Gingrich? Chris Christie, being a bully, might do, but he betrayed the brethren by accepting Federal help on Hurricane Sandy.

With such a weak bench, it was perhaps inevitable that conservatives would find a foreign dictator to embrace. Putin is ruthless, rugged, and hates homosexuals — really, their dream candidate if they could get the citizenship thing sorted. They’d been contrasting bare-chested manly man Putin with metrosexual Obama on flimsy pretexts for years (“IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH,” etc), but Ukraine really brought it out of them. They were especially fond of funny pictures, but employed wordcraft, too, e.g. “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

Putin received perhaps his most eminent conservative blessing from Sarah Palin, who sneered at Obama as “as one who wears Mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates” and sighed over Putin as “one who wrestles bears and drills for oil.” But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess — in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.” Hanson did put in some mild admissions that Putin was not really a role model, in much the same way that the Shangri-Las told us their guy was good-bad, but he's not evil.

Months later, with the ruble crashing, Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.

(More later.)

REMEMBER THE NAME: WILLIAM BIGELOW.

Uhhhh....

In attempting to inculcate young girls with his administration’s “War on Women” theme, Barack Obama made a point of making the central theme of the 2014 White House Science Fair last May the paucity of women in the sciences.

The author is William Bigelow and I am only recording his name so that when he advances in the conservative propaganda mill -- and he will, because anyone who would drag his tongue so eagerly through such a pool of shit as this will go far in that loathsome enterprise -- the world may remember what an asshole he is.

William Bigelow: See you on the Times OpEd page.

UPDATE. Yeah, I know it's a ridiculously puny subject; that's why I'm making a point of it. Once upon a time, Ross Douthat was just a freelance nut like Bigelow, and look how that turned out. For some samples of Douthat columns that were buried once he became an NYT big-bug, see here, here, here, and plenty more where that came from. Once Bigelow is thus promoted, expect him to be similarly coddled.

UPDATE 2. Oops, messed up the link to the story; fixed.

MURRAY CHRISTMAS.

And, the obligatory:

Tidings of comfort and joy.

UPDATE. That Big Star song is one of the few Christmas songs I can stand anymore. I must say this is a pretty good version of "Carol of the Bells" though:

Too bad he couldn't wait to come in at the falsetto part. Maybe with some practice?

UPDATE 2. Not a bad time to re-up my old Village Voice holiday compendium of "The Five Most Miserable Christmas Songs."

DINESH D'SOUZA MUST HAVE BEEN BUSY.

Time magazine gives the floor to a man who, before he went to prison, was a top advisor to President Rudolph Giuliani:

Bernie Kerik: War Is Being Waged on Our Homeland

In short: Eric Garner had it coming, and you mooks better be nice to the cops or "America will look more like a wasteland than the greatest country in the world in just a few short years."

Next issue, Time will have an essay by Justin Volpe on community policing.

UPDATE. In comments LookWhosInTheFreezer asks, "Was Mark Furhman unavailable?" Could be -- like his fellow felon D'Souza, he's a regular guest on TV and radio shows.

John Edwards, onetime Democratic Party nominee for Vice-President, merely cheated on his wife (in spectacular manner, I must admit) and as a result he's an unperson; the idea of him doing regular commentary a la Kerik, Furhman, and D'Souza is absurd. Yet conservative criminals are immediately rehabilitated via talk show therapy, where they pontificate about the very subjects on which they've disgraced themselves. I would love to hear an explanation of this phenomenon from the people who are always going on about the liberal media.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS: AN ENDLESS SERIES.

Back when Gabby Giffords was shot and some liberals gave Sarah Palin and other conservatives a hard time about their incendiary rhetoric before the fact, I wrote this:

To be fair, we can imagine a reasonable answer to [these liberals’] argument. And we have to imagine it, as no one is actually making it. (Those who come closest are actually milquetoast liberals like the New York Times' Matt Bai who, in our current, debased political discourse, take the role once filled by moderate Republicans back when such creatures existed.) 

What we got instead was less reasonable, because once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense. 

For example, when leftblogger Matthew Yglesias cited Congressnut Michele Bachmann's 2009 "armed and dangerous" comments as an example of violent rightwing lunacy, the Daily Caller's John Guardiano said it wasn't as bad as it sounded: "Bachmann clearly was using 'armed and dangerous' in a metaphorical and political, not literal and violent, sense," he said…

Etc. Now some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it. In fact, here’s Guardiano himself on Twitter: “Obama, Holder & de Blasio R to the mob today what Pontius Pilate was to the mob in Jesus’ time: weak-willed enablers.” Etc. etc.

It's tu quoque, I guess, but conservatives alway manage to be quoqueier than anyone else -- they whine such a lot about the flak they take (Jonah Goldberg even complained it was unfair to conservatives that Giffords continued to appear in public after her shooting) that it makes their viciousness when it's time to grandstand even more repulsive. Now they're circulating their clip of some knuckleheads shouting for “dead cops” at a New York protest and implying that all the tens of thousands who protested the Brown and Garner cases across the country were calling for assassinations.

Some of them put a lot of apparently wasted effort into trying to look reasonable -- like Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, who every few paragraphs assures us that "conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair" and such like, but keeps spinning around and coming back with convoluted quasi-accusations such as this:

If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.

This grammatical cloverleaf is not improved when you read the whole thing and realize that by “false set of assumptions” Tobin means the idea that police sometimes treat black people unfairly. (He also says "narrative" about 70 times, which is wingnut shorthand for "who ya gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?") More forthrightly absurd is New York Post harrumpher Bob McManus:

Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the ­responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head. 

But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional.

“Wow, a liberal Democrat is in office!” cried the psycho career criminal; “Now’s my chance!”

At National Review, Jim Geraghty says hopefully that “police shootings will do for the anti-police movement what the Oklahoma City bombing did to the militia movement.” This will sound weird to ordinary people, but it’s perfect in a way: Conservatives tend to think of Oklahoma City as a propaganda put-up job to make them look bad — you seldom hear them talk about what a shame it was those people were killed, and mostly hear them explaining, as Byron York did a 2011 column, “How Clinton Exploited Oklahoma City For Political Gain.” That’s really how they think about the Brooklyn shootings — it’s not life and death to them, and certainly not right or wrong: It’s just a way to get back at people who made them look bad.

Another point: This shows how big a fraud the vaunted libertarian-conservative harmonic convergence really is. Conservative columnists recently had a brief libertarian-flavored fling of police criticism over the Mike Brown case -- remember National Review's "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police"? You won't be seeing anything like that for a while, now that their old lawn-order avatars Rudolph Giuliani and George Pataki are tugging the leash. Mutual respect between the governed and the government might be alright for a weekend fling, but when the party's over it's time to go back home to authoritarianism.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   The imbecility of the Sony/North Korea thing could not achieve full ripeness without a contribution from Jonah Goldberg. He talks about the 1940s, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, were getting menaced by New York Nazis, and Fiorello La Guardia phoned them to pledge his support. Alas, New York's current mayor has disappointed Goldberg:

New York mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t call the management of Landmark Theaters in New York, where Sony Pictures was slated to premiere The Interview, and say, “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” He didn’t say much of anything at all.

1.) I wonder if Goldberg called de Blasio's office to confirm this. 2.) I can imagine Landmark receiving such a call and saying, "Thanks a lot, Mayor! Wait'll I tell the management of Sony Pictures that you'll ring the theater with cops if they release the picture -- that ought to change their minds about cyberterrorist threats!" 3.) Doesn't Goldberg know that La Guardia smashed pinball machines, and was therefore a Liberal Fascist? Farrrrrt.

•   Oh Jesus, Goldberg just sent out his G-file email on the same subject. It's not on the internet yet, so allow me to treat you to a key passage:

The collective U.S. response to North Korea’s assault on Sony has been disgusting and dispiriting. I don’t think we should bomb North Korea over this... but the correct response is to flip Kim Jong-un the bird. What form that bird-flipping would take is open to debate.

Open to debate?

I’d like it if the TV networks all ran The Interview at the same time.

 Yeah, let's have a debate about what the nets run. Didn't this guy write a book called Liberal Fascism?

I’d like Barack Obama to call the leaders of the House and Senate to a private screening of The Interview at the White House, just like Woodrow Wilson did with Birth of a Nation.

Wilson, the biggest Liberal Fascist of them all! Goldberg is becoming a National Greatness Conservative, I guess. Wait, it gets betterworse:

Obama’s conduct in this episode has been better than others, but not very good. This is the kind of moment great politicians seize.

"What? Hollywood's making a sequel to Arthur? I'm still president, Mommy, let's nationalize Warner Brothers."

It’s the kind of moment they pray will fall into their lap. First of all, short of C.H.U.D.s, there’s really no better enemy than the North Korean regime. The Left can’t really shout racism about hating on the Norks...

I never thought I'd say this, but I thought this sort of who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-Axl-Rose-and-a-blade-of-grass gibberish was beneath Goldberg. But then, ours is an age of new lows.

•   Michael Coren at Breitbart.com:

AS OBAMA WAVERS, CANADA’S HARPER IS THE TRUE LEADER OF NORTH AMERICAN VALUES

"North American values?" This is weaker than that "Anglosphere" shit.

The Conservative leader has been in office for more than eight years now and his response to the terror attacks was entirely typical. Firm, resolute, controlled, slightly boring but utterly uncompromising.

Boring and uncompromising -- aw, but ain't that North America?

While opposition leaders and liberal newspapers were reluctant to even describe the crimes as terrorism, Harper used the word repeatedly and spoke of the need to combat this darkness internationally as well as domestically. Indeed, along with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, Harper has led the world in candour concerning Islamist aspirations and the need to affirm western values.

Apparently Harper says "terror" and "Islamicism" a lot, which is why a Mountie can just roll up in ISIS territory drinking a Brador and no one can touch him. Also he's "the first leader to officially boycott Hamas," and thinks "Canada should not have to pay fines and be punished for their environmental policies," and is shutting down Canada's socialized medicine program -- kidding about that last one, guys, but though Coren doesn't approve of everything Harper does, "it’s liberals and socialist who most despise him," and after all isn't trolling what North American Values are all about?

FUCK KIM JONG UN, AND FUCK YOU.

David Atkins is right: It wasn't "Hollywood" or America who pulled The Interview due to North Korean pressure, it was Sony, a multinational corporation that, like any other, values shareholder interest waaaaaay more than free speech.  Of course conservatives see it differently, and affect to believe the capitulation has something to do with campus speech codes or some shit. At National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke:

Sadly, one cannot help but see in this response some faint echoes of another, disheartening development: to wit, our present tendency to accommodate the thin-skinned and the intolerant and to permit their professed discomfort to interfere with our public debate.

Oh, cannot one?

In our schools, in the media, and in all of our political arenas, we have of late become accustomed to kowtowing to hecklers, to fleeing from anything controversial, and to treating the outrage du jour as if it were representative of anything more substantial than rank self-indulgence and the desire to silence dissent.

Speak for yourself, limey. In the same venue, Michael Auslin:

The truth is, we’ve been heading this way for a long time, starting with our response to Islamist assaults on those whom they believe blaspheme Mohammed. Now, we’re moving to another level.

Who the fuck is "we"? I've been blaspheming that fuck Mohammed for years. I have no trouble telling Kim Jon Un to get stuffed either. (I don't have time to draw a cartoon of him right now, but if I did I would make him look fat and ugly. Pay tribute to my heroism, America!)

Capitalism doth make cowards of us all, but conservatives prefer to blame liberals because we're "politically correct" (i.e., polite to people with fewer privileges than ourselves). When a corporate board thought they'd rather not have Brendan Eich and his anti-gay cooties representing their company, liberals got the blame. When a TV network wanted some of the racist stank to wear off Paula Deen before they put her before the public again, ditto. When the NBA pushed out Donald Sterling, ditto; NFL Rice Peterson ditto. It's not just or even mainly because they're wired to pin every bad thing that happens to liberalism; it's also because they believe that the market is God and money His grace, and can't stand to see it proven otherwise.

You know what else? Every one of these fuckers who brings up The Great Dictator would, given the chance, have joined the red-baiters who kicked Chaplin out of America.

UPDATE. In comments, D Johnston: "I'm thinking that December -- the month we remember how Saint Bill O'Reilly saved Christmas -- is perhaps not the best time for conservatives to complain about a 'tendency to accommodate the thin-skinned.'"

JESUS HATES YOU.

I don't mean to write so much about torture but Jesus, conservatives sure are covering themselves in glory with this, huh? At National Review, Deroy Murdock -- once considered a libertarian, if you can believe it, despite his history of torture advocacy -- did a yay-torture column that had so much 9/11 in it that Rudolph Giuliani filed a trademark infringement suit. (Murdock also uses the mildest descriptions of what happened -- e.g. "blowing cigarette or cigar smoke into a detainee’s face" -- rather than the killing and broken bones stuff, and omits the torture of innocents altogether, so I can't even give him Cheney points for bare-faced evil -- like most of his fellow torture fans, he wants readers to wish it into the cornfield and denounce liberals for thinking bad thoughts about Anthony.)

Speaking of Jesus, from D.C. McAllister at The Federalist here's what may be a new low:

Yes, Christians Can Support Torture
Majorities of Christians support the use of torture in some instances. And they’re not bad Christians for doing so.

I'm not even kidding. McAllister smacks down some wussy "pastor" who claims it isn't Christian to chain people to the ceiling, keep them awake for days on end, and rape them with syringes:

He states in a “PS” that he originally wrote, “You cannot be a Christian and support torture.” He took out “a” probably because he received a lot of backlash, and rightly so. So he qualified it: “You cannot be Christian and support torture. . . . Can you support torture and go to heaven? Maybe. Can you support torture and be Christlike? No.”

Zahnd can try to disingenuously snake his way out of his own wording, but it’s obvious he’s calling people’s Christianity into question, and that’s what he meant when he initially wrote the post. But even with the qualifier, he is judging 79 percent of evangelicals in America and 78 percent of Catholics (along with 68 percent of all Americans, according to a recent poll)—who say torture can be justified.

How dy'ya like that, Mr. Pastor? The overwhelming majority of Americans say "Give us Barabbas!"

I expect next we'll see Jesus paraphernalia that shows the Prince of Peace giving the Abu Ghraib thumbs-up.

SCRAPING BOTTOM.

At New York, Jonathan Chait offers this assessment of Dick Cheney defending torture on TV:

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said... 

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

OK, take a second and try to imagine how the lowest sort of hack might respond to this. You probably envision sputterings about 9/11, and Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary does supply those. But his real achievement -- one I confess I couldn't have predicted -- is to reduce the issue to one of style, and to claim Cheney's opponents are not disgusted by his defense of practices denounced by civilization for centuries, but by Cheney's balls. Here is a man who, when confronted with shackled, raped, broken-legged innocents, looks them in the eye and says "sucks to be you," and liberals are too lame to appreciate it:

The discussion about torture reminds us of the qualities that always annoyed his opponents most about Cheney. It’s not just that he does things they hate, it’s his air of defiance in which he doesn’t even accept the premise of the questions posed to him that makes them think he is evil... 

Chait’s argument rests on the notion that even if you thought torture might be necessary, the decent thing to do is to act shocked or horrified by the ill treatment of even the bad guys of al-Qaeda. Cheney won’t play that game...

Try to imagine defending a sullen, unrepentant murderer thus: Ooh, you're just mad at Dick because he's not all [high feminine voice] "I'm so sorry I gut-ripped that old man with a letter opener." Well, he won't play that game! The defense rests! 

Whatever they're paying Tobin, it's not enough.

WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

To those of you who worry that mainstream attention to the con artist Charles C. Johnson will damage the reputation and efficacy of journalism, I have to say you're waaaaaay late, and submit in evidence this Ole Perfesser Instapundit post from today in its entirety:

WHAT’S SAD IS THAT IN THE OBAMA ERA IT’S ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE: Matt Drudge says spending bill passed because NSA has ‘dirt’ on John Boehner.  

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama’s immigration executive orders.   

“Obama got EVERYTHING,” Drudge tweeted Friday. “NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins.” 

I’ve seen similar speculation about John Roberts in the ObamaCare case. Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.

This isn't just some nut, The Perfesser is king of the rightbloggers and a regular contributor to mainstream journalism outfits, and here you see him not only promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory out of Matt Drudge, but limning it with his own bullshit.

The damage to journalism has not only been long-lived, but deliberate. The point was always to obviate any distinction between the verifiable or even believable and boob bait.

It's a different kind of problem from the bias, if that's the word for it, found in the mainstream media. The Rolling Stone/UVA story got caught by the Washington Post's Erik Wemple and others, the whole world came to know about it, and much soul-searching was seen over it in the journalism community. Even if they were insincere, they at least had to pretend. Conservative crap-merchants, however, don't soul-search. They'll dish anything, and their audiences, convinced that everything the MSM says is a lie, takes the absence of these stories from the big papers and nets as proof that their heroes are telling the truth the Lamestream won't dare to print.

This has provided a fertile environment for hucksters to throw shit, and for a loyal audience to not even care if it sticks. Johnson's just a logical mutation of that. While most of these guys just duck out of the way of the debunkings and negative attention their stories receive, Johnson welcomes the attention and makes himself the story. He's standing on the shoulders of midgets; good thing for him there's such a lot of them.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The new National Anthem.

•   I have treated this week's torture revelations as comedy, which is how I treat most of the buffoonery within my jurisdiction. Also as usual, the comedy is of a grim sort because the stupidity and venality of my subjects has far-reaching effects on real people, whether it's the snake-oil salesmen who want to rid us of national health care for our own good, or the psychopaths who have rushed to defend the gruesome torture of individuals who (it cannot be said often enough, or by these psychos at all) were often innocent and were in any case human beings. I feel bad for the victims, but also -- and I hope you will excuse my unchecked privilege in saying so  -- I feel just plain bad. When I was boy, back in the days of the vo-de-ville and horseless carriages, they told me ours wasn't the kind of country that did that. It's been a long time since I believed it -- hell, even a trimmer like Peter Beinart doesn't believe it -- but I have to admit it shook me a bit to see nearly every conservative in America run to proclaim hell yeah, we torture, what's wrong with torture? At least they trouble to lie about racism -- the tribute virtue pays to vice and all that -- but they're proud of torture. The days when children saw their country in Sands of Iwo Jima is over, and the day when they see it in Starship Troopers is upon us. Better hang onto yourself; in this country morality isn't even valued as a loss leader anymore.

•  Oh holy jumping Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is writing about torture. After several grafs of what-is-torture from someone who probably would start naming names if you took away his appetizer, Goldberg offers this rhetorical masterpiece:

One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross.

Like incest! Sure, I'm fucking my daughter, but let's talk shades of gray. For one thing, she's really sexy.

The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless.

This is similar to Goldberg's stock everyone-believes-in-censorship argument: If you were starving and shit was the last thing on earth and you would eat it, that means you believe in eating shit, hurr hurr fart. I would love to see McCain's reaction to Goldberg personally laying out this argument -- or saying this:

When John McCain was brutally tortured — far, far more severely than anything we’ve done to the 9/11 plotters —

Well, mostly, anyway.

— it was done to elicit false confessions and other statements for purposes of propaganda. When we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was to get actionable intelligence on ongoing plots. It seems to me that’s an important moral distinction.

Under torture, KSM gave up the names of two guys who had nothing to do with anything; the CIA hauled them in and jailed them till they eventually figured out they had nothing to do with anything. Mission accomplished and morality established! (None of this is to speak of how torture, non-binary or not, squares with whatever religious bullshit Goldberg pretends to believe in.) Listening to Goldberg defend the indefensible is not as much fun as listening to him defend the technically defensible so badly that it looks indefensible, but we take our yuks where we can.

THE LIBERTARIAN MOMENT, CONTINUED.

At libertarian flagship Reason, Scott Shackford:

In this politicized fight between the contents of hundreds of thousands of pages of reports and reviews, the actual debate centers on disagreement over two issues: How honest or dishonest the CIA represented what it was doing in communication with those charged with oversight; and whether enhanced interrogation or torture actually succeeded in accomplishing what the CIA claims it did. Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program. Was the Department of Health and Human Services honest with those charged with oversight about the state of Obamacare health insurance exchanges prior to their launch, and has it succeeded in providing affordable health insurance? It's the same argument.

"Strip out the torture and terrorism" and statist meat inspections are also tyranny.  Similarly, strip out the so-called racism and Eric Garner's death is about cigarette taxes. I used to think these people were raised in Skinner boxes, but now I think they spend their whole lives in them.

UPDATE. Speaking of Garner, Steven Hayward at Power Line takes the tax thing all the way:

LIBERALISM CAUSED ERIC GARNER’S DEATH

Has anyone argued yet that liberalism caused torture because, I dunno, moral relativism or Saul Alinsky or some shit?