AXELROD, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD.

This is masterful trolling:

Barack Obama was "bullshitting" his opposition to gay marriage and support for civil unions during his 2008 presidential campaign, according to a new book authored by former senior White House adviser David Axelrod. 

Time magazine reported Tuesday that the longtime Obama confidant said in his new book, "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," that he counseled then-senator Obama to soften his position on gay marriage for political reasons. 

"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod wrote, as quoted by Time...

"I’m just not very good at bullshitting," Obama told Axelrod after one of those events, as quoted by Time.

Normal people will go, "Yeah, so?" Even Lincoln was doing the "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" thing as late as 1862. Getting elected President in a nation always verging on a majority makeup of Snopeses requires some finesse.

But among the abnormal, by which I mean conservatives, it's a different story. So roll out the argh-blargh and mutter-sputter! Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart.com:

OBAMA’S GAY MARRIAGE LIE WAS A LIE ABOUT HIS FAITH, TOO... 

"Obama Misled Nation” is almost a perennial headline–it applies to nearly everything the president does. Yet it is important to be clear about the nature of this particular lie. 

Obama did not just pretend to oppose a controversial position. He pretended to hold that view as a matter of his Christian faith. 

Thus he made Christians look bigoted -- by acting the bigot and thus getting them to vote for him! HE IS THE FATHER OF LIES! Next, Noah Rothman at Hot Air:

Obama... spent the next 16 years hiding his politically inconvenient opinions from the public until they became acceptable to a majority. There’s nothing especially shocking about that, but the fact that this fails to astonish is itself a lamentable condition. 

[Blink. Blink.]

...This level of cynicism, the expectation that obviously our political leaders would mislead us about what they truly believe, cannot be healthy in the long run. 

Yeah, the first two hundred years of knowing that politicians lie were alright, but now it's getting a little old. I know, let's elect that Duck Dynasty guy.

Most of the brethren apply their traditional Crisis of Credibility bullshit -- "It’s liars all the way down in this administration," hehindeeds Ole Perfesser Instapundit; "Obama lied about opposing gay marriage, contrived the 'God’s in the mix' stuff, isn’t an Honest Politician," huffs Guv'nah Charles C.W. Cooke; "Obama Adviser Says Obama Repeatedly Lied About Gay Marriage for Political Gain... Related: They Lied: Obamacare’s 12 false premises and broken promises," report those lovable libertarians at Reason (read the comments for extra libertarianism, by which I mean loss of faith in humanity).

But we see their point -- the political repercussions could be severe: Maybe word will spread to Alabama, and the Democrats will have a hard time winning elections there!

UPDATE. Oh man:

That monster! Or maybe the Daily Caller doofus who wrote this thinks Sasha and Malia are the monsters, for helping Nobama pretend he used to be regular Christian fag-hater in order to hornswoggle the American People into gayness. Just look at them in the picture, acting like a regular family!

Next we have neo-neocon. The entire tortured mess is hilarious -- sort of Murder in the Cathedral meets Blood Feud -- but there are two stop-the-show moments:

Over the years Americans have become cynical about lying presidents. Some date that cynicism—or at least a great leap forward for that cynicism—to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the fact that Clinton survived it. The left, of course, says “Bush lied” about WMDs, but the right points out that Bush relied on intelligence reports around the world that were mistaken, and that is different than a lie, and that a lie would have been wrong.

So what if he turned a formerly functional Middle East republic into a slaughterhouse and killed thousands of innocent people? He may be a war criminal, but he's not a liar!

[NOTE: I haven't seen any reactions from the black religious community yet, but it's possible they might be quite displeased at this news. It's one thing to change your mind on something; it's another to lie to religious people about your religious beliefs.]

"Why is that white lady staring at us from the bushes? It's like she wants ask us something but she's scared."

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT!

You read Bob Dylan's great MusiCares speech, right? Remember the part where he talks about the grand tradition of folk and blues and how it affected him? Excerpt:

For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once. 

If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.

Dylan is so clear about this that you wouldn't think he could be misunderstood. But then you'd be forgetting libertarians! Take it away, Ed Krayewski at Reason:

Bob Dylan's Makes the Case Against Today's Copyright Climate
In a 20 minute speech, Bob Dylan explains how copyright is detrimental to cultural heritage without mentioning the word

Ain't even kidding.

...Were these different folk standards composed in a legal climate such as today's, they would never be "standards." They'd be copyrighted and would lose their status as musical currency that can be passed around, performed, revised, and rewritten and so forth.

And some old black men might have gotten paid. I wonder if Krayewski reached out to Dylan and told him he was on the right track, and should now read some Hayek and oh, yeah, put his catalogue into public domain to stimulate freedom. He might also try that on Kid Rock, Nick Gillespie's latest libertarian rock star -- see how he goes for the idea that copyright is "detrimental to cultural heritage."

These guys have got me believing in life on other planets because they can't possibly be from this one.

ON TO OSCAR, 4.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.

There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”

This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.

So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.

If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.

This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.

Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.

One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.

Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.

I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.

(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)

NEXT WEEK: PINOCHET WAS NO ANGEL BUT AT LEAST HE WASN'T A SOCIALIST.

There's plenty of argh-blargh over Obama mentioning the Crusades and the Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast, on the apparent grounds that Christians aren't like that any more, whereas all Muslims are ISIS sleeper agents waiting for the word of the Prophet to leap out of their taxicabs and convenience stores and do jihad. (Also Obama mixed in slavery and Jim Crow, and that was totally the Democrats!)

Most of the brethren are content with ordinary, meretricious bullshit ("Obama uses National Prayer Breakfast to compare Christianity to ISIS," lies Some Guy at RedState); but making everything worse as usual is Jonah Goldberg, who has a long history of defending the viciousness of the Church (particularly toward Galileo, which Goldberg describes as a sort of innocent misunderstanding among friends) and, roused by an Obama news hook, stumbles onstage with his Inquisition Was Not So Bad crib notes:

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

It's like when your friend says that boring lecture was "torture" -- just a figure of speech! Yet libtards get mad when you subject a Gitmo detainee to the equivalent of a boring speech.

I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.

Hitler has a bad rap but if only you'd seen him with his dogs, etc. The thing you have to remember about this yap is, it's not meant to convince normal people, who will be giving it that Springtime for Hitler stare, but to soothe whatever vestigial sense of shame is left among the true believers. (Goldberg even brings up Martin Luther King to defend Christianity, which for conservatives is definitely like knocking down chairs behind you when you're on the run from the cops.)

Goldberg also says that Inquisition stuff was a long time ago, but take a look at Goldberg himself and all the freaks and monsters with whom he associates; you just know that if the coast were clear, if the effects of the Enlightenment (including the founding of this Republic) were completely dead and faded, they'd be burning and beheading to beat the band.

UPDATE. I am grateful for the reminder from Chauncey DeVega at Alternet that, regarding the Big Long Time Ago objection to speaking ill of the godly, some horrific lynchings of black men were performed within living memory. Klansmen didn't burn giant question marks on people's lawns, y'know, and Bizarro Jesus is often an honored guest at outbreaks of American mayhem.

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson has spoken:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is.

He's got a point. There's no evidence that Obama beats his children, fucks his cousin, goes out of his way to make other people miserable, seethes with hate at the unfair advantages enjoyed by the poor, or many of the other traditional hallmarks of Christendom. Being a politician, though, he does lie habitually, so maybe he can be redeemed.

MAKES A PERFECT GAG GIFT.

Look what you can get for as little as $1,699:

Join Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit and one of America’s foremost Second Amendment Scholars, Dana Loesch, author of Hands off My Gun as well as Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Mark (Rip) Rippetoe, Roger Simon, Helen Smith and Kevin Williamson for a weekend dedicated to the Second Amendment. 

In addition to scintillating seminars we will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights at a luxurious hunting and shooting retreat. Rough Creek Lodge not only has world-class hunting and shooting opportunities, but a wide range of other activities available to our guests. 

Because of a very low speaker to guest ratio (1:9), guests will have the opportunity to schmooze, eat, drink, ride ATVs, go zip lining, shoot model rockets, use the golf driving range, hunt and shoot with our speakers.

A weekend at a richie resort with the worst people in the world! Not sure why they're booking so far in advance, though -- by December the Obama apocalypse may have come, and all the deposits will have been made in worthless government fiat scrip. (There is, believe it or not, no provision to pay your way in gold or bitcoin.) Know what else seems wrong? Check out the "free activities":

Zipline And Rock Climbing
Watch A Movie
Catch And Release Fishing

"Catch And Release Fishing"? What is this, some eco-Nazi love-in? Real men and their ladies' auxiliary catch those suckers and stare them down as they thrash out their last breaths! Also:

Petting Corral

Come on, now. There's also a shitty blog ("I couldn’t wait to leave NYC when I graduated law school. In California I met my first real gun owners"), but maybe you just want to wait for the police reports.

EVERYTHING IS POLITICS TO THESE PEOPLE, PART ONE GAZILLION.

I ignored the Super Bowl on Sunday, and a good thing too, as Ed Driscoll tells me if I had watched I would have been subjected to a barrage of liberal propaganda. No, this isn't the old Rush Limbaugh idea that the NFL itself is left-wing; it's about the commercials:

So starting with one of the first Super Bowl-only ads, the legendary Ridley Scott-directed 1984-inspired Apple advertisement to launch the Macintosh, Madison Avenue ad reps began to use the platform to have fun. Ad reps created brilliant demo reels for themselves, and buzz for the clients’ products, which sometimes, with a little luck, even translated into increased sales.

That formula began to grate a bit in the postmodern naughts, as a formula began to evolve that featured men as the butts of jokes, part of a larger trend in the media overculture that Glenn Reynolds and others were first commenting on well over a decade ago. But those seem like pretty carefree days compared to what we witnessed last night...

Even worse than dumb husband jokes? Steel yourself, my friends:

By my rough count, there were at least two ads featuring people with no legs, one with a missing father, one with misogynistic anti-male crack from comedienne Sarah Silverman, and one ad bullying a ten year old boy because he said someone “plays like a girl.” (The horror.)

The ads with people with no legs, I suppose, were meant to make you feel sorry for them, which is a classic Democrat trick, and the father was probably missing because of no-fault divorce.

And perhaps most infamously based on comments on Twitter and even the London Daily Mail, one dead ten year old boy, thanks to Nationwide. (And if you don’t approve of this understandable media gruel, you’re an Internet “hater” — says Coca-Cola?)

I'm not sure why the famous dead kid ad is left-wing: was he murdered in the womb?

A friend of mine watching the game at my house last night, a fellow member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bivouacked behind enemy lines in Deep Blue Socialist California, dubbed it “The Nanny Bowl.” He’s definitely on to something. As journalist Kevin P. Craver tweeted to me last night, “I fell into an alternate universe in which the party that loses the November election gets to write the Super Bowl ads.”

Actually, the people who write the ads do so because they are paid by clients, who carefully vet the ads and then pay millions of dollars to get them on during the game. Contrary to Driscoll's paranoid fantasy, they aren't doing it so the ad guys can have fun, or as a donation to the Democratic Party; they do it so people will talk about their brands, and then remember them when they go shopping. It's as pure a capitalist spectacle as can be imagined. The League, the network, and the sponsors can hardly help it if no one ponied up for a #Benghazi infomercial.

Rush Limbaugh has been talking for years about how hard the left has been trying to undermine football...

OK, this is where we came in. Oh, wait: Driscoll eventually gets someone to explain the dead kid-Democrat connection:

The modern left’s ideology is one big Nationwide ad. Submit to our practices or your kids will die. Only our mandated health insurance will treat your Bain cancer or protect you from global warming...

It's like he had a mole in the focus group! I look forward to Driscoll's column on how the left was responsible for Daniel Bryant getting screwed in the Royal Rumble.

NEW MEME: LESBIAN MOTHERS HATE WOMEN, STEAL BABIES!

Children-of-gay-marriage-against-gay-marriage really may actually be a thing. In addition to Katy Faust, whose case we examined yesterday, we have The Federalist's Rivka Edelman. Unlike Faust, Edelman doesn't describe her gay-mommy childhood positively ("My mother, you know, she had some of that pornography around and the books and stuff..."), so from her we don't get the absurdity of a happily-raised child of gays arguing no one else should be raised that way. We do, however, get a heapin' helping of bad faith and bile:

LBGT Demands For Other People’s Children Are Misogynistic
The misogyny of the LGBT movement flings women backward to a dark era, when the rule was prejudice against single mothers and unintended pregnancy... 

The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children, often claiming that if gay adults can marry the children they are raising will benefit from broader “protections.” This is doublespeak. The “protections” consist of the gay adults’ access to and control of children as commodities.

Edelman engages the Supreme Court case in which two lesbians adopted a child who had been given up by his homeless birth mother:

Daughtrey is sure to note of the biological mother, “She surrendered her legal rights.” How did the birth mother do this if she was “impaired”? The unstable and impoverished mother is a useful trope in misogynistic and classist discourse. I wonder what was done to find this biological mother housing so she could in fact leave the hospital with her son. It is likely that few if any good-faith attempts were made to keep “N” with his mother, let alone find his father and enforce child support or at least compel some kind of connection so “N” could know his origins...

That's some gooood trolling: You libtards say you care about homeless people, well how come you let the State steal their children and give them to dykes?

The new social justice dictum is that society owes LBGT people the flesh and blood of other people’s children because they are “married” now. Let’s be honest. Love does not make a family in this case. Human trafficking does.

It's like, look, she's gay -- now will you listen to our gay baby-stealing stories? I hope some conservative movement types are grooming Edelman for a larger role in the gay-marriage fight; I'd love to see what Mr. and Mrs. America make of her argument. I guess the ones who are willing to countenance baby-stealing stories about Jews and Gypsies might go for it.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

Rod Dreher:

It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent... 

The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.

Throughout his post, you will find hundreds of words about how Dreher is really just talking about proper communication, and hey, he softens his accent when he goes on the radio so what's the big deal, and "who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered 'white'?" etc. He seems to be afraid the big bad multiculturalists want to make his beloved NPR sound like a ghetto barbershop.

But it's the quoted bit that really lives for me. Imagine Dreher bristling as some insolent Dominican pronounces his own name too Spanishy! I suppose he gets it from this:

The rest of his posts are about political correctness, natch.

MY GAY PARENTS RAISED ME RIGHT, AND MUST BE PUNISHED.

Remember the "My Daddy's Name is Donor" movement, in which adult children of sperm-bank poppas pleaded for Congress to force their fathers to reveal themselves, because you can't put your arms around a turkey baster? Here's something else in that line: From the Witherspoon Institute, a nuthatch from which we have derived pleasure before, comes Katy Faust, the daughter of a gay couple who says, with love in her heart, that her two mommies raised her wonderfully, and the Supreme Court should prevent something like that from ever happening again:

When you emphasized how important the voices of children with gay parents are, you probably anticipated a different response. You might have expected that the children of same-sex unions would have nothing but glowing things to say about how their family is “just like everyone else’s.” Perhaps you expected them to tell you that the only scar on their otherwise idyllic life is that their two moms or two dads could not be legally married. If the children of these unions were all happy and well-adjusted, it would make it easier for you to deliver the feel-good ruling that would be so popular. 

I identify with the instinct of those children to be protective of their gay parent. In fact, I’ve done it myself... 

I cringe when I think of it now, because it was a lie. My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. While I did love my mother’s partner and friends, I would have traded every one of them to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is willing to remove the politically correct lens that we all seem to have over our eyes.

If you weren't politically correct, you'd see how Faust suffers! (She also tells us, "many are of the opinion I should not exist," just to up the victimization ante.) Anyway, gay unions like the one Faust grew up in may look nice, and Faust has many kind words to say about her own blended family (perhaps to decrease the tension at holiday get-togethers), but they're really evil, because "the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents." Really, they prosecute football players for whipping a kid, but they let parents separate? How does that make sense?

As for the so-called "studies"  that say gay parents are great, Faust's got this compelling counter-argument:

Does being raised under the rainbow miraculously wipe away all the negative effects and pain surrounding the loss and daily deprivation of one or both parents? The more likely explanation is that researchers are feeling the same pressure as the rest of us feel to prove that they love their gay friends.

Just like them climatologists! In a few years, the only scientists conservative will not have accused of making it all up for the Politburo will be the guys who come up with new boner pills.

The big thing that jumped out at me, though, was this: She's 38 years old? Isn't it about time she stopped whining about this?

ON TO OSCAR, 3.

American Sniper. As I suspected, the political obsessives were watching, through their Zhdanovite lenses, a very different movie than the one I saw, which is both more interesting and weirder than what they describe.

Chris Kyle is a good Christian Texan whose father taught him to shoot and that the world is made up of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (basically a more Christian version of the dicks-pussies-and-assholes analogy from Team America: World Police). Kyle internalizes the lesson, including the contempt for both sheep and wolves contained in it; when U.S. embassies are blown up in 1998, he quits his fun but purposeless cowboy life to sign up with the Navy Seals (yeah, it does seem weird; Eastwood rushes through it); Nineeleven finally sends Kyle into combat in Iraq, where in the ruins of the cities he more or less gives up on sheep entirely and just tries to kill Iraqis who are trying to kill his fellow sheepdogs. Oh, in between '98 and '01, he meets a lady who likes him, marries her, and gets her pregnant (don't worry, I'm not eliding many grace notes there).

This all happens very quickly, bookended by a flashback from Kyle's first kills: First a child, then a woman try, surreptitiously at first, to blow up his comrades. Kyle takes them out from a rooftop. Another SEAL tells him as he prepares to fire that if he's wrong he'll get his ass thrown in Leavenworth; but he's not wrong, he saves his men and his illustrious career as a sniper and (this word gets thrown around enough to become loaded) "legend" is launched.

This first part of the movie teaches us everything we're going to learn about Kyle -- that he's capable of intense focus, charming when he wants to be, believes in what he's doing and isn't afraid to say so. In other words, he's like a Clint Eastwood hero, except for one thing: No sense of humor. He does have some mildly funny lines, but nothing on the order of "make my day" or "there are two kinds of people -- those with loaded guns and those who dig." There's no irony to him, nor the reflectiveness than gives a man irony. He does what he does, and never questions himself for a minute.

And that's why, throughout the remainder of the film, Kyle doesn't see a lot of things that Eastwood makes very obvious and that even other servicemen, even his own brother, are able to see: That they're only defending each other, and Kyle is only killing so many people in defense of them, because they insist on coming back, over and over again, to a place where no one seems to want them. He also can't tell that he's suffering from massive PTSD attacks (and by the way, I don't think anyone's shown transient mental illness better than Eastwood does here). I'm not even sure that, when he begins his mercy missions among wounded warriors near the end, Kyle knows what happened to him. And he gives no indication that he's expecting what's going to happen to him at the end.

Once that first section is over with, the movie gets really weird. A seminarian turned SEAL reveals to Kyle that he's lost faith in his God and this war; later, when he's killed in an ambush, his mother reads his anguished letter about the war aloud at his funeral -- it's barely coherent, as his mother is breaking down with emotion; later, Kyle, apparently in the midst of another stress attack (and therefore pretty much devoid of emotion) says it was actually the letter that killed his comrade.  Then there's the scene where Kyle calls his wife on the phone from the middle of a firefight -- a firefight he caused because, against orders, he had to take a magic mile-long shot to kill his nemesis, which alerts all the local jihadis to the squad's presence -- and tells her tearfully that he's ready to come home. When he does get home he sits in a bar watching a basketball game; his wife calls and he tells her, "I just need a minute."

And there's the scene where Kyle's goading a severely disabled vet, in the easy, friendly way he goaded his own comrades back in the field, to get his shots to hit a target. The goading works; "I feel like I got my balls back," says the vet. He keeps making shots, and gives Kyle a look that doesn't seem entirely friendly. "Who's the legend now?" the vet tells him.

But the legend is Kyle, of course; as the credits begin we see archival footage of the real Kyle's coffin borne along the Texas highway, lined with people saluting and waving flags. They see things the way Kyle did. Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs; do what you have to do and don't cry about it. Eastwood knows his Ford, and what Ford said about what to do when the legend becomes fact. I'm not shocked the movie's such a hit.

TODAY IN BULLSHIT.

At National Review, Heather Mac Donald tells the story of de Blasio and the cops. It's full of grafs like the following, about de Blasio's famous comment that his black-skinned son had to watch himself around the police:

At the time, those remarks — based in thorough ignorance of the facts about policing and crime — were a body blow to the rank and file. But after the Ramos and Liu assassinations, carried out in the name of Eric Garner and Ferguson teen Michael Brown, they became a source of visceral rage, as they fed the atmosphere of escalating cop hatred that led to the killings.

So de Blasio's remarks were like a time bomb, or rather a time-traveling bomb -- after officers Ramos and Liu were killed, the remarks "fed the atmosphere of escalating cop hatred that led to the killings." That's propaganda, baby -- by which I mean, the author is so committed to bamboozling you that she's willing to embarrass herself with incoherent prose to do it.

Mac Donald portrays de Blasio as an out-of-touch elitist social justice warrior -- "[New York's] long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor who sees his base as the anti-police Left" -- but does not mention even once the polls that show most New Yorkers siding with de Blasio  against the NYPD. Mac Donald does seem aware of them, though, because instead of larding in anonymous quotes from humble citizens begging for Giuliani to come back, her anonymous quotes are all from alleged cops who agree with her ("'Liu and Ramos would have turned their backs as well,' asserts an official at One Police Plaza").

Mac Donald also defends the force's work slowdown as justified because they felt like it:

Ideally, and usually, cops perform their duty regardless of their attitudes toward the civilian authority under which they operate. That this tradition of neutrality cracked in this instance shows how deeply de Blasio violated their trust.

The next time a public service union feels itself disrespected and goes on strike, I wonder if we'll see Mac Donald at the barricades.

Boy, that libertarian moment seems like a long time ago, huh?

UPDATE. There has been some misunderstanding about my first complaint, which is not that de Blasio's comments came after the cops were shot -- they came before -- but that Mac Donald wrote about it as if time itself were fluid, and the Mayor's remarks had been weaponized by the shooting, then sent back through time to do their lethal work. Regarding the notion that de Blasio's expression of concern for his black son had anything to do with the nut who shot Liu and Ramos, commenter Ellis_Weiner laments that "MacDonald has never recovered from the trauma of discovering that the Beatles killed Sharon Tate."

JUST A FEW NOTES...

...on the Jonathan Chait bullshit, because for the most part Pareene has dealt with it ably and I only have this to add:

1. I assume all the very public complaints against "political correctness" raised in Chait's wake were smuggled out of liberal gulags on toilet paper as samizdat, right? No? Then what's the fucking problem?

2. Every single conservative response to Chait I have seen has been too incredibly stupid to take seriously -- and since many of them call Chait a p.c. hypocrite because he said bad things about conservatives (which is the same thing as a fatwa, apparently), I guess that makes me p.c. too. Hmmph! My many services to freedom of speech count for nothing, I see.

3. OK, one example: Here's a key section from Ace of Spades' offering on the subject:

Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case. 

They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other. 

Thus, in a very real sense, to insist on the standards of rational discourse with such people does in fact predjudice them; it is the same as insisting a horse walk on two legs to enter a race. It is the same as disqualifying them outright.

Behold the enlightened discourse of which we would be deprived by some leftists on Twitter! I wonder if the editors of Der Stürmer ever thought of complaining that protests against their caricatures (carried out in the early-20th-Century version of social media, which I guess would be graffiti in cabaret bathrooms) were in fact assaults on their free speech. If not, we should congratulate the brethren for advancing the form.

SELF-AWARENESS DROUGHT CONTINUES.

Obama was in India and chewed gum during a parade. The Times of India had some fun with it:

NEW DELHI: In an ungainly sight, cameras caught US President Brack Obama chewing gum during the Republic Day parade on Monday. 

In the picture captured by cameras and posted on Twitter by some users, Obama was spotted removing his chewing gum while PM Modi was seen trying to explain something to the US president... 

Comments on Twitter included remarks by author Shobhaa De, who said, "Barack bhai working his jaws overtime and chewing gum! At least it isn't gutka. But seriously - gum during a formal parade?".

"Glad to see @BarackObama is so human. Like most Americans, he chews gum. Anyone know what brand?," was how noted film-maker Shekhar Kapur reacted.

I suppose you can say Allahpundit of Hot Air also had "fun" with the incident, though it's more the kind of fun that lonely and unliked children have with razor blades:

Video: Semi-retired president gonna enjoy his gum during major photo op with important ally

Not sure what the dialect-humor provenance is of "gonna enjoy his gum." Maybe it's a blah thing, I wouldn't understand?

To cleanse the palate, I believe formal diplomatic protocol in this situation requires him to offer Narendra Modi a piece of his Bubblicious. Two points. One: Is it Nicorette he’s chewing? That would explain, at least, why he couldn’t refrain from smacking away despite knowing he’d be on camera for hours with India’s PM during a formal state parade. How bad is this guy’s smoking habit, though, if he couldn’t make it through an afternoon without a hit of nicotine?

Wait, was it Bubblicious, or Nicorette? I don't know why Allahpundit missed the equally plausible options of ghat or black tar heroin.

Remember, this isn’t the first time recently that he’s been criticized overseas for chewing gum at an international summit. Indian media obviously noticed his “ungainly” display, as you’ll see below. Either he was jonesing awfully hard for a smoke or today’s the day he moved officially from the YOLO phase of his presidency to the WGAF phase.

This, I remind you, is about the guy chewing gum. Allahpundit goes on quite a while like this ("Does O chew gum during formal events here at home too? He’s done it a few times, if memory serves...") Here is the best line:

Two: This is the sort of trivial faux pas that the media would have hyperventilated over had it come from Bush...

Leaving aside the propriety of complaining about hypothetical offenses that you're in the very midst of committing in real life, I'd say if Bush had been seen chewing gum at a foreign event, it would have been portrayed as a bold example of American exceptionalism, like not dipping our flag at the Olympics.

Hey, anyone remember when the knock on Obama was that he showed too much respect for our foreign allies?

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "[Obama's] such an egghead, he was probably also walking at the same time."

BUT OLD MAN GOLDBERG, HE JUST KEEPS FARTING ALONG.

Jonah Goldberg tells us he had to house-husband for a bit and, after some humorous padding about how what a slob he is, does one of those pirouette-off-a-cliff segues for which he is justly famous:

But I also think about how hard it must be to be an actual single parent. It seems to me that this is the ground-floor argument conservatives should build up from when talking about marriage.

Maybe they should start with jokes about male housekeeping too. "Ah wipe mah ass ohna floor lahk a wormy dog," chortles Rick Perry.

Raising kids is just easier with two committed parents around. Put aside the moralizing for a second (moralizing I often agree with, by the way) and just talk logistics. It’s very hard to do all the things you want to do for your kids without a wingman (or wing-gal).

For example, his wife keeps a stick with a hook on it in the Subaru, for when Goldberg drops a bag of Funyuns under the brake pedal.

I’m not even talking about the financial part, which is huge. It’s simply harder to help with homework, show up at games, serve home-cooked meals, and generally participate in your kids’ life if you’re the sole breadwinner and sole parent. (Charles Murray has been making this point for a very long time.)...

I imagine Goldberg's comrades sitting around the McManse, marveling at how inner city single moms get their kids to soccer and ballet practice. (With our tax dollars via the socialist subways!) Inevitably Goldberg gets to his Murphy Brown section -- liberals are all rich white people who want blacks to breed unwed because something something plantation, whereas conservatives are racially indistinct reincarnations of the Founders, in whose world black families stayed together until sold off separately -- and then offers the traditional solution:

When Hillary Clinton & Co. talk about how “it takes a village to raise a child” they’re invoking wisdom from what P. J. O’Rourke called the “ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia” to make the case for vast new federal bureaucracies, taxes, programs, regulations, etc. But the phrase itself contains a lot of truth. Unlike bureaucrats in Washington, neighbors, teachers, pastors, coaches, coworkers, and friends can help raise your kids, in ways large and small. Real communities involve extended networks of trust and goodwill. Fake communities have regulations, fees, subsidies, and checklists...

While Obama would rob the mega-rich of their precious savings -- savings they need to complete their yacht flotillas -- to subsidize community college, which will only cause the poors to get above themselves reading Derrida, Republican policies will nourish real communities by destroying all safety nets, forcing the poors to huddle for warmth with grampa and all the brats in their slums, thus reinforcing family feeling.

But much as Goldberg enjoys helping the underprivileged with morality lectures and tax breaks for the wealthy, he's really interested in Murphy Brown -- or a similarly well-aged avatar of liberals' refusal to join in the hectoring:

But elites won’t come out in favor of marriage as a social ideal (except for gays, of course), because as Charles Murray likes to say, they refuse to preach what they practice. 

Speaking of preaching, this reminds me of something I’ve been griping about for years: Madonna. Here’s how I put it in The Tyranny of Clichés....

Madonna! I wonder if, before settling for this, Goldberg spent five minutes bugging his intern: "You're young and with it. Who can we call a whore these days?" (He also tries to tart this nonsense up with "hypocrophobia," a perfect Goldberg neologism, in that it disguises incoherence with pretend erudition.)

Then comes a truly breathtaking argument:

This raises a fundamental problem for democracy. When certain lifestyles multiply, they become political constituencies rather than cautionary tales. If we didn’t have so many people in prison, there’d be no movement to give felons the vote. If so many people didn’t smoke pot, the legalization movement wouldn’t be doing so well. George W. Bush lavished praise on single mothers for the simple reason that there are lots of single mothers out there. If enough people go on the dole, then we stop calling it the dole and we stop shaming able-bodied people who turn it into a lifestyle. 

It doesn’t really matter what you think about the specific issues to understand the point. Everyone likes to think they’re principled, but principles can get overwhelmed when enough people violate them...

You're a bunch of whores and moochers and that's why liberals get away with it.

This was the real point I was trying to get at in my column earlier this week. We make all sorts of allowances for Islamic extremism because we are cowed by its numbers (and its willpower), not its arguments. If there were 1.6 million, not 1.6 billion Muslims around the world, there wouldn’t be nearly so much fumfering and fooferall about Muslim sensibilities.

In Goldberg's world, you're only nice to people -- blacks, single mothers, Muslims -- because you're ascared of them. After some more padding which contains, it should be noted for the record, the clause "JFK and Teddy were scummy dudes," comes this:

Principled people can deploy cost-benefit analysis too. For instance, I’ve long argued that if we could do it cheap and without losing any American or allied lives, we would be right to topple the North Korean regime. I believe that. I also believe that we should have wiped out the Soviets once we were done with Hitler provided doing so wouldn’t have meant a long and bloody third world war. But those options aren’t and weren’t on the table.

My fantasies are more righteous than your fantasies!

The trick is to uphold the principle while allowing for the fact that reality often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost (a useful thing for Republicans to remember in their internal squabbles as well)...

Over years of following Goldberg's work, I'm noticed some patterns in it, and this is one: Usually when he leaves a hanging curveball, he won't take the effort to rewrite it into something better, but will instead try to confuse his reader with a barely-relevant parenthetical -- as here, where he clearly hopes you will associate a "reality" that "often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost" with GOP squabbling instead of, for example, the multi-trillion-dollar Iraq War.

The rest is just dribbling, but I have to note this:

There’s a corruption of the soul at work when you can bleat and whine about the “Taliban wing of the Republican party” while effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban.

No link on "effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban," you may have guessed.

UPDATE. Goldberg's column is a rich vein for enthusiasts, and in comments mark f says he can't believe I left this bit unmentioned:

...liberal writers give [the Kennedys] a pass because . . . Camelot! Or something. 

It’s not just writers, though. It’s all of us. And that’s not always wrong (though it often is).

I agree  it's wonderfully Goldbergian -- especially the parenthetical pee-dance -- but, you know, I'm doing this in my spare time and can't do all the glosses Goldberg deserves, so thanks, mark f -- and thanks Yastreblyansky, who takes the trouble to source some of Goldberg's misapprehensions, e.g. one about Obama's community college plan, to which Goldberg objects in part because it requires "raising taxes on college-savings plans":

The college-savings plans in question are the 529 and Coverdell plans used by a little under 3% of the nation's families to pay for their children's tertiary education (the families have a median income of around $142,400 per year as opposed to $45,100 for the rest of us, and median financial assets of about $413,500, or 25 times the median financial asset value, $15,400, of families without the plans). 

I'm not clear about how keeping them tax-free helps the impoverished single parent in a more efficient way than free community college, since the impoverished single parent doesn't actually have any of the money involved. Perhaps the owners of the accounts plan to donate the interest money to the poor...

ON TO OSCAR, 2.

Birdman. At first I wondered why Iñárritu was sticking all that magic realism into a perfectly good New York backstage drama. It made me suspicious; maybe, I thought, he just didn’t want it to be All About Eve all over again, and that’s why he gave the central character, Riggan, washed-up former star of an old superhero franchise, the superhero himself as an alter-ego who spurs him to narcissistic fantasies and then (spoiler) destruction — you know, the way Jimmy Cagney told Raoul Walsh, when they were trying to figure a way to make Cody the gangster in White Heat more interesting, “Why not make him nuts?”

Still, White Heat’s a pretty great movie.

There is something old-fashioned and melodramatic about the Birdman Broadway plot: Riggan has put himself in hock to finance his stage adaptation of Raymond Carver stories (hello Room Service!) and it’s a mess (hello The Bandwagon!); he loses an actor during tech week, but rejoices when a young phenom steps in (hello 42nd Street!), only to find that the phenom is a total snake-in-the-grass asshole (hello Eve Harrington!).

Of course Iñárritu’s mise en scène is a little more, um, ambitious than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, and the main thing about Emmanuel Lubezki’s holy-wow camerawork isn’t the single-take illusion (though that helps with the paranoid-schizo vibe) but how grubby he makes everything look, from the backstage tunnels to the canyons of Manhattan — I don’t think there’s a clean surface in the movie until we get to the hospital. And the story itself has some very contemporary modifications beyond the Birdman bit, like Riggan’s tough relationship with his daughter who’s just out of rehab. Still, there’s enough razzle-dazzle in the dialogue that even the scene that (spoiler I guess) ends in a Sapphic embrace plays like something from Out of The Frying Pan (“Why don’t I have any self-respect?” “You’re an actress, honey”).

So why the weird stuff? Well, I think it’s like this: Riggan isn’t happy. But it’s not because he’s about to lose his shirt. No, it’s because he’s doing what actors do — but unsuccessfully, aimlessly, because he doesn’t really believe in it. (The play looks awful, and his why-Carver explanation is just ridiculous.) When the phenom starts throwing around actorly shit about “truth,” it drives Riggan crazy — particularly when it works on his daughter — because he knows he’s not coming up to scratch on that score and he thinks he should be. But the truth the phenom's talking about is limited, it’s grubby and narrow and circles in on itself. And the costumed superhero is coming around because Riggan is realizing he prefers something else — and, despite what we might have assumed if the movie didn’t show us different, it isn’t his old tattered stardom. It’s magic. Even when no one else sees it, even when it’s insane, he has it. And with that he can fly. We see him fly.

We don’t see him fall. Does he fall? But with that question the movie, and all its tunnels and circles, is over.

Bonus spoiler: I don’t know if it means anything but I have this in my notes: He shoots off his nose to spite his fate.

SNATCHING DEBACLE OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEFEAT.

I'm sure there's some wheels-within-wheels strategy behind the House Republicans dropping Fetal Pain like it's hot, but it doesn't look good, especially with female members forcing them to drop it:

In recent days, as many as two dozen Republicans had raised concerns with the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" that would ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy. Sponsors said that exceptions would be allowed for a woman who is raped, but she could only get the abortion after reporting the rape to law enforcement. 

A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life, a gathering that brings hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion activists to Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. 

But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.

This makes hard duty for conservative propagandists, and even such practiced hands as Mollie Hemingway are showing strain. She blasts the female Life-traitors for changing their minds (I thought that was a woman's prerogative, der hur hur), and rages that the bill, which from its title on down reads like something out of The Handmaid's Tale, is actually "easy legislation that is broadly popular (outside of American newsrooms, at least)," as if the will of the people for federal anti-abortion laws had been thwarted by the awesome power of America's increasingly-unread newspapers. (Sometimes I think the only thing keeping our Fourth Estate alive as a totem of soft power is the right wing's endless need for strawmen.)

But my favorite part of Hemingway's column is this:

Even if you’re not one of the majority of Americans who want to protect these children in the womb, this debacle should concern you.

Such exquisite concern-trolling hardly needs explaining but basically Hemingway thinks we can all agree it's bad when the GOP trips over its dick because "if Republicans can’t pass wildly popular legislation protecting innocent unborn children, what’s going to happen when they face difficult legislative battles?" Why, the Anti-Witchcraft Amendment may never make it out of committee!

SOTU WHAT?

I leave the recap to National Review's leading torture enthusiast:

Yeah, all in all a good night. It makes me sad I didn't activate PBS yet on my Apple TV. I missed David Brooks! Well, I don't want to hurt myself laughing.

UPDATE. Don't want to miss the Washington Times' coverage:

President Obama spent much of Tuesday’s State of the Union calling for civility in politics — then taunted Republicans over his two election victories, after many of them applauded the looming end of his political career.

Obama made a so-called "joke," which is straight out of the Alinsky playbook! Quick, someone write another column about American Sniper lest we lose momentum.

UPDATE 2. Speaking of which:

 

Snipermania is back! Now to get some of those hipsters dressing like troops instead of 19th Century dandies. I know -- let's wreck the economy again; then, they'll have no choice but to join up!

UPDATE 3. Here to make everything worse as usual, Jonah Goldberg:

Like a lot of people, I found tonight’s speech a chore. That’s less of a criticism of Obama than it sounds. I find all State of the Unions to be tedious, particularly this late in a presidency. I do think it was better delivered than most of his State of the Union addresses. I didn’t, however, think it was particularly well-written. “The shadow of crisis has passed”? C-minus.

There are at all times lots of middle-aged white guys scratching their nuts in their Barcaloungers, seeing sumpin' on TV, and going "meh," sometimes at muttering length, without having a particular complaint beyond how comfy their junk was sitting while they watched. But only a few of them get wingnut welfare and a national platform, and among their few obligations is to pad, pad, pad 'til it looks like business. Eventually we find that Goldberg ran out of proper stuffing in the first paragraph:

More telling, the last 15 minutes amounted to Obama’s golden oldies. His real foe is cynicism. We can all work together. There are no red states or blue states. We are all our “brother’s keeper.” 

The difference is that the first time we heard this stuff it had at least superficial plausibility because the Obama presidency hadn’t happened yet. Five, six, ten years later, it’s all pretty sad. It’s sad because it shows that Obama still thinks his original material is fresh when it’s actually played out (and some of it was piffle to begin with — don’t get me started on “my brother’s keeper”.)

Yeah, Obama thinks Americans will actually go for this "brother's keeper" bullshit. Well, how can you expect a secret Muslim to understand Christians anyway. Besides ha ha Obama because Jonah Goldberg knows what Americans really want: Bar-B-Q Ranch Lime Sriracha Cheetos, and torture. You're so over! This is the age of Presidential frontrunner Ben Carson!

Oh, there's more -- e.g. "[Obama] promises all sorts of 'free' stuff out of one side of his mouth and then insists we must raise taxes to pay for it. Oh, so it’s not free, huh?" Wait'll the sheeple hear about this! -- but I warn you, it's the sort of thing that, if they handed it to Joni Ernst last night before her speech, she would have told them, "Come on, nobody's gonna go for this."

ZHDANOV'S CHILDREN.

I like Clint Eastwood movies, therefore I want to see American Sniper, therefore I hope it's good. But I have to say, the political ravings about the movie are pretty annoying. Like a lot of people, I thought Dennis Jett's review based on the trailer at New Republic was stupid; but, as I've pointed out before, conservatives do this sort of thing all the time and no one cares -- because no one expects them to treat films or any other works of art as anything but propaganda. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:

I’ll reserve any serious comment on the film until after I have seen it – I guess I’m just not up to the standards of The New Republic –

Haw haw.

– but whether or not American Sniper is “pro-war,” it appears to be resolutely and proudly pro-soldier. And that is a giant factor in moviegoers’ enthusiastic embrace of it. Note that American Sniper isn’t afraid to showcase the painful and difficult parts of military life for soldiers and their families, and my suspicion is that audiences love that part, too – because showing the pain makes it honest. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and company don’t want to tell you only one part of Chris Kyle’s story. They want to paint as complete a picture as they can in the running time that they have. If you made the story about the battlefront, without the home front, or vice versa, you would only be telling about half the story.

So in the very next breath, Geraghty reviews the film he didn't see -- though I suppose "serious comment" is the crossed fingers behind his back. (This is the sort of thing I did as a kid when I wanted to pretend I had seen some big movie of the moment. I wonder if adults do this anywhere but in the pages of rightwing magazines.)

Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:

Next, chunky iconoclast Seth Rogen weighed in with his observation that American Sniper reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Bastards. What a scumbag. This came after we conservatives stood with him when the Norks threatened him over The Interview – even to the extent of watching his piece of garbage on VOD – while his hero Barack Obama whined about people actually exercising their free speech rights.

First, this supports my perception that the only part of arts journalism conservatives genuinely relate to is gossip columns. They don't know what art is, but they sure know who did what to whom! Second, it figures that Schlichter would be enraged that Rogen didn't repay the debt Schlichter imagines he owes "we conservatives" for yelling about North Korea in blogs and switching off porn for a couple of hours to watch this bro-com. Everything is politics to these people; movies, plays, novels, and choc-o-mut ice creams have no value for them except as symbols on a bloody flag to wave at their base. Sometimes I think when they relax at home in front of the TV, they actually watch a placard that says HOME ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT (CONSERVATIVE).

Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.

A CONSERVATIVE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY.

As we have done in years past, let's see what gifts the brethren have brought us for Martin Luther King Day. Ah, here's Ann Althouse's: She directs us to this passage from a phone tape of LBJ and MLK --

LBJ: We want equality for all, and we can stand on that principle. But I think that you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you yourself, taking very simple examples of discrimination where a man's got to memorize [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow or whether he's got to quote the first 10 Amendments or he's got to tell you what amendment 15 and 16 and 17 is, and then ask them if they know and show what happens. And some people don't have to do that. But when a Negro comes in, he's got to do it. And we can just repeat and repeat and repeat. I don't want to follow [Adolph] Hitler, but he had a--he had a[n] idea...
MLK: Yeah.
LJB: ...that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people accept it. Well, now, this is true, and if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina, where... well, I think one of the worst I ever heard of is the president of the school at Tuskegee or the head of the government department there or something being denied the right to a cast a vote. And if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon the fellow that didn't do anything but follow... drive a tractor, he's say, "Well, that's not right. That's not fair."
MLK: Yes.
LJB: And then that will help us on what we're going to shove through in the end.
MLK: Yes. You're exactly right about that...

Althouse's headline:

50 years ago today: LBJ and MLK talked on the telephone... "I don't want to follow Hitler, but he had a... he had a idea..."

The boys at the Daily Caller get the idea, and repeat the anecdote under a more explicit headline for their particular readership:

From The Archives: 50 Years Ago, Lyndon Johnson Urged Martin Luther King, Jr. To Be More Like Hitler

This year let us all remember the true meaning of MLK Day: Liberal Fascism!

Meanwhile at Canada Free Press, John Lillpop has his own idea of the true meaning of MLK Day, which he complains has been hijacked by black people:

However extensive the shutdown of government and private enterprise will be, there is one industry that will be open for business as usual, that being the race-baiting for profit business led by Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Eric Holder, among others.

I knew there was someone I forgot to send a card to! Lillpop also has an interesting idea about the goals of the post-Ferguson protests:

The fact that thousands of blacks marched in Ferguson, Missouri to demand the death of Police officer Darren Wilson, who had been acquitted of wrong-doing by a legally constituted grand jury in the death of criminal Michael Brown, is testament to the power and intensity of the vitriol spewed by Obama, Sharpton, and Holder.

One must wonder how Dr. King would view the facts surrounding the Michael Brown death. 

Would King join the protesters in demanding that the rule of law be suspended and that Wilson be freed from police custody and handed over to street gangsters...

Similarly, the civil rights marchers of the '60s just wanted to lynch Bull Connor. Another alternate history of recent events is supplied by  Dan Dagget at American Thinker:

...race baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson demanded that Brown not be judged by concrete evidence of the quality of his character but that the color of his skin made him immune to such judgment.

That filing must have been be sealed. Release the Free-a-Brother Documents!

Furthermore, they declared that anyone who tried to apply such judgment (in effect, applying King’s Dream) was a racist.

Doesn’t that mean they were calling Martin Luther King Jr. a racist?

This is up there with "You say you're for peace and love, so how come you don't love me?"

UPDATE. At Raw Story, Scott Kaufman lists "12 statements by Martin Luther King Jr. you won’t see conservatives post on Facebook today." Pretty good, but he missed the ones in which King called for a guaranteed income. Wait'll the boys at Reason, who like to portray King as a victim of statism, find out the Reverend was a big ol' moocher!

UPDATE 2. Speaking of moochers, and with a hat tip to @WineJerk, here's Power Line's Paul Mirengoff with something unreconstructed:

It’s not surprising that transferring money from whites to blacks is at the core of Obama’s agenda. This was, after all, Martin Luther King’s final mission, as Mufson points out. And, as with any good socialist, it has been Obama’s mission since his days as a left-wing “community organizer” and before.

Give him credit -- unlike his comrades, Mirengoff isn't pretending to like King.

ON TO OSCAR.

The nominations are out, and spurred by some vestigial urge from my showbiz days I'm working on seeing the big ones and reporting back here whenever I get a chance.

The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson heroes don’t usually have life-or-death crises; they suffer from misunderstandings. Some of these misunderstandings are large and threaten their happiness, but they’re nothing that can’t be straightened out, for in the Anderson universe good will and reasonableness are always popping out from around a corner, ready to set things right. Even criminals don’t give Anderson heroes much trouble. (The pirates in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou were less of a threat than the Pirates of Penzance.) His movies have been like children’s-edition versions of Dickens, which is a large part of their pleasure, and also their limitation — they have a great range of amusing characters and incidents, but the viewer is always aware that this is not quite the world.

The Mitteleuropan fantasyland of Zubrowka, in which The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, is not quite the world either — the visuals are rich as frosting; you can see how much pleasure Anderson gets from the very idea of an early-20th-Century alpine funicular. There is also the very Andersonian mentor-pupil relationship of Monsieur Gustave, the Hotel’s brilliant concierge whose aplomb, we come to realize, is not only inventive and industrious but magnificent and brave, and Zero the Lobby Boy, who climbs but is not a mere climber, which Gustave recognizes by instinct and seeks to encourage. And around many corners come many helpful people to lend Gustave and Zero support — most memorably the secret order of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys.

But these helpers can’t do everything. There is a probate matter that has the appearance of a misunderstanding, and Deputy Kovacs attempts to deal with it as such; he is (spoiler) murdered for this misapprehension. His assassins, and Gustave’s and Zero’s main nemeses, are Dmitri and his enforcer Jopling, two genuinely savage creatures beyond the reach of all sentiment or reason, whose evil industry seems a match at least for the energy and good faith of our heroes. Also, from near the beginning of the film a great war threatens, and in the end it does more than that.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from Anderson. The amplified grandeur of the Lubitsch-y, cinema buffa settings make it even easier than usual to expect them. But Lubitsch for all his kitsch was pretty wised-up, and I think Anderson is getting to be, too. Much has been made of the film’s inspiration by Stefan Zweig, not least by Anderson himself. I take him at his word: The melancholy for a vanished world — a world, as Zero, seen in his old age in the framing device, tells “the Author” was probably vanished even before the story began, but embodied and upheld by Monsieur Gustave — feels genuine, and informed by the sadder lessons of history and life. It’s not that kindness and its effects have left the world; just that their value has to be treasured and transmitted, maybe in movies like this.

That framing device makes the point beautifully. We see the message passed by elderly Zero to the Author, and the Author passing it on, through literature (and through difficulties which are only suggested but which to anyone who lived in the 20th Century will be perfectly clear) to his people. The evil in this world, this seems to say, does not refute the rosy Anderson idea of life; rather, vice-versa. Our problems, that is, may not all be misunderstandings, but when we insist on understanding we can yet triumph.