Monday, August 11, 2014

WHAT ELSE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW?

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

Sunday, August 10, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

This one has loads of director's-cut extras. For example, I wanted to include a bit about how libertarians sometimes propose something less vicious than usual in a touching attempt to appear human; but word count was getting out of hand. So I include the excised section below for you late-night real-people:
True, sometimes a libertarian will try to stir the pot with ideas that are not just straight-up starve-the-poor: For example, Charles Murray, the Cato Institute, and others have floated the idea of a national guaranteed income, on the grounds that it would remove the disincentives of traditional welfare. (Part of the irony here is that the statist Martin Luther King, Jr. also wanted a national guaranteed income; by the way, last MLK Day, Reason's Nick Gillespie honored the Reverend's memory with "Ending the War on Pot Would Help Complete Martin Luther King's Call for Civil Rights," which is just about as libertarian a headline as one can possibly imagine.) 
At Reason Matthew Feeney talked this up, though, he nervously allowed as how "those who are not fans of Murray’s guaranteed income may be more open to Milton Friedman’s negative income tax," since libertarians, like other conservatives, love anything that looks like tax reform.  
But alas, guaranteed income looks like a non-starter among the libertarian rank and file. "Libertarians don't need to dream up anti-libertarian crap to promote," cried Thomas Knapp. "We've already got people who are willing and able to do that. They're called statists and they are perfectly well-qualified to vomit up nonsense like [Cato's guaranteed income argument]..." Even more to the point, take a quick look at Feeney's commenters, and you will see many ripe examples of the dominant attitude among libertarians toward giving the moochers anything at all, e.g., "Personally, if it were up to me, SNAP would only purchase some sort of horrid nutritional gruel," etc.
By the way, if you think the libertarian cartoons we used in the column were wacky, you should see this.

UPDATE. Not that I want to take attention away from our subjects (let alone my column -- please click, they beat us if no one clicks) -- but I found so many numbskulls while researching this that I am compelled to share, and one of my favorites is Sheldon Richman -- remember him from that amazing "How to Talk to Non-Libertarians" article, which is right up there with Lenny Bruce's "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties"*? Well, now he has one at Reason called "Can't Help But Be a Libertarian" and holy shit:
It's not easy being a libertarian. I am not looking for sympathy when I say that.
<laugh></pretend weep><laugh></pretend weep>
I just mean to point out that rejecting the conventional wisdom on virtually (do I really need this adverb?) every political question, current and historical, can be wearying. Life could be so much simpler if it were otherwise. No doubt about that. I really don't like conflict, especially when it can quickly turn personal, as it so often does. (I embrace the advice that one can disagree without being disagreeable.) But for a libertarian, disagreement with most people is not an option — we can't help it.
<beats tiny fists> Oh, if only I could be a littlebrain!</beats tiny fists>  But alas, wonderful conversational gambits like "if you follow the steps of an algebraic problem and see why X=4, do you have a choice about whether to believe that X=4?" aren't working for him. "If you grasp that an inference logically follows from factual premises and self-evident axioms, can you really elect to disbelieve it?" he blubbers. "I don't see how." Please, invite this poor schlub to your next party -- for freedom!

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

Friday, August 08, 2014

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•  At National Review the ever-excitable David French has a post called "Why Do Liberals Have Trouble Understanding the Pure Evil of Jihad?" Excerpts:
I continue to be discouraged by how few Americans — and especially how few of my friends on the left — truly understand (or even try to understand) what the world faces... 
Why is this the case? Why can’t so many liberals understand the pure evil of Islamic jihad? I can think of three reasons: 
First, they’re often in the grip of a strange kind of moral relativism. I say “strange” because it’s not true moral relativism.
Not even true relativism! That's how bogus these leftist friends of David French are.
Second, relativism drives the quest for justifications. Since there is no way that Western culture can be superior to Middle Eastern cultures...
Third, the quest for justification drives deception and willful ignorance.
To me the big question here, besides "why do I even read this shit," is: David French has "friends on the left"? I've treated this phenomenon before, and am surprised at its persistence: They express the most bitter contempt for them, yet refer to them as friends. I wonder if it's a little trick they're taught at Propagandist Academy, the purpose of which is to make them seem reasonable, despite the evidence of their ideas. Look, we have liberal friends! We have them over for tongue-lashings on Thursday evenings.

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

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

Thursday, August 07, 2014

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.

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

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

But there are compensations. The segment on "self-identified libertarian" (and me-identified hack) Mollie Hemingway is rich:
When I asked Hemingway what she thought of extending rights to gay couples, she replied carefully: “Well, I have always thought that government should be so small that it doesn’t have a role in giving benefits. It’s interesting to me that libertarians see government redefining the institution as something that will maximize liberty. And I am very skeptical about that.” She added that while “people should be free to organize their own lifestyle,” the state had a unique interest in protecting heterosexual marriage, because it was “the relationship that’s ordered to producing children.” 
This was a familiar point — but for social conservatives like Rick Santorum, not for libertarians. When I pressed her on it, Hemingway said: “Do I think the state should change the definition of marriage to allow same-sex couples? I think people should be free to organize their own lives however they wish. I’m skeptical about the way we’re accomplishing this. I don’t know. I feel like I need to think about it more.”
Think about it more! This means Hemingway will consult with the Blessed Virgin, who will tell her to keep shoveling.

This is my favorite segment, though, starring Nick Gillespie, whom Draper compares to Lou Reed (congrats Nick, the leather jacket finally paid off!):
Arrayed before Gillespie were several boxes of exotically flavored Pop-Tarts that he had purchased at the Lancaster grocery store. He held them up as evidence that individualism was flourishing and choices were in abundance or, as he put it, “The libertarian moment is now.” 
Sweet freedom! Wait'll these kids find out how many dollars in scrip it takes to buy a box of Pop-Tarts at the company store.

UPDATE. Just in case you don't get my point about Hemingway, here's something she posted this week:
Kneel Before Zod: On Celebrating Obama’s Birthday 
This is really not the biggest deal in the world, but every year on August 4, I’m reminded of something kind of creepy in the Cult of Obama...
Also, some people actually put bumper stickers bearing Obama's name on their cars! CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING.

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

WINGNUT ARTS & CRAFTS NIGHT.

Speaking of kulturkampfers gone wild, Rod Dreher has a post called "A Case For Why Conservatives Make Better Art":
["a blogger called Staffan"] goes on to claim that the fact that Hollywood keeps making movies that rely on archetypes that go against contemporary liberal dogma means that despite the individualism and anti-traditionalism of our culture relative to the rest of the world, it is very difficult to tell stories that speak to people as they actually are without relying on archetypes — which is to say, without using the full spectrum of moral intuitions, including so-called retrograde ones that people like Richard Cooper call “fascist.” Staffan says that these filmmakers have to lie to themselves about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, for the same reason that certain liberals will, for example, profess to favor diverse public schools, but pay a lot of money to send their children to all-white private schools.
Sure all those Hollyweird homos are liberal, but their art is conservative and they're all hypocrites, Oh, did I mention that the "art" Dreher is talking about in this post is superhero movies?

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

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

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

CHEW ON THIS AWHILE.

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

Meantime, please enjoy this image courtesy of @randlechris:


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

UPDATE. Perl's thing is full of stuff like this:
What is certain is that in our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun.
So when, in centuries past, young rich men and ladies were sent or taken on the Grand Tour so they might poetaste of the Arts in a properly luxe setting,  it wasn't because art had already been commodified to hell in Europe and America, it was because these poor toffs had been zapped by mind-rays through a crack in the time-space continuum with the poison of our own data- and metrics-obsessed era, and turned into proto-hipsters and -feminists for the duration.
The whole question is so painful and so difficult that I have frankly hesitated to tackle it.
O better you had forborne, Percy Dovetonsils! Now you must suffer to be wedgied in effigy by the corrupt liberal artsmeisters of Obama's America.

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

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

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

Sunday, August 03, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

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

UPDATE 2. Also:


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

UPDATE 3. The future of the impeachment schtick may be seen in this post by Power Line's John Hinderaker called, honest to God, "IS BARACK OBAMA PLOTTING A COUP?"
That seems like an awfully strong word, but it is the term that distinguished law professor Glenn Reynolds, no hysteric...
(He's talking about this guy.)
...uses to describe the Obama administration’s oft-reported plan to issue executive amnesty to five or six million illegal immigrants in violation of federal law. Glenn’s characterization is a fair one. When a tyrant asserts the right to rule by decree in a state that has formerly been subject to the rule of law, he is commonly described as carrying out a coup d’etat.
So if Obama does an EO on immigration, whatever its scale, expect screaming rightbloggers, weeping eagles, an Army of Bob Owenses trying to take down the power grid and their arrests portrayed as Triple Hitler. My favorite part:
When Obama changed the Affordable Care Act by decree -- to name just one example, substituting “2014″ for “2013″ in a critical provision of the statute -- he acted as a tyrant.
Just like Hitler did. And yet the sheeple sleep, so weep, eagle, weep!

Friday, August 01, 2014

TODAY IN MRA RAGEWANKS.

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

Fave literal passage:
To a certain class of women in the media, it’s always about them, and their various mucous membranes.
Try to imagine that coming from a normal human being. This is a rare long post from the Perfesser; the subject clearly excites him. I wonder if he has a spin-off in mind -- the missus has already built a customer base, and frankly edumacated misogyny is probably a better long-term investment, suckers-wise, than politics.



Thursday, July 31, 2014

THE HUSTLER.

OK, so you're a former Bush Administration factotum and now National Review's foremost torture enthusiast. You like to keep abreast of wingnut trends, so when you observe a heavy flow of impeachment gibberish in the movement, you step up with a book called Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, promoted even now at Amazon thus:
In Faithless Execution, McCarthy weighs the political dynamics as he builds a case, assembling a litany of abuses that add up to one overarching offense: the president’s willful violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully. The “fundamental transformation” he promised involves concentrating power into his own hands by flouting law—statutes, judicial rulings, the Constitution itself—and essentially daring the other branches of government to stop him. McCarthy contends that our elected representative are duty-bound to take up the dare.
Oooh, impeachment goosebumps!  You promote your book at your home base with articles like "It’s Not Crazy to Talk about Impeachment" (August 2013), in which you tell people that Obama "has usurped the lawmaking power of Congress by unilaterally amending some statutes and expressly refusing to enforce others... His Justice Department openly and notoriously flouts the Constitution by enforcing the civil-rights laws in a racially discriminatory manner. His administration has knowingly transferred firearms to murderous Mexican criminal enterprises," etc. and including a whole paragraph on #Benghazi, and then insist that the only reason this master criminal has not been brought before the bar of justice is because "the votes are not there."

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

Well, times change, and this week the racket is "Impeachment? Who, us? Obama's making it up to make us look bad." And there's you, Andrew C. McCarthy, with a fat impeachment book hanging around your neck. So what do you tell the world?
To be clear, neither Bill, I, nor most Obama critics, nor any elected Republicans that I know of, are calling for the president’s impeachment at this point...
For word games like "at this point" to work, though, you're supposed to plant them before anyone notices you're full of shit, and when the time is right pull them out like trump cards. Now you look like Franz Liebkind in the trial scene of The Producers, singing "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" through a full body cast. You're the guy with the impeachment book, and you have to make it look like the "(no) impeachment (at this point)" book or go into hiding for several months.

Oh, you have help: Your pals at National Review and Fox News back you up with items like "McCarthy: Dems Wrongly Claiming My Book Argues for Obama’s Impeachment," in which Megan Fox or whatever her name is interviews you and sets you up as a Wronged Party as best she can:
The Democrats are already trying to fundraise off of the "I" word, right? And they use books like yours --
(Which, I remind readers, is called  Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.)
-- to say, "Look at the lunatic right wing fringe'" -- which you are not! But they would have them believe -- "They want to impeach President Obama." But, here's a little fact check for you, that's not what your book argues, and they continue to use it to say, "You see?" Explain! 
And you do, but to people who aren't watching your performance with special Fox glasses and earplugs, it just looks like more bullshit:
The reason impeachment is crazy is because his guys will protect him. It's not that he hasn't done anything lawless... The more there's talk about impeachment, the more the focus is gonna be that this isn't a manufactured claim -- impeachment is in the air because the President does a lot of high crimes and misdemeanors.
I've made it sound more pathetic than it is -- McCarthy knows what he's being paid for, and I doubt he feels any more than a slight discomfort at these trimming duties. But until Satan gets him, this is amusement enough.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

PUTTING OUT MORE STATIST FIRES.

In 2012 Virginia Postrel wrote an item called "Case Against More Job Security? It’s Academic." In a poll she'd seen, 86 percent of respondents had said that to be middle class, one had to "have 'a secure job,'" noted Postrel. "Not 'steady work' or 'a reliable income' but 'a secure job.'" As a libertarian (or rather a futurist, which basically means a libertarian who gets published in consumer magazines), Postrel found this ridic:
It seems to exclude from the middle class everyone who doesn’t draw a regular paycheck from a single organization -- the self-employed (about 11 percent of the workforce), the retired, housewives, students -- as well as employees on limited-term contracts. As a self-employed writer who doesn’t have “a job,” let alone a secure one, I found the word choice striking.
Don't these littlebrains know this is Freelance Nation, where freedom rules and it's "fire 'em all, let Galt sort 'em out"? Postrel worried that policy makers might "decide to follow the polls and try to guarantee everyone 'a secure job' in order to promote the middle class... regulations, for example, to make it harder to fire long-term employees."

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

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

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

Again, this, too, is nothing like capitalism. And guess what Postrel's main concern is:
....employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.
Goddamn Gummint! Her point of comparison this time is the pharmacy: All those lucky pharmacists making a median wage of $58/hr (many of them women!), while "many clerks and cashiers, by contrast, make minimum wage." (Funny, she didn't see this as a problem when she commended the example of lady pharmacists in 2011.) And get this: those clerks' and cashiers' wages "can’t legally go any lower. Even those who make more than the legal minimum often have wages tied to it." So they're caught in a tap where they can't work for quarters and loose cigarettes, and the boss is caught in a trap where he has to use those cruel flex-time schedules -- the market demands it.

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

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

Monday, July 28, 2014

PRE-EMPTIVE SHRIEK.

The conservative impeachment crusade is metastasizing thus -- Rich Lowry at National Review:
Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached? 
...The White House may consider the unilateral amnesty a winning move on several different levels: it gets its policy goal; it satisfies an important part of its base; and if there is any serious move toward impeachment, it rallies the entirety of the Democratic base in a way we haven’t seen since 2008 and — assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans — drives the middle away from the GOP. An administration that is fast entering its dotage could consider this one of the few potential positive game-changers that it has direct control over — the Constitution and the rule of law be damned.
Daily Caller:
Rep. Scalise Calls Out Obama: ‘First White House In History Trying To Start Narrative Of Impeachment’
Glenn Beck:
“Who wants [impeachment]? The president does,” Beck argued. “Because then he’ll be able to say, ‘I demand justice.’ The birther thing is over, the Black thing is over. So now he needs to be able to call for justice.”
Etc. etc. etc.

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

It reminds me of what happened in the endgame of the Obama birth certificate fiasco -- remember the afterbirthers, and how they tried to tell the world that Obama had set them up by pretending to be from Kenya? For example, John Hinderaker of Power Line, May 2012:
We know for sure that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, because it was announced in a local newspaper. But we also now know that for sixteen years, his literary agent circulated a bio that said he was born in Kenya. That statement must have come from Obama himself; or, at a bare minimum, it certainly was known to him. So: why? Why would Obama put it out that he was born in Kenya if he was actually born in Hawaii? 
Over at PJ Media, CEO Roger Simon, a mystery writer by trade, put his mind to the puzzle and came up with an intriguing theory...
I'll spare you -- the upshot, in this case as in all of them, was that their extensive birther self-embarrassments weren't really their fault. Something similar's happening here, except it's isn't just salve for their blistered egos this time: They're hoping citizens who are balking at voting in an impeachment tribunal this November may be convinced that Republicans would never do anything like that, it's just something the wily Democrats are making up.

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

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

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

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

UPDATE 2. Ha ha ha ha.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

Friday, July 25, 2014

WORD GAMES.

Now conservatives are fighting with dictionaries and thesauri.

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

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

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

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

UPDATE.  In comments, Derelict reminds us that when conservatives didn't like Wikipedia making them look bad, they created Conservapedia. So maybe now they'll create their own dictionaries and thesauri. whetstone proposes "The Oxford Gibberish Dictionary or Reagan's Thesaurus," which would include
peace (n.); synonyms: war; ongoing futile occupation
bigot (n.); synonym: persecuted free-thinker
libertarian (n.); antonym: pants-crapping authoritarian NO IT'S TRUE SHUT UP
sharculese gets the big picture: "They get that the internet is powerful, and that they don't control it the way they'd like to, but they also fundamentally have no clue how it works, so they've invented their own personal Fairness Doctrine, enforced not by federal jackboot but by careening a metric dongload of poutrage at anyone they find insufficiently deferential."

Thursday, July 24, 2014

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

Columnist Josh Barro:

Fundie queen Mollie Hemingway.


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

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

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

UPDATE. Making everything dumber, Erick Erickson at RedState:
Certainly I’d like to think Barro doesn’t have extermination of the religious at mind, but then King Henry never said to kill Thomas a Becket. He just openly pondered about who would rid him of that turbulent priest.
I suppose he imagines Josh Barro openly-pondering this in an MSNBC green room, and Ezra Klein going, "Uh, so you're saying I guess kill the Christians? Because I could totally do that" while Amanda Marcotte stirs a cauldron of latte and cackles. (Oops, I forgot the armbands!)

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

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

GIBBERISH FOR JESUS.

The University of Chicago has an online guide to "Accessing Abortion in Illinois," and Ian Tuttle, one of National Review's cadre of Jesus freaks (K-Lo's Kids, we might call them), is enraged:
...the abguide is a narrowly tailored resource: Only those determined to counsel women not to seek an alternative to terminating their pregnancy need peruse.
I wonder if women who want an abortion for themselves can peruse it, too?  This convoluted sentence is an early tip-off that Tuttle is too angry to write clearly, at least without yelling "slut" and "whore" at frequent intervals, yet he persists, determined, it would seem, to find an intellectual angle on anti-abortion discourse so it doesn't look so much like "because Jesus said so, in code" (though it is).

Tuttle's willing to work, though; he finds a reference from the guide to a "foundational document," and tears at that a while:
[The ACRJ's] “A New Vision,” with its Port Huron–era complaints (“imperialism,” “cultural hegemony,” “White supremacy”), is a twelve-page repurposing of Marx — albeit less proletariat, more Pretty Woman — except that in lieu of “liberation” and a classless society comes “justice.”
Not only does Tuttle get to make fun of Marx and hippies, he also hits on that bugbear "justice" -- why, Dinesh D'Souza agrees with him that the Left is all about this so-called justice, while conservatives are all about freedom! (That reminds me -- isn't D'Souza due before the bar of so-called justice soon, whereby he may lose his freedom? Must create a Google alert.) So Tuttle digs in:
So successfully has the Left commandeered this ancient ideal that it has become a byword of political southpaws the way “freedom” is a byword of conservatives. That dichotomy is wrong, but it is pervasive, and “justice” is regularly spliced to a variety of niche progressive concerns to give them moral purchase: reproductive justice, environmental justice, social justice.
The problem with all of these, though, is that they are fundamentally contentless.
Foolish leftists! There is no justice without the Lord, as is proven by Tuttle's quotes from Moses and Russell Kirk. And conservatives still have freedom, neener neener.
But reproductive justice does not strive to accord with any order of things outside itself — not even, evidently, biological fact. Nowhere does the ACRJ envision concretely what reproductive justice would look like, any more than Marx dwelt on the specifics of a classless society. Reproductive justice thus means nothing more than reproductive freedom,
BIG GASP. Justice is nothing but freedom! But freedom in the non-D'Souzan sense, therefore bad.

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

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

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

REAGAN IS GROOVY, KILL THE PIGS.

A.J. Delgado has an item at National Review called "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police." She really goes off on the fuzz, man -- she's even outraged by the recent NYPD killing of Eric Garner, which is the first time she or any conservative I can think of has expressed outrage over cops killing an unarmed black citizen. She also claims that "the Right is waking up to this reality" in part because "the Tea Party’s emphasis on constitutionalism has refocused attention on the Bill of Rights."

If I believed this, I'd book tickets for the 2016 GOP Convention so I could catch the posters of Reagan saying "Kill the pigs," and the Chicago-'68-style riots. Forgive my lack of faith, but if you know Delgado's work, and the conservatarian movement in general, you will have already guessed what really animates her: she's moving to reverse decades of rightwing law-and-order advocacy not on humane grounds, but on big-government grounds -- because the cops have "generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer," etc.

But Delgado's not a good enough writer to leave her hand untipped. You may notice at the bottom of the article a disclaimer: "EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece has been amended since its initial posting." In the current version, Delgado warms up the crowd thus:
For decades, conservatives have served as stalwart defenders of police forces. There have been many good reasons for this, including long memories of the post-countercultural crime wave that devastated, and in some cases destroyed, many American cities; conservatives’ penchant for law and order; and Americans’ widely shared disdain for the cops’ usual opponents. (“Dirty hippies being arrested? Good!” is not an uncommon sentiment.)
That kicker was even more interesting in the original:
...conservatives’ penchant for law and order; and Americans’ widely shared disdain for the cops’ usual opponents. (A hippie being arrested is something people from all walks of life are usually happy to see.)
So much for Constitutionalism! Still more interesting is a passage that appears in both versions:
Conservatives are rightly proud to have supported police officers doing their jobs at times when progressives were on the other side.
This is the heart of the whole wretched thing. They still want the parts of police brutality they've always wanted: Physical intimidation of their enemies, and a vicarious feeling of butchitude. They just don't want to pay for it.

UPDATE. I think I may have found some source material for Delgado's anti-cop animus: From an April 2014 edition of The Free Thought Project:
Bundy Ranch Woke Up Conservatives to Police Abuse
Cliven Bundy, role model! I'd say he's got a pretty effective anti-police posse himself -- it's called the Militia Movement.

UPDATE 2. My Cali buddy Ben Thompson sends this lovely New-New Conservative image:


He's a hippie, Hippie Ronnie; that John Birch brain, that G.E. face...

In comments, swkellogg is succinct on Delgado: "A change in embouchure will still only get one note out of a dog whistle."

A few other commenters get to a Delgado claim I skipped over: namely that conservatives are also newly-sensitized to police brutality (besides cop-on-hippie, that is, as well as cop-on-unpersons to be named later) because "cell-phone cameras are having a tremendous impact... It’s easy to dismiss eyewitness claims of police brutality, but a lot harder to ignore evidence such as a video of a man suffocating to death." Jay B ain't buying that at a discount: "Bull Connor EXISTED in real life," he informs Delagado. "The historical record of cops killing unarmed people unnecessarily is so endless... that it literally takes the world's most obtuse person to not recognize that heavily armed agents of the state OFTEN ABUSE THEIR POWER." "It wasn't being insulated from heavy interaction with the police that made it easy for conservatives like you to dismiss eyewitness claims of police brutality," adds mortimer2000. "It was, and still is, your ingrained race and class prejudice, coupled with an authoritarian desire to see harm come to people you disdain."

Should also include some of Delgado's commenters for balance: "Progressives have co-opted the police and soon they will do the same to the military." "They have become storm troopers for liberals. BasicLly anti Bill of Rights." Plus a bunch of them claim that if a cop shot their dog, like a cop in Delgado's story shot someone's dog, they would kill the cop. Yeah, these are useful foot-soldiers for the Cause. (Funny thing, the only time in 33 years of citizenship I ever saw one of New York's Finest cock his pistol was when some homeless lady's German Shepherd stood up and bared its teeth at him. Having been bitten by a German Shepherd, I think the cop did right.)

WHAT MAKES THEM HAPPY.

Shorter entire right wing: Paupers get their benefits yanked -- HOORAY!

They're already laughing about how Congress didn't cross their t's, giving the antis their big chance in the Halbig decision. I don't think much of Democrats, but I must say it looks like they're at least trying to bring us some relief, while the Republicans (and the conservatives whose hands are up their asses) are rooting for them to fail. Which is pretty much how things are in general, isn't it?


Monday, July 21, 2014

JONAH GOLDBERG'S LOVE GOSPEL.

Ladies: Grateful to be considered something more than an object, but nostalgic for old-fashioned romance?  Jonah Goldberg has good news: Conservatives may be willing to treat you nicer. In fact, look at the sacrifice he's prepared to make:
Political correctness can actually be seen as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order.
The guy who wrote Liberal Fascism is saying nice things about P.C.!  The need to peel some unmarried-female votes from the Democrats has been judged an all-hands-on-deck situation at Camp Conservative, I guess, and Goldberg must move with the times. But he can still keep his Hayek! Also he can portray himself as a thought-leader:
I wish more conservatives recognized that at least some of what passes for political correctness is an attempt to create new manners and mores for the places in life where the old ones no longer work too well...
Identity politics is only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Medical, technological, and economic changes are almost surely far more important than changing demographics alone...
The New Conservatives are watching their pressure gauges and tracking the New Mores. Apparently these studies are desperately needed (and possibly eligible for a grant!), because the New Conservatives are locked in a Mores Race with the liberals to see who's got the best political correctness, and Goldberg wants potentially donors to know that the libs' sexual Sputnik is still in orbit:
Democrats recognize this, which is why they’ve cynically exploited changes in family structure, female labor participation, and reproductive technology and declared that Republicans have declared war on women.
This is like saying "Democrats cynically exploited growing tolerance of minority groups to make us look like bigots."  There's a step missing there, Goldberg, can you guess what it is?
Progressives are steadily dismantling the beautiful cathedrals of traditional manners and customs, arguing that they’re too Baroque, too antiquated. They use the sledgehammer of liberation rhetoric to destroy the old edifices, but their fidelity to liberty is purely rhetorical. In place of the old cathedrals they build supposedly functional, modern, and utilitarian codes of conduct. But these Brutalist codes are not only unlovely, they are often more prudish than traditional approaches...
It's like he knows us, right? To capture chick votes we smashed the cathedrals of courtly love! Which was awkward, you know, because all those apses and semitransepts are so vaginal, but it was worth it to get rid of that meddling Christ. Then we put up a Government Fucking Center. A bit sterile, but it does the job, especially after you put down the hemp mats.

Goldberg thinks he can do better:
What I would like to see from conservatives is recognition that some of the cathedrals are outdated. But instead of arguing that they should be razed and replaced with Jacobin Temples of Reason with rites and rituals grounded in abstraction, why not argue for some long overdue updating and retrofitting? I guarantee you more women prefer a modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex than the “modern” schizophrenic system of getting drunk enough for a same-day hook up but not so inebriated to forget to get a signature on the consent form. Traditional notions of romance and respect are far better tools than the mumbo-jumbo campus feminists have to offer. The problem is that the mumbo-jumbo feminists are fighting largely uncontested.
I look forward to seeing this conservative modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex. "I'm here to read you some pastorals." "OK [continues texting]." Later: "I swear by my life and my love of it I won't cum in your mouth."

Just not being a dick was never an option, I suppose.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about recent doings in the Culture War, one of my favorite subjects and, as I admit upfront, a cheering alternative to the news from Ukraine and Israel. Couldn't we all use a little good news?

I could have spent a little more time in the column on the Archie-dies-for-gay-friend thing, but here's a little lagniappe for your late-night real people from Patheos' Mark Shea:
Good Soviets Will Now Repeat: “Archie Died For Our Sins”
Like I said the other day: I didn't know how great an idea this was until I saw how badly it pissed off the Jesus freaks.

UPDATE. Forgot to post the link earlier so here it is.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

ELAINE STRITCH, 1925-2014.



She was great. (In this clip, wait'll she warms up! She begins a tad pro-forma, as if she doesn't like filling in for Merman nor the giant image orthicon cameras pointed at her -- that discomfiture is fun to observe, too -- but soon she shakes it off, and by the encore it's as if she's spotted a friend in the audience and is showing off.)

Now maybe I'll download her children's album.

UPDATE. Guess we should have this, especially if you've never seen it:



Not many people in history could be called definitive interpreters of Sondheim and Noel Coward.