NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Hobby Lobby case and the tropes it has stirred among out rightblogger brethren: That health insurance that includes birth control is a near occasional of sin; that lady judges are stupid; and that, as devoted as they are to socialism and black nationalism, what the Obama Administration really want to do is destroy Christianity. You know: the usual.

UPDATE. In comments, Meanie-meanie tickle a person informs me that my gag -- "not only aborty, but also facient, which sounds like 'fascist,' right?" -- is actually a serious matter for some people. Kirk Kelsen believes birth control is "ABORTIFASCISM" and that the ACA decrees "you must, under the law, dine exclusively at the government buffet serving up abortifacients," which I guess will be their next legal argument if this one fails -- isn't being forced to eat at the same table as abortion cruel and unusual? Bonus feature: An opera review that doesn't mention the music because the libretto is blasphemous.

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WE DO IT FOR THE KIDS.

Nick Gillespie, the fighting libertarian priest who can talk to kids, has a new angle from which to spray youth appeal on his Koch-funded causes:

Based on the first volume of a wildly popular young-adult trilogy, Divergent is set in America of the near-future, when all people are irrevocably slotted into one of five “factions” based on temperament and personality type. Those who refuse to go along with the program are marked as divergent—and marked for death! “What Makes You Different, Makes You Dangerous,” reads one of the story’s taglines. 

Which pretty much sums up Rand Paul...

Ha ha ha ha... wait, no, he's not kidding. Divergent is wow and Paul will be wow too, because 1.) "Paul is showing strongly in polls about the GOP presidential nomination in 2016," which is about as attractive a recommendation as "it's one of pedophiles' favorite child-lures," and 2.) The kids are waving the Gadsden Flag and don't know it yet:

Millennials are "unmoored from institutions," gasped Pew Research recently. There’s every reason to believe that large swaths of the country are ready to shake off the politics of exhaustion and move toward a future that is different from the past.

"A future that is different from the past" -- surely that must be the grim, Pay-or-Die dystopia Paul promises! And if that doesn't convince, hang on, Gillespie's talking in blockbuster tongues again:

“I don't want to be just one thing,” explains one of the protagonists in Divergent. “I can't be. I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind.” If anything explains Rand Paul’s rising profile, it’s precisely his ability to be more than just one thing—a social conservative, a civil libertarian, a budget cutter, a decentralizer, and more.

If only Veronica Roth had thought of using "virtuously selfish" instead of that socialistic "selfless"  -- well, who cares: any teen-angst drama will do for a libertarian mash-up in Gillespie's hands; last year he was trying this same shtick with The Hunger Games. Maybe he should collaborate with the guy from American Enterprise Institute who did "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time." Or maybe just pick some cool band -- how about Fucked Up? "he's the back without the bone/The king sits on a crooked throne..." That's gotta be Obama, right? Plus Damian Abraham was on Red Eye with Greg Gutfield. The future will be ours! 

UPDATE. "'I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind'... Wow. Even in a random string of adjectives describing normal people, Rand Paul goes 0 for 5," says mortimer2000 in comments. The tigrismus version: "In a world where people are sorted based on a personality test, one man fails it."

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LUCIANNE'S BOY AND THE FACTS OF LIFE.

The basic theme of Jonah Goldberg's latest is "a Democrat Congressman is maybe a hypocrite, stop talking about the Koch Brothers." To save you time and effort, here is the stupidest part:

Here’s the problem. The profit motives of the Koch brothers are by far the least interesting thing about them. Charles and David Koch are worth about $40 billion — apiece! Could they make even more money in a more libertarian America? Who knows? But let’s say yes. The idea that they are going to all of this bother just to be worth $50 billion instead of $40 billion is pretty silly when you think about it.

I guess they feel that at a certain point they've made enough money.

And profit lust probably has little to do with why Charles Koch co-founded the nonprofit libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, either.

Is it possible that Goldberg doesn't know what the Cato Institute is paid to do for the rich? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't know what he's paid to do for them.

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FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: NOT JUST FOR MARXISTS ANYMORE.

I think Roger L. Simon has outdone himself.

The Democratic Party’s War on Black People and How to Counter It

True, we've seen the-real-racists stuff like this before, but Simon's beats them all. Por ejemplo:

...I am going to say something that will be extremely controversial to liberals, indeed make them hate me.

Did you just feel shockwaves emanating from the nation's liberals? The dull thud of millions of dropped lattes? No? Then I have failed in my purpose [drops head, pushes out lower lip].

Given all those years I spent on the two sides, I have observed liberals to be vastly more racist than conservatives and libertarians.

Plus they smell like poo. Oh, but I'm being ungracious -- Simon isn't offering just his one-man fact-finding tour as evidence, nor just the "obvious Freudian projection" of the left; he also proves liberal racism with LBJ's nefarious "give Negroes money, that'll fix 'em" strategy:

The Democratic Party has been waging a War on Black People since the Great Society of 1964-65 (actually for far longer than that) that has reached horrifying proportions in our time. That nearly 73 percent of African Americans are currently born out of wedlock, 67 percent living in single parent homes, is nothing short of disastrous with yet more disastrous auguries for the future.

No other explanation for it -- nor for black truculence: "All these social welfare programs, affirmative actions, etc. were a signal to African Americans that they were inferior... quite naturally, it engendered a great deal of anger." The next time a black guy asks you for money, make him dance for it or something -- he'll respect you. Here's my favorite part:

And all this during the administration of our first black president. The level of hypocrisy is astronomical.

"But Roger, didn't the Democrats nominate the nation's first black President?" "I know! The nerve of them, huh?" You could show Simon the entire Republican leadership attending a lynching in Klan robes and he'd explain the liberal-racist roots of the phenomenon. But then the whole movement seems to have gone nuts in just this way. Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it.

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COME LET US REASON TOGETHER.

Timothy Carney on ways to, get this, "accomplish peace in the Culture Wars" between liberals and conservatives on the Hobby Lobby case:

I saw a flicker of hope last weekend at a libertarian dinner featuring psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind. Haidt inspired me to try to understand the mindset of religious liberty’s enemies.

That's a promising opening, enemy of women's rights! And what did Carney learn?

The Pill is not just a pill to them. It has become something holy. And they won’t tolerate any burden between them and their Blessed Sacrament.

The culture war isn’t religious versus secular. It’s a clash of two faiths.

Despite the mania of religious liberty's also-religious enemies, Carney is willing to compromise with them:

To get peace in this arena, we have to disentangle employment from health care, which requires repealing parts of Obamacare and scrapping the tax preferences for employer-based insurance.

Look, he's meeting ya halfway, isn't he? Sounds like this dream of comity died, you should pardon the expression, in the womb. Welp, time for another hundred columns about how Thomas Frank is condescending.

UPDATE. First comment, Dr. Bethany Spencer: "Tim Carney wants single payer. Who knew?"

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SWEET SCAM OF LIBERTY.

Remember back in 2012 when Ole Perfesser Instapundit was pimping something called Liberty Island, an online magazine of rightwing arts? Well, the thing's getting a big push now in all the best places -- e.g, PJ Media and wingnut Twitter feeds -- and the current offering is more substantial, volume-wise, than once it was.

I applaud the brethren and wish them well -- swindle, comrades! As for content quality, well, no accounting for taste. If you think a noir parody based on CPAC might give S.J. Perelman a run for his money, get a load:

I was surprised, though, at the differences: Young Republicans dressed in business casual with a hundred variations on the red tie, politicians in suits glad-handing the crowd, older women with Sarah Palin glasses and sweater sets, even a sprinkling of guys dressed in Continental Army attire, their tricorn hats occasionally bumping against long rifle props painted safety orange and pink. The last group looked at home near the faux colonial homes that provided space for shops and restaurants. 

At least I wouldn't get copped for my gat today--an M1911 brown-handled beauty. She nestled in my trench coat's inside pocket along with her triplet of .45 ACP cartridges. The folks here understood the world was a dangerous place, and that the police were rarely within reach when you really, really needed them. There was an arsenal fit for a militia here, tucked away in purses and coat pockets and concealed bra holsters. It felt good. But, I reminded myself, at least one of those weapons had been used in the wrong way today.

If you're vacillating, the dame in the tale is a popular conservative authoress named Ann, and the caper gives them a chance to say rude things about Michael Moore.  Maybe some of the other stuff is better; let me know, life's too short.

UPDATE. Ha ha, commenters: "Farewell, My Homely" and "Forget it, Jake, it's Cheetotown." Thanks also for perusing the Island's other offerings. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard finds an interesting personal essay -- "Our lives are always the eggs getting broken to make the Leftoid omelette. Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering if they'll get cracked?" -- that's a shoo-in for this year's Arthur Bremer Award.

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NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...revisiting the Crimea situation, on which rightbloggers have gotten slightly more strategic; though they still tend to get lost in Mad Vlad's eyes -- a worthy adversary, he! He knows how the world really works! -- they are much more interested in painting a picture of a world at war and Republicans the only daddies who can hold the line. Get a few folks who are swayed by this drivel, shove them in the booth with the Klansmen, Ayn Rand freaks, and sadists, and you just might tip the Senate.

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YOU WISH.

John Podhoretz at the New York Post:

Even the haunting confusion over the missing Malaysian aircraft, for which no rational person could hold our president responsible, is surely contributing to a general sense that the world is coming unglued — and that the president is hunting around under his desk for a glue stick he hopes one of his predecessors might have left there for him.

You know what else is hurting the President?* The Associated Press allowing "over" to replace "more than" in descriptions of numerable items. The resulting malaise has wafted from copy-editors' desks to the nation at large, and Americans from all walks of life, even those who wouldn't know a gerund from an infinitive, are now asking themselves: If Obama cannot enforce the old certainties, whither the Republic? I can just feel it.

* Besides the usual bullshit thumbsuckers, I mean.

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PROPAGANDISTS IN A HURRY...

...like to multitask. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger does several grafs of the same Scary Putin Menaces Weak America stuff all the other conservative columnists are doing these days, then goes for the hat trick:

Running alongside these old realities is a new phenomenon, surely noticed by Mr. Putin: The nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality. Barack Obama says so, as does the International Monetary Fund. Western Europe amid the Ukraine crisis is a case study of nations redistributing themselves and perhaps NATO into impotence.

This week's other big rightwing add-on  -- that Crimea is all the fault of the environmentalists and we should frack our brains out because freedom depends on it -- at least has to do with oil, and is thus connected in some way with reality. But Henninger's implication that Putin has "surely noticed" and is spurred to mischief by the West's attempts to raise workers' pay is a new one -- particularly since, in the last Cold War, ordinary Americans' upward mobility was one of capitalism's greatest weapons against the Russians. I guess their hope is that they can scare people enough that they'll believe anything they say -- as usual.

UPDATE. In comments, satch takes a little trip down Memory Lane: "We can be certain that Vladimir Putin noticed a couple of things in 2008, starting with that notorious traitor and Commie appeaser Charles Krauthammer, who in his best Neville Chamberlain voice said: 'Well, obviously it's beyond our control. The Russians are advancing. There is nothing that will stop them. We are not going to go to war over Georgia.'" Ah, new realities, comrade!

D Johnston considers: "Two weeks ago, [Henninger] wrote a column about Putin the Strongman, and three weeks before that he did a column on how the President was too obsessed with income equality. It's like a mashup. Maybe this opinion remixing will become the next big thing in conservative circles." It's got youth appeal. I can imagine one taker at least.

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ASSHOLES WANTED: APPLY WITHIN.

Josh Encinias at National Review:

Labor groups held 30 protests against McDonald’s franchises across the country Tuesday. The focus of today’s protests is “wage theft,” part of an ongoing campaign to raise the federal minimum wage.

That's not what "wage theft" is -- it's doing work and not getting paid for it, and at least one major franchisee has recently made restitution for it.

Here's how Encinias ends his report:

Three black-leather-clad French women asked National Review what the protest was about. When they appeared not to understand that it was a minimum wage protest, this reporter raised his hands and shouted “Rah rah, give us more money.” The three visitors to the United States nodded and walked away.

Encinias appears to be new at National Review, but he's already a champ at missing the point.

UPDATE. Some commenters question young Encinias' verisimilitude. "The three visitors to the United States come from a nation famous for a 35-hour work week, vacation the entire month of August, and a willingness to go to the barricades when provoked," says Spaghetti Lee. "I suspect they understand Encinias all too well."

Wrangler says, "it sounds like the kind of pointlessly overspecific detail I use to increase the perceived reality of a story when I'm trying to lie to someone." To me, it sounds like the kind of detail one is taught in writing classes; with this technique, real writers struggle to portray truth, while hacks cheerfully festoon propaganda, hoping their bosses will appreciate their porcine cosmetics skills.

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FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE RICH FUCKS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK...

Hey, look who the Wall Street Journal wants me to feel bad for:

The Internal Revenue Service's most intimidating weapon is the power to audit—and well-heeled taxpayers are more likely to be the target.

Gasp!

Audits are rare and getting rarer as the agency faces funding cuts. Fewer than 1% of taxpayers endured one last year, according to IRS figures.

Good news, but not for America's Neediest:

But while the audit rate has fallen over the past five years for taxpayers who earn less than $200,000, the rate has risen for those earning $200,000 to $1 million. 

The increase was particularly sharp for people earning $1 million or more. Nearly one in nine of those taxpayers was audited last year compared with fewer than one in 15 in 2009.

I would like to think that the IRS is simply hunting where the ducks are, since rich fucks are more likely to have been given effective means of evading the taxman by their financial factota than us poor schlubs.

But even if that's not the case, you know what? I think I can live with it.

Several of the brethren are shaken by the news, including National Review's Veronique de Rugy: "One does wonder," she says, shaking so with rage you can almost hear her jewelry rattle, "whether that is part of the soak-the-rich mentality that is so prevalent in this administration."

De Rugy also detects a grim irony: "More than $12 billion a year is improperly spent through the EITC," she reports; "or roughly 22 percent of the overall amount spent on the program." In other words, low- to moderate-income working taxpayers are getting a break, and the richest are not! I can see why she's upset. There does seem to be something un-American about it, at least as Americanism has been lately defined.

UPDATE. Another day, another rich fuck says this is Nazi Germany and he's Anne Frank:

“I hope it’s not working,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and major GOP donor, said of populist political appeals. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

Worse than this latest outbreak of Kristallnuts is the Politico article itself, in which the rich are hilariously posited as just another interest group, like soccer moms and unionized pipe fitters, that must haggle and sweat for political influence:

...the 1 percent fights back hard and the effectiveness of the populist approach comes into question...

...the pro-business wing of the [Democratic] party is ready to draw up new plans...

In two-dozen interviews, the denizens of Wall Street and wealthy precincts around the nation... say they see signs that the political zeitgeist may be shifting back their way and hope the trend continues.

Which simply means the rich fucks and the "political zeitgeist" have finally agreed on a price and -- surprise! -- it favors the rich fucks. Be not deceived, this outcome was never in doubt; these guys run everything and have all along. But into each life a little rain must fall, and they've been forced to endure some bad publicity (which they loudly decry as Hitler) because they've become bigger pigs about it than previously -- so much so that even ordinary Americans, eternal suckers for the rich and famous though they may be, began to grouse about it. I'm surprised they let it go on for as long as they did; maybe there was a yacht race or something distracting them.

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NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Obama-Galifianakis comedy sketch and how this was -- wow, everyone hit the buzzer at the same time and said "an outrage," huh? Yes, but I tell you how they did it!

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GALT III: THIS TIME IT'S PROFITABLE.

Just as the New York Times has to do its "Neediest Cases" and the Girl Scouts have to sell Thin Mints, so libertarian standard Reason magazine has to pimp every installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. Though Reason's Brian Doherty and Shrugged producer John Aglialoro love capitalism, at least one of them is not quite ready to accept the verdict of the marketplace:

I questioned the business sense of Aglialoro’s foray into filmmaking during a February interview on the set of Atlas III. The first two movies in the trilogy were financial failures, losing him millions. 

“We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."

Though I saw the first movie and hoo boy did it suck, I'm inclined to side with Aglialoro -- fuck all these nay-sayers, cowboy, make the movie you know will blow their minds! Alas, Aglialoro appears to incline more toward rightwing human product placement:

To further prime the promo pump, they’ve given guest-casting appearances to what Aglialoro says are “almost 10 personalities who have TV shows or radio shows who have a million plus followers who are going to talk to their people" about Atlas III.

I think they could have saved some money by just having Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, and Peter Ingemi tour the country with a readers-theater version.

The libertarian-entertainment complex are so eager fro ASIII to succeed, they're even promising to make it less like the source material:

Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she decided to valorize the term “selfishness,” which he thinks blunts her message of individual achievement through freely chosen market cooperation, not “self at expense of others.” Thus, he tried to make their approximately four-minute condensation of Galt’s speech a bit more inspirational, a bit less condemnatory, than the novel’s version. It ended (from what I could hear) with talk of how you should not in your confusion and despair let your own irreplaceable spark go out and how the world you desire can be won. 

With the speech, says [co-producer Harmon] Kaslow, the “challenge was, you want people to feel good” and so they tried to “accentuate the positive aspects as opposed to presenting things in negative”...

So, basically, it'll be like Flashdance, only hella talky. My favorite part is where Doherty explains the Randian morality of the ASIII Kickstarter campaign:

This led many to assume that asking people to freely support something they valued was in some sense un-Randian. Aglialoro sees it differently, as would anyone who understands Rand. Her novel The Fountainhead is a paean to an artist whose work is not rewarded by the marketplace. Rand believed in the glory of trading value—money—for value—a film the giver wants to see.

I understand why he'd see it that way. Me, I don't get why it's worth anyone's money to propagandize themselves. Well, markets in everything and one born every minute, I suppose.

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THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.

Ben Shapiro's TruthRevolt reporting from CPAC some days back:

[Dr. Ben] Carson spoke about the need for small government, but warned that the tactics of progressives come straight out of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." They are not trying to have a conversation with you, he said, because that will humanize you. Their ultimate goal is to demonize you...

Then they quoted Carson:

And then recently, I said that in Nazi Germany, people do not believe in what Hitler was doing. Most of them did not. But did they speak up? Did they say anything? Absolutely not, and look at the atrocities that occurred. And of course the left said, Carson says that they are changing American to Nazi Germany. Of course that is not the case, but that is what they do. They repeat these lies over and over again because they cannot argue the actual facts...

At TruthRevolt today:

Dr. Ben Carson: U.S. is Like Nazi Germany

Again they quoted Carson:

I mean, [we are] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe. And it’s because of the PC police, it’s because of politicians, it’s because of news...

In a few more days TruthRevolt will cover Carson saying the left lies about him saying "they are changing American to Nazi Germany," and then a few days after than he'll compare America to Nazi Germany again, and a few days later...

You get the idea. So does Carson. He's caught on quickly to the secret of conservative political success: Say something offensive, then complain that liberals are misrepresenting you.  It's like writing a book called Liberal Fascism, then saying "the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people." Not everyone's dumb enough to buy it, but the ones who are you can get coming and going.

UPDATE. Paul Ryan's pretty good at it too.

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THEY'RE ONTO US!

Zombie at PJ Media offers a roundup called "Progressive Racism: The Hidden Motive Driving Modern Politics." Most of it is what any follower of such writers would expect: For example, progressives wish to "restrict access to guns as much as possible; ultimately ban and confiscate them all" because "white urban liberals are deathly afraid of black gangbangers with guns, but are ashamed to admit this publicly, so to mask their racist fears they try to ban guns for everyone, as a way of warding off the perception that their real goal is to target blacks specifically," which is why the notorious liberal Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act when the Black Panthers started walking around with loaded firearms.

And on and on. But there's one bit that deserves special attention:

PLASTIC BAG BANS 

Progressive position:
Prohibit businesses from giving plastic bags to customers.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:
Discarded plastic bags harm the environment and befoul the landscape; we should be kind to the Earth by using cloth or paper bags instead.

Conservatives’ inaccurate theory of progressives’ real intent:
Leftists have an illogical phobia about plastic, because to them it symbolizes artificiality and consumerism; they’re trying to outlaw an extremely useful invention simply to make shopping and capitalism more inconvenient.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance:
White progressives specifically want to stop inner-city blacks from littering, but don’t want to be perceived as racists who further penalize the black community for its behavior, so rather than focus on whom they believe to be the actual perpetrators of littering, they remove from everyone‘s hands any objects which might potentially become litter.

Strangely, Zombie doesn't have one for Obamacare. Which should be easy: Black people are always getting shot up at card games and contracting sickle-cell anemia, but liberals are so ashamed of their own racism that they're making everyone get health insurance.

UPDATE. Commenters want to play too! DocAmazing:

Progressive position:
Proper dental hygiene and water fluoridation are necessary for community health.

False public rationale offered by progressives to justify their position:
Poor dental hygiene leads to poor health overall.

Conservatives' inaccurate theory of progressives' intent:
Progressives just want to dictate every phase of life; elitist emphasis on having a full set of teeth.

The actual racist origins of the progressive stance:
Fearful white liberals want to be able to see approaching black people in the dark.

Plenty more where that came from (e.g. Warren_Terra: "Better Gas Mileage: Liberals are afraid of running out of gas in the wrong part of town. Carpool Lanes: Liberals want company in case they run out of gas in the wrong part of town," etc).

Also, textual analysis from Spaghetti Lee: "'I'm not racist; I have a black friend' has apparently evolved into 'I'm not racist; you have a black enemy.'"

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NEW FRONTIERS IN GOLDBERGOLOGY.

My fellow connoisseurs of Jonah Goldberg's literary fartitiousness may have noticed these little logic-eddies Goldberg gets into when his mind veers from the topic, and which he leaves in his copy, probably out of laziness. There is a nice example in his latest post, which starts out being about the Sheryl Sandberg "bossy" campaign, then wanders into the War on Boys, then off a cliff, producing this spectacular graf:

Then there are the issues at the school level. Admittedly, I don’t send my daughter to public school in DC (because I live in DC), but to one of those hoity-toity schools that affluent liberals who oppose school choice send their kids to (for the record, we love our kid’s school). Most of my friends either send their kids to similar schools or, if they live outside the District, to good public schools in the DC suburbs. In short, these are the kinds of schools Sandberg probably sends her kids to. And the idea that the girls are being shunted or shortshrifted strikes me as just plain other-worldly. Don’t get me wrong, my kid has her complaints. For instance, she signed up for girls lacrosse and is miffed the boys get to “tackle” and the girls don’t.

There is so much in this -- the argument-from-italicization; the defense of his daughter's private school education with an assertion that unnamed liberals (and "probably" Sheryl Sandberg) use private schools too; an irrelevant discussion of his friends' educational preferences; a surprise repetition of the sorta-theme (that girls have certain disadvantages at school), and finally another observation that's irrelevant if not injurious to his cause. One may also enjoy Goldberg calling the kind of school his daughter goes to "hoity-toity" (perhaps so he can use it as an insult to liberals, assuming Goldberg can think one clause ahead), then parenthesizing "for the record, we love our kid’s school" -- like a comedian backing off a mean joke, except comedians are funny.

Not that the rest of his post has much going for it, either, but the drain-circling nature of it, and the realization that he does it frequently enough that it qualifies as a motif, suggests to me a new definitional term: J-hole. Maybe if I work at it, I can develop an entire Goldberg Rhetoric. History will thank me!

UPDATE. First out of the comments gate, coozledad: "Beginners in Jonah's rhetorical style are encouraged to talk with their mouths full of Fruity Pebbles."

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TODAY IN CULTURE WAR.

At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson wonders why people watch Jon Stewart when they could be reading The Road to Serfdom:

Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name.

Ah, Williamson has been to college, I see. Later:

Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz)...

There are plenty of insults here, but nothing that qualifies as criticism -- until Williamson abandons aesthetics, in which he seems to have no real interest, and addresses politics. He is upset that there are so many headlines on internet aggregation sites like "Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News Over Syria Coverage" and "Jon Stewart Destroys Bill O’Reilly."

Williamson seems unaware that headlines on the internet are often calculated to draw the attention of consumers, and thus monetize the enterprise (maybe because he works at a place where profit is not expected); he also seems unaware that other entertainers such as Ann Coulter are frequently portrayed as "destroying" their opponents for a different audience but for the same reason. He thinks "destroy" in these headlines actually says something about The Left:

...there is no substantive difference between what Mr. Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does (“Ezra Klein Destroys Romney,” “Ezra Klein Destroys David Brooks,” “Ezra Klein Destroys Republican Opposition to Temporary Payroll Tax Cut,” etc.) because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found in one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done...

As a close follower of the New Zhdanovites, I often hear the liberal establishment blamed for Hollywood, pop music, the theater, comics, etc. but this is first time I've ever heard it blamed for SEO.

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NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Crimea crisis and the rightblogger angle that a real man/President would be kicking Putin's ass right now-- you know, like we did to Saddam, only rhetorically! It brings to mind the old saying: Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to commit U.S. troops to a highly unpopular foreign war.

UPDATE. Oh God, I have to transfer a comment from my Facebook feed from Bill Alexander: "In Yakov Smirnoff voice: 'In Russia we have Pussy Riot; in America, Dick Armey!'"

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AFTER THE BALL.

The remainder of my Raw Story CPAC dispatches are here, here, here, here, and here. It was a grueling three days, and I didn't even attend the after-hours festivities like Reaganpalooza -- you can go to Wonkette for that stuff. I also recommend Charlie Pierce's dispatches, which are full of fierce indignation, unlike the measured, just-the-facts reporting for which I am known.

Overall I'd say the event was a success for its people, in that they seemed energized by it and optimistic about their chances on the hustings. Of course they had every reason to feel that way in 2012 too, and we saw how that turned out. But though CPAC is for true believers and, as you may have gleaned from the coverage, some of what they true-believe is crazy, the folks I spoke with and overheard were serious about success.

And I think for them the libertarian schtick is where it's at. The youngs who have driven the Paul-heavy straw poll results in recent years were there already; I believe the growing conservative tendency these days of portraying, for example, their opposition to mandatory insurance coverage of contraceptives and gay rights as religious-liberty issues, instead of merely denouncing birth control and homosexuality as tools of the Devil, shows that the elders are also ready to talk the talk, at least.

Also, consider: The American Conservative Union reported that in this year's straw poll, 62% of respondents said marijuana should be legal in at least some circumstances (21% approved for medical reasons, 41% in all circumstances) and only 33% said it should remain illegal. ACU also claimed that all age-groups but the oldest were broadly pro-legalization. I haven't seen any cross-tabs -- and moldy fig Patrick Brennan thinks the wording of the questions makes the survey "push-polling for libertarians" -- but I wouldn't be surprised. The Republican voters who might be turned off by a pro-legalization policy aren't going anywhere except to the grave, while there are a lot of independent voters who might be pleasantly surprised to hear conservatives want to free the weed while Democrats like Jerry Brown are much less enthusiastic.

I predict whoever gets the GOP Presidential nomination in 2016 will preach marijuana legalization and abortion bans. It may seem incongruous to you, but national politics is about coalition-building.

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ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLOR.

But you're a good girl, the way you grab me, must wanna get nasty...

I dragged my ass through CPAC again today, and Raw Story posted it here, here, here, here, and here. I must say that I liked all the people with whom I spoke, notwithstanding that they're trying to destroy the country; we all have our faults. I particularly liked the Duggars, maybe because, after my long acquaintance with show folk, their cheerful cooperation with a humble member of the press charmed me. Trust me, I've been treated worse.

Tomorrow we do it again. [retch]

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SERVICE ADVISORY.

Raw Story's running my live-and-in-person dispatches from CPAC. So far they're here and here. If you know anybody at this thing you think I should talk to, please let me know; I'm just running catch as catch can.

I have to say that the CPAC scene, such as it is, isn't too different from other conventions I have been called on in various professional capacities to cover, except that the overheard conversational snippets occasionally slide into politics. Things like, "they can't name one thing Hillary achieved as Secretary of State. Not one!" Kind of like the bitching one used to hear at the New Music Seminar about bands that were not to the speaker's liking. Except everyone's got money, it seems. They want more, and power besides, but who at a convention does not?

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BRINGING A KNIFE TO A SHOTGUN WEDDING.

Shorter Dennis Prager on bringing together social and fiscal conservatives:




Money shot:

The entire American experiment in smaller government — and even in secular government — was based on the presumption that Americans individually would be actively religious. Unlike Europeans of the Enlightenment era — and unlike the Left today — the Founders understood that people are not basically good. That is a defining belief of Judaism as well as of Christianity. Therefore, to be good, the great majority of people need moral religion and belief in accountability to a morally judging God. In other words, you will have either the big God of Judaism and Christianity or the big state of the Left.

Which is why Europe went up in flames and to this day is used exclusively for guano farming -- oh, wait, no, actually they get two months of vacations a year, socialized medicine, and Gothic cathedrals, and make us look like shit.

The thing is: Prager's probably addressing this appeal (if that's the word for it) to bullshit libertarians like David French who already don't give a shit about any freedoms that don't apply directly to themselves and their employers, and whose libertarianism is a Jedi mind trick that only works on people like Dennis Prager. And if it won't make any difference to them, try and imagine how it will be read by normal people who only seem to be hanging in with the Democrats because they're afraid the Republicans will destroy all safety nets and do away all public positions except Witchfinder General, Corporation Bagman in Chief, and Keeper of the Rapestick. It's like Prager is saying, "Everything you hate about us? That's the part that's non-negotiable!"

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THE MIGHTY WURLITZER, PLAYED BY MONKEYS.

Sometimes, when you're a busy professional propagandist like John Fund, the week's talking points sort of slosh together in your mind and you wind up with analogies like this:

Last week, New York’s ACORN mayor Bill De Blasio announced he is evicting Success Academy, a widely praised charter school from the Harlem public school building it occupies. Two other charter schools will be blocked from opening. He claims elementary-school kids wouldn’t be safe in a building with high-school students. His excuse is as absurd as the propaganda Vladimir Putin is using to justify the occupation of Crimea.

I understand his first draft included "stuck on stupid" and the Dark Enlightenment, but was trimmed for space.

Try to imagine a normal person reading that and thinking, yes, I see the connection. There's plenty to say about why most political writing is so incredible shitty, and one important reason is that the apparatchiks thus engaged aren't trying to clear a path to truth; they're just sticking pebbles in pieces of shit.

UPDATE. Hmmph! I wished to talk about style, but some commenters insist on addressing the charter schools issue, in which conservatives who squawk any time taxpayer money feeds a starving bum will suddenly burst into tears if a city refuses to use that money to prop up a charter school. Susan of Texas quotes from Fund, who complains that "charging the rent Mayor de Blasio’s backers envision [for the charters] would result in 71 percent of the city’s charters running deficit." "The free market fails again," Susan observes. She also observes that the charter in question isn't necessarily delivering value for money -- as does Diane Ravitch, via commenter mds: "When the New York State Comptroller attempted to audit Success Academy’s use of public money, Success Academy sued to prevent the audit..." I've seen some good charters, but this kind of thing ain't helping.

Also commenters are at least as interested in the "ACORN Mayor" sobriquet as they are in the Putin/Crimea analogy, which is what caught my eye. ACORN we will have with us always -- as a wingnut curse-word, if not as an actual living organization -- but comparisons of local expenditure issues to geopolitical military crises are as of yet rare, unless you count the Third Reich.

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NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the religious freedom bills that were supposed to protect citizens from gay brides and grooms, and how as usual the brethren took their enthusiasm so far that ordinary observers might just think they were also rooting for repeal of the Civil Rights Act. (Which some of them were, of course, but no fair reading anything bigoted into it.)

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