Oh, Well, If Marc Thiessen Says It’s All Right...

Marc Thiessen, "Big Brother Isn't Watching You".  June 10

LISTEN, weren’t these the guys who were just screaming about how it was First amendment apostasy for one guy in Cincinnati to do his job by asking Teabagging “social” organizations to fill out a little paperwork? Impeachable  First amendment apostasy?

The exposure of the PRISM program under which the NSA monitors foreign terrorists on the Internet, as well as the leak of a top-secret court order requiring Verizon to share calling data with the government, are incredibly damaging to national security. These leaks give terrorists information they did not have about our collection activities. They undermine the willingness of American companies to cooperate with us because these leaks have put their international reputations at risk. And they teach everyone — including sources and liaison partners — not to work with us because we cannot keep a secret.

Gott I’m Himmel, “giving terrorists information they didn’t have”? Is there any greater and ongoing insult to the intelligence of the American public than the National Security swindle? If you’ve simply got to convince us there’s a vast SPECTRE out there bent on wiping out the American Way of Life, the beneficent work of Capital, and the cuteness of puppies, couldn’t you start by sounding like you know what you’re talking about? Anybody who’s read a headline in the last twelve years knew all this. International Terra, Inc. is like some global network of irritable junior-high Facebook posters?

And “putting international reputations at risk”? It’s now revealed that we can’t keep a secret? You reveled in our use of international kidnapping and torture! For fuck’s sake, was that in the Chamber of Commerce brochure?

The Verizon court order shows that what is being tracked is not the content of the communications but the records of which phone number called which number, as well as the location and duration of the calls. In Smith v. Maryland , the Supreme Court held that there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment protection, for the phone numbers people dial (as distinct from the content of the call), because the number dialed is information you voluntarily share with the phone company to complete the call and for billing purposes.

A 5-4 vote of the Burger Court (Motto: “You Think We’re Bad? Just Wait.”) in the early days of the As Long As They’re Arresting Bad People theory of law enforcement conduct. Suggesting that Smith has established Fourth amendment guidelines for all times and all further development of communications technology is, I think, a bit optimistic on your part. Not that I expect a return of Constitutional protections to break out any day now.

Funny thing, too: the right to intercept international transmissions (and not just the wrapper) has always been asserted since the Trans-Atlantic cable. So why all the insistence that Prism is super-duper black-letter law, plus we’ve got a warrant, and so, in conclusion, Don’t Worry About It? Hmmmmm? Some of us did live through the Nixon administration, Marc. The rest of you can look it up.

Why does the NSA need to collect all that data? One former national security official explained it to me this way: If you want to connect the dots and stop the next attack, you need to have a “field of dots.” That is what the NSA is collecting. But it doesn’t dip into that field unless it comes up with a new “dot” — for example, a new terrorist phone number found on a cellphone captured in a raid. It will then plug that new “dot” into the “field of dots” to find out which dots are connected to the new number. If you are not communicating with that terrorist, your dot is not touched. But the NSA needs to have the entire field of dots so it can unravel the network connected to that terrorist.

Yeah, the old “If You’re Not Doing Anything Wrong, Why Do You Need Rights?” routine. It doesn’t deserve an answer. The law enforcement “interest” in dot collection includes your browser history, and any dots you leave in your underwear. Because that’s how authoritarians operate. It’s why we so desperately need to hold people upside down and pour water up their noses, too. Only there’s not a single example of this working. I refer you, sir, to that administration you were a part of. Have a look at that Terror Alert Color-Coded thingy. Never raised before any international terror attack. Raised any number of times before…nothing. All the cloak-and-dagger shit in the world still leaves you with a coin-toss about its usefulness. And every, every extraordinary police power results in extraordinary abuses.

Unfortunately, some on the right are joining the cacophony of condemnation from the New York Times and MSNBC. The programs exposed in these leaks did not begin on Barack Obama’s watch. When Obama continues a Bush-era counterterrorism policy, it is not an outrage — it is a victory.

And when those programs are exposed by leaks, it is not whistleblowing — it’s a felony.

Well, gee, I guess y’all should have seen it comin’, then.

I'm Not S'posin'

QUESTION: Did someone call "Conservative" intellectuals to the ramparts over Diversity in Academia--I mean so-called Diversity--this week, or is it the only issue they've got left? I mean, Amity Shlaes is always good for giggles--generally her own--but this is twice for Will this week, and he's got all the charm of a prairie preacher with five daughters.

And there is nothing like a George Eff Will column on the evil thought-control tactics of Diversity, Inc. to remind you just what sort of diversity Republicans have favored since the end of Reconstruction, is there? Dive on in; it's the deep end of "conservative" thought:

Suppose such SGA [Johns Hopkins Student Government Association]-recognized student groups as the Arab Students Organization, the Black Student Union, the Hopkins Feminists, or the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance were to link their Web sites to provocative outside organizations or were to counsel persons not to patronize firms with policies those groups oppose. Would the SGA want to deny them recognition as student groups? Of course not. Obviously, the SGA has acted to express animus against the content of VFL [Voices for Life; guess what they're up to]’s speech and to protect students from the discomfort of disagreement.

Oh, let's try that again:

Suppose such SGA-recognized student groups as the Arab Students Organization, the Black Student Union, the Hopkins Feminists, or the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance were to link their Web sites to provocative outside organizations

Why, have they?

Would the SGA want to deny them recognition as student groups?

How much time do I…

Of course not.

Oh, well then.

Obviously, the SGA has acted to express animus against the content of VFL’s speech and to protect students from the discomfort of disagreement.

Obviously. Except for their explanation, which is that they didn't.

Wait, can we do that again?

Suppose such SGA-recognized student groups as the Arab Students Organization, the Black Student Union, the Hopkins Feminists, or the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance

Suppose you weren't a crypto-racist, sexist, right-wing homophobe who's now reduced to trolling Red State for column ideas?

Really, if the Arab Students Organization website linked to al-Qaeda's Pinterest page? Or the Black Student Union linked to the New Black Panther Party? Suppose they'd been denied student government funding because of that? Would you have complained? Obviously not.

Okay, cheap shot, George, but your sources at Breitbart wouldn't have given two shits about free speech.

And why are those your examples, hmmm? What do any of them have to do with it, aside from the fact that they earn your Holy disapproval? Suppose the Protestant Student Union, or the Muslim Student Association, decided they were going to engage in "peaceful, quiet 'sidewalk counseling'” outside the Catholic chapel, especially targeting young women in parlous circumstances seeking help, or handing young boys fliers on how to recognize priest pederasts, because those groups didn't care for anyone else exercising a Constitutional right?  Would their word be good enough for you? Ever seen any "peaceful quiet sidewalk counseling" as conducted by the morally superior beings who have all the answers, and lack merely enough places to scream them at the rest of us? Would you want your rape-victim daughter subjected to one, on the philosophical grounds that she really needs to hear both sides of the argument?

Enshrined alongside the right of free speech, and of a free press, are their limits. You can't use speech to defame, or incite violence; you can't yell "Theater!" in a crowded fire, or read the Koran out loud on a crowded airplane. Such instances are often contentious. What they aren't is de facto violations of the Constitution, any more than the desire for public safety at 30,000 feet is cowardice, any more than "diversity" is a blanket excuse to harass.

This, of course, is not a free speech issue; Life's spokesmen are free to say or publish what they wish. And Johns Hopkins, the sort of private institution which used to get unlimited support from the Right when it denied Constitutional rights, has a right to establish rules of conduct for those who receive student funds. If your VoLers can't just sit back and enjoy the martyrdom, they can withhold their student fees in protest. They can go to class with duct tape on their mouths. They can join the "pro-Life" groups on campus which manage to operate without harassing women. Or there's always Bob Jones.

It's A Miracle

SO I was planning to leave the the de-pantsing, or de-cassocking, of Ross Cardinal Douthat to better men, along with the concomitant requirement of watching Patrick Francis Timothy Cardinal Fitzeveryone on the Sundays, where they proved to be in favor of Jesus, and slightly gay-friendlier than they appeared to be last week. Roman Catholic gays in New York are now permitted to be friends. In case you missed the news.

The Romanists seem to really be talking up this Jesus guy lately, apparently in response to getting outcompeted by snake handlers in Latin America. And, look, I'm as cynical as they come about organized religion, and I still can't figure out how they manage to sound so insincere while doing it.

Two things. First, Salon, if you ever again give up the top half of your page, and my entire screen, to side-by-side extreme closeups of the dueling facial hair mistakes that are Andrew Sullivan and Ross Cardinal Douthat I swear I'll buy a subscription just to cancel it.

Shown properly sized. Assuming you have to. Which you don't.

Second, I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that Douthat's leaping-of-faith and jumping off-of-logic point is the 1997 debate between David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, which Douthat describes as having taken place between "two prominent conservative writers", but which, certainly in retrospect, should be described as "two desperate liars filling a much-needed hole at Slate.

Anyway, while it's always a treat to watch the religiously-mazed social moralist try to walk-back his theological certainties from the previous week while simultaneously running to catch up with the tail end of the times and hoping all the while that no one notices, I got all the religion I could handle for one weekend from Turner Classic Movies. So leave us not forget Jennifer Rubin:

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling, public opinion seems to have shifted irreversibly. How did it happen? Here are seven ways in which social conservatives fumbled the issue: 

1. They never explained how same-sex marriage “harms” heterosexual marriage. 

2. They confused their own beliefs with those of mainstream Republicans, who were far less ideological and, in fact, were following the general societal shift. 

3. They did not drum out of their ranks anti-gay (as opposed to pro-traditional marriage) voices, who portrayed the entire movement as intolerant and exclusionary. 

4. They had no logical objection to states’ popular referendums in favor of gay marriage. With no imperial judiciary to rail against, they were reduced to making an anti-democratic argument that voters couldn’t or shouldn’t be allowed to define marriage as they saw fit. 

5. They ignored the plight of heterosexual marriage (soaring divorce rate, rise in single-person households), which made their defense of “traditional” marriage seem insincere. 

6. As more gay and lesbian Americans came out to friends, family and co-workers, the anti-gay-marriage voices were handicapped; they argued against an issue in the abstract while gay-marriage proponents could argue that Mike and Sam down the street or Sue and Ann at the office shouldn’t be denied the right to marry. 

7. They insisted on federalizing the issue with the Defense of Marriage Act, leading to the current Supreme Court case and turning federalism (usually a conservative cause) into an argument about federal meddling into marriage.

Yes, somehow the Republican party managed to take over the Republican party. While nobody was looking. For fifty years.

In fairness, this is the sort of crap that Republicans have been getting away with since Barry Goldwater based his political Second Act on pretending to be too pure a "Conservative" to've approved of all the racism that powered Act One. Change the words, preserve the high-quality of the hallucination, and you have every hagiography of Ronald Reagan ever written. I suppose Rubin can be forgiven for walking into the middle of it, and deciding that if it got someone with her skills a job writing opinion, it was a magic amulet the Sci-Fi network could base a series on.

Problem there is that she might be expected to've remembered The 2012 Republican National Committee Platform:

Preserving and Protecting Traditional Marriage

The institution of marriage is the foundation of civil society. Its success as an institution will determine our success as a nation. It has been proven by both experience and endless social science studies that traditional marriage is best for children. Children raised in intact married families are more likely to attend college, are physically and emotionally healthier, are less likely to use drugs or alcohol, engage in crime, or get pregnant outside of marriage. The success of marriage directly impacts the economic well-being of individuals. Furthermore, the future of marriage affects freedom. The lack of family formation not only leads to more government costs, but also to more government control over the lives of its citizens in all aspects. We recognize and honor the courageous efforts of those who bear the many burdens of parenting alone, even as we believe that marriage, the union of one man and one woman must be upheld as the national standard, a goal to stand for, encourage, and promote through laws governing marriage. We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity.

'Cause judging from how it reads she could have written the damn thing.

Kicking The Blind Elephant In The Room While It's Dead

Megan-Jane McArdle-Galt, "Why Gay Marriage Will Win, and Sexual Freedom Will Lose". March 26

LET'S deal with the fine print at the start:

• Yes, I know the entire internet has already hooted about this.

• Yes, I still hold that, in the case of Megan McArdle, it is impossible, whatever rich loam of unintentional self-parody she's spreading at the moment, to make sport of her one-hundredth as cutting as the fact that she chose "Jane Galt" as a nom de flume.

• There seems no possibility that "Megan McArdle" is a leg-pull.

• The only alternate explanation for her continued blipping on the most sensitive of our nation's radar screens, the idea that she's engaged in a lifetime effort to prove, redundantly, that the real point of Objectivism is that one needn't be able to write, or think, in order to do either, is mooted by the fact that her own attempts at communication make Ayn Rand sound like Tolstoy.

• "Why" continues to reign as the most indecipherable adverb in the history of English, for some reason.

In some sense, it doesn't really matter how the Supreme Court rules on the gay marriage case it's hearing today.

Yes. That would be the sense of "Republicans are up shit creek both without a paddle and in a canoe manufactured by a company Bain Capital took over".

The culture war is over on this front, and gay marriage has won.

Right. Just a little matter of forty-one state legislatures agreeing, not counting those with civil union laws that differ from their marriage laws. Including some which have enshrined heterosexual marriage in their constitutions, and/or prohibited themselves and their posterity from recognizing homo nups from other states. But I'm sure it'll all be cleared up by spring, if that ever gets here.

Even if it loses at the Supreme Court this term, it will win in the legislatures . . . because it is already winning in popular opinion.

As goes popular opinion, so goes the legislature.

Few people much under the age of sixty see a compelling reason that straights should marry and gays should not.

Yeah, and there are no young racists, either.  Today's maritime forecast: smooth sailing forever.

At this point, it's just a matter of time.  In some sense, the sexual revolution is over . . . and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.

I can't believe you just said that.

That's right, I said it:

No, see, Megan-Jane, the reason I couldn't believe you said it is it's so fucking stupid.

this is a landmark victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality.  Once gays can marry, they'll be expected to marry.  And to buy sensible, boring cars that are good for car seats.

Megan-Jane, darlin', the practice of same-sex marriage was going on long before James Buchanan was a girl. We're just arguing over the legal recognition, okay? Now run along.

Wait until all those fabulous "confirmed bachelors" and maiden schoolteachers...

Oh dear God. Ladies and Gentlemen, and "Others", your new, hip, under-60, Tolerant America.

are expected to ditch their cute little one-bedrooms and join the rest of America in whining about crab grass, HOA restrictions, and the outrageous fees that schools want to charge for overnight soccer trips.

And people ask where the new Dennis Millers are supposed to come from.

I know, it feels like we're riding an exciting wave away from the moral dark ages and into the bright, judgement free future.  But moral history is not a long road down which we're all marching; it's more like a track.

Jesus Christ, my junk drawer is better organized than her brain.

Sometimes you're on the licentious, "anything goes" portion near the bleachers, and sometimes you're on the straight-and-narrow prudish bit in front of the press box.  Most of the time you're in between.  But you're still going in circles.  Victorian morality was an overreaction to the rather freewheeling period which proceeded it, which was itself an overreaction to Oliver Cromwell's puritanism.  (Cromwell actually did declare a War on Christmas, which he deemed to be sensuous paganism.)

"Victorian morality was an overreaction". Fuck a duck. While there's still time.

We've been moving away from the Victorian view of marriage for a long time, which means that we're probably due to circle back around the prudish front that drove Charles Dickens to lie when he left his wife for another woman.

And sleeve garters. Don't most people sink into a reverie about this when they're, oh, fifteen or so? And is that actually a contradiction in Megan's case?

The 1970s were an open revolt against the idea of the dutiful pair bond, in favor of a life of perpetual infatuation.  The elites led the way--and now they're leading it back.  Compare Newt Gingrich or John McCain to the new generation of Republican hopefuls.  Jindal, Ryan, Christie, Rubio . . . all of them are married to their first wives.  Jindal met his wife in high school, Christie in college.  By their age, McCain was preparing for his first divorce, and Gingrich was just a few years from his second.  

This is what made me read an entire McArdle piece. Because, even granting that Megan's grasp of the imaginary 70s is no better than her grasp of the imaginary 50s--and for the same reason--how th' fuck does anyone choose Newt Gingrich and John McCain as arbiters of 70s fashion? Especially seeing as how neither man made it to national semi-prominence, nor to divorce court, before that decade was up? What, you should pardon the expression, was the thought process here? Are those the only two divorced politicians McMegan can name? Or the only two she imagines as alive in the 70s? Did she pencil in Ronald Reagan before someone explained to her he actually would torpedo what passes for her argument, if she had one? Sheesh.

For fuck's sake, being divorced is still a bit of a political liability, and if you don't believe me, ask First Lady Cheri Daniels. This may go some way to explaining what "born after the horrors of Perpetual Infatuation" does not, namely, why a bunch of ambitious pols in the Family Values party might yet want to avoid Alimony. Not to mention the fact that Chris "Ladykiller" Christie is the only one of the bunch to've gone past 44, the age where McCain divorced his first wife, reportedly amicably, before running for office. Newton Leroy was 38, but that man had lots of travelin' to do, and knew it.

Is the argument that social morality is an Cosmic Hamster Wheel any smarter than that Henny Youngman routine about why should The Straights suffer alone?

No.

And for the record, Megan, why th' fuck do you care?

Grow Up, Shut Up, Give Up, Or Dry Up

George Eff Will, "The shaky science behind same-sex marriage". March 15

IN the spirit of the thing let's begin with two "social science" questions. One: at the height of their swoony-ness, what effect did a personal appearance by Sinatra, or Elvis, have on the promiscuity of a town's teenaged girl population? And, two: is it possible to determine if this is the exact effect the proximity of CPAC has had on George Eff Will?

(Speaking of which, since the national networks didn't find that guy who suggested that Frederick Douglass should have enclosed a check covering his room and board in that Thank You note he wrote Massa even 1% as newsworthy as Ward Churchill or Jeremiah Wright, my favorite CPAC moment was Andrea Fucking Mitchell opining that "the people inside the room needed to find a way to connect with the people outside the room". As though this constituted a brave critique, and as though renouncing the very foundation of the organization wasn't the only possible way to do that.)

When on March 26 the Supreme Court hears oral arguments about whether California’s ban on same-sex marriages violates the constitutional right to “equal protection of the laws,” these arguments will invoke the intersection of law and social science. The court should tread cautiously, if at all, on this dark and bloody ground.

As opposed to invoking the intersection of law and religious tenet, which is an excuse to dance like a drunkard.

The Obama administration says California’s law expresses “prejudice” that is “impermissible.” But same-sex marriage is a matter about which intelligent people reasonably disagree, partly because so little is known about its consequences.

Talking about the "consequences" of same-sex marriage isn't proof of reasonable disagreement. If anything, it's proof of not having engaged the argument.

When a federal judge asked the lawyer defending California’s ban what harm same-sex marriage would do to the state’s interests in “the procreation purpose” of heterosexual marriage, the lawyer said, “I don’t know.” This was mistakenly portrayed as a damaging admission. Both sides should acknowledge that, so far, no one can know.

When did we all agree that the state has an interest in "the procreative purpose"? The question doesn't apply to both "reasonable" sides, just the one making the claim in the first place. A claim it can't back up. So, yeah, damaging admission. (Meanwhile, as has been pointed out again and again--engage the argument, George, or get yourself to an hermitage--the state permits senior citizen marriage, prisoner marriage, and marriage where one or both parties is barren.)

A brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the California case by conservative professors Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy warns that “the social and behavioral sciences have a long history of being shaped and driven by politics and ideology.”

Unlike, say, religion. Or The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.

And research about, for example, the stability of same-sex marriages or child-rearing by same-sex couples is “radically inconclusive” because these are recent phenomena and they provide a small sample from which to conclude that these innovations will be benign.

Mathematics is the only science that isn't in a constant state of flux. Of the social sciences, only linguistics and physical anthropology can claim to approach "hard" science, in a court of law, anyway. That doesn't mean we, excluding Texas and Florida, of course, believe in frying the insane. Trials are all about weighing disparate testimony, expert or no.

Which is not to say "let's call it even." It's to say, "This is your fucking argument, not the fucking argument." The fact that the other side responds to those claims doesn't grant them some holy rhetorical credence. I really don't know anyone on the Right to Married Life side who argues like this. "Ha ha, some psychologist somewhere is on our side." It's a question of equal protection. Period. The rest is just shit your side has thrown against the wall in the hopes being plastered with feces will protect you from being homo-raped.

Unlike the physical sciences, the social sciences can rarely settle questions using “controlled and replicable experiments.” Today “there neither are nor could possibly be any scientifically valid studies from which to predict the effects of a family structure that is so new and so rare.” Hence there can be no “scientific basis for constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.”

No, hence social-science argument is a matter the Court will adjudicate, or ignore, which is the same situation that applied two-hundred and eighty-nine words ago, at the beginning of your column. Constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, which is, actually, not the question before the Court, (although the Court could make it so, and macaques could take wing from my rectum) is not, in fact, technically a question of scientific consensus.

The brief does not argue against same-sex marriage as social policy, other than by counseling caution about altering foundational social institutions when guidance from social science is as yet impossible. The brief is a preemptive refutation of inappropriate invocations of spurious social science by supporters of same-sex marriage.

"Social science cannot metaphysically refute our claims, therefore the only prudent course is to wait until it can. Reasonable people say so."

For example, a district court cited Michael Lamb, a specialist in child development, asserting that the “gender of a child’s parent is not a factor in a child’s adjustment” and that “having both a male and female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well-adjusted.” The conservatives’ brief notes that, testifying in the trial court, Lamb “had conceded that his own published research concluded that growing up without fathers had significant negative effects on boys” and that considerable research indicates “that traditional opposite-sex biological parents appear in general to produce better outcomes for their children than other family structures do.”

"The social sciences prove we should not listen to the social sciences."

The brief is replete with examples of misleading argumentation using data not drawn from studies satisfying “the scientific standard of comparing large random samples with appropriate control samples.”

Maybe both sides should have attorneys, then.

Name two, by the way. Just for fun.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a distinguished social scientist, said the “pronounced” liberal orientation of the social sciences is “well established” and explainable: “Social scientists are frequently caught up in the politics which their work necessarily involves” because social science “attracts persons whose interests are in shaping the future.”

Okay, even granting that "distinguished sociologist" is not an oxymoron, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wasn't one. He was a public policy maker with a sociology Ph.D, much beloved of people who think theatricality, vocabulary, and retrograde haberdashery indicate one is The Right Sort.

Since Moynihan wrote the above in 1979, the politicization of the social sciences has become even more pronounced, particularly in matters of “lifestyle liberalism.”

Yeah. The explosive growth of the highly-lucrative "addiction" counseling industry is just a minor blip that had nothing whatsoever to do with politics.

Hence the need for judicial wariness about social science that purports to prove propositions — e.g., that same-sex marriage is, or is not, harmful to children or society — for which there cannot yet be decisive evidence.

Of course, the rather clear picture of the dominant role of biology in gender and sexual orientation is irrelevant.

If California’s law is judged by legal reasoning, rather than by social science ostensibly proving that the state has no compelling interest served by banning same-sex marriage, the law may still be overturned on equal-protection grounds. But such a victory for gay rights, grounded on constitutional values, and hence cast in the vocabulary of natural rights philosophy, would at least be more stable than one resting uneasily on the shiftable sand of premature social science conclusions.

And, y'know, it's really easy to make an informed decision on just that question. Just a thought: why don't you guys see what it's like being on the right side of history for once?

Forget It, Jake

David Weigel, "Birtherism Is Dead. Long Live Birtherism. : The history of a national embarrassment, and why it's not over yet." April 27

LEAVE us begin at the end: Birtherism isn't a national embarrassment. Waterboarding is a national embarrassment. Keeping innocent men in Guantánamo is a national embarrassment. Keeping guilty men in Guantánamo, without the benefit of trial, is a national embarrassment. Our two major political parties are a national embarrassment. The unseriousness of our mass-market media is a national embarrassment.

Birtherism, on the other hand, is a Republican embarrassment. And Republican embarrassment is fast becoming a redundancy.

As to "why it's not over yet" well, simple: because Birtherism is not some Snopesworthy email which caused a majority* of Republicans to accidentally believe the President is not an American. It's the fucking delusional soul of a party, and a "movement", based on being delusional. The Weigels of the world, and his occupation writ large, for the most part, may consider anything older than five years to be ancient history. The clearer view is that modern Right Wing Republicanism, a phenomenon which can be shortened to "Republicanism", certainly after 1964 at the latest, is a veritable museum of Fucking Crazy Shit People Insisted On, from Commies under every bed, fluoridating our drinking water, biasing our screenplays, and weakening our moral fiber so we'd be ripe for that Soviet invasion coming any day, to the Cult of Flag and Cross, which inserted "Under God" into a 19th Century Boy's Life homily before insisting that every public school student mouth the words uncomprehendingly each dawn, to the contention (from such marginal Republican outsiders as William Fuhbuckley) that the Negro, however well- intentioned and -mannered, could not be trusted to vote in any jurisdiction where the average annual temperature accentuated his natural indolence, to the various Stab in the Back/ We Weren't Allowed to Win/ We Really Did Win theories of Vietnam, to the entire Ronald Reagan mythos, or at least those parts touching on Economics, Defense, Culture, and the Mathematically Verifiable, "The Judeo-Christian Tradition", the confusion of modern-day Israelis with mythic Israelites, and the sacred tradition of Cecil B. DeMille's prop ten commandments on every courthouse lawn, to the Presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Cambrian explosion of crazy--the point at which Right Wing America formerly merely gulled by PR and irritated by facts became, like the Simpsons, a family that didn't know any songs that weren't commercial jingles--about which we will just say "The Vince Foster hit" and let the reader to add his own fond memories. That brings us to the Presidency of the Prodigal Bush, and certainly to within shouting distance of when Weigel wants the clock to start moving.

Birtherism is not an aberration. Birtherism is the Republican party. It's too bad if it makes the Davids (Frum, Brooks, Weigel) uncomfortable. They should be uncomfortable. They should be especially uncomfortable with the number of times they've coverted for this sort of shit in exchange for lower marginal tax rates.

Here, by the way, is how much this sort of thing affects Weigel's perception of his own party:

Proto-birtherism: April 2008 to June 11, 2008

In March and April 2008, [Hillary] Clinton regained ground and looked to have some chance of beating Obama for the Democratic nomination. This was the time when some Clinton supporters started glomming on to any rumor that looked dangerous. A chain letter from American missionaries in Kenya did the trick: It claimed that Obama's real middle name was "Mohammed."

and:

Birtherism, the Democratic tactic: March 2009 to January 2011

In March 2009, with very little fanfare, Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., introduced one of his first pieces of legislation.

"To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee's statement of organization a copy of the candidate's birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the Office of President under the Constitution."

For the first time, an elected office-holder had indulged the birther theory. Before this point, there was no reason to ask a Republican if he bought into that stuff. Now there was. A dozen Republicans co-sponsored the Posey bill. Fringe-curious reporters (and here I'll raise my hand) and liberal blogs covered it all with amazement. A liberal videographer named Mike Stark tailed Republican members of Congress to get their takes on the story.

At the time, Democrats saw an advantage in making Republicans look crazy.

Now, for the record, "Proto-birtherism" follows "Paleobirtherism", a period evidentally renowned for its being named for a phenomenon which did not then exist, making the ever-convenient PUMAs, all six or eight of 'em, counting Republican plants, the spark that lit the fuse that ignited the unsuspected barely-contained cloud of racist sewer gas under the houses of 51% of Republican voters. And then Democrats suddenly saw an advantage in making Republicans look crazy. Something which hadn't occurred to them in the previous forty-five years. And all because a mere dozen or so duly elected Republican representatives were insane enough to sponsor a harmless little bill.

So, then, Whatever are we to do about these Democrats? (And while we're at it, does anyone know the identity of any "liberal bloggers" who were "amazed" in 2009 by anything whatsoever a Republican, in or out of Congress, would do?)

Spirited attempt, really; the problem is it's about fifty years and a hundred-fifty cases of marrow-deep insanity too late. The "serious" policy positions of the Republican party belong on Snope's Crazy Email Chain page right alongside Birtherism, Palinism, and Larry Craig's wide-stance explanation. If you wanna claim it's all just a sideshow, kindly point us to where the real, sane, rational show has been going on.

____________

* statistic courtesy Dave Weigel.

Could We At Least Get Better Liars?

MY Poor Wife (resting comfortably for now, thanks) had the NBC Nightly News As Performed By Brian Williams on last night, a signal for me to withdraw to my office, but my mood was such that I didn't reach for the earplugs, and enjoyed instead listening to the Pants Crapping Opening Monologue about Libya. US and NATO weigh military options! Where's Irving Berlin when you really need him?

At some point someone actually found a guy who knew what he was talking about, and who said, basically, "Th' fuck's a No-Fly zone supposed to do?" while adding a little grace note about what it would cost in these budget-conscious times. I believe they refer to this in the mass-market news biz as "comic relief".

The highlight for me, though--okay, there's the fact that things are so bad in the country that in an international "crisis" we turn to Andrea Mitchell for an explanation, but I'm not quite cynical enough to call that a "highlight"--was Susan Rice calling Gaddafi "delusional". Having the United States Ambassador to the UN call your public political pronouncements "delusional" is like having the French Minister of Manners call you "rude".

For the love of Voltaire, how often do people need to be reminded that all our enemies are idiots? Can one in three Americans even point to Libya on a map? (Can 2 in 3 point out Africa?) It's like the Red Menace was that bad boy boyfriend we broke up with after high school, but still fantasize about during those monthly three-minute sessions with the actuary with the combover we wound up with.

And I don't know about you, but I don't speak Arabic, or Farsi. I do know just enough about languages to have some sense of the pitfalls in translating even modern French, Middle German, or Old Frisian into English. Yet every word attributed to Gaddafi or Ahmadinejad is a spotless window into his craziness. Weren't Brian Williams and Jon Stewart just yukkin' it up last week about this? "He said 'goat burger', heh heh heh." I mean, there are at least six levels on which that could be wrong before people who lie about such things for a living got a hold of it, and you just swallow it whole? Was Mubarak really all that grounded an individual? Why is it that "sanity" equates with "taking what money we're willing to give you and shutting th' fuck up?" Are these people schoolteachers? Gaddafi's a goddam junta-leading Colonel. Sanity? His sanity has been moot since back when we spelled it "Kadaffi"; hell, it was seriously in question back when we decided he could be trusted to run the place. That was Nixon and Kissinger. Who's fucking crazy, again? I could care less what you say about Ahmadinejad, provided you don't use it as an excuse to nuke Iran. Okay? Like pretty much everything else in Life, crazy is a continuum.

Speaking of combovers, I think I failed to consider whether despising Mitch Daniels was a good enough reason to actually follow what Mitch Daniels is doing on an almost daily basis. Not that I really have much choice, since the local news follows him around now like he's Erik Estrada. Two weekend teleprompter readers mentioned that he'd "escaped the political turmoil in Indiana" to go make speeches in DC; both said "escaped" (on different channels) as though the poor man was forced to flee the pounding jungle rhythms favored by his teenagers for the sanctity of his garage workshop. Obviously, neither could even be bothered to rewrite a quip from Daniels' own people, nor wonder if it was fair, let alone ask why he's off making campaign speeches when he's not a candidate when he's got plenty of the people's business at home he could be tending. (This was just a couple days after Short n' Smirky joked about sending the Democrats the bill for the Special Sessions he's planning to call until he gets his way.)

Yesterday's Star gave us a thoughtful recap, and Mitch the opportunity to say this:

"The less I do, the louder it [the national 'buzz' about his 'candidacy'] gets,"

"I dunno how the fire got out of control, Your Honor. All I was doing was stoking it."

Lessee. Apparently the CPAC Ronald Reagan Dinner speaking slot--much more prestigious than the Reagan Breakfast, Reagan Brunch, or Reagan Lite Snack n' Nap slots--reached out an' snagged him; then this weekend he was required to go on the News Hour, NPR, and FOX. I guess "doing less" must mean he didn't have the final edit on Sunday's Bi-weekly Wall Street Journal fluffing.

"It's not my matinee idol looks or charisma," he added, referring to the obligatory references in profiles such as The Wall Street Journal's to his 5-foot-7 stature and lack of pizzazz.

Did you GET THAT? HE LACKS CHARISMA! I guess if he ever decides to run he'll have to address that, somehow. Maybe try to make a running gag of it, or somethin'.

The best part, though--Mitch had a better weekend than I did, but then I have to try to get rid of bilge--was when last week's twelve hour statesman pose, back when he said this about skedaddling Democrats:

“The activities of today are perfectly legitimate part of the process,” he said. “Even the smallest minority, and that’s what we’ve heard from in the last couple days, has every right to express the strength of its views and I salute those who did.”

reared up an' bit him like the one-year tax increase he advocated for fifteen minutes.

Daniels was pressed [on FOX] about whether he initially expressed support for Democratic legislators' right to walk out, something he got hammered for by conservative bloggers and that could be a problem for him in a GOP primary should he decide to run for president. Daniels said he had been referring to the right of union members to express their objection to legislation, not lawmakers' right to walk out to prevent the quorum needed to debate bills.

Yes, the Governor of Indiana called the first of three press conferences last week, which literally doubled the number he's called in his second term, just to announce that he supported the right to peaceable assembly. Apparently there was some question as to whether Indiana was planning to nullify the First Amendment once it got rolling. Not that that would hurt him on the campaign trail.

Now will you fuckers just leave the poor man alone?

May You Never Get Old

Matt Bai, "In Time of Change, Nostalgia Has Appeal". October 27

I B'LIEVE I'm on record as granting permission to anyone who wants to to bash "Boomers" for a multitude of real sins: opposition to the enormity of US involvement in Indochina, which lapsed as soon as the threat of conscription did (in fairness I, born in the closing moments of 1953, was eligible for the last six months of the draft; so 2/3 of Boomers, by median if not mean, never risked a government-sponsored jungle trip at all). Blame 'em for insufficient resistance to the the post-facto rewrite that portrayed that war as a fine little patriotic excursion spoiled by a few chronic grumblers and ungovernable loogie launchers; for the hypocritical descent into mindless consumerism and real estate acquisition of the Reagan/Yuppie era; for Reagan himself; for the soul-deadening shallowness that replaced the News, and our politics; for that commercial that uses Melanie's "Brand New Key"; and for everyone named "Dylan".

Here is a partial list of things you cannot blame on Boomers. In fact, let's rephrase that. Here is a partial list of thing you must either be a total idiot, a liar, or a sad-sack careerist mining the endless lode of "My Generation Uses the Internet, while Yours Had Enormous Rotary Phones and Sideburns", or all three, to blame on us:

• Boomers are not responsible for the fact that old people tend to xenophobia, terminal crotchets, and a lack of familiarity with the latest dance steps. Similarly, your generation is not to blame for inventing the extraordinarily broad and unwarranted generalization that puts your sorry, complaining, never-did-nothing-worth-spit ass in the best possible light by comparing it to something worse and imaginary.

• We're not responsible for the rise of that paranoid and post-war domestic fascism program which eventually merged with the Republican party around the time the oldest of Boomers was learning to drive.

• In fact we're not responsible for the massive propaganda campaigns which, since 1946, convinced Americans that invasion, subjugation, and forced sex with garlicky foreigners was right around the corner unless we kept our military brass crotch-deep in jet/atomic/digital-powered bombers and golf courses.

• Nor the corporate takeover of America, of roughly the same vintage.

Let's just note here that, while you're so busy congratulating yourself on living in a post-racial neighborhood you've done nothing whatsoever to address the rapidly expanding implementation of the last three, with a particular note about how easy it's been to scare Post-Racial, Internet-Savvy America with the specter of brown men stealing our freedoms with shampoo bombs. Just like everyone else.

And yet, a less noticed undercurrent is pulling politics in the opposite direction, too. The latest polling suggests we may see the election of several venerable politicians to offices they held before, including some who haven’t governed since the days when “apple” and “blackberry” referred primarily to fruit. And this suggests that as much as we talk about closing the book on the last era of American politics, we may be having some trouble letting go.

Y'know, I love it when a totally artificial meme is stood on its head by the very people who perpetrate the fraud in the first place, and then the crazy juxtaposition! is displayed as some sort of glimpse at a parallel universe, which somehow then proves the original contention. It's why I try to start every morning off by reading Slate.

The poster septuagenarian for this new crop of resurrected office-seekers is Jerry Brown, who was the youngest governor in the country when Californians elected him to the first of two terms in 1974. (Mr. Brown was famous then for dating Linda Ronstadt. You can Google her, or just ask your mom.)

Okay, we're often called upon here to explain some humor basics. First, like most people, this construction (bygone cultural icon + "ask your mom" = funny) worked on us the first 6 or 7 thousand times we heard it, but since then, eh. Second, the humor [if any] really requires that Bygone Cultural Icon be someone the average audience [if any] member had at least some vague familiarity with, i.e., someone still in the public eye but increasingly seen as a tired relic squeezing out link sausages to a rapidly deceasing audience. The Eagles. Ask your mom. Bon Jovi. Ask your mom. It doesn't really work when 52% of your audience really would have to ask its mom who someone was. It doesn't work on someone whose last album/tour was twenty years ago, unless that person was the most hugely colossalest star of his time. Garth Brooks. Ask your ma.

Now then. I, Boomer, was among the first batch of eighteen-year-olds allowed to vote in a Presidential election, in 1972. This means that, in my rapidly-dwindling lifetime, I've had the opportunity to vote against Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan (twice) G.H.W.H.M.S Bush (twice), and Bob Dole. It was twenty years before I had the change to vote for one of my generational buddies, and ten more before the first (and probably next-to-last) chance to pick between two. So shut th' fuck up about Jerry Brown, fer chrissakes. Or better yet, move there, vote against him, and help the younger, internet-savvy inmates take over the rest of the asylum. Ask your mother.

By the way, has anyone calculated the odds that the sort of person who makes a career of making shit up about randomly ascribed collections of birth years will also claim that two instances of something unremarkable constitute a Trend?

Times Two

YEAH, I saw it. Brooks, last Friday:

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012...

"Most likely", of course, in that he's candidate most like Brooks--and there's a surprise choice, huh?--in that he keeps his opposition to the religioculture-war wing of the party hidden until it's time to come out and declare how much he supports and admires it.

Is this, in fact, the secret of the Republican party's (electoral) success--that it functions as a sort of Rorschach Test for the emotionally stunted and terminally untruthful? In his Times tenure alone Brooks has gone from enthusiastic war triumphalist, to Reasonable Public Intellectual Who Needs Some Time To Think Over the Apparent Discrepancy Between Everything He's Ever Said On The Subject and Reality, to Guy Returning from His Long Ruminations as an enthusiastic war promoter. He's gone from insisting that social "conservatives" were merely the more publicly moralistic tribal faction, to wishing them into the Cornfield, and back; he's gone from proclaiming the desperate need for the Republican party to look more like David Brooks, to "welcoming" the energetic and charming, if somewhat naive and redolent of hay, Teabaggers (though he, like Brother Douthat, is careful to maintain these are outsiders who've suddenly discovered all they have in common with the Party of Henry Cabot Lodge), to, as here, pretty much discounting them as a force in primary elections. The real question here is whether situational ethics and head-spinning hypocrisy should disqualify you from being stabled with the Times' Reasonable Conservative Voices, or whether it is, in fact, the major qualification.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with our own admittedly almost non-existent estimation of either man. It's just that maybe, just once, Brooks might take a column to explain why The Major American Political Party That Spends Its Weekends Discussing Burke is the one which is simultaneously The Party Perpetually In Thrall To One Snopes-Worthy Chain Email or Another. Or maybe just how he imagines Mitch Daniels is going to get through the Republican primaries after someone asks why the only thing he ever tried to do as governor of Indiana is sell off enough resources to build our section of the NAFTA highway. (Take it from me: don't waste your breath asking where the money actually went.)

Then there's Douthat, whose recent appearance on Colbert raised the question, "Who cancelled at the last minute?", as well as suggesting that there's a Wingnut Welfare cash award somewhere for the media personality who smirks the most without cause. Today's column might've been titled, "A History of the Democratic Party, As It Was Explained To Me At Pater's Knee, over the Entire Thirty Years of Life On Earth". One imagines, supposing one is a blogger with space to fill and a large coefficient of boredom, that Douthat thinks of himself as Blake's star: desperate that should he ever have an original thought the Universe might wink itself out.

What Is Robbing A Bank Compared To Founding A Bank?

Joshua Lott/Reuters. Remember when the old white guys

who run things were scary creepy, not just regular creepy?

Damien Cave, "Murkowski of Alaska Locked in a Tight Senate Race". August 25

Jon Cohen and Michael D. Shear, "Poll shows more Americans think Obama is a Muslim". August 19

David "Still Employed, But Now He Doesn't Deserve It" Weigel, "Mystery, Alaska". August 25

I'VE been forced to concentrate on personal business for a couple weeks, and in the odd moment when politics has crept back into my brain, waiting for a stoplight or a return phone call, it's been an experience similar to those Out-of-Body reports from people who die momentarily on the operating table: I'm floating up above things, looking down sorta half-disinterested. Just minus the bright light, organ music, and tap-dancing seraphim.

So, first, I'm skeptical about all this, same as I am about all that Near Death stuff. But, hey, even a momentary peaceful calm is nothing to toss aside lightly.

This country is nowhere near as certifiably pathological as it's being made out to be. Which is a far cry from saying it's no fucking crazier than it should be. Maybe it's just me…

The number of Americans who believe -- wrongly -- that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now accounts for nearly 20 percent of the nation's population.

but for some reason I think the fact that the Washington Post sees fit to report this is a helluva lot more disturbing than how many people supposedly believe it. Even with that wrongly. Maybe especially with it.

Because Who Th' Fuck Believes This? Not the fact that one in five of our--you should pardon the expression--fellow citizens believes it. They'll believe anything, a fact establish beyond refutation by the mid-19th century. Of the global supply of crackpot religious splinter groups, just to grab one example, how many did we invent? The world's largest goddam economy runs on that. No; who believes that in the last year 8% of Americans decided the President was a follower of Islam? Were they previously on the fence about it? Has a twelvemonth's rumination expanded the definition of Muslim for 24,560,524 Americans? Can this possibly make any sense to anyone? To anyone who can read?

Who's the bigger problem? I'd say it's the people who see to it such shit gets reported as though it were a fact to be confronted, or absorbed, and not some piece of shit oddity which belongs in the Ripley Museum between the two-headed cow and the life-size statue of Robert Wadlow, for the amusement of the perpetually slack-jawed.

Oh, it's news. It's a snapshot of a troubled country. It's an important indication of what sort of lunacy (which, naturally, isn't exactly reported as lunacy) is out there. Well, no, it ain't. Let's note, for starters, that you now have a notable congruence between the number of Americans who tell some guy on the phone they think Barack Obama is a Muslim, and the number of Americans who told some other guy on the phone--or maybe the same one--they thought Dick Cheney was the greatest Vice President of the United States since Nathan Bedford Forrest immediately after Disaster Dick mistook his hunting buddy for a penned bird.

No. At some point this has to occur to you. At some point you have to consider the consequences of your actions. If that consideration is bounded entirely by how this sort of shit improves ratings, or circulation, or ad revenues, then it's fucking time to start considering that:

Those results, from a new Pew Research Center survey, were drawn from interviews done before the president's comments about the construction of an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, and they suggest that there could be serious political danger for the White House as the debate continues.

Which is what? That at this rate, by 2012 48% of the electorate will think he's running on the Sharia ticket? Just tell me, exactly, what effect this is supposed to have? So the sort of person who believes some patent horseshit just because FOX tells him to isn't on your side, and this is a problem? What, are they deserting the Democratic party in droves over this? I Useta Be A New Dealer, But Since The Ground Zero Mosque I'm Outraged By Obama's Birth Certificate? Is the President required to try to talk some sense into each and every one, thus losing valuable stump time? How many times do we have to hear that sort of nonsense; how many times are we supposed to take The Right seriously just because it's found something else to yell about? Y'know, if you really have to take this shit seriously just because your boss tells you to, it's time to take stock of your expenses.

Wrongly! Thanks for that. Hope it helps you sleep. How 'bout "Pew Research Center Asks Specious Question, Finds Americans Are Badly-Informed, Pouty, Racist Second Graders"? How 'bout "Astonishingly, Only 18% Believe Obama Is a Muslim, Considering That 75% Say They Ask a Dead Jewish Carpenter Who Spoke Aramaic for Career and Relationship Advice"? Y'know, the President and the majority of Congressorganisms claim to be Democrats. They got there by winning elections, despite every insistence that all real Americans think they're Socialists. And it's true that the professional Dems, like professional journalists, fear to ford the shallows of the Mitch McConnell River of Stupid. And--how many times does this need be said, and by how many people?--th' fuck has this gotten us? The Teabagging enthusiasts can't win an election, not a fair one, without roiling the worst, lowest-common denominator, inarticulate rageswamps our backwoods have to offer, something which has resulted, historically, in disaster after disaster after disaster. They can't find a candidate who can string a complete sentence together, or one who, if he can, can couple noun and verb without a lie on either end. It's not just when they win an election and put their crackpot schemes into operation again that they'll be relevant; it's when they put together something approaching Sensibility. And if our newspapers and networks can't tell the difference then it's time to recall everyone's diploma.

Oh, gee, we've got a couple examples of Last Season's Insane Parrottage still handy. Mr. JournoList?

OK -- you're wondering how Joe Miller, a lawyer who has never won an election, is currently leading Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in a primary she seemed to have in the bag. Didn't Murkowksi have all of the money? Weren't Miller's rallies pretty listless affairs?

Know what, David? I'm not wondering. It's fucking Alaska. It's Frozen Texas, minus the culture. If I've ever wondered anything about Alaska politics it's "How come their Senators get to vote?"

Okay. Yes, the Gray Lady in the front row?

Mr. [sic] Murkowski has been in the Senate since 2002, when her father appointed her to the seat he had held since 1981 so that he could become Governor. She is battling for re-election in a political season in which another Senate incumbent, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, lost a primary after switching party affiliation to Democrat from Republican, setting off fears that a tide of anti-incumbency would spell doom for sitting lawmakers.

Well, I'm sorry, but who, exactly, is it who's been publishing those erroneous Tide Charts all year, if not the same people who now explain to me the Mystery of some Teabagger win in New Bumfuck?

Second-Hand Revenge: A Dish Inevitably Served As A Thin, Tepid Gruel

George Eff Will, "Israel Can Do No Wrong, Pt. 3.5 x 10 ⁷". August 19

QUICK sketch of our current political situation: 35% of the populace apparently will not rest until it can marry another girl just like Reagan, overlooking, somehow, the result of our eight years of bliss with Bush-Cheney, aka The Bride Formerly Known as Reagan II. (The fact that the Reagan wedding album itself used more Vaseline on the lens than Brycreem on the hair we will simply leave aside.) This, of course, is where the charitable divide garden-variety unwarranted hopefulness from serious and irreversible mental instability. I am not charitable. They've been fucking crazy for years, now they're fucking crazy at DSL speeds.

I'm not inured to this, but I am temperamentally disposed to expect it, plus I'm from Indiana, which amounts to forty-plus years of almost daily practice. Even so, I've found myself of late lost in a nostalgia de la merde for the Nixon administration.

Whatever else you can say about him--and that's plenty--Nixon was a goddam pro. He didn't fucking go crazy at the first sign of opposition, nor at the very thought of opposition. He was already fucking crazy. He didn't slowly begin to confuse himself with the roles he'd once played, or something he read in Reader's Digest. He didn't fly off the handle because Carson made a joke about Tricia. He may've been our most clinically paranoid President, or just or most obvious one, but his Enemies List was, at most, about 1500 names, and sorted into categories; if there were a Palin Enemies List, what would be the Over/Under? 90 million? Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese to think he was crazy. This, of course, doesn't make him sane; a pathological liar may yet know when (and when not to) bluff. But he wanted them to believe he was crazy enough to bomb indiscriminately, even with nuclear weapons. Imagine George Bush trying to pull that one off. Everyone would know he was faking, because everyone would know the thought nuking anyone who looks at us crosswise was a perfectly reasonable approach.

I'm too young to know Nixon-Gahagan, or his Red-baiting days, except as history. To me, Nixon's insane politics seemed more like the logical harbor for his insanity-driven ambitions. This made the world a more optimistic place: just wait out all the old Red Baiters, and Nixon's idiosyncratic pathologies, and the world might right itself, assuming it survived. I don't need to remind you how that one worked out.

Enter George Eff Will, the Missing Link: chronic Reaganite by trade, Nixonian at heart (but stomach only for petty larceny). Will first comes to national attention at the Nixon-era National Review; he's soon given credit for criticizing Nixon administration corruption, which is like giving someone credit for denouncing child labor: just because you expect Republicans to be in favor of it is no reason to go overboard when one or two exhibit some public sensitivity at no cost to themselves. (Of course Will's tua culpa didn't extend to Nixon's conduct of the war; he's been a faithful re-imaginer of that history his entire career.)

So Will, rising careerist, gets associated with Reagan, via one of the lesser criminal acts that helped his election, rather than Nixon, despite the fact that he's much more like Heinz Kissinger than one of Reagan's Cracked Lt. Colonel advisors. He's the sort who, during its ten-minute heyday between the invasion of Iraq and the disaster of the invasion of Iraq, would have been described as a "paleocon", but probably not to his face, since his support was needed. And so, now, to the Nixonian Lament that the end of the Cold War has deprived the Right of its best reasons for Continual Nuclear Brinkmanship, or maybe just the fun of playing it two-hand. Of course it's not really a Lament, since they just change the reality to correspond to new circumstances, but still: one supposes the withered charlatan in his dressing room at ABC, ten minutes to air, shedding a solitary tear for the old days, when you could actually mean what you said, however crazed.

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis.

And Israeli Self-Defense killed 5000 Palestinians.

As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000….

How much is that in Swedes? What's the conversion rate for Native Americans? How many Dresdens? Most importantly, how's it compare to the homicide rate in Detroit?

approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam.

Assuming you think 72% approaches totality, in which case you must imagine that US public schools are in excellent shape. (Not, mind you, that I intend on trading equations with a guy who's pulling his out of his ass.)

During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

Okay, two things: we might consider whether the lesson here, as in Vietnam, is "When you decide to take over someone else's playground, consider the neighborhood". And, y'know, if the Israeli government doesn't like the Risks for Peace argument, maybe it could consider what resisting it for sixty years has wrought. Or maybe we could switch the lecture to "Mumsy and Pater may seem to be made out of money, but if you expect to keep driving a new Ferrari every week on our dime you can start behaving, let alone driving, responsibly."

Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long.

Well, I don't like the man, but I've admitted many a time that in the field of international relations no one's ever topped George W. Bush when it comes to asphalt metaphors.

And Jesus Christ, isn't that the land God gave the Ancient Israelites so a few millennia later some rabid and self-declared heirs could demand it back, by any means necessary, so He could get this whole Armageddon thing back on schedule? Whaddya fucking want?

Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.

Well, forgive me if I disremember slightly, but didn't the Israeli government always declare it would return that land in enhance for peace, however "chilly"? Okay, maybe it did specify "body temperature". I really don't remember. But that agreement--the only genuine breakthrough in the Middle East since the Partition, by the way, and one which owes its existence to Jimmy Carter and his willingness to make our client state "take risks for peace"--has assured Israel's existence. The preceding paragraph from Mr. Will shows just how thoroughly that's been appreciated by its staunchest defenders, 6000 Miles Away Division. The Oslo Accords--following another twelve years of Hands-Off Republican administration policy which refused to build on Camp David, or even acknowledge it--would have been the next step. Even in the crazy Middle East we can be pretty clear about who sunk those.

The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived.

Sheesh, talk about the Pot lecturing the Kettle on carbon content. There was no State of Palestine in 1947 because it was yet another bronze-tinged corner of the globe the British had thoughtfully agreed to command. There were enough Zionists in it by War's end to terrorize the Brits into giving up because they'd spent the previous fifty years looking the other way while they emigrated, in opposition to international agreements. (Of course in fairness, those international agreements, like Zionist terrorism, don't count.) And the reason there's no Palestinian State there today is that the US, which thoughtfully stepped in when Britain and France were unable to keep 1/3 of the world subjugated on their own anymore, simply ignored that part of the agreement.

After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

How much is that in undisclosed megatonage? Hey, anybody got change for a Finn?

Y'know, we can keep on saying this until it takes: you wanna complain about taxing Future Generations, start here. Start with the immense amounts of treasure which go to Israel every year to help enforce our unilateral decision in 1946, treasure which allows the Israelis to continue thumbing their noses at the rest of the international community. Start there. Israel can defend itself; its overkill ratio is nearly as great as our own. What it can't do, and what we can't do, either, is turn that enormous technological advantage into the leverage required to dictate everyone else's actions. And that's clearly proven by the last sixty years of people resenting that the bargain comes with the government of Israel getting an occasional earful. So, fine, let's remove the basis for the lecture.

This Is Your Brain Frying On The Sidewalk.

SO it takes Gregg "Some of My Best Friends Are" Easterbrook more than a thousand words before this year's initial Tuesday Morning Quarterback gets to the really big off-season story: Al Gore's divorce. Not really sure what caused the delay, but he makes up for it by including a picture of The Kiss, which leads to another of those brilliant insights which only Gregg "Saying There's No Such Thing As Global Warming Doesn't Mean There's No Such Thing As Global Warming" Easterbrook believes he has:

In retrospect, could that nationally televised kiss have been more evidence that everything about Al Gore is phony?

Now I dunno about you. I'm not the world's biggest Al Gore fan; I do think he doesn't receive anything close to enough credit for actually doing what everybody else claims they want done, which is reducing government expenditures, and, absent everything else about Gore and his history as a public figure, I think you kinda gotta scratch your head about that one, or conclude that the country is chock-a-bloc with lying assholes; regular readers are familiar with my choice in the matter. Remember that in 2000 Al Gore is Wooden! trumped George W. Bush is a Barely Literate Kleptomaniac by a factor of fifty. Al Gore's a Liar! Al Gore's a Phony! Assuming you, as I, occasionally survey the major players on the national political scene, is, or has it ever been, Al Gore you would single out as the paragon of those traits? Would you even bother pointing that shit out at all? Reader, if you need more than one hand to tally all the public figures in this country, of whatever stripe, whom you believe to be Genuine, either you know a lot of celebrities I've never heard of, or you're missing several fingers.

Okay, The Kiss was staged. So was Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal. Which one's still bothering you a decade later?

I haven't piled on Easterbrook. I grew up reading the columns of Indianapolis Racist Beacon (at that time the Birch Society Weekly Denouncer and Fluoridation Report) sports editor Bob Collins, and the syndicated West Coast legend Jim Murray, neither of whom could go 800 words in the Sixties without mentioning Muhammad Ali's religion or Joe Namath's Fu Manchu. So I've got a sort of built-up immunity. Easterbrook was a Global Warming denier until 2006, when he decided to half-bow (not the Full Obama) to the the scientific consensus which had suddenly appeared. I don't really care. It's been obvious all along that bigger and more powerful idiots are controlling the tilt of the table on this one. Easterbrook's position on Global Warming, Space Weapons, and Feminine Pulchritude are just things you have to strain out to get to the plankton of those columns of his.

Two things do bother me, though. The first is the assumption of superiority based on being wrong first, on the grounds that this proves your skepticism. (It's notable how often this attitude correlates with a lifelong religious belief.) The second is how the original belief, like the Fog, pads along on little cat feet. I've trained a lot of cats, to some extent or other, and usually not much. If you get a cat to halt at a line, and go no further, it will not be long before the first paw is on the line, then half over the line, and then both are on the other side. Thus Easterbrook, formerly dead wrong by his own admission:

Check this recent researchers' statement in Science magazine. I'll exempt the statement from my normal complaint about science papers with an unrealistic numbers of authors -- it's signed by 255 people! -- since it is intended as a political declaration. The statement shows there is a strong, but also mild, scientific consensus: Climate is changing in part owing to human action. That's not the doomsday view beloved on the left, nor the denier view beloved on the right, but is a reason to begin greenhouse-gas regulation.

So "The Left" was correct because it loves it some Doomsday. And moderates like, oh, Gregg Easterbrook--moderates who just might happen to have a book out arguing that Everything Is Always Getting Better But We Won't Admit It--are More Correcter Still, because they only want us to treat the Doomsday potential, without all the celebrating.

And without, presumably, The Spice, though first I'd like to suggest that if modern life is Two Scoops of Triple Chocolate Fudge Ripple at Affordable Prices, that the well-born and well-off Easterbrook simply renounce all his belongings and income above the American average, and have himself a ball.

Now then: the locals in Boone County have discovered Spice, the herbal "incense" and secret Marihuana substitute which is turning our nation's children into a pack of drooling imbeciles when it doesn't kill them outright. They banned the stuff Monday, so, effective next week, teenagers will have to smoke real pot, or buy it online, or drive ten miles to the next county.

They apparently learned about the stuff from local Channel 8 which, mired in a ratings slump coupled with a stable of "talent" that makes Fox and Friends look professional, has decided that Screaming Sensationalism is the one idea sure to put 'em back on top.

They gave the story to Deanna Dewberry, apparently on the grounds that she was the only anchor out of two-dozen who hadn't yet sacrificed every last shred of decency in the cause. Dewberry came to the market five years ago as a reasonably competent teleprompter reader, something which was almost refreshing, considering. It took 8 about two months to correct that. She now gives the impression of auditioning for the Bette Davis role in some dinner-theater musical version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the last couple weeks she's added a lunge to her repertoire, which came in handy for this forty-year-old retread of Dragnet. I swear to God, yesterday she reported the stuff contains THC. My Poor Wife and I have a friendly bet on the next escalation: she's going with the classic "Jumped off a building thinking he could fly"; I'm going with "Got high, stared at the sun until their eyeballs melted". That leaves "Put the turkey to bed and the baby in the oven" open, if anyone's interested.

Blind. And Not Homer/Milton/Borges/Ray Charles Blind.

WE have in Indiana an annual tradition known as the State Fair--maybe you've got one, too--which celebrates a way of life none of us wants anything to do with anymore, because it involves hard work, careful husbandry, and precious few opportunities to get over on other people by being the bigger liar. About the only part of agriculture your average Hoosier finds attractive these days is selling the theoretical family farm to strip mall developers.

In fact, tracking the Fair over the last fifty years--I was last dragged to one in 1960, and expressed my complete lack of interest in ever returning in, apparently, a remarkably efficacious manner for a six-year-old--should be worthy of a grant, moving, as it did, from a celebration of the early days of a post-war economy, still operating on an agricultural calendar of sorts, through some serious doldrums occasioned by the fact that there weren't any farmers left, to its rescue by the artificial Americana craze begun under Reagan, in which genuine American Rural Life was replaced by aggressively marketed Vague Ruralishness, the Hee-Hawing of America, the Bob Evansification of the Heartland, if you will. The template for all this--alongside Nixon's Southern Strategy, I mean--was Nashville, Music City USA, which had responded to a dwindling audience for the nasal charms of the Louvin Brothers, Red Foley, and Ernest Tubb by chasing anything that worked, as you will, and finally settling on the Aggrieved Hard Workin' Patriotic Murrican Beset By Hippies routine, which, somehow, a short generation from the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the Hobo Jungles had aligned itself with the Banks, the Cops, and the Strategic Air Command. In fact, from 1980-2004 or so you could get the jump on the summer release of the Fair's entertainment line-up by reading the Country music trades to see who was on tour.

Fair time is also the one time in the year when the Hoosier fixation on weather coincides with Hoosiers actually being outside; heat stroke is, of course, the frequent result. It's sorta the meteorological equivalent of a drinking holiday.

My Poor Wife, for example, must see six weather-prediction routines a day, three of which may not be her fault; the damned weather is fifty percent of local news, and the lead story three days of four.


I know she'd just as soon watch actual news on the news, but good luck with that.

This frequently leads to one of our favorite games, unofficially known as You Fucking Moron! in which I make wild accusations about what the idiot teleprompter readers said--or what they really meant--about some issue of local import, she tells me I wasn't listening, and I ignore her. The best thing about this game is that everybody wins.

Case in point: last Friday morning an Indianapolis policeman on an emergency run hit a group of motorcyclists, killing one and critically injuring two others. My recollection of that evening's coverage is one long Make the Point That Vehicles Which Can't Pull Over Are Supposed To Freeze In Place lecture, which I remember because, at the time, there was no explanation of how the accident had occurred, which made the suggestion that the motorcyclists had behaved improperly somewhat suspicious. My Poor Wife, when the game began in earnest 24 hours later, claimed to've heard that very evening a report that the bikers were properly stationary when they were struck.

And I didn't hear that, not that I doubt her; it's just that I heard over and over, the next day as well, about What You're Supposed To Do when there's an emergency run flying up your backside, suggesting They Hadn't Done So, with tragic results.

It turns out that this was a parrot's version of the official statement from IMPD spokesman Brian Dixon, who earlier Friday said

"Several vehicles yielded and moved to the right shoulder. . . . However, three motorcycles were stopped in traffic in the left lane and did not move. The officer slowed, braked and swerved trying to avoid colliding with the motorcycles, but was unable to do so."

And, y'know, you or I might have been just the tiniest bit skeptical, seeing as how this was the police investigating their own, and the city which was on the hook for any liability costs. But then you and I are not local news celebrities, and they know best.

Except one of the things they didn't know at the time, and which might or might not've fallen under the rubric of Things You Might At Least Have Considered, was what we all finally learned yesterday: that the officer involved had a Blood Alcohol Level of 0.19 two hours after the crash.

Though I Do Agree Americans Should Be Polled Regularly. And At Length.

George Eff Will, Leading "Conservative" Intellectual, "Obama's Apogee in His Rearview Mirror". July 1

EFF, you say:

If Obama has a second term, it probably will be, as most are, more difficult than the first, during which his party’s brand has been badly damaged in just 17 months. The 22nd Amendment renders reelected presidents instant lame ducks. Public boredom is induced by the incontinent talkativeness of those who occupy the modern rhetorical presidency. And power seeps from reelected presidents as attention turns to selecting their successors.

So, naturally, it would surprise you to note that in the run-up to the 2004 election Will was anticipating--oh, do not get ahead of me!--George W. Bush finally being able to concentrate on his Domestic Agenda Plain-Talking Texas Awesomeness (now that all that forced focus on International Unpleasantness was behind him), solving Social Security (by turning it over to Just the Man for the Job: Alan Greenspan!), and reforming Taxes and Welfare. (How ironic, then, that these would prove the twin sticking posts which would drag his Grand Domestic Schemes down! If only Public Assistance and High Taxes hadn't crashed the Global economy!) Followed by the natural withering of the Democratic Party when its Tax and Spend Lifeline is permanently kinked shut.

Sure, sure, the first instance speaks of "most" second terms being more difficult; the second of the specific salivary prospects of George War President Bush being unleashed on domestic enemies. Still, it's not exactly unreasonable to expect the general principle of 2010 to've tempered your views in 2004.

And if you don't like general objections, try the specific on for size: by 2004 Bush's popularity had plunged below 50%, on its way to Historic Levels of Suck; it briefly revived just in time for the election. His days of hiding behind The Day That Changed Everything were rather clearly numbered. You might think a paid political observer of whatever stripe would've noticed.

(Is there even any reason to point this shit out anymore? The Daily Show can do this nightly if it wishes, just by having an intern monitor Fox and Friends, tempered only by the Law of Diminishing Comedic Returns. These people are liars, ever' las' one of 'em. And in a culture which has decided the penalty for that is thirty years on This Week, the only response is that there can be no more appealing to "facts". And whom does this benefit? "Conservatism" and its intellectuals? The Republic? As we've noted here before, Mr. Will, it's you guys who insist you believe that Lying can send you to a Lake of Fire for All Eternity.)

The remainder of Obama’s first term will be complicated by this November’s elections. Turnout in this nonpresidential year will be significantly smaller than in 2008. The largest declines will be among young and minority voters who were energized by Obama being on the ballot. So this year’s turnout will be older, whiter—and more conservative.

Speaking of Gehenna fire, it's where people who now insist Obama was elected by young, idealistic idiots belong. Right next to the people who two years ago were celebrating the fact that young, idealistic idiots were going to drive a national election.

Many conservatives were too dispirited to vote in 2008.

Yeah, We let you guys win.

Not now.

Look, we don't engage in this kind of shit, and we wish George Effing Will wouldn't either. But we realize this "the Real America thinks exactly as I do" is either in "Conservatism's" DNA, or his bowtie's been on too tight. Why aren't "conservatives" still dispirited? Their party's still in the hands of microencephalics, mule traders, fast-food culture "personalities", and various mixes of all three; it has already proven in spades it can't govern, and its ideas are toxic. If Sarah Palin doesn't want the 2012 nomination her All-Powerful Endorsement Powers might determine where it will go, and she'll still get her own night at the Convention. You're facing the prospect, at best, of achieving Congressional majorities which won't be filibuster or veto proof (though they will have the advantage, as always, of having the Democratic party as opponents), and every Obama veto will make him look like the last goddam hope of Moribund Sanity. (Fuck, that could've been his plan All Along. Nothing else explains it.)

Gallup reports a four-poll average of 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying that this year they are unusually enthusiastic about voting, the highest number Gallup has recorded for a midterm election since the earthquake year of 1994, when Republicans gained 54 House seats. In Gallup’s June poll, 53 percent of Republicans said they were unusually enthusiastic, 39 percent said they were less; 35 percent of Democrats said they were unusually enthusiastic, 56 percent said they were less. The Republicans’ net of plus 14 more enthusiastic compared with the Democrats’ negative 21 is the largest party advantage Gallup has ever recorded for a midterm election.

Which still doesn't make it anything but gibberish, George.

As a theory, the swift and total opposition to everything Barack Obama touched will prove to be a mistake, in that 1) you were bound to pick up seats in the midterms anyway, building toward Palin/Daniels '12; but now you've already begun wearing out your welcome ahead of time, and 2) you've got nowhere to go, and you don't know how to stop yourselves from going there, over and over. Your solutions don't work. Only your complaints do, on occasion. And in practice, well, George: your people are assholes. They couldn't keep their mouths shut about Barack the Magic Negro even when they imagined he was the wildly popular focus of a temporary mass Messianic delusion. What're they gonna do when they imagine they almost have him pinned?

The Teabagger shit won't hold, George; you didn't do a goddam bit of self-reevaluation after the utter public failure of "conservative" truths which was the Bush administration. Somebody somewhere in your party needs to get it to stop jumping at every shiny mirage of Returning to Reaganite Glory, and start working on how to effectively govern the country. The real country, not the one you imagine. And at this point it's becoming clear that'll have to wait for the first generation of "conservatives" who can't remember who th' fuck Reagan was.

It's "You Broke It You Bought It", Not "You Broke It, So You're Just The Guy To Design An Unbreakable Version For Us".

Ross Douthat, "One Way Out". June 27

OKAY, Stop Me When the Barrel's Out of Fish:

Here is the grim paradox of America’s involvement in Afghanistan: The darker things get and the more setbacks we suffer, the better the odds that we’ll be staying there indefinitely.

Quagmire! Quagmire! Quagmire!

Look, Ross-boy: I don't need the utter failure of your ideas under real-world conditions to score easy political points off you and your ilk, though thanks for all the opportunities. Simple observation, simple motherfucking common sense, and a glance at either of your columnist head shots is enough to tell us neither you nor Brooks has any business advising us on Afghanistan.

Our point, instead, is this: maybe you should shut th' fuck up about grim paradoxes and dark setbacks, since you and more than 80% of your fellow citizens thought the war was such a great idea back in '01 that we didn't need to spoil the rollout by waiting for market research to come in. Maybe that's your column, Ross. For the next nine years. Write about what you know. That's something the next generation could learn from.

Not the way we’re there today, with 90,000 American troops in-theater and an assortment of NATO allies fighting alongside.

Of course not. They know better.

But if the current counterinsurgency campaign collapses, it almost guarantees that some kind of American military presence will be propping up some sort of Afghan state in 2020 and beyond. Failure promises to trap us; success is our only ticket out.

Look, kiddo, the only reason there is an insurgency in Afghanistan is our military presence created it. And, needless to say, we weren't prepared for one, first because we can't imagine anyone else in the world seeing things differently than some cloistered sinecure at The Atlantic. Because, y'know, New York New York. You've made it there. USA! Just the World's Jolly Copper, having an apple on the arm, maybe, but everybody knows he's there for our protection, right? Our Cause, like our Operation, was Just. Right again? Only criminals could oppose us, so everyone who opposes us is a criminal.

Why? Because of

Hold up, Clausewitz. We don't need you to explain why Success is our only chance of winning. We need you to explain what, exactly, we win if we get there.

three considerations. First, the memory of 9/11, which ensures that any American president will be loath to preside over the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul.

Well, y'know, maybe you Official Keepers of The Memory of 9/11 could try to recall that original rationale of the thing was to get bin-Laden and his three-dozen #2 men. And that Your Boy in the White House had seven years and unlimited black budgets to catch him, and failed. (I'm sorry. I know The Memory of 9/11 isn't suppose to evoke anything unpleasant.) In theory, anyway, if The Taliban had just handed over al-Qaeda before sundown, the way we demanded, we wouldn't have given a shit about how they treated their women. Or no more than we give about how our corporations and health care systems treat ours.

Of course The Memory of 9/11 has fuck-all to do with it, anyway; the reason no American president--and particularly a Democratic one--will not simply eliminate a costly and worthless mission in Afghanistan is that people like you would try him for treason.

Second, the continued presence of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan’s northwest frontier, which makes it difficult for any American president to contemplate giving up the base for counterterrorism operations that Afghanistan affords.

One: you don't know al-Qaeda from Quinoa, the Mayan Grain of Death™. You don't know who's in Waziristan, what they think, what they want, nor what they're capable of. You spout "base of counterterrorism operations" the way a preacher might say "guardians of moral rectitude". Not because it means a goddam thing; because it reflects your Faith. Our counterterrorism methods will be our counterterrorism methods, and they will either work, or they won't. They do not depend on our continued military presence in Afghanistan, or if they do, please explain how.

Two: if we--that is, the administration you backed without reservation--hadn't been in such a goddam hurry to exercise cowboy diplomacy and win the dick contest with its daddy administration, we could have exerted real pressure on Pakistan (and the Taliban, for that matter) instead of threatening to come in and kick everyone's ass. Would the Taliban have given up bin-Laden once we peeled off enough million-dollar bills? Would Musharraf had been willing to exert real pressure on the Badlands? We'll never know. What we do know is that your fucking method didn't work, had about zero chance of working, and was only a pretext for sending in the bombers. It's not like we could have known the region was volatile ahead of time, right? And what th' hell's a few metric tons of fissionable material and technological upgrades handed over to a non-NPT signatory like India because we had to even things out? It's not like increasing the amount of nuclear fuel in the region could ever come back to haunt us.

Finally: y'know, Ross, I don't particularly care for the Taliban. In fact, I was making my objections known back when they were just subjugating women and destroying world heritage sites, the sort of shit you couldn't care less about. But then, I'm not really partial to Pakistan, either. Or India, or China, Myanmar, Russia, France, the British Royal Family, or the New England Patriots. Hell, that Dalai Lama guy's on my last nerve. I just don't imagine--since I pretty much see it close up everyday--that the United States has the fucking answers, the capability of finding the answers, the political will to put those answers in place over the objections of Mitch McConnell or Glenn Beck, nor the ability to do so even if it did. And I think the record going back sixty years now is pretty clearly on my side.

You wanna prove me wrong, go ahead. But take my advice. Sneak up on it slowly. Try being right about one thing first.