A: 'I think it’s a fair question'

by Smitty

Now if the question has the form: "Is it possible that the Climate Research Unit is playing games with the research?" then you're cool.

However, if the question is along the lines of: "What if other people make Barack Obama's birth certificate an issue?" then Rick Moran thinks you may be among the "simpletons and paranoid conspiracy freaks".

Re-read the quoted section of the interview, Rick, emphasis mine:

Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue ’cause I think there are enough members of the electorate who still want answers.

Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?

I think it’s a fair question, just like I think past associations and past voting record — all of that is fair game. You know, I’ve got to tell you, too: I think our campaign, the McCain/Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were and perhaps what their future plans were. And I don’t think that that was fair to voters to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of the things that now we’re seeing made manifest in the administration.

For the record, (and I can't say whether Stacy would agree), the galactic coordinates where Barack Obama first drew breath have got to be the least important Constitutional threat at the moment. There are 12 trillion+ more sinister dangers (i.e., the national debt), than the question of whether Barack was born on Mars or in Hawaii. Even if you could conclusively prove otherwise, you'd require all three branches of the Federal government to admit they utterly tubed it when they installed BHO. So really, this isn't an issue likely to bear fruit, and therefore isn't worthy of attention.

Sarah gave it no attention. Can't you see that she's leaving it to "a small subset of the entire electorate cares?" She hasn't said anything more than "it's all fair game"

They are missing the point. Sarah Palin has said that these questions are legitimate, that voters have a right to know, and that "a lot" of citizens are concerned about it.

She didn't say what any rational person on the right or left believes: that questions about the president's birth have been settled by the state of Hawaii, that only a very small group of citizens are even concerned about the issue, and that an equally small number of people were even aware of the ridiculous controversy over Trig's origins.

Why, Rick, should she listen to you, me, or any other purportedly "rational person on the right"?

If anything, Sarah's biggest crime would seem to be cribbing from BHO's own playbook: leaving minions to do the rough work like pursue a birth certificate controversy, or a $400 haircut.

Maybe I'm in your "cotton candy conservative" category:

There is much wrong with many inside the beltway conservatives. I agree that they should be castigated for their hypocrisy; running as pious conservatives back home while playing fast and loose with conservative principles in DC. Such cynicism should be punished severely and I have no qualms about taking them to the woodshed for their sins.

But the world looks a little more complex to the "elites" than it does to most conservatives. In fact, many on the right reject complexity entirely, seeing it as just another excuse for a lack of adherence to principles among establishment conservatives, and others like Friedersdorf. It is their lack of fervency that is suspect, not necessarily any deviation from principle that riles the critics. That, and a slightly different interpretation of what "conservatism" is all about, convicts establishment righties of the crime of "not being conservative enough," and thus a target of the true believers.

So, Rick, if we can agree that every challenge, at a certain point in time, has some level of complexity, maybe we can agree that obfuscating is worse than oversimplifying. You can always add bureaucrats. Unlike a Danish whore, however, prostitutes of the organization chart nature won't go down or go away easily. They will, however, cook the books any way necessary to fulfill that great line from Civ IV: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy."

Chatting with Stacy today, I threw out the idea that the Democrats are the Harlem Globetrotters, and the Republicans are the Washington Generals. The pressing question of American politics is not whether we like the Globetrotters over the Generals, but rather whether we think this last century of exhibition basketball, with its debt, deficits, incumbency, and socialism, is the preferred governmental sporting model. Lefties and moderates take turns cheering for the Globetrotters and Generals, since the Progressives sold us this exhibition basketball shinola.

Has Sarah Palin offered a substantial alternative to exhibition basketball? No. She started her national phase as a VP nominee for a Progressive, moderate squish of a presidential ticket. Since then, she's given us a ghosted book, of which I haven't read enough to comment. Posts responding to yours about Sarah are by no means a gushing endorsement.

Returning to Palin Mainstreams the Birthers:

The problem is, unless the GOP — and that includes Rush Limbaugh and the other cotton candy conservatives who wield a lot of influence — stand up and denounce her in no uncertain terms, birtherism will have gone completely mainstream in the Republican Party. If that happens, you might want to forget about any significant gains at the polls for the GOP in 2010.

By her stupidity, she is now going to force every GOP candidate for the House and Senate to come out and declare whether they are birther nuts or not. Even if they’re not, being forced to answer in the first place makes the party look even kookier than it has to this point in time. You can bet Democratic opponents of Republican candidates will be asking whether they agree with Palin or not — and they will do it every chance they get. The press will gleefully repeat the question, no matter how many times the GOP candidate answers it.

What a sad, tragic, maddening turn of events.

Short: No.
Medium: You're headed for Sullivan territory.
Long: Your bogus presumption of mainstreaming has led to an unhinged conclusion about the direction of the debate.

My suspicion is that you're deriving great traffic from extrapolating far-fetched conclusions from simple statements. I admire your capitalism, sir. Also, do you think Mitt Romney a viable 2012 Republican candidate? I figure that you must, given his suave executive demeanor.

In the meantime, Dr. Smith prescribes moderate exercise for all the tension coming through your posts. Also, a healthy diet.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl has a more reasonable response than Rick Moran's.

UPDATE II (RSM): As Smitty mentioned in his American Glob interview, the risk of a blog partnership is that you sometimes work at cross-purposes. Just the other night, as I recall, I warned Smitty not to give into his temptation to whack the Rick Moran tar-baby. And while he was working on this post, I was working on a post -- which I may yet decide to publish -- whacking a better target: Andrew Sullivan. But never mind that right now.

In my opinion, Sarah Palin gave the wrong answer to Rusty Humphrey's question. I don't know if I've been interviewed on Rusty's show before -- I did a lot of talk radio while promoting Donkey Cons in 2006 -- and certainly have no more desire to attack him than I do to attack Palin.

However, Rusty's question was as misguided as Palin's answer. As I've said before, there is simply no political payoff to Birtherism. If and when conservative score political victories in 2010 or 2012, it won't be because somebody's found a "smoking gun" about the circumstances of Obama's birth. Instead of asking questions about a birth certificate, conservatives need to be asking questions that don't lead into a cul-de-sac of fruitless speculation.

We might say something similar about Smitty and Rick Moran going at one another. Rick's problem, I've surmised, is that he is cued into certain liberal media outlets and has internalized their spin on these kinds of stories. It's a GIGO situation.

I've been on Rick's blog radio show several times and hung out with him at CPAC, and he's always friendly. However, he and I perceive different political realities.

Why? I don't watch much TV, almost never watch the Big Three network news, don't even get CNN on my cable selection, and am always on guard against bias in any news I read. I know nothing about Rick's own news diet, but from the stuff he writes I'm sometimes tempted to think he's listening to NPR, watching Anderson Cooper and reading New Republic. NTTAWWT.

Smitty's problem, on the other hand, is that he's got Rick's blog in his RSS feed, so he sees at least the headline of every post Rick writes and madcap hijinks ensue.

Through long years of writing and editing other writers, I've learned that what you read influences what you write. For example, academic historians are bad writers because most of what they read is the work of other academic historians. And a lot of women journalists write in a lightweight style because they spend too many leisure hours reading novels and women's magazines.

Well, we bloggers have a bad tendency to read too many blogs. We get into the habit of looking for excuses to grab our flamethrowers and incinerate anybody who disagrees with us.

Never mind that this leaves a lot of charred corpses lying around. It also leads to bad writing and pointless arguments that are only interesting to the two guys wielding the flamethrowers.

Smitty is a very nimble writer, so his stuff is interesting to read even in this kind of situation. And I've won a few fans at gladitorial exhibitions of this sort. But . . . eh, I don't know. I've sort of resigned myself to letting Rick Moran be Rick Moran. Is that wrong?

The Tanenhaus Republicans and the Architecture of Intellectual Prestige

Should you wish to develop a critique of the conservative movement, yet are incapable of genuinely original thought, try to avoid borrowing your second-hand ideas from an avowed enemy of conservatism like Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times. (Y'all reckon his Buckley bio will get a good review?)

The brilliant Dan Riehl observes Rachel Maddow's MSNBC guest host Ana Marie Cox (speaking of "sworn enemies") interviewing Tanenhaus "discussing how WND is the equivalent of the Birchers today? Detailing how the Birchers were shut down." Dan continues:

Going on about the lack of intellectuals in conservatism today? Questioning where the Republican leadership is?
Damn! Almost seems to me I heard precisely all that just recently.
Then going on to pull in NRO, claiming that NRO (wink wink) only pretended to reject, while bringing forth new evidence, in the Birther conspiracy? Calling today's conservative "mouthpieces" pseudo-intellectuals? Do they mean Talk Radio? I'd bet they do.
No point in reading The Next Right anymore, perhaps. I can just wait to catch the latest young conservative wisdom on MSNBC. . . .

Ouch. Here's the MSNBC video, so the reader may appreciate the extent to which the liberal Tanenhaus has influenced this species of "conservatism":

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What astonishes me is that these Young Turks, who conceive of themselves as infinitely superior to their elders in terms of intellectual sophistication, fail to recognize that they are being played as suckers in a very familiar sort of hustle. I explained this four months ago in "The Republicans Who Really Matter":

The Republicans Who Really Matter can be relied on to reinforce liberal stereotypes of the GOP, and to pen op-ed columns offering "helpful" advice to the Republican Party which, if followed, would lead to certain electoral disaster. . . .
No Republican pundit is ever going to become influential by buddying up to Wayne LaPierre or right-to-lifers; make favorable mention of environmentalism, however, and MSNBC producers will flood your inbox with e-mail invitations to a 10-minute guest segment on "Hardball."
One reliable method for advancing to the pinnacle as a Republican commentator is to argue that the party is badly divided, and to blame this fragmentation on some constituency universally loathed by liberals. . . .

The inarguable fact that liberals dominate the publishing industry, academia and other such institutions of intellect means that liberalism and its advocates possess a prestige that no out-and-out conservative can ever enjoy.

The Monopolization of Prestige
Neither Joseph Farah nor Dan Riehl will ever be published by the New York Times, will they? If Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin or Ann Coulter wrote biographies of William F. Buckley Jr., would their books be praised in a feature NYT book review? Would they be excerpted by The New Republic?

Of course not. Liberals would never lend the prestige of their institutions to such avowed enemies of liberalism. And anyone who desires to research the career of Buckley may easily discover the vehemence with which he was once denounced by liberals -- up until such time as liberals discerned that they might use him as a weapon to attack other conservative targets.

To be the sort of conservative intellectual acceptable to liberals, one must never make a criticism of liberalism that is genuinely effective, an argument that undermines the prestige of liberal ideas and liberal heroes. Why? Because once an intelligent person comes to suspect that liberalism does not deserve its prestigious reputation -- well, the emperor has no clothes, you see? Therefore, Pinch Sulzberger hires a neurasthenic weakling like David Brooks, and not a vigorous, forthright and courageous advocate of conservative ideas.

At some level, the shrewd and ambitious young Republican-leaning writer perceives all this. He understands that he can gain an especial distinction by courting the praise of liberals, in quite the same way a junior varsity cheerleader can become "popular" by dating the defensive line of the varsity football team. And the analogy is all the more apt in that the JV cheerleader who seeks the easiest way to "popularity" so often condemns as ill-motivated hypocrites those more virtuous girls who eschew her ways.

'Boring' or Burkean?
When, in a symposium on Tanenhaus, Austin Bramwell declares that conservatism is "intellectually boring," he is in one sense quite correct. The basic principles of American conservatism -- the defense of constitutionally limited government, opposition to the welfare state, sympathy for tradition, foreign policy based on strength, sovereignty and national interest -- are so well-known that they offer no attraction to those who crave novelty in political thought.

The upstart who desires to gain a reputation as an "innovative" thinker is welcome to seek employment outside conservative politics, if he is not content to find new ways to celebrate old verities or new arguments with which to eviscerate liberals.

Instead, what we see over and over -- see Brooks' disastrously influential "National Greatness" as a textbook example -- is an enthusiastic race to get ahead of the Zeitgeist, to become the Promethean author of a new Welltanschauung, to establish one's place as the founder of Some Other Conservatism.

Wise men are not deceived by these pretentious intellectual hustlers. When a self-described conservative begins slinging around words like "creativity" and "progress" in political discourse, it is not generally taken as evidence of doughty resolve. Rather, it is wise to suspect such a person of being what the Brits would call a trimmer.

The Cruelty of Ambition
Conservatism is a philosophy of opposition. Excuse me for repeating myself, but some of our Young Turks do not seem to be paying attention to the lessons.

They invite chastisement, lest they become still more impudent (if such a thing were possible). I call them "Young Turks," but they rather remind me of certain Young Hegelians of yore, unwisely eager to hasten the historical synthesis. Their conceited trust in their own superiority is dangerous, perhaps more to them than to the hoary elders of the "movement" whom they seek to supplant, and I suspect there would be far less tolerance of dissent if these ambitious youngsters were mounted in the saddle and empowered to wield the whip.

We need no Nietzschean ubermensch nor Platonic archons to rule over us, to enlighten our supposed benightedness and soothe us with their tendentious myths about Olympian idols. This dishonest campaign to employ the aid of Tanenhaus to enlist the departed Buckley as a ghostly advocate of Pragmatism deserves to be rejected with extreme prejudice. And any Young Turks who desire to keep pursuing this approach will do so at peril to their own ambitions.

Whatever the Zeitgeist amongst the intelligentsia, the balance of power within the conservative movement does not favor "Pragmatism," which means that would-be leaders of Some Other Conservatism will suffer from a shortage of followers, and will find themselves isolated and ignored.

Even while I was writing this little essay, the brilliant Dan Riehl was busy discovering what sort of advice Sam Tanenhaus offered to his own party in 2003. The liberal Democrat urged Democrats to embrace their own radicals, while the same liberal Democrat's arguments are now being used to urge Republicans to purge Joseph Farah and WND.

"Maximize the contradictions," as Abby Hoffman said.

Do we need a purge? I don't think so

Patrick Ruffini waxes nostalgic for the days when Bill Buckley might purge any uncouth rubes who threatened to undermine the intellectual prestige of conservatism. In doing so, he calls to my attention something I had previously ignored -- my friend Jon Henke's call for a purge of WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah -- to which Matt Lewis had previously replied at Townhall.com.

This points to the gap between the interests of young political professionals like Ruffini and Henke, and the interests of the grassroots, as I explain at The American Spectator:

Grassroots conservative activists are, by their very nature, not engaged in the political process as a career. They tend to be older, well-established in non-political occupations and less concerned about the Big Picture questions than in finding immediate, practical ways to oppose the menace of liberalism. The question one hears from the grassroots is not, "Whither conservatism?" but rather, "What can I do?"
The Tea Party movement -- which will host a major rally in Washington next weekend -- has given the grassroots something to do, so that joining en masse to voice their opposition to the Obama agenda, they are actively engaged in the political process.
However, grassroots activism has consequences. One of the consequences of a ressurgent conservative grassroots is that their concerns, beliefs and attitudes are sometimes not in sync with the concerns, beliefs and attitudes of smart young Republican activists like Patrick Ruffini. . . .

You can read the whole thing. As always, no matter how much I share certain concerns of the intellectuals, my strongest sympathies are with the grassroots. Intellectuals need the grassroots more than the grassroots need intellectuals.

UPDATE: Catching up on the reaction that roiled the online Right while I was politely ignoring this dispute, Around the Sphere has a list of links, including my favorite acromegalic bride-to-be, Megan McArdle:

If the right ever wants to get back in power, it needs to start policing its lunatic fringe.

Why is it always the Right, and never the Left, that is urged to suppress its lunatics? Are our Birther kooks so self-evidently more dangerous or more embarrassing than left-wing kooks like Van Jones? What is at work here, I suspect, is that those who travel in intellectual circles -- where the influence of liberal academia is pervasive --almost inevitably become intimidated by the prestige-claims of liberalism.

A concern for debunking liberalism's prestige -- the persistent notion that liberal ideas possess a presumed legitimacy that conservative ideas do not -- is why I wrote "How to Think About Liberalism (If You Must)":

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

Once you conceive of ideological combat in these terms -- and I urge you to read the whole thing -- then you lose patience with soi-disant "conservatives" whose two basic instincts are cringe and flinch.

By God, stand up on your hind legs and fight! Grab some liberal pet idea by the scruff of the neck and pound the crap out of it. Destroy the prestige of liberal ideas, and attack the prestige of liberal spokesmen, so that it is they who are compelled to cringe and flinch.

Pussyfooting around, concerning yourself with civility and respectability -- the Marquis of Queensbury rules that liberals insist conservatives respect, while they're rabbit-punching us and kneeing us in the groin -- is a tactical error that will inevitably lead to defeat.

This doesn't mean that conservatives must be rude and uncouth. Rather, it means we ought not be defeatist and cowardly, displaying the characteristic attitude of the man whose pride in good sportsmanship is closely related to his habit of losing.

UPDATE II: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit:

Careerism and credentialism are as big a problem for the conservative establishment as for the liberal one. . . .
The blunt truth is that unless the intellectuals are able to mobilize the grassroots, all their plans and hopes are for naught.

Exactly -- the electorate will not respond to rhetoric cluttered by qualifiers or ideas expressed in dry, dull, language. "Herewith, A Brief Primer" is not a fighting creed.

Like Matt Lewis, whose engagement with Henke prompted Ruffini's counter-blast, I consider Henke and Ruffini friends. Jon's critique of the errors of the Allen '06 gubernatorial campaign -- the failure to get ahead of the Allen-is-a-racist smear that was already well-developed before "Macaca" -- was atom-splitting accurate, and his phrase "the eyes of the influentials" has stuck in my mind for more than three years.

Yet Jon's attack on Farah and WND strikes me as wrong-headed and harmful, and I think Ruffini's defense of the attack included some erroneous ideas, too.

So, having ignored all this for three days, I at last felt obligated to engage. Not because I want to purge anyone, but because I want my friends Jon and Patrick to have the benefit of my ideas (which are 100% correct, as usual).

UPDATE III: Speaking of 100% correct, Matt Welch:

All signs are pointing preliminarily to a Republican resurgence in the 2010 elections, even as a growing number of political thinkers–many of them on the right–conclude that conservatism as we know it is verging on a self-inflicted death.

Which points, I think, to the issue of careerism among conservative intellectuals, each of whom wishes to claim credit as the far-sighted visionary who mapped the way to the spectacular comeback victory. I think Matt Welch and I should agree in advance to flip a coin for those honors.

UPDATE IV: Now a Memeorandum thread, and Dan Riehl reminds us of Buckley's populist side:

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Also linked by Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints, by some Goth-club conservative(?) and by our old friend Conor Friedersdorf.

I'm not going to argue with Conor just now. This thread's already way too long and to address his "substantive" arguments would take too much effort on the Friday night before Labor Day. Also, my wife just brought home two large cheese pizzas from Little Caesar's. Party time!

I guess I'm sort of a Birther...

by Smitty

UPDATE: of course I meant 44th POTUS, not 43rd.

How can you deny the documentation? The facts? The history? After you consider

• Kneecappin'Trade
• The Healthcare Prevention Legislation
• Cash for Clunkers

I just don't see how anyone can begin to deny that all the POTUS's ideas have Born in Keynesia written all over them.

OK, everyone put the blunt instruments down and listen to me. Barack Obama has been sworn in as the the 44th POTUS by the Chief Justice of the SCOTUS. That's just the way it (ahem) is. There are plenty of worthwhile questions pertaining to school records and such. Focus on those. They're legitimate. They're interesting. They're the due diligence that magically didn't happen pre-election.

Winning generals don't pick crappy ground for the battle. Even if you could show that Barack Obama was really a sweet transvestite from Trans-sexual, Transylvania, it wouldn't matter. He's sworn in. You can't get the 111th Congress to deal honestly with the 10th Amendment, and that's cut and dried. Getting all of DC to admit, in the purely-for-argument's-sake-case that birtherism is valid, that DC had completely screwed up is simply impossible. Crow on that scale is inedible. So quit the pissing into the wind, people.

Things for which there is no time now

A friend just invited me to join a Facebook group called, "Birthers for Intellectual Honesty." This is probably a joke, and he is a friend, and therefore I will not get mad at him.

Please note the previous "Amen" to Philip Klein. Whatever the circumstances of Obama's birth, they cannot now constitute the basis of an effective political attack. So any further attempt to advance along that line is wasted time or, worse, giving fodder to those who delight in portraying conservatives as kooks. Mitchell Blatt writes:

[D]id you know that NBC was planning on asking [Michelle Malkin] if she is a birther conspiracy nut? . .
NBC wanted to ask Michelle what she thought of where Obama was born even after Media Matters themselves noted that Malkin thought the theory was insane.
Malkin said at her book signing [Friday] that NBC producers were actually asking her about it before she went on . . .

It is inarguable -- and I've been watching this steadily develop on Memeorandum for several days without mentioning it -- that the same online minions of the Left who spent months assailing Sarah Palin have now re-directed their efforts toward pushing this "Birther" thing.

Any conservative who thinks that the Left is interested in a rational discussion of facts (whatever the facts may be) needs to wake the hell up.

Please pardon my French, but if they actually cared about facts they wouldn't be the Left, would they? The Left wants propaganda, and they clearly think that this Birther meme serves the propaganda purpose of portraying everyone on the Right as a tinfoil-hatter.

Ergo, STFU, IYKWIMAITYD.

Both National Review's anti-birther editorial and Andrew C. McCarthy's extended discussion of the related issues are but the latest exhibits for the prosecution in the continuing case of Why Rich Lowry Should Have Been Fired No Later Than 2001.

For some reason, Lowry keeps publishing things that never should have been published, stirring up fights that avail nothing for the conservative cause, and otherwise stepping on his . . . Well, pardon my French.

When Lowry permitted Ann Coulter to be banned from NRO on account of her famous 9/12/01 tribute to her recently departed friend Barbara Olson, you knew the man's judgment was flawed. And he has since repeatedly blundered in ways too numerous even to begin listing them here.

Of all the particular kookeries to which National Review might have devoted its efforts in recent weeks -- Waxman-Markey, hello? -- what purpose was served by this engagement with Birtherism?

As Richard Brookhiser reveals (perhaps not altogether intentionally) in his new book, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age With William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement, the crowd at National Review has always been a peevish clique of snobs and oddballs.

Oh, the stories that D.C. conservative journalists could tell you about their dealings with National Review! Since I cannot breach any confidences, let me just ask you to imagine a D.C. press conference or discussion panel.

Mingling around the danish-and-coffee table in the back of the room, you'll see representatives of all the various Right-side media: Washington Times, Human Events, American Spectator, CNS, etc., etc. Camaraderie and conviviality are the prevailing spirit -- a spirit of which the National Review representative does not partake.

The National Review man is not a mere reporter, you see, but an intellectual! And therefore, he doesn't hang out and chat with the lowly ink-stained drudges, who are so far beneath the NR man as to be mere Sigma Nus to his Skull and Bones.

Oh, they're not all equally bad. But the insufferable snobbery of the NR crowd is notorious, and even the most down-to-earth of them cannot resist succumbing in some degree to this esprit des snobs.

Which might not be so bad, and perhaps even justifiable, if NR was as good as the NR-ites think it is. But the magazine's repeated blunders under the Lowry regime -- remember, it was Lowry's NR which deemed Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" deserving of a cover story and later gave Dreher his own separate blog to promote that ridiculous philosophical cul-de-sac -- have become an embarrassment.

One hesitates to speculate on who the proper replacement for Lowry would be, especially since howls of fury would erupt at the mere mention of Jonah Goldberg. Howling aside, Goldberg is far more intelligent than Lowry, and at least has something of the basic virile pugnacity that Lowry so conspicuously lacks. Goldberg has in the past committed errors of his own, but in the current crisis his ferocity on the attack would certainly be a change in the right direction.

As I said, however, one hesitates to speculate about these things, and I'm sure that the moment I hit the "publish" button, an online lynch mob will descend into the comments, denouncing me for even suggesting Goldberg for the gig, telling me what ideological heresies and political deviations I have thereby endorsed.

Before I'm strung up, however, let me point out that we are not proposing to elect a beau ideal of conservatism, but merely replacing Rich Lowry. And it would be hard to imagine any replacement actually being worse.

OK, Fred Barnes would definitely be worse, but . . . why quibble?

Whatever the facts about Obama's birth, the most important fact is that Lowry is a clueless son of a bitch.

Pardon my French.

(P.S.: Programming note -- The weekly FMJRA Rule 2 round-up will probably be late this week. I got a frantic e-mail late Friday from Smitty, saying he'd missed a flight at O'Hare, thus derailing his schedule and leaving him off-the-grid before the thing was complete. Will try to get it online at some point this afternoon. We appreciate your patience.)

UPDATE 2 p.m. SATURDAY:Apologizing again for the continued delay in the FMJRA, but without the Porsche Man's key, I can't get his legendary TechnoratiBots to function, and we must await Mr. Smith's return to give our bloggy friends the obligatory courtesy prescribed by everyone's favorite Gunnery Sergeant. (To paraphrase: If you link them, they will come. But better late than never, as they say.)

Meanwhile, in a not-entirely-unrelated development, CIA Director Leon Panetta tries to tell the Left to drop their obsessive crusade to expose the eeeevil deeds of the Langley Spook Shop. Or, as one of Panetta's former bosses once famously said, "Better put some ice on that."

Of course, the Left will not listen to Panetta's wise counsel, any more than some of the Birthers who have infested Free Republic will let go of their own idee fixe.

The point that some obstreporous knuckleheads apparently cannot comprehend, and I must again refer everyone to Philip Klein's argument, is this: Whatever the True Facts may be -- e.g., the intriguing theory that Obama was conceived in Jakarta, sired by Beelzebub and subsequently whelped by a Kenyan jackal -- the quixotic pursuit of those facts is an utterly irrelevant and arguably self-defeating waste of time for conservatives who have any real talent that might be applied to the serious task of halting the advance of the progressive policy agenda.

Any Birthers tempted to denounce me as a pawn or a dupe of the Establishment would be advised to consult my friends -- or even, perhaps, my enemies -- whereby they might discover that, among my many other talents and interests, I am well-known as a Friend Of The Fringe.

A Vow of Vengeance

My long habit of sympathy to the marginal and excluded is probably a result of my having been one of the last of a formerly plentiful breed, the Sam Nunn Democrats.

Man, talk about life on the fringe! To have been a common-sense sort of Democrat in 1988, the year the Democratic Party's nominee decided to campaign not for the presidency of the United States, but for the presidency of the ACLU, is to learn a cruel lesson in the politics of marginalization.

Stubborn then as always, I hung on doggedly as late as 1994 until finally President Clinton -- whose bumper sticker adorned my old Chevy Impala during the '92 campaign -- signed into law that abomination I call The Great Gun Grab of '94. (What part of "From My Cold Dead Hands" is so hard to understand, Bill?)

I have been a professional journalist since 1986 and spent the early years of my newspaper career covering sports, education and many other ordinary matters no more political than a local school-board election. My career as a conservative journalist since the mid-199s, however, can be accurately understood only in light of Clintonian betrayal.

Nothing less than the complete destruction of the Democrats coudl ever sate my desire for revenge on those backstabbing bastards. I will not be satisfied until the Democratic Party exists only in the pages of history books.

Not until we have completed that noble mission shall we take up the business of annihilating whatever vestiges of Voinovichism might still persist.

And you, Dear Birther Kook, are getting between me and my revenge. If you think you're the first, you're wrong. You are the inheritor of a long and sorry legacy of time-wasting triviality, of a sort that I encountered as soon as I swore my oath of vengeance against the Democrats.

All Roads Lead to Mena

Hey, pal, ever heard of Mena Airport in Arkansas? You know, the place where Columbian drug lords imported tons of coke to supply the habits of Gov. Clinton and/or his brother Roger and/or the hordes of nymphomaniac coke whores who flocked to the cocaine-fueled orgies in Hot Springs with Bill, Roger, Vince and Hillary.

Ah, yes, Sodom in the Ozarks! The Hillbilly Gomorrah! A sinister cabal of drugs, sex, payoffs and bribery. Woe unto the Arkansan, however prominent or obscure, who posed a threat to the Mena-Medellin Connection! An army of amateur researchers devoted themselves to demonstrating conclusively -- with True Facts[TM]-- that every suspiciously unexplained death in Arkansas from 1978 to 1992 was attributable to the sinister operations of the murderous Mena Mafia.

Alas, despite accumulating mountains of True Facts[TM], the Mena-obsessed Kook Corps was frustrated in its ambitions. Why? Because the Clintons' personal private army of assassins finally rubbed out Vince Foster, a/k/a, The Man Who Knew Too Much.

As soon as the Park Police found Foster's corpse, the Kooks Corps lost all interest in those tales of two Arkansas boys on bicycles slain in the late '80s because they inadvertantly stumbled onto the scene of Hillary's hot-tub rendezvous with Janet Reno -- excuse me if I don't recall all the details of that well-documented True Fact[TM] -- and set out to prove the falsehood of that transparently bogus "Vince Foster Suicide" cover story. (The media, then as now, was oblivious or perhaps even part of The Conspiracy Of Silence.)

But seriously, folks: Have we learned nothing from all that Mena Airport/Vince Foster idiocy?

The truly sad thing is that, underneath all the hype and hysteria, there was the stuff of genuine scandal. Yes, one could say that when the Clinton gang ruled in Little Rock, there seemed to be a suspicious indifference to certain criminal activity in Arkansas. And yes, though all evidence suggests Vince Foster's death was a suicide, it was a despair produced by the blundering amateurism of the Clinton White House in 1993, and by Hillary Clinton's inability or unwillingness to understand that non-cooperation with federal investigators is both bad policy and bad politics.

However, efforts of serious journalists and legitimate conservative activists to document and publicize the genuine Team Clinton scandals were constantly being obscured by the clouds of chaff scattered everywhere by the Kook Corps.

Team Clinton quickly learned, and eventually developed into a science, a reliable method of de-scandalization. They could scare MSM reporters away from almost any potential scandal, you see, by insinuating that it was just another one of those fact-challenged fringe fodder scams, like the various overblown Clinton "exposés" peddled byKook Corps hucksters circa 1993-96.

You Might Be a Kook If . . .

Let me give you Birther people a clue: You are being scammed by cheapjack flim-flam artists no less repulsive than those maggots who made handsome sums pushing the "fire-can't-melt-steel" 9/11 conspiracy theories. The minute you see somebody promoting themselves as an "expert" on such stuff -- UFOs, ghosts, the JFK assassionation, no-money-down real estate -- you need to apply some good old-fashioned common-sense skepticism: "What's in it for him?"

Next thing you know, your crackpot self-anointed "expert" will be hustling a crudely-made video or badly written self-published book, and you'll find yourself attending a "national conference." In a meeting room at a hotel, you and a few dozen or maybe even a few hundred of your kooky kindred spirits will convene. There will be panel discussions, lectures and debates. There will be tables with books, magazines, pamphlets, T-shirts and bumper stickers for sale. There will be kook organizations eager to sign you up for their newsletters and Action Updates.

God Bless America, where citizens have the right to assemble peaceably, even if their main grievance is the high price of heavy-duty alumimum foil for their hats. Freedom means nothing if it does not include the freedom of fools to waste their time and squander their money listening to idiotic lectures on "The Lost Secrets of Atlantis" or homeopathic herbal miracle cures, and to support such fringe political causes as Dennis Kucinich For President.

Caveat emptor, as the Romans said, the best English translation of which is, "Never give a sucker an even break."

You Birthers think you're so much smarter than everybody else, right? So how come you never ask that basic cynic's question: "What's in it for him?"

The Cynicism Deficit

In the case of the Kucinich For President crusade, the final haul was precisely calculated as $5.5 million and the affections of an astonishingly beautiful redhead. Those low-level idiots who worked at starvation wages -- or worse yet, volunteered -- on the Kucinich campaign were a special kind of stupid, a stupidity that is unfortunately common among some grassroots conservatives who suffer from similar deficits of cynicism.

Before any conservative sheds a tear of pity for the Kucinich moonbat brigades, let us pause to ask ourselves what was the fate of the sincere grassroots Republican who volunteered to work the phone banks, or perhaps even donated $20 of their hard-earned income, to such bogus activities as the 1996 Dole For President juggernaut.

There are McMansions in Loudon County, Virginia, occupied by the overpaid campaign operatives -- no need to name names -- who shrewdly spotted the potential of Dole's doomed venture as a lucrative get-rich-quick scheme. Trust me, there are plenty of Republican political operatives whose motto might as well be, Caveat emptor (or its English equivalent).

Well, there are secrets a reporter learns that he can never publicly divulge, but one secret I must share: You will never accomplish anything useful in politics until you learn to tell the difference between a Cause and a Scam.

"But wait a minute!" you say. "Nobody's selling me anything. I'm doing this because I sincerely believe the True Facts[TM] are of vital political importance."

There is no fool like a volunteer fool.

So you Birthers just keep it up with your political Lamaze classes ("push! push! push!") and intelligent people who are serious about effectively opposing the Obama agenda will do the only sensible thing: Ignore the living shit out of you.