Great Moments in Lefty Consistency

by Smitty

The first comment on the earlier "Profile in Cowardice" post bears promotion to a full post, in light of the diabolical nature of things.

[A Nebraskan Commenter] said...
'cuse me
I'm a Nebraskan and you need to know two things:
1. We know he's a Democrat. We voted for him and have been voting for him for years.

Indeed. Incumbency in the last century makes a Vasa of our ship of state. Emphasis mine here:

2. We don't appreciate outsiders tell us how to think or how our senators ought to vote.
Finally, why do republicans continue to flirt with him when you know he's a democrat?

This is where I achieve orbit. The system is broken. The practical point is that we've a small number of people wielding vast power over others. Tyranny. For now, the tyranny is disguised as 2k+ page bills that are rushed through, literally in the dead of night. As government grows, the rule of law will gradually be discarded, as was seen so blatantly last week with Sanders' amendment.

So, you have conscious people arguing against this decadence. The 10th Amendment, now merely an icon to chastity that is venerated as foreplay for new adventures in sodomy, ought to make this entire argument about health care moot. The Federal government has no business whatsoever, per the Constitution, dealing with individual citizens. Sure, interstate commerce regulation for medications. Fine, running an FDA: there are economies of scale to achieve, without violating privacy. And we're all going to get violated, one way or another.

Ah, but your Senator Nelson is telling us what we'll pay. Your Senator's vote is going to have direct impact on me, over here in VA. You sound downright conservative there, getting all puffy about your state's rights and stuff. But did you follow the Big Government link above, and see what your Senator is perpetrating on the rest of the country? Do you really think that, for all Nelson's whoredom, this special treatment isn't going to get thrown under the bus Real Soon Now?

Oh, and here is your sorry punchline:

He's betrayed no one. He acts for us - not you.

He, and both of my local pieces of work, Warner and Webb, have betrayed the whole lousy country. They act for themselves. If you think he's acting for you, or for Nebraska in any long-term useful way, then all I can say is that your glasses are a fetching shade of rose. "not" and "you" are the only accurate words in your entire reply, sir.

I don't think any of the whining from the left about the contents of the bill is meaningful. The precedent is set, once this is signed. Our brave new Orwellian version of Logan's Run beckons. Cue Young4Eyes to come in and call me paranoid. Of course it will be implemented over time: I'm giving you the decades-out view. But Chekov's Law is correct. The century-long project to demolish our country history nears completion. And we still have these silly squawks from Nebraska that we shouldn't tell their Senators how think, when those Senators are cheerfully dictating to us. You stay beautiful, lefties.

And, as I hate leaving a post on a down note, here is a parting shot:

Strange noise on the Left

A blogger named Suzi Gablik gets frosted by anti-war criticism of President Obama and writes a post called "Why I'm Not a Liberal Anymore":

All I know is that I can hardly stand reading the Huffington Post these days. The stuff coming out of "progressive" mouths is all too often on a par with Glenn Beck's abusive rants . . .
I think the straw that broke this camel's back was an horrendously ugly and smearing essay Christian Parenti wrote last week, which was published on the Huffington Post after Obama's Afghanistan speech. . . .

The essay in question was standard issue anti-war leftist discourse, no different from anything any peacenik has said about U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam. Because its target is a Democratic president, however, Gablik decides to excommunicate herself from liberalism.

While not so naive as to believe in Peace Through Pacifism, I nevertheless admire the peacenik consistency of those on the Left who, like Parenti, don't allow themselves to be bamboozled by appeals to partisan unity or stunned into silence by the haloed awesomeness of Obama.

Is there anything in Gablik to be admired? Not really. She slams Beck for "abusive rants," yet what did she write last October?

Palin's cultivated malice almost makes the KKK look untutored.

So much for consistency. And who exactly is Gablik? An art critic with a penchant for grandiose abstraction:

A new paradigm of an engaged, participatory and socially relevant art is emerging . . .
Within the modernist paradigm under which I grew up, art has been typically understood as a collection of prestigious objects, existing in museums and galleries, disconnected from ordinary life and action. . . .
Many of the beliefs about art that our culture subscribes to, that the problems of art are purely aesthetic and that art will never change the world, are beliefs that have diminished the capacity of artists for constructive thought and action. . . .
As many artists shift their work arena from the studio to the more public contexts of political, social, and environmental life, we are all being called, in our understanding of what art is, to move beyond the mode of disinterested contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged. . . .

Verbose nothingness, the familiar incantation of buzzwords -- "paradigm," "socially relevant," "participatory" -- that function primarily as signifiers of membership in the intellectual ranks. And now, because some liberal critics have turned their guns on Obama, she decides that HuffPo is coterminous with liberalism, and therefore she is not liberal.

Remember this next time somebody tells you conservatives are anti-intellectual morons.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

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

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

Fort Hood Massacre: Jeffrey Goldberg on the See-No-Evil elite

When "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" strikes, there is a curious incuriosity in some quarters:

A consensus seems to have formed here at The Atlantic that the Ft. Hood massacre means not very much at all. Megan McArdle writes that "there is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this." James Fallows says: "The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine?" . . .
It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell "Allahu Akbar" while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. . . .

The whistling-past-the-mass-graveyard reaction Goldberg discerns is quite striking among the opinion elite, if we contrast it to their reactions in other cases.

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about "Southern populist terrorism" in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as "nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war," demonstrating how "the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult"?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their "nothing to see here" reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming "Allahu Akbar" while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

So instead of a search for meaning, the elite engage in a search for non-meaning. The Fort Hood killer attended a radical mosque? Meaningless!

What is most amusing is how the elite assume that the rest of us are so stupid as not to notice the pattern.

UPDATE: Phyllis Chesler observed Saturday:

Quickly, reflexively, without waiting for more of the facts to emerge, the mainstream print media has already decided that Major Hasan is a tormented “innocent” who must have snapped under alleged conditions of extreme provocation and humiliation. The mainstream media assures people that there is no such thing as jihad; that the Ft. Hood massacre has nothing to do with Islam or with violent jihad; that if there are any victims here, it is not the dead and wounded soldiers . . . but the man accused of their mass murders.

Michelle Malkin wonders, "Why do we have to read British papers to get Ft. Hood jihadist news?!" Meanwhile, Donald Douglas notices that anyone who thinks Islam had anything to do with the Fort Hood massacre has been declared guilty of anti-Muslim "bigotry."

'Worked up into a fine froth'? LGF's rage vs. the cheerful laugher of conservatives

Over at the Unlinkable Land of Liberal Lizards, Charles Johnson sneered at the reaction to Obama's Nobel Prize for Nothing, prompting another spectacularly laughable act of sycophantic fellatio by the aptly named Sharmuta:

Posted in: A Peace Prize for the President
»30 Sharmuta
10/09/2009 8:43:23 am
Of course, Republican pundits are worked up into a fine froth over it.
Certainly rains on their Olympic Failure celebration.That was short lived. Perhaps it's karma.

Notice the liberal chop-logic involved here:

• Obama fails to win the Olympics;
• Conservatives laugh;

Ergo . . .

• Conservatives are hateful.

Input different data into the LGF Chop-Logic Dispenser, and still it produces the same conclusion:

• The Nobel committee bestows an unmerited laurel on the eminently unaccomplished novice;
• Conservatives laugh;

Ergo . .

• Conservatives are hateful.

The liberal argument is not actually an argument, but rather an unsupported assertion and a demand: "Liberalism is good! Stop laughing, you haters!"

Their anti-logic begins with the conclusion and accepts any "evidence" to prove it, ignoring all contrary evidence nor even bothering to test the alternative hypothesis: Liberalism is always, predictably, 100% wrong.

Why is the alternative hypothesis rejected? Because it's so simple that even the undistinguished graduate of a third-tier state university can understand and explain it. The truth being apparent to any honest mind, the elitists seek an explanation so complex that their credentialed expertise is required to articulate it.

Whether you call it "socialism," "liberalism" or "progressivism," the worldview of the Left -- The Vision of the Anointed, as Thomas Sowell so brilliantly described it -- has always appealed to the self-congratulatory impulses of the intelligentsia. The complexity of this worldview, constantly calling into service their verbose specialty ("Well, of course the policy hasn't had its desired result, however . . ."), makes them necessary and therefore flatters their sense of their own importance and superiority.

Friedrich Hayek -- who won the Nobel Prize before it had begun the process of progressive political devaluation -- examined this phenonomenon in "The Intellectuals and Socialism":

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. It is through their influence on him and on his choice of opinions on particular issues that the power of ideas for good and evil grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness. As he knows little about the particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world.

Read the whole thing (also available in PDF). Yet Hayek only expended 7,628 words on this subject, hardly exhausting its vast potential. Criticism of this phenomenon could fill endless volumes, for every day some liberal elitist makes some new error in logic that is inevitably praised by all the bien-pensants (membership in the Community Of The Well-Meaning And Enlightened being the essential object of the intellectual's pronouncements).

Furthermore, Hayek wrote that essay in 1949 and died in 1992, so he never had the opportunity to apply his insights to the interesting phenomenon of Little Green Footballs. Charles Johnson jumped on the post-9/11 GWOT bandwagon in 2001, rode it as long as it suited him until, in Octbober 2007, he began defaming anti-jihad activists like Pamela Geller.

Yet Johnson's primary loyalty has always been to that "picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced." So long as Bush and the GOP were riding high, Johnson dishonestly concealed or suppressed his contempt for the traditionalist tendencies of Geller and other conservatives.

Once it became apparent that Bushism had run its course, however, Johnson discarded his selfish pretense and opened fire on an erstwhile ally. Geller was a target of opportunity. She didn't have Sean Hannity's personal cell-phone number in her speed-dial, and her sharp-elbowed New York attitude meant that she had made a few enemies on the Right. Thus, when Mad King Charles began accusing Geller and others of sympathy for "Euro-fascism," he did so with the cynical calculation that no one important would object, at least not publicly.

One by one, Johnson targeted Geller's defenders (Richard Miniter, Diana West, et cetera) who were successively thrown under the Little Green Bus, their reputations besmirched by his dishonest assertion that they were blind to the totalitaritarian tendencies of European conservatives. Of course, these tendencies were apparent only to Charles Johnson and his sycophants, who began to wave the Dreaded Banning Stick at anyone who doubted that Gates of Vienna was plotting a 21st-century Beer Hall Putsch or that Vlaams Belang was a greater threat to American security than Al Qaeda.

Once the 2008 election had passed -- in fact, the day after Election Day -- Mad King Charles resumed his Anti-Geller Inquisition with new zeal, and I took alarm. From that moment, I became a target on the LGF radar, much like Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement, until the 9/12 convergence gave Johnson an excuse to denounce Stephen Green (?!) as a crypto-fascist sympathizer.

LGF's drain-circling downward spiral into full-blown Sullivanesque parody has relentlessly proceeded until there is no distinction between Mad King Charles and Media Matters ("Right-wing media root against America ... again: Media conservatives cheer when America loses, fume when it wins").

Some commenters have speculated that Johnson is now on the Soros gravy train, a conspiratorial suspicion that violates Occam's Razor. Johnson surely isn't a sellout, for this would mean that he had been bribed to betray some important principle or to dishonor some obligation of loyalty.

Yet no one has ever offered evidence that Charles Foster Johnson ever had any principle or honor, and or that he was ever loyal to anyone but himself. He has been consistently vicious and selfish, and this only escaped notice so long as it served Johnson's interests to deceive those whose assistance he sought in advancing his own self-aggrandizing agenda.

So now conservatives laugh at Johnson's new idol, Obama, and he responds by sneering at Red State's Erick Erickson and others whose favor he once so earnestly elicited. Certainly, I took no part in the "fine froth," as I was busy coping with Vonda and the cable company, my only response to the subject being a sarcastic jest. So far as I expressed any irritation, it was directed at Allah (who hates me) and Erik Telford (who has repeatedly snubbed me).

Yet Mad King Charles, guided by his self-congratulatory commitment to all things "modern or advanced," projects his own rage onto the former friends whose backs are now so thickly studded with his knives.

How shall we react to Obama's Nobel Prize for Nothing? Nonsensible Shoes suggests:

Ignore it, it's a distraction, just like the IOC vote down of Chicago. . . . [W]ho cares if 5 Norwegians think President Obama is a conduit for peace?

Indeed. And yet we can thank those Norwegian fools for this gift and the laughter it has inspired.

Janeane Garofalo: So infinitely superior to you, she doesn't even need evidence

Behold, the authoritative power of liberal assertion:

It's obvious to anybody who has eyes in this country that tea-baggers, the 9-12ers, these separatist groups that pretend that it's about policy – they are clearly white-identity movements. They're clearly white power movements. What they don't like about the President is that he's black – or half black (applause) – and they, what also is shocking is that people keep pretending that that's not really the case with these people.
I'm not talking about people that do have problems with his policies, that's fine. But these people, who are also being led by the Glenn Becks, the Michelle Bachmans, the Rush Limbows [presumably Limbaugh], whomever, they are no different than any other white identify movement that's part of our history. This has been going on since the founding of this country that white power movements have tried to establish themselves and hold onto power.

See? "It's so obvious to anybody" that actual evidence to support her assertions is unnecessary. Conservative Republicans were equally opposed to liberal policies promoted by Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- who were both white Southern males -- so the fundamental basis of Garofalo's argument is self-evidently unsound.

Yet notice how she pre-emptively negates any possibility of rational disagreement. If you dispute her assertion, then you're clearly one of those "people [who] keep pretending that that's not really the case" -- you're deluded, in denial, or engaged in deceit.

She claims she is "not talking about people that do have problems with [Obama's] policies," yet nowhere does she offer genuine evidence that anything other than policy disagreements inspire Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachmann to oppose Obama.

Exactly where does Garofalo derive her psychic mind-reading insights -- her expertise -- about the motives of people she's never met? Ah! The mere fact that you would ask such a question can only mean one thing . . .

Remember: There are five A's in raaaaacism!

Nanny State vs. Actual Nannies

Michigan cracks down on black-market babysitting:

MIDDLEVILLE, Mich. (WZZM) - A West Michigan woman says the state is threatening her with fines and possibly jail time for babysitting her neighbors' children.
Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.
The Department of Human Services received a complaint that Snyder was operating an illegal child care home. DHS contacted Snyder and told her to get licensed, stop watching her neighbors' kids, or face the consequences.
"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.
Mindy Rose, who leaves her 5-year-old with Snyder, agrees. "She's a friend... I trust her."
State Representative Brian Calley is drafting legislation that would exempt people who agree to care for non-dependent children from daycare rules as long as they're not engaged in a business.
"We have babysitting police running around this state violating people, threatening to put them in jail or fine them $1,000 for helping their neighbor (that) is truly outrageous" says Rep. Calley.

Big Brother is watching your babysitter! The Imperial state will tolerate no rivals to its operation.

Via Memeorandum. More at Stop the ACLU.

Fritz hears a dog-whistle: 'Raaaaacism!'

Evoking Mondale's painful memories of the bitter civil-rights struggle in Minnesota:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale joined his old boss Jimmy Carter Wednesday, arguing that some of the opposition to President Obama's agenda is fueled by racial animus. . . .
"I don't like saying it," Mondale continued. "Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years ... I know that some of that must still be around."
"I don't want to pick a person, say, he's a racist, but I do think the way they're piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it," he said. "I think I see an edge in them that's a little bit different and a little harsher than I've seen in other times."

Also, some opposition to George W. Bush was motivated by prejudice against rich Texas Republicans.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Media Matters attacks . . . MSNBC?

Why would one crooked left-wing smear operation attack another crooked left-wing smear operation?

Two words: Pat Buchanan. (That's a post at the personal blog of Media Matters employee Oliver Willis, who spent hours Twittering his attacks on Buchanan.)

Notice that the Left was OK with Pat being on MSNBC as an anti-war Republican during the Bush years. But now that Buchanan is criticizing Obama . . . eh, not so much.

Buchanan's views about the subjects for which Media Matters now denounces him haven't changed at all. All that has changed is the tactical objectives of the Left, whose No. 1 goal now is to silence all critics of Obama.

The Left has always been more dangerous to its "friends" than to its enemies. Trotsky was a comrade-in-good-standing until he began to became a threat to Stalin's leadership. Try to make friends with the Left, and next thing you know, somebody puts an ice-ax through your skull.

Of course, I'll defend Buchanan against these leftist vermin, but there is a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is this:

When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
'Til your last dyin' day.

No conservative should ever believe that there is anything to be gained by making friends with the Left.

Shocker! South Carolinian is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans!

Crooks and Liars is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that these people like Joe Wilson haven't been exterminated yet.

When I spoke at the SCV camp in Rome, Ga., in June, they paid my travel and also paid my membership dues . . .

The SCV is a hereditary association, the only requirement of which is that you have an ancestor served honorably in the Confederate military. My great-grandfather, Winston Wood Bolt, was an illiterate farmboy who served as a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry Regiment.

Private Bolt was captured July 1, 1863, in the opening clash of the Battle of Gettysburg -- when the right flank of Brig. Gen. J.J. Archer's brigade was turned by the Union's famous Iron Brigade -- and he spent the next two years in the Fort Delaware prisoner of war camp.

Exactly why Neiwert is employing eliminationist rhetoric against Southerners, I don't know . . .

Discovering 'The Peter Brimelow Rule'

Being linked by the New York Times and the New Republic? Kinda cool. Nebulous insinuations of anti-Semitism? Not so much:

You never discover the fine-print rules of American public discourse until you're accused of violating them. Generally speaking, liberals ignore cultural discourse among conservatives. Only when you discuss potentially sensitive topics in such a way as to waive your Miranda-warning right to remain silent -- "Anything you say can and will be used against you by the New York Times" -- will your contributions to the discourse be wrenched out of context as proof of your malevolent intent. At some point, you'd think I might cease to be amazed by this distinctive habit of liberals, but they keep coming up with innovative new variatons on their otherwise predictable idiocy . . .

Read the whole thing, you evil right-wing crypto-fascists! And please, somebody hit the tip jar -- brilliance like this has got to be worth something to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Tristero, you ignorant twerp

You can judge an idiot by the authorities he cites:

I thought they were serious people interested in a genuine meeting of the minds. I was dying to have useful conversations with intelligent conservatives, who knew how to write and also knew how to debate.
It has never happened. It will never happen with the Robert Stacy McCains of the world, for they are not what we think of as conservatives. They are probably best described as part of the group that flirts with what David Neiwert calls eliminationists and eliminationist ideas . . .

"Eliminationist" being a perjorative description of an outcome in domestic politics similar to the triumph over the Soviet Union, which collapsed from the weight of its own inherent contradictions, once Ronald Reagan resolved to call evil by its right name. To the extent that a conservatism that genuinely succeeds -- rallying a majority to a decisive rejection of liberalism -- would "eliminate" the political viability of its philosophical antithesis, then the term is accurate.

The problem of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was that it sought to co-opt liberal policy ideas -- No Child Left Behind and Medicare prescription drugs being the most significant examples -- as a sort of pre-emptive compromise. This had the opposite of its promised political effect, since it involved a "conservative" paying rhetorical tribute to policy ideas that were the opposite of conservative.

If, as we were led to believe in the case of NCLB, experts in Washington have all the answers to assuring educational excellence, then why not give the federal government complete control of American schools? The fundamental premises of NCLB therefore being antithetical to any recognized meaning of "conservative" (in its American sense, as opposed to some universalist philosophical "conservatism" detached from the constitutional principles of the Founding), then the "success" of NCLB would have had the effect of invalidating basic conservative principles.

Of course, NCLB has been an abject failure, producing none of the promised policy benefits in terms of educational improvement, while spectacularly failing to "take away an issue" from the Democrats, which was its aim as political "strategery." By attempting to pass off this Big Government boondoggle as "conservative," Bush succeeded only in confusing people about the meaning of conservatism.

Karl Rove envisioned a "permanent Republican majority" to be obtained in a "center-right" nation by this sort of unprincipled "triangulation," blurring the edges of partisan loyalty by seeking compromise between right and wrong, offering voters a Laodicean blend of truth and error.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it appeared as if Rove and the Republicans might actually achieve this dubious objective. With the economy buoyed by tax cuts -- the one inarguably conservative policy that President Bush implemented-- and with attention focused on national security issues, the GOP stunned the Democrats in the 2002 midterms and handily dispatched John Kerry in 2004.

Ah, but fatal hubris had already taken hold, and in the next two elections, the Republicans who had sowed the wind reaped the whirlwind. Now, in 2009, the liberals stand triumphant, and we see many in the GOP arguing for a "pragmatism" even less principled than the bankrupt politics that have led the party of Reagan to a low ebb of influence it has not seen since 1977, or perhaps even 1965.

"Eliminationist," bah! As if Dave Neiwert wouldn't eliminate conservatives if he could. Let us return to the vacuous arguments of Tristero:

Whatever you call them, they hate liberalism with a passion. And by "liberalism" I mean liberalism as in the Enlightenment and the American Founders such as the Jefferson of the Declaration and the letter to the Danbury Baptists. These are people who are still fighting the battles lost by the Federalists in the earliest days of the United States.

What Tristero knows about the Founders is as a thimble to my ocean -- to accuse me of siding with the Federalists (e.g., Hamilton, Adams) rather than with the authors of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798! Tristero could more accurately accuse me of sympathy with the Anti-Federalists (e.g., James Mason and Patrick Henry) who opposed ratification of the Constitution on the grounds that the central govenrment created was insufficiently limited, and would ultimately prove hostile to liberty.

Tristero knows even less about the ratification debates than he knows about Jefferson. Years ago, while visiting a girl in Charlottesville, I was able to spend a day at Monticello and found myself standing before Jefferson's grave, pondering that pregnant riddle: Why would a man who had twice been elected president, rather than to list such an honor on his tombstone, instead command that it should note his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom?

This question long burdened my mind, and I studied that document intently over the years so that I might almost cite by memory the key passage:

[T]hat to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical . . .

Intimately familiar with the text, I am also well-versed in the historical background of abuses caused by the establishment of religion, abuses which Jefferson sought to spare his fellow Virginians. But "establishment of religion" does not mean what Tristero and his fellow liberals have been indoctrinated to believe it means. People who file federal lawsuits, claiming their "civil rights" have been violated if a pastor is invited to say an invocation over the public-address system before the start of a high school football game, are not friends of liberty but its worst enemies.

The problem of the "Naked Public Square" -- the cultural vacuum carved out in our society by the advance of militant secularism -- is far from the contemplations of a Tristero, content as he is to think in the superificially convenient categories furnished to him by his indoctrinators.

Accept these prefabricated categories and the selective narratives provided to you by your professors, and you are mentally enslaved, incapable of forming genuinely independent conclusions. There is an entire universe of facts you've never encountered, yet your conception of your self as "educated" serves to stifle any sense that you ought to inquire further. These, you see, are the liberals who don't get the irony of their "Question Authority" bumper stickers!

Like so many other liberals, Tristero you possess the arrogance of ignorance, presuming that no one can possibly know facts that you do not. Ergo, if anyone does not share your opinions, this must somehow signify their intellectual and moral inferiority to you, Tristero, who can't even accurately describe the political landscrape of your own country during the life of Jefferson.

Facts you do not know, Tristero? That I am an ex-Democrat, perhaps? That if I had been content to accept prefabricated ideas, I might still be a Democrat? You do not know me, and you don't know what I know and yet, in your vast ignorance, you are going to lecture me about the Founders? Make. Me. Laugh.

And now, Tristero, to your conclusion:

I'll simply conclude by repeating what so many of us have said: our political discourse is deeply askew. Norman Podhoretz's and Robert Stacy McCain's ideas would have only a marginal impact and distribution in a healthy discourse. Instead, NoPod, a truly troubled soul, is thought a serious intellectual, and the likes of McCain are heard everyday in the drooling rants of Beck and other clowns. They can't be ignored, but they also can't be engaged. Believe me, I tried. I learned.
Finally, don't be fooled if, like Huckabee or Gingrich, they seem personable. They have a long history of acting on their hate and rage. These are ugly, ugly people.

Well, you may be the first liberal ever to describe Newt Gingrich as "personable," a term that few Republicans of my acquaintance would apply to the former Speaker. As to the "drooling rants of Beck" -- do you perhaps mean the investigative reporting that led to the recent resignation fo Van Jones?

And really, why would anyone think that -- compared to you, Tristero -- Norman Podhoretz is a "serious intellectual"? He only spent three decades as editor of Commentary, one of the nation's most influential monthly journals. His most recent book is, what, his 11th? He was a student of Trilling, he knew Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, to say nothing of his acquaintance with such historically significant figures as Ronald Reagan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

That you should sneer at me, Tristero, is not in the least surprising, but to condescend to Norman Podhoretz as a "troubled soul" -- well, no one can say that your observations about "drooling rants" from "clowns" lack for authenticity, as you examine the subject of your expertise every time you look in a mirror.

Conservatives and their "long history of acting on . . . hate and rage"? That's hard to do when we're laughing our asses off at the likes of you.

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.

Is 'Liberal Idiot' Redundant?

Late Sunday, I was searching for a blog post that Jennifer Rubin wrote at Commentary about the Van Jones resignation. I had seen it at Ed Driscoll's blog and quoted it early Sunday morning. Then one of the commenters noted that the link had gone dead. Apparently -- for reasons unknown -- the Rubin post had been deleted.

While searching for that post, however, I noticed that Commentary had a symposium about Norman Podhoretz's new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? I skimmed over it, found it interesting and did a post with excerpts of the symposium, adding my own thoughts on the subject.

Monday evening, habitually checking SiteMeter, I discovered that I had been linked by the liberal Balloon Juice blog which ridiculously insinuated . . . well, something:

Maybe I’m too touchy about this, but I’m profoundly disturbed by the idea of relocating intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals, so they can learn about real values. Isn’t that exactly what Stalin and Mao did? Is there any Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist idea that the American right hasn’t embraced.

This is the most perverse possible reading of my post, which had observed merely that:

• Modern liberalism is predominantly an urban phenomenon;
• American Jews are more likely to reside in urban areas; and
• Therefore, if conservative Jews wish to ameliorate the prevalence of liberalism among Jews, they should think about ways to encourage more Jews to live in small towns in the Heartland.

Exactly how Balloon Juice views this mild suggestion as "Maoist/Stalinist/Leninist" defies explanation. Then again, the liberal thought-process generally defies explanation. By contrast, conservatiive thought is easily explained:

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

The great truths are simple truths. And the great errors are liberal errors. Speaking of liberals and errors, via Memeorandum, I find that the Balloon Juice thread is linked with a Newshoggers post about Max Blumenthal's new book, quoting this from a BuzzFlash review:

"Inspired by the work of psychologist Erich Fromm, who analyzed how the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right."

Ding! Ding! Ding! Blumenthal's analysis is warmed-over cultural Marxism via the Frankfurt School:

'Cultural Marxism' and 'critical theory' are concepts developed by a group of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute, modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. . . .
[Frankfurt School theorists sought a] 'revolution' [that] would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet, subtle and slowly spreading 'cultural Marxism' which would apply to culture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modern psychological tools of Sigmund Freud. Thus, 'cultural Marxism' became a marriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a 'quiet' revolution in the United States of America . . .
The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s was set in motion and guided intellectually by the 'cultural Marxists' of the Frankfurt School -- Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and others.

Thus the discredited Marxist theories of the past are made the ideological template through which 21st-century "progressives" misunderstand the present. From atop my desk, I retrieve my yellowed and tattered old paperback edition of William F. Buckley Jr.'s Up From Liberalism (1961), from pages 78-79 of which I quote, in reference to the Frankfurt School's grandest project:

[O]ne needs no advanced degrees in clinical psychology and psychoanalytical theory in order to penetrate the fallacy of The Authoritarian Personality. Its thesis is very simply this: American conservatives (primarily members of the lower middle class) are the way they are politically because of marked tendencies to authoritarianism. The authors of the project began with the assumption that anyone who is opposed to the welfare state is likely to be "unenlightened" in his attitudes . . . These postulates are fed into a mill . . . to produce the stereotype: "the authoritarian personality."

Which is to say that Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse, et al., were recognized as transparent frauds 50 years ago, and yet we find that Fromm's smug little theory is made the inspirational basis for a "compelling narrative" -- compelling to whom? liberals, of course -- in 2009!

Remarkable, really, how the Left's erroneous presumptions haven't changed at all: If the social welfare state is synonymous with enlightenment, opponents of the welfare state must therefore be unenlightened. The only question remaining for the liberal theorist is to identify the variety of psychopathology that explains this (presumably irrational) opposition.

So it is that Max Blumenthal, who no doubt favors putting the federal government in control of America's health-care system, effectively nationalizing 1/7th of the economy, presumes to diagnose opponents of such policies as suffering from "the fear of freedom."

Well, two can play the armchair psychoanalyst game, and I hereby diagnose Max as suffering from diminished self-awareness and an underdeveloped appreciation for irony.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. When you point out how idiotically circular are the "intellectual" arguments that beguile liberals, their response is the same as it was a half-century ago. The finger is pointed at you and the furious shrieking is heard: "Fascist!"

You Might Be 'Urban Modern' If . . .

. . . you don't understand why it's controversial to have a Marxist Truther as a key White House aide:

These days, the [New York] Times doesn’t consider itself biased. Instead, it's calling itself "urban modern" . . .
[New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati wrote:] "Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology but a geographical one, the mentality of the place it is created: 21st Century Manhattan."

Insofar as "Urban Modern" isn't just another code-word for "gay" (NTTAWWT, Gerald) what does it mean?

In a previous thread, I mentioned that city people can't drive worth crap. So an inability to understand that the left lane is for fast drivers would qualify as a defining characteristic of "urban modern." Let's try a few others. You might be "urban modern" if . . .

• You graduated from a college where the yearly tuition is larger than the annual income of the doorman at your apartment building.
• You're all about "rights" mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, but don't believe the Second Amendment really means that ordinary people have the "right" to own guns.
• You actually considered moving to Connecticut to be a campaign volunteer for Ned Lamont.
• You're a woman who wears sneakers with a business suit while commuting, switching to heels after arriving at the office.
• You have ever used the phrase "social justice" in a conversation, and weren't joking.
• You make a six-figure salary, live in a rent-controlled apartment, and vote for candidates who promise to fix the "affordable housing" problem.
• You are a magazine editor named "Gerald."

Well, that's a few samples to start the list. Anyone else got suggestions?

UPDATE: Typo corrected, thanks to smart-asses in the comments.

UPDATE II: Jimmie Bise Jr. at Sundries Shack offers some good additions:

• Your definition of "crisis" is when the sushi bar down the street runs out of California Rolls.
• Even though you think people shouldn’t eat cows, you’ve never actually seen one face to face.
• You don’t know anyone whose job requires manual labor.

How do you know that Jimmie Bise isn't "urban modern"? He'd be known as Jamie, and would have a business card describing himself as an "Online Communications Strategist."

Oh, and as for sushi, I believe it was the late Lewis Grizzard who said, "Raw fish and seaweed? Where I come from, we call that bait." (The last time anyone saw an "urban modern" near Moreland, Ga., it was a writer from the New York Times -- sent down to cover the 1996 Atlanta Olympics -- who took a wrong turn leaving Hartsfield Airport. His rental car broke down on I-85. They towed the car to S&M Auto Repair in Newnan, which seemed to make the New York Times guy strangely happy. But then the guy made a lewd suggestion to Bubba, who was working the lube rack. The writer got his nose busted, got locked up overnight in the Coweta County Jail, and missed the men's gymnastics finals. "Urban moderns" have carefully avoided that vicinity ever since.)

On Jews and liberals

UPDATE 9/8: For the benefit of liberal blog readers, a relevant question: "Is 'Liberal Idiot' Redundant?"

ORIGINAL POST: The September issue of Commentary has a symposium in which six writers discuss Norman Podhoretz's latest book, Why Are Jews Liberals? A few excerpts:

Since nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, Podhoretz concludes that the religion of liberalism—that is, faith in the powers of government -- has replaced Judaism in the hearts of Jews. . . .
Why, asks Podhoretz, do Jews cling to this belief if it no longer serves our interest? . . .
If I may be allowed so vast a sweep of generalization, Republicans, conservatives, are the party that feels comfortably at home. We need not attach a value to this observation; you may approve of this sensibility or not. But for Jews, unease is our mother tongue. . . .
-- David Wolpe

Jewish liberalism endures, Podhoretz concludes, because turning conservative, in liberal eyes, is nothing short of heresy—or worse, apostasy.
-- Jonathan D. Sarna

Most American Jews, on the other hand, seem to have learned from an early age that to be Jewish is to be a liberal Democrat, no matter what. . . . [T]he loyalty of American Jews to the Left has been unaffected by the failure of the Left to reciprocate that loyalty.
-- Jeff Jacoby

In many cases, Podhoretz notes, left-wing politics took the place of a Judaism that felt to new American immigrants like a business suit on a beach: conspicuous, constraining, ridiculously out of place. . . . On this reading, emotional, facts-be-damned Jewish liberalism is a gravestone marking the death of religious faith.
-- David Gelernter

But my own tentative personal resolution, reached after reading Why Are Jews Liberals?, is this: I'm going to stop worrying about American Jews. They're not worth the headache. Either they’ll come to their senses or they won't, and there's not much I (or anyone else, I suspect) can do about it.
-- William Kristol

For most American Jews, the core of their Jewish identity isn't solidarity with Israel; it's rejection of Christianity. This observation may help to explain the otherwise puzzling political preferences of the Jewish community explored in Norman Podhoretz's book. Jewish voters don't embrace candidates based on their support for the state of Israel as much as they passionately oppose candidates based on their identification with Christianity -- especially the fervent evangelicalism of the dreaded "Christian Right."
-- Michael Medved

The order of the symposiasts has been re-arranged to allow Medved to have the last word for a reason: He's nailed it.

The demonization of the "Religious Right" was a project developed by Norman Lear and others during the Reagan era, after Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority played such a key role in the 1980 election, and this theme has defined the politics of the Democratic Party ever since.

As a political tactic, it is both amazingly effective and fundamentally false. The Republican Party is chiefly devoted to political policies having nothing specifically to do with evangelical Christianity. Yet there is an entire industry of liberal propagandists who specialize in seeking out various outre pronouncements of "Religious Right" leaders and presenting these views as if they would become firm policy in the next Republican administration.

Sophisticates vs. the Benighted
Thus, for the past several years, we were treated to endless liberal jeremiads against "abstinence education," as if the sex-ed curriculum in public schools were the single most important issue in national politics. The propaganda purpose of this liberal campaign was to suggest to people who think of themselves as sexual sophisticates that the GOP is actively promoting ignorance.

If you wish to identify the source of the Republican Party's electoral weakness among under-30 voters, this is it -- even though, as I say, this perception of the GOP as "anti-sex" (or "pro-ignorance") is strictly a function of liberal propaganda. GOP leaders have failed to recognize the damage inflicted by this propaganda, have failed to clarify the policy issues involve and have, at times, unwittingly played to the negative stereotype of Republicans as uptight, repressed, and clueless about sex.

Depicting the "Christian Right" as an especially benighted and menacing component of the Republican Party has, as Medved notes, a particular value in discouraging Jewish Democrats from reconsidering their political loyalties. To any liberal, the conservative is always the Other. But by depicting the GOP as dominated by the "Christian Right," the Otherness of conservatism is effectively doubled -- if not, indeed, magnified exponentially.

Never mind that evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly pro-Israel and philo-Semitic. The liberal propaganda depiction of evangelicals as backward ignoramuses, taking their marching orders from a handful of TV preachers, accomplishes its intended purpose -- to evoke a distinctive cultural revulsion among Jews, and to conjure up nightmare visions of an American Kristallnacht.

Town and Country
This effect is compounded by a factor which, whether or not Podhoretz discusses it in his book, I didn't notice mentioned by the symposiasts, namely the town-and-country divide in American politics. Although the trend to suburbanization has somewhat ameliorated this generalization, most American Jews are fundamentally urban in their orientation, while most American conservatives are fundamentally rural.

Think of Reagan, riding horses and clearning brush at his ranch -- it is an image that appeals to the "country" side of the town-and-country divide, embodying as it does the antique ideal of the American frontier homesteader.

This "rugged individual" ideal, the self-sufficient property owner zealously guarding his freedom, is intrinsic to what American conservatism is all about, and it is an ideal quite alien to the urban lifestyle. The city-dweller is inherently dependent on public services. He doesn't draw his water from a well, doesn't go out with a chain-saw to supply firewood for the winter, doesn't augment the grocery budget by hunting deer or growing his vegetables.

Also, and I think this is an important point, city people can't drive worth crap. A country boy learns to drive by hot-rodding along winding backroads, often well before he's old enough for a license. Because his home is sometimes quite distant from the places where he works, shops or goes to school, the rural youth has typically driven many hundreds of miles before he turns 18.

The rural American's natural love for the internal combustion engine, and his pride in his automotive skill, has a lot to do with his active hatred of environmentalist wienies who want him to limit his fuel consumption by driving a hybrid or -- God forbid -- taking public transportation. "I drive, therefore I am" is the existential truth of the rural American, a truth that the city-dweller can never truly appreciate.

People tend to vote how they live and, despite the particular cultural differences that influence the politics of American Jews, I suspect that lifestyle has a lot to do with the persistence of liberalism in Jewish politics.

If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland, where their kids can grow up hunting, fishing and hot-rodding the backroads. A guy with a gun rack in the back window of his four-wheel drive truck may occasionally vote Democrat, but he's extremely unlikely to be an out-and-out liberal.

UPDATE 9/10: Oh, for crying out loud, now I've been linked at The New Republic and the New York Times (liberals never link me when I'm bashing RINOs, you might notice). Thanks to this publicity, I suppose that henceforth I shall be known to liberals as The Great Ruralizer.

Meanwhile, I reply to Ron Rosenbaum's Joan-Baez-Made-Me-Do-It defense of liberalism at the Hot Air Green Room. Perhaps this would not be the best place to mention the (strictly hypothetical) scenario of Israel's first Gentile prime minister, but once you poke your thumb in the eye of liberalism, it's usually best to go ahead and use both thumbs.

If anyone named Podhoretz is reading this: You're welcome for the free publicity. The liberals were politely ignoring your symposium, until The Great Ruralizer stirred things up. Feel free to hit the tip jar now.

'Punished with a baby? At your age?'

"That's terrible!"

(Conservative Funhouse via Hot Air Headlines.)

Blog Headline of the Day Week Decade

Yes, We Cannibal

Brilliant, although perhaps not as brilliant as the MoveOn.org thug who decided to take a bite out of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy:

A 65-year-old man had his finger bitten off Wednesday evening at a health care rally in Thousand Oaks . . .
About 100 protesters sponsored by MoveOn.org were having a rally supporting health care reform. A group of anti-health care reform protesters formed across the street.
A witness from the scene says a man was walking through the anti-reform group to get to the pro-reform side when he got into an altercation with the 65-year-old, who opposes health care reform.

As the headline genius Confederate Yankee says, that's clear-as-mud reporting, the gloppy stuff required by the elite journalistic insistence that ObamaCare is the sum and essence of "reform" and that anyone who opposes ObamaCare is therefore anti-reform. (Cf., "anti-choice," "anti-gay" and "anti-immigrant.")

Then again, considering that opponents of ObamaCare are "Right-Wing Terrorists," maybe the finger-biting MoveOn thug was engaged in anti-terrorism.

UPDATE: Just when you thought the arguments for ObamaCare could not possibly become more retarded, there's always Ed Schultz:

Schultz, on his Sept. 2 MSNBC program, 'The ED Show' told viewers he believed Jesus would vote for a government public option.

Michelle Malkin asks, "Where are Barry Lynn and the anti- 'theocracy' crusaders now?"

Better question: Where are Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan? Ed Schultz to be denounced as a "Christofascist Godbag" in 3, 2, 1 . . .

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was 'a special pile of human excrement'?

Frankly, I never thought of the fat drunken lecherous senior senator from Massachusetts either as "special" or particularly "human," but . . .

Andrew Breitbart Unleashes
A Torrent Of Invective
Against Sen. Ted Kennedy's
Legacy On Twitter
Early this morning, news broke that Sen. Ted Kennedy had passed away after serving in the U.S. Senate for nearly 50 years. Soon after, conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart began a sustained assault on Kennedy's memory, tweeting "Rest in Chappaquiddick."
Over the course of the next three hours, Breitbart unapologetically attacked Kennedy, calling him a "villain," "a big ass motherf@#$er," a "duplicitous bastard" and a "prick." "I'll shut my mouth for Carter. That's just politics. Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement," wrote Breitbart in one tweet.

(Note to self: Carefully study Breitbart's "Torrent Of Invective" Twitter technique. Emulate. Practice. Improve. If you can't out-invective Breitbart, go back to Mary Jo Kopechne riffs.)

What does Janeane Garofalo know about Uganda?

I'll pass over her "functionally retarded adults" slur against Tea Party protesters, and focus instead on this:

"Our media is quite happy to report on any stolen election around the world, any stolen election around the world except ours. And it's just unexamined narcissism. It's just, if you were to say this to the average American, ‘You know they steal elections in Uganda.' ‘Yeah.' ‘You know they steal elections in America.' ‘Why do you hate America?' ‘Why didn't you ask me why do you hate Uganda?'"

Having been to Uganda, having spent some time studying the history and politics of Uganda, I cannot help but wonder why Garofalo decided to pull the name "Uganda" out of a hat in this manner.

The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has done a remarkable job of establishing peace and stability for his nation in a region where peace and stability cannot be taken for granted. Museveni fought to overthrow Idi Amin and then, in the brilliant political-military campaign of 1981-86, overthrew Amin's corrupt successors. For more than two decades, Museveni's national government has sought to overcome the dangerous legacy of ethnic rivalry among Uganda's tribes, and to establish a modern economic system.

Museveni has, at times, been accused of a highhanded approach toward opponents, but when one considers the horrors of civil strife that have afflicted so many of Uganda's neighbors -- including Sudan to the north -- the overall prudence of his leadership tends rather to excuse whatever his faults or errors may be.

Given that Museveni was most recently re-elected in 2006 with 59% of the vote, I have no idea why Janeane Garofalo would pick Uganda, of all the countries in the world, as an example of stolen elections. However, if Janeane or anyone else wants to go to Uganda, my recommendation would be:

• Take British Airways -- you don't want to bother with other airlines
• Make sure you have sufficient clothing, etc., in your carry-on, as checked luggage can be delayed in delivery;
• When you get to Entebbe Airport, tell your cab driver to take you directly to the Kampala Serena Hotel, a truly world-class resort; and
• Drink only bottled water.

Or, better yet, try Uganda's excellent Bell Lager beer.