Because I'm SUPREME!

My friend Chris Muir celebrates my 50th birthday with an altogether natural joke about my growing reputation as the blogospheric Brabantio. You can click the image to see the rest.

It's a free country, and people are entitled to believe what they want. And they are even entitled to write what they want -- even if what they write is wrong. Of course, as they say, you shouldn't shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, although I don't know if the Supreme Court has yet ruled on whether you have the right to shout "miscegenation" in a crowded Alabama.

OK, there I go again -- joking about something that should only be addressed seriously, such as Rachel Maddow's dream of becoming Mrs. Jason Mattera. (Remember, Rachel: Once you've had Puerto Rican, you never go back. Just ask Suzanna Logan.)

If you're under 40, you might not believe it, but people used to be able to joke about stuff like this. Before political correctness, Mel Brooks made Blazing Saddles -- "It's twue! It's twue!" -- and there were no thought police taking down notes of who laughed at the jokes. When I was in college, we laughed at Animal House -- "Mind if we dance with your dates?" -- without realizing we were violating anyone's civil rights.

Given the choice between Mel Brooks and David Brooks, who do you trust? And would you rather watch Animal House or Michael Moore's latest flop? (Hint: Which one has a topless pillow-fight scene?)

At least since third grade, my class-clown tendency to treat everything as a set-up for a punchline has been getting me into trouble. Because I am altogether naturally so facetious and sarcastic, when I actually try to get serious, people become confused. "Uh . . . heh heh . . . you're joking, right?"

Well, as I always say, the key to success is sincerity -- once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy. The altogether natural response to accusations of prejudice is to say, "Hey, wait a minute -- some of my best friends are macacas!"

Had I been advising Sen. George Allen in 2006, that might have been his official response to the smears against him, and maybe he'd still be Senator, instead of James Webb, a notorious neo-Confederate. (NTTAWWT.)

Did anyone ever credibly suggest that George Allen was prejudiced against Indian-Americans? Does George Allen recoil in horror at being introduced to Dinesh D'Souza or Ramesh Ponnuru? Did George Allen ever support any policy that might be considered discriminatory against the many South Asian immigrants and their offspring who are now proud citizens of the Old Dominion?

The implied accusation of MacacaGate -- i.e., that Senator Allen's joking reference to Democratic activist S.R. Sidarth was evidence of prejudice -- was fundamentally false, so exactly what was accomplished by the senator's subsequently disastrous Apology Tour? (Fact: In 2007, I interviewed a leader of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who explained that he and many of his comrades enthusiastically supported Webb's campaign.)

God gives us enemies for a reason, and He chastises those He loves. Israel was enslaved by the Egyptians, conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans -- did this signify God's blessing of Israel's conquerers? God's chosen people were dispersed to the four corners of the earth after the destruction of the Temple. They were despised, oppressed and persecuted.

Had Genesis 12:3 been repealed? God forbid! For somewhere in all this misery and suffering, the Lord of Hosts had a purpose and a meaning. Yet we see through a glass, darkly, and like Job's doubting wife, many will counsel us to "curse God and die." However, we know that the very name Israel can be translated "he who overcomes."

When an inveterate joker begins to speak seriously, people become frightened: "Are you OK, McCain? Have you been getting your rest? Taking your meds?"

Don't worry, folks. I'm just fine and dandy today. As Nurse Madeleine Ochoa might say, "Affect: Bright. Mood: Expansive." It's my 50th birthday, I was denounced on "Meet the Press" Sunday and I was libeled yesterday by a syphilitic poofter. All because the Left has it in for Sarah Palin and her new bestselling memoir Going Rogue.

As my faithful accomplice Smitty has reminded us today, the occasion of his gaining co-blogger status was an event at the Heritage Foundation. Gee, I wonder what Ginny Thomas must think about all this? Do you suppose Mrs. Thomas has any reason to trust the things that liberals say about conservatives? Or do you think that perhaps Mrs. Thomas would be more inclined to trust the judgment of such of our mutual friends as Kate Obenshain, Ron Robinson and Ward Connerly?

People know me, and the people who know me will tell you one thing about me: That dude's crazy. So if worse comes to worse, I can always plead insanity.

It's my birthday -- you're welcome to hit the tip jar, you ungrateful b*stards -- and there's no need to belabor the obvious any further. However, if you'll read through Smitty's post from this morning, you'll notice the photo of my inscription on the title page of Donkey Cons. As always, below my signature, I included the citation to a Bible verse:

Seest though a man diligent in his work? He shall stand before kings, and his place shall not be among ordinary men.
-- Proverbs 22:29

Claim the promise, as they say. Step out on faith. If you doubt the promise, go to Christ Church in Philadelphia and see the grave of "Benjamin Franklin, Printer."

Shama-lama-ding-dong, baby!

Chappaquiddick, in brevis, and an exegesis of the infamous 'incident'

Right Girl sums it up:

The death of Mary Jo Kopechne was an accident, but his actions at the time of and in the weeks following the accident were beyond the pale. Poor, scared rich kid gets strings pulled to make the whole thing go away.

She's got much more, so you should read the whole thing, but in two sentences she has accurately distilled the essence of the narrative arc. Excuse me, however, for betraying my Bible-thumping roots, as I indulge in what evangelicals call exegesis of the text.

"Accident," yes. Yet when a man guzzles booze all day and then drives off a bridge, it is certainly not an unavoidable accident. The idea of Chappaquiddick as a "tragedy" whose main victim was Ted and the "Kennedy legacy" -- which is the manure load Ted's MSM hagiographers are now peddling -- is debunked by two stubborn facts pointed out yesterday in our Kopechne Day remembrances:

• Mary Jo didn't "drown," but died of asphyxiation. The passage of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption dealing with Chappaquiddick (pp. 38-43) was researched and written by my co-author Lynn Vincent, who was emotionally traumatized to discover this reality. Mary Jo did not drown, a horrific enough experience, but one which would have killed her in barely a minute. Rather, she remained alive, underwater in Teddy's Oldsmobile, breathing the oxygen trapped inside an air pocket at the rear floorboard of the upside-down car. So, while Ted walked back to the regatta party at the Martha's Vineyard cottage and tried to concoct an exculpatory cover-story (as his own cousin, Joe Gargan, later explained), Mary Jo was still alive, frantically hoping for a rescue that never came, until finally she breathed her last.
• Mary Jo Kopechne was a dedicated young liberal woman of tremendous potential. This was pointed out by Jimmie Bise's co-blogger Paula at the Sundries Shack. Mary Jo had gone to Alabama during the civil rights era, having the courage to live out her own convictions. You don't have to be a liberal to say of her that, at least, she was neither hypocrite nor a coward. Nor could anyone rightly describe Mary Jo Kopechne as a lightweight bimbo, just another bit of womanizer Ted's incidental arm candy. Had Mary Jo lived . . . Well, the women's movement was just then coming into its own, and one could easily imagine an experienced Democratic political operative (for that's what she was) enjoying a long and successful career in her own right.

However, such are the mind-fogging powers of liberal orthodoxy that not even feminists -- who, of all people, ought to be denouncing the MSM's disgusting veneration of this privileged swine, Ted Kennedy -- will grasp these key facts as the bedrock truth of what Chappaquiddick really meant.

Instead, in story after story, we see dishonest passive-voice references to this "incident." Call it an "incident" or an "accident," but at all costs, avoid describing it as vehicular manslaughter or anything else that might attribute agency and responsibility to the responsible agent, the man behind the wheel. The New Republic covered itself in shame yesterday by publishing a Kennedy remembrance by Bill Clinton's Lewinsky apologist, Sean Wilentz, which featured this classic exercise in moral idiocy:

For many years, [Ted] did not understand how the incident at Chappaquiddick in July 1969 foreclosed the possibility that he would ever succeed JFK to the presidency or fulfill the promise of RFK's presidential campaign in 1968. . . .
The disgrace of Chappaquiddick helped cost Kennedy his position as Senate Majority Whip in 1971 . . .
He also carried the weight of a collapsing marriage, as well as of the public's lingering outrage about Chappaquiddick. . . .

So, according to Wilentz, the most important thing about the "incident" was its impact on Kennedy's political prospects, which Wilentz externalizes as the responsibility of those muddleheads who constitute "the public," and whose "outrage" so unforgivingly lingered.

The passive voice of willful ignorance enables Wilentz to avert his eyes from the scene of the crime, where the declarative-sentence facts might lead to a genuinely honest and enlightened historical understanding. And yet such liberal "intellectuals" wonder why we laugh at them.

Ah, the joys of guilt by association!

So, I walk into the Reason magazine party Thursday evening and the first person who greets me is my old buddy David Weigel. "Hey, your girl got the deal!"

Eh? And then he told me that Lynn Vincent, with whom I co-authored Donkey Cons, had been signed to collaborate on Sarah Palin's book. Son of a gun, it's true, it's true, it's true.

And as we have come to expect, the usual suspects launch the usual smear attack, complete with recycled idiocies about me.

After I clocked my first million hits here, one of the things I decided to do was to write a proper "Who is" bio, and in that bio I included this:

The "racist" smear. A long, long story that began on May 9, 2000, when I published a news feature with the headline, "Researchers Say 'Watchdogs' Exaggerate Hate Group Threat." When the smears started, my bosses decided that the best response was a non-response. The smears were thus elaborated year after year on the Internet, errors compounding on lies with additions of libels and distortions, like a metastasizing cancer.
Had I been permitted to respond initially in my own defense . . . well, "if" is the largest two-letter word. Trying to unravel it all at this late date would be a waste of time and energy.
Along the way, I've discovered the amazing professional value of a bad reputation. Being notorious is not the same as being famous, but it's better than being anonymous. The harm to my career and my reputation was more than recompensed by the acquisition of virtuous character attributed to A Man Who Has The Right Enemies -- the same parasitical assassins who attack me have also attacked inter alia Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Mark Steyn, Kathy Shaidle and other worthy souls more eminent than myself.
At this point, if it pleases anyone to think of me as a neo-Confederate white supremacist xenophobic bigoted nativist hatemonger, the accusation is too delicious to deny and if anyone wants the full explanation, they can pay me for it. (I write for money.)

So there you go. Now, let me defend Donkey Cons against my friend David Weigel:

It was an uncomplicated book, its thesis being that if you compared the number of Democrats who’d committed some sort of crime and the number of Republican lawbreakers, the Democrats were, objectively, the more criminal party.

This is an underestimation of the book. It is the most comprehensive chronicle of Democratic Party corruption ever published. In Chapter 2, "Rap Sheet," Lynn took on the task of counting every serious charge of corruption or criminality involving members of Congress since 1976, and found 46 Democrats to 15 Republicans. So it's certainly true that Democrats are the more criminal party -- by a 3-to-1 margin!

Critics of the book simply couldn't get their heads around this immense disproportion. Even some conservative radio talk-show hosts who interviewed us were skeptical. Ever since Watergate, Democrats have benefitted from the notion that somehow it is the GOP that is more corrupt -- even while dozens of Democratic congressmen were either convicted of felonies or censured for ethical violations: Jim Trafficant, Mel Reynolds, Robert Torricelli, Jim Wright, Corrine Brown, Barney Frank and Alcee Hastings to name a few.

That the Democrats would win a congressional majority in 2006 based on their promise to clean up a "culture of corruption" in Washington is a testimony to how little public awareness there is of the extensive tradition of corruption in the Democratic Party, a tradition traceable in a direct line all the way back to the party's co-founder, Aaron Burr.

"Uncomplicated"? Check out Chapter 4, "The Gang's All Here," about the Democratic Party's long association with organized crime, Chapter 5, "Look For the Union Label," about labor union corruption, and Chapter 8, "Scene of the Crime," about the tragic consequences of liberal urban policy.

"Uncomplicated"? A serious accusation! Unfortunately, Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: Over at the American Spectator, I congratulate Sarah Palin on her choice:

Congratulations, Governor. If you didn't hire the best writer in the business, at least Lynn is very close to the best writer in the business. She's also got an excellent sense of humor,

Kathy Shaidle also has an excellent sense of humor. I've found a sense of humor indispensible to dealing with this kind of "scandal," because the nature of the accusation is so manifestly absurd. As I explained:

However much I sincerely admire beauty, there are few things that interest me less than who wins beauty contests. Yet in the case of Miss Prejean, we see a perfect example of the totalitarian thought-control impulse of modern liberalism, which marginalizes dissent by coercive approval: Disagreement with the liberal agenda disqualifies one from any position of social prestige, and invites the accusation of mala fides.
In the case of the liberal agenda on gay rights, those who disagree are diagnosed with “homophobia,” a mental illness apparently afflicting a majority of the electorate in 30-odd states which have approved measures prohibiting same-sex marriage. Beyond its implausibility as a psychological disorder -- conservatism as a species of insanity being a favorite theme of the Left at least since Theodor Adorno’s “scientific” study of The Authoritarian Personality -- the problem with the “homophobia” smear is that this allegedly dangerous tendency does not correlate with any actual evil.

Read the whole thing. By the way, I am still the blog king of the "Carrie Prejean nude" Google-bomb (among others of relevant interest that need not be explained here). I mean, you wouldn't want liberals to monopolize that traffic, would you? And because I'm a giver, I shared this valuable knowledge with Marie Osmond's lesbian daughter.

Je suis un bloggeur capitaliste. I'm also a "top Hayekian public intellectual." I write for money. See Rule 5.

Cheaper than a mortgage

Sean Hackbarth explains why book sales go up during recessions:

Instead of buying expensive dinners, vacations, and cars people hunker down in their homes. Things like DVDs, music, and books become relatively more valuable. Consumers see a bigger bang for their buck with something that gives them 2, 3, 4, even 10 hours of entertainment . . .
Less-expensive paperbacks are chosen over more-expensive hardcovers.

Ah, but what about less-expensive hardbacks, Sean? Did you know that as of today, you can order Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party at Amazon.com for a paltry $10.47?

Talk about about getting a "bang for your buck"! Donkey Cons has got lots of sleazy Democratic sex scandals (bang) and bribery (bucks). Ted Kennedy! Barney Frank! Alcee Hastings! And of course, everybody's favorite unindicted co-conspirator, Frank Murtha! The gang's all here ... oh, did I say "gangs"? Yeah, you'll also learn about the connection between gangsters like Lucky Luciano and the Democratic Party.

If you're concerned about inflation, unemployment and the housing crisis, what could be a more enjoyable diversion than Donkey Cons, a 228-page romp through the corrupt history of the Democratic Party?

UPDATE: Clicking over to Amazon just now, I saw one of those Amazon reviewers who slammed the book in a totally bogus manner. To wit:

Many reviewers have mentioned the book is heavily footnoted, which it is. However, if you go to the back of the book, you will discover that the book division of a tabloid magazine is one of their favorite sources.

WTF? I have no idea what this clown is talking about. Just to give you a sample of how Donkey Cons is actually sourced, let's turn to page 238 and look at the sources listed for Chapter 3:

• 1. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960
• 2. Christopher Matthews, San Francisco Examiner
• 3. David Greenburg, Slate.com
• 4. Amity Schlaes, Townhall.com
• 5. Mazo and Hess, Nixon: A Political Portrait, 1968
• 6. Peter Carlson, The Washington Post . . .

. . . and so forth, down the list of 45 endnotes for a 16-page chapter -- reputable writers and sources, sometimes with multiple sources cited for a single note. Where that idiot's claim about "the book division of a tabloid magazine" came from, I honestly don't know. What I do know is that I checked his other reviews and found he gave a 5-star review to a scaremongering book about global warming, which gives you an idea where he's coming from. He also makes one of the most common bogus criticisms of Donkey Cons, to wit:

[W]hile I didn't expect this book to be balanced, I did expect, at a minimum, that the authors would acknowledge that both parties have skeletons to hide. From this book, you would expect that the Democrats are fleecing everyone, while the Republicans are clean as snow, which is not the case.

That is just a damned lie. In Chapter 2 of Donkey Cons, on pages 30-33, we list the names of every single member of Congress convicted of felonies or punished for ethics violations from 1975 through 2005. There were 15 Republicans compared to 46 Democrats, and all are named in the same chapter. It is simply a fact that, during this 30-year span, Democrats in Congress were about three times as likely as Republicans to become involved in serious crimes or ethical scandals.

Ever since Donkey Cons was published, Lynn Vincent and I have had to deal with this stupid and dishonest charge -- "Yeah, but what about the Republicans?" -- even though we've repeatedly pointed out where the corrupt/criminal Republicans are named in the book. Not to mention the fact that the book's final chapter deals extensively with the role of Republicans (and Democrats) in the Abramoff scandal.

As I've often said over the past two years, if someone wants to write a book about corrupt Republican, nobody's stopping them. But if anyone goes to the trouble of actually counting the crimes and scandals and making an honest comparison between the two parties, they won't be able to avoid the conclusion we reached in Donkey Cons, namely that the Democrats are far worse when it comes to corruption.

So please order the book. If we can sell out the hardback edition, maybe we can talk them into commissioning a paperback edition -- and then we'll be to add an updated afterword, talking about such fun Democratic scandals as Eliot Spitzer and Kwame Kilpatrick.