We Need The Traditional Agenda More Than 'The New Agenda'

by Smitty (from The New Agenda via No Quarter)

As part of National Offend a Feminist Week, let's observe a sample of the Agents of Societal Destruction in action. We have the standard hand-wringing over a serious problem:

What can we do to stop the “normalization” of violence in youth culture? What can we do to stop assault in the next generation? That was a major topic at The New Agenda’s Violence Against Women forum on April 18. Here’s the video: Please help us to spread it far and wide!

The gist: as part of the overall decay of public schools, women are seeing escalating violence, in addition to a spate of Big Numbers.

What we never manage to hear escape the lips of these purveyors of dismal is any recognition of possible societal factors involved:

• The ongoing destruction of the family (i.e. male, female, children) as a unit of societal organization.
• The denigration of the male role as a leader and servant in the relationship.
• The promotion of government policy, process and procedure as a source of authority for societal organization.

The specific case these women are on about?

In the weeks after hip-hop artist Chris Brown allegedly beat and strangled singer Rihanna, a stomach-turning phenomenon happened across America: acceptance.

I will admit to a jaded cynicism: my first thought when Rihanna bobbed to the surface of the stream of effluent that is the cable news was that the whole thing was a publicity stunt. While Jane's Addiction falls short of the John Bohnam Criteria, the observation that "...the news is just another show, with sex and violence." remains spot on.

So, what do we do? I tell the kids in the youth group:

• Don't worry about being serious with anyone until after college. Figure yourself out first.
• Don't date in numbers smaller than four--keep the fun level up and the pressure level down.
• Don't date outside of the community of faith. If they're too cool to show up at the house of worship at the appointed time, this is a good indicator of their actual interest level.

Of course, I'm ignored, but they can't say they're not getting sound advice.

The community of faith is valuable at the adult level, too. I wouldn't accuse church members who attend steadily of perfection. However, I'd like to see a serious comparison study of their overall problems against society in general. My gut feeling is that the ugly numbers are significantly lower amidst those who have some grasp of the meaning of life, and for a good reason. Regular negative feedback on the "don't do" aspects of life, and positive feedback on the "do this" aspects produce a superior product.

On the other hand, we have feminists who produce, in my severely biased opinion, a stream of marginally useful bumperstickers that will achieve little beyond short-term empathy for victims. If a community of faith is a nutritious spiritual diet, I'm accusing these feminists of pushing Snickers and Doritos, washed down with soda pop. If the real goal is minimizing violence against women, you're going to have to return to the traditional modes of turning boys into men. The platitudes on offer here do little, AFAICT, besides open up more government programs and career paths for people to maintain the problem. So let's discuss a broader "come to Beavis" meeting about the root causes, and ignore limited value approaches, please. Finally, remember that the "come to Beavis" meeting is an individual thing. We can do all of the rah-rah and statistics we want, but as with Fireproof, it remains an individual life-long challenge to avoid idiocy, irrespective of gender.

Jack Kemp, Renegade Republican

"The Kemp-Roth tax cuts, the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, were really intended as a Molotov cocktail thrown toward the Nixon-era GOP establishment. . . . I think that today's GOP doldrums are due to the fact that it doesn’t have enough renegades like Kemp who buck the party line."

Joe the Plumber didn't get the memo

From GOP-HQ about "outreach" and "inclusion":

I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children.

I'd be interested to see a poll, in which the opinions of parents with children under 18 were compared to non-parents.

This poll showing a "generation gap" on gay issues doesn't break down the demographics that way. My gut hunch is that the support for gay marriage among the young -- supposedly a harbinger of dramatic social change -- mostly evaporates if you distinguish married from unmarried, and parents from the childless. That is to say, married parents will always be more conservative.

The tendentious supposition that the high rates of pro-gay-rights attitudes among 18-to-34-year-olds will remain constant as this cohort older doesn't take into account the likelihood that today's 19-year-old liberal college student will some day be a 29-year-old conservative suburban soccer mom. Remember that the liberal youth of the 1960s and '70s drifted rightward in the 1980s and '90s.

Much easier to be "tolerant" and "open-minded" when you're a 25-year-old bachelor than when you're a 35-year-old husband and father. And just wait until you become a 49-year-old curmudgeon like me!

Dadgum smart-alecky whippersnappers think they know everything . . .

UPDATE: Dan Riehl on Joe's remarks about gays and children:

I suspect the attitude is still more widespread than people think.

Exactly. College-educated people working in professional environments -- especially people in academia, politics and communications -- must internalize a basic level of political correctness. There are things you can't say, attitudes you can't exhibit, if you are going to work at a major university (as Lawrence Summers learned at Harvard). And so you get used to never encountering certain attitudes.

Once you get outside that elite professional environment, however, you meet the Ordinary American -- the guy who sees what he sees, knows what he knows, believes what he believes, and is not afraid to speak his mind about this stuff.

The elite recoil in horror whenever some Ordinary American type (e.g., Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck) gets anywhere near the levers of power. What the elite are trying to do to Joe Wurzelbacher, they have done to many others: Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, to name just a few.

What they're trying to do is to imply that Wurzelbacher's beliefs are dangerous, that he is ignorant and guilty of a "hatred" that endangers his fellow citizens. Nonsense. There are tens of millions of decent, law-abiding Americans who believe exactly like Joe the Plumber believes, and none of them has ever harmed anyone.

Compliments or Attacks?

"Apparently, giving a woman a compliment on her good looks is inherently an insult now, no matter the context, at least if politics and the media are involved in any way. . . . It's one thing to point out blatant sexism in its true form. It's completely silly on the other hand to misconstrue obvious, harmless compliments as an insult in order to spark a fake verbal spar between two GOP leaders."

Worse SCOTUS idea than Princess Kennedy: Gore

by Smitty

I thought the HillBuzz suggestion of Princess Kennedy was a decent split of the territory between stupid and absurd.
Pat in Shreveport sees my absurd, and raises me a Nobel Prize and an Oscar: Al Gore for SCOTUS.
Pat quotes the Catholic weekly America:

there is a long tradition of having those with legislative or executive experience on the Court, a tradition that has fallen by the wayside as Presidents have sought nominees with little or no paper trail. Earl Warren was a lawyer, and had served as attorney general of California, but it was his stature as a three-term Governor who was nominated by both parties for the job that earned him the nod for the Court in 1953.

It makes great sense in Hopey-change America. We have a POTUS who's got more best-sellers under his belt than substantive legislation.
Where Pat's post only gets a B+ instead of the A grade is that she neglected to nominate RSM instead. Like Gore, Stacy hasn't a law degree. Unlike the Global Grilling Gadfly, Stacy's opinions can be guaranteed in advance not to render the reader comatose.

Free the Beers!

Moe Lane is on the story of how gourmet beer enthusiasts in Alabama are waging an activist campaign against a Republican state senator who opposes their effort to legalize their favorite brews.

As might be expected, the ubiquitous Libertarian troublemaker Stephen Gordon is right in the middle of it. First he pushes the "Going Galt" meme, then he breaks the DHS "Rightwing Extremist" report, and now this.

He's like the Forrest Gump of liberty.

UPDATE: Daley Gator has sharp words for the Republican douchebag. BTW, I understand that Alabama has a state law against sex toys. Couldn't somebody file a lawsuit asking the state supreme court to rule that Sen. Bobby Singleton is a dildo or a buttplug, and thereby ban him from the state?

The Cosmo Syndrome

(BUMPED; UPDATED) Dylan Sauders has a brilliant takedown of Cosmopolitan's sex-marketing scam:

The four prompts are 1) Sex headline 2) Smiling face showing approval of sex 3) A desirable bust-line 4) Second sex headline. . . .
These four prompts are enough to make your subconscious feel healthy, attractive and sexual - just like the girl on the cover. Cosmo found that they sold the most magazines by taking advantage of the natural eye pattern your eyes take accross a magazine cover and putting these four prompts in their path.

You should read the whole thing. (H/T: Conservative Grapevine.)

It must be noted that Sauders is a self-made "expert" on seduction, which will cause a lot of female readers to snort in derision. But since this is National Offend A Feminist Week, his article offers a good talking-point to discuss the degree to which "feminism" is an ideology advanced via brainwashing and propaganda methods.

My grievance against Cosmo (and Glamour, etc.) is one of long standing. In 2000, I wrote a Washington Times column about it:

It seems impossible to go through a supermarket checkout line without being confronted by magazine covers like the January 2000 Cosmopolitan, offering "Sex Tricks Only Cosmo Would Know: 20 Earth-Quaking Moves That Will Make Him Plead for Mercy -- and Beg for More."
The Kroger grocery chain has, thankfully, decided to install racks that conceal such lurid stuff from general viewing. Perhaps someday it will be safe again to take our daughters to the grocery store.
What is the point of schools and parents telling girls that they can be valued for their character, their intellectual abilities and their personal achievements, when the newsstands are full of magazines displaying near-naked supermodels and telling girls that their true worth is their ability to master "earth-quaking moves"?
Scarcely had my daughter learned to read than I found myself troubled by what she was seeing on women's magazine covers at the checkout lines. A child with a knowledge of phonics can figure out what "s-e-x" spells and -- according to Cosmo, Glamour and the other major women's magazines -- "s-e-x" and "d-i-e-t" are the most important things in a woman's life. . . .

And you can read the whole thing, if you'd like. Having been excoriated recently for criticizing Carrie Prejean's decision to get breast implants, and having long baffled female readers by my relentless jihad against feminism, this is as good a time as any to point out what should have been obvious: I hate feminism, I hate breast implants, and I hate Cosmo for the same reason -- because I love women and want them to be happy.

You cannot have a happy life built on lies, and Cosmo is selling you lies. People want to give me a hard time because I occasionally blog about boobies, but my readership averages about 6,000 visits a day. If my readers are not all adults, they are at least old enough to operate a computer and care about politics. Whereas Cosmo's leering come-ons are displayed on thousands of magazine racks all over the country and, as Sauder says, they reach a readership of some 39 million women.

Cosmo sells a lie, namely that sex and beauty are the sum of a woman's value. And this evil propaganda is conveyed effectively (that is to say, women accept the lie) because of the perception that this is "woman to woman," that these messages are being related by other women -- and glamorous, sophisticated women, at that.

There is a basic factor of communications psychology called the "halo effect." If someone has certain attributes that you consider positive, you will tend to generalize this into an overall positive perception about that person, often giving them credit for personal qualities like being smart, kind, honest -- attributes for which you have no direct evidence at all.

Parable of the Glen-Plaid Suit
Being physically attractive is one of the most powerful factors in the "halo effect," which is why magazine ads feature attractive models. The positive perception created by the model's good looks is psychologically transferred -- generalized -- to the manufacturer's product. Let me tell you the story about my glen-plaid suit.

Back in the day, after I'd graduated college and was a bachelor on the hunt, I was something of a clothes horse. I had always desired to be a well-dressed man -- to look sharp -- but now I had a little more disposable income to devote to fashion than I'd ever had before.

GQ and Esquire were required monthly reading for me. In the summer of 1986, you might have seen me bopping around Atlanta in robin's-egg blue slacks (triple-pleated, cuffed), a pleated-front pink tuxedo shirt, a robin's-egg blue bowtie, and a sport coat that was striped in pink, robin's-egg blue and white. (I'd bought the coat first, then bought the rest of my ensemble to match.) Buddy, I was styling, and the ladies loved it.

So, one day I saw a fashion layout in GQ featuring a guy in a double-breasted gray glen-plaid suit, wearing a red bow tie. Man, that dude looked sharp. I resolved that on the next payday, I'd get me one of those suits and a red bow tie like that. So I did, and got myself slicked up for a night on the town with my buds. And when I showed up at the club, one of my buddies said: "Look, it's Pee-Wee Herman!"

Indeed, this was exactly the wardrobe that the absurdist comedian Pee-Wee Herman had made his trademark. But I hadn't been thinking about that. I had been looking at that ruggedly handsome model in the magazine -- briefcase in hand, standing with Manhattan skyscrapers in the background, the very epitome of a smart young businessman. But I was not a ruggedly handsome model and this was not Manhattan.

The money I'd spent on that suit had been spent in an attempt to purchase the perception conveyed by the magazine display. I wanted to feel like a smart young businessman. I wanted to look ruggedly handsome. But this suit did not magically transform me. I was still the same goofy guy I'd been before I bought the suit, and even goofier for inadvertantly dressing like Pee-Wee Herman.

Well, the money wasn't entirely wasted. I seldom wore that suit again, but I'd learned a valuable lesson.

Marketing and Manipulation
One of the fundamentals of marketing psychology is the concept of how role models affect our perceptions. Because of the "halo effect," we have positive reactions to attractive people, but we have the strongest positive reactions to attractive people who resemble us in some way. Such people can be said to represent our idealized perception of ourselves.

Thus, the smiling woman on the Cosmo cover represents an ideal -- she is what women want to be, the aspirational self. And Cosmo uses this aspirational self to tell women that diet, fashion and sex -- sex! sex! sex! -- are the secrets of happiness. Oh, one other secret: Buying the products advertised in Cosmo.

William F. Buckley Jr. said that the hallmark of successful indoctrination is that the subject doesn't realize he's been indoctrinated. In fact, if you try to tell him he has been indoctrinated, if you point out the means and methods of his indoctrination, and cite evidence of the fallacious nature of his ideas, the indoctrinee will become angry. He will not only defend the indoctrinated beliefs as self-evidently true, but he will vehemently insist that he arrived at these beliefs by independent thought.

So it is with the 20-something "Cosmo girl," who has been reading these trashy magazines every month since she was in middle school. She has a closet full of clothes and 42 pairs of shoes. She has enough cosmetics to equip the road company of Les Miserables for their North American tour. She has mastered every one of the "99 Sure-Fire Sex Secrets" and has been through two dozen boyfriends.

And she is desperately unhappy.

By the time the "Cosmo girl" has been consuming this propaganda for a good 10 years, complete de-indoctrination is almost impossible. She has internalized the belief system so deeply that it has become part of her identity. She will interpret criticism of her Cosmo beliefs as a personal attack. To question whether her mastery of "Earth-Quaking Moves" is beneficial or necessary is to criticize who she is.

Debunking the sexual mythology of Cosmo is as simple as getting a guy to talk honestly about women. Back in the day when I was sporting around in my pink-and-blue sport coat, a stylin' babe-magnet with the cool Patrick Swayze mullet and the lean, tanned Speedo-worthy physique, I was scarcely an exemplar of the Christian ideal of chastity. Or any other Christian ideal, for that matter. (Hey, I was also a Democrat back then.)

What Matters?
Let us ask this question, then: When a young man is out there on the hunt, looking to "score," how does he evaluate his conquests? That is to say, what is it about the chick he picks up that makes him want to brag about it the next day, and perhaps call the chick for another date?

Two things: Looks and enthusiasm.

The first factor is obvious enough. Among his various conquests, the fellow who rides the romantic rodeo circuit will tend to have the most favorable opinion of the drop-dead beauty with the bitchin' bod. That's just how guys are. But the stuff that Cosmo is selling -- the clothes, the shoes, the jewelry, the cosmetics -- has very little impact on this evaluation. Ask any guy.

A really sexy girl is sexy even when she's in sweats and an oversized T-shirt, shopping for groceries. And women's near-universal embrace of the cosmetics/fashion industry is kind of like escalation in the Cold War arms race: At some point, everybody's got enough nukes to destroy the entire planet, and the argument for additional nukes is attenuated by the problem of diminishing returns. If every girl's made-up like a fashion model, a little extra skill in applying make-up isn't really going to gain you any advantage.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania today, there is at least one beautiful 19-year-old Amish girl who has never worn make-up, never worked out in a gym, never read Cosmo. And that girl, in her homemade plain dress, is more truly beautiful than any of the styled-up, decked-out hotties hanging around the most fashionable nightspot in Hollywood. Like I said, ask any guy.

So much for looks. Ceteris paribus, the better-looking girl is the more desireable pickup, the one the guy will brag about and ask for a second date. However, what about the sex itself? It may be -- consider this a hypothetical, if you wish -- that a young man on the prowl will score with lots of good-looking girls over the course of his prowling. Insofar as the performance of the sex act itself makes any difference in his evaluation of his conquests, what is the key factor?

Enthusiasm. The guy likes the girl who is not only "into" sex, but is evidently and unabashedly "into" him. She's kissing him passionately, can't keep her hands off him, she's saying his name and telling him how crazy she is about him and -- Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! Yes! YES!

And here, ladies, is exposed the cruel lie of all those "sex secrets" they push in Cosmo. They want you to believe that a guy will evaluate you, sexually, based on your mastery of specific sexual techniques.

Think about this for a minute, ladies. However limited or extensive your sexual experience with men, ask yourself: Is a guy's workmanlike mastery of sexual technique really what turns you on?

Of course not. If a guy is really "into" you -- that is to say, if he has the necessary sexual enthusiasm -- he'll eventually figure out what you like. That eager-to-please attitude where you are so crazy about your partner that you're actually asking them what they like, and doing it exactly the way they like it -- it's that fundamental enthusiasm, you see, that makes all the difference in the world. Ask any woman.

But don't let the ladies kid you, guys. Being tall, handsome, muscular and wealthy kind of helps, too. The Pee-Wee Herman suit has nothing to do with it.

The Myth of 'Sex Ed'
What this all means is that, even if a woman's desire is to "spread it around" and be that chick that guys pick up in bars, Cosmo doesn't tell her anything useful. Reading "sex secrets" in Cosmo is not going to make you more erotically attractive, or make your sexual performance more memorable. The idea of sexual "success" as being a function of technical expertise is a myth and a lie.

This relates to my disagreement with the proponents of "sex education." It is a remarkable thing that mankind has, through sexual reproduction, flourished to the tune of 6 billion people on the planet and yet "sex education" wasn't invented until the 20th century. If you buy into the sex-ed mentality, this means that for at least 92% of recorded human history, people had no clue what they were doing.

Furthermore, the sex-ed proponents would have us believe, unless sex is taught to children in classrooms -- in a government school by a government-certified teacher using government-approved curricula -- there is no possibility that kids will ever learn the basics of sex.

That these assertions of the sex-ed enthusiasts are self-evidently untrue. Sex is not rocket science or brain surgery, and untutored human beings have throughout history figured out the basic "Insert Tab A into Slot B" of sexuality without textbooks or classroom instruction. Three random thoughts:

• Given the alarming failure of the government education system to teach math and reading, what kind of fool would trust a public-school teacher to instruct his children about sex? (Hello, Mary Kay LeTourneau!)
• In the information age, surely mere facts and data about sex is not hard to find. But the religion of Educationism is based on the false belief that no one can learn anything without going to school to learn it. (Fact: Jimi Hendrix never took a single guitar lesson.)
• What is the real value of knowing the Latin names of the genitalia? Never let it be said that public schools no longer teach Latin -- every sixth-grader in America is now required to memorize such terms as labia, clitoris, urethra and vas deferens, and to identify these items correctly on an anatomical chart.

Such are the transparent fallacies of this perverse ideology. There are 501(c) non-profit foundations dedicated specifically to the purpose of promoting sex-education in public schools, without anyone ever questioning the false premises involved in their "philanthropic" mission.

Insightful readers immediately recognize the connection between sex-ed in schools and Cosmo on the magazine stand. Not only are they are both promoting the same ideology, but perhaps more importantly, they are promoting the same attitude. This attitude -- of sex as a matter of technique to be studied and mastered, in which a superiority of knowledge and skill is the ultimate objective -- is central to the sexual worldview into which the elite desire to indoctrinate the masses. And it is a monstrous lie.

Whether in gushy Cosmo "sex secrets" features or in the Educationist terminology of a middle-school sex-ed textbook, this attitude toward sex presumes that all sexual problems are the result of a lack of information. If you're not getting off, or if your partner is not getting off, or if you're both getting off but neither one of you is really happy, then what you need is more data.

My goodness, what did people do in the Dark Ages, before every middle-school child was required to study anatomical cross-section diagrams of the pelvis, learning to identify (by the proper medical terms) the prostate gland and the uterus? Pity poor Romeo and Juliet, who knew not the joy of the anatomical cross-section!

American young people today have more sexual information than at least 90 percent of the human beings who ever lived. Yet out-of-wedlock births, abortions, sexually-transmitted diseases and divorce are more rampant than ever. Somehow studying those cross-section charts, memorizing the Latin names of the genitalia and practicing how to put a condom on a banana have not prevented the skyrocketing levels of romantic misery.

We don't suffer from lack of information. Instead, we suffer from a lack of virtue.

Good luck trying to locate "virtue" on the anatomical charts. God knows you won't find it in Cosmo.

* * * * *

Well, I've been working on this for few hours and have reached a stopping point, but not the end point I had in mind when I started writing. If you'd like me to finish out this essay, just leave a comment, sharing your thoughts and requesting more, and I'll come back and write more. But first, I need a nap. Ah, the joys of blogging. (Please hit the tip jar!)

And to Cassandra, in the famous words of Ulysses S. Grant: "I intend to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

* * * * *

The comments -- and correction, thank you -- are piling up, leading to the conclusion that I must lead on to the conclusion of the matter. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out that when, in May 1864, Grant vowed to "fight it out . . . if it takes all summer," he actually ended up fighting nearly another 11 months. And, in fact, he did not continue fighting on the same line, but maneuvered to his left in the famous campaign that brought him finally to besiege Lee's army at Petersburg.

Yet it was his dogged determination, his unrelenting commitment to take the fight to the foe, that made Grant victorious. "I cannot spare this man. He fights," Lincoln said and, while I am not in the habit of quoting Lincoln to make a point, in this he was entirely right.

Having had (not much of) a nap, I now remind you that we began this examination of The Cosmo Syndrome with a mention that it is National Offend A Feminist Week. I have found myself recently chastised for (a) criticizing Carrie Prejean for having breast implants, and (b) employing the words "slut" and "whore." Ah, nothing gets 'em like plain English, eh? Well, then -- forward!

* * * * *

Virtue, Vice and 'Civility'
Virtue shiould always be praised, never derogated or dimissed as irrelevant. Virtue may be its own reward, but the natural human desire for esteem in society provides an incentive toward virtuous behavior, at least insofar as society esteems virtue.

When we praise the courage of heroes -- the firefighters who went into the inferno of the WTC on 9/11, for example -- we thus incite others to emulate such brave men, in the expectation that they might also merit praise. If we praise diligence and honesty, we likewise encourage people to be diligent and honest. Whatever society esteems, whatever is commonly praised and celebrated, it enshrines as a goal that attracts the eyes of the young and ambitious.

By the same principle, vice should always be condemned. Deceit, sloth, cowardice -- if such traits and behaviors do not elicit scorn from society, if we tolerate and refuse to be "judgmental" about vice, then we may expect vice to flourish. Think about the "gangsta" rap culture, with its celebration of violent drug dealers and pimps, its lyrics boasting of drive-by shootings and rape, its costumes of garish "bling" -- Bill Cosby is surely right that this perverse phenomenon has badly damaged the black community.

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil . . ."
-- Isaiah 5:20, KJV

To celebrate vice, to mock virtue -- these are cursed behaviors. And thus we must recall our discussion of Jessica Valenti, the feminist whose book is called The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.

Is chastity not a virtue? Premarital chastity is the dress rehearsal for the main performance that is marital fidelity. It is a natural presumption (though one seldom voiced in our increasingly unnatural society) that the ability to restrain one's passions in youth -- to resist temptation -- would be a reliable predictor of the ability to be faithful in maturity. We might further reflect that habit is a great force in human behavior and that the habit of adventurously sleeping around, acquired early in life, would later make it difficult to adjust to the monogamous routine of marriage.

These are not merely philosophical speculations, but sociological fact that can be teased out of the available data if one is statistically minded. However, I need neither statistics or philosophy to know the truth, because I am a fool.

"Experience is a hard school, but a fool will learn in no other."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Yesterday, in mock-Victorian mode, I declared that "years of youthful association with companions of low character have irretrievably corrupted me, rendering me permanently unfit for polite society." You see, I had been condemned for demonstrating a lack of "civility" in my description of Valenti's philosophy:

A perverse non-judgmentalism, that refuses to praise virtue or condemn vice, is moral nihilism. Valenti goes beyond this, to celebrate whoredom and condemn chastity.

If that was uncivil, what would they say if I started telling tales of my own experiences, about the things a young rebel does, and the things he sees, when he's riding on that Highway to Hell? And if, by grace, I somehow managed to survive the ride, is it not my obligation to the memories of those who died on that road, to warn others against taking that wrong turn? If I see others making the same mistakes I made, or the mistakes that led others to an early grave, shouldn't I tell them to turn back before it's too late?

What a strange conception of "civility," that would rob civilization of its natural defense, the social disapproval that is rightly heaped upon the coward, the liar, the sluggard, the whore. In the name of "civility," we are supposed to allow Jessica Valenti to argue that chastity is a "myth" without fear of rebuke, lest we damage the fragile self-esteem of tramps, floozies and strumpets!
Next thing you know, your daughter will encounter some clever user -- perhaps a practiced player of Dylan Sauders' "game" -- who'll spring "the Cosmo routine" on her, and you may be sure that the upshot of this experience won't be an increase in her self-esteem. Do you really think that Valenti and Sauders and the editors of Cosmo, who preach a religion of unabashed promiscuity, deserve to be protected by the cloak of "civility"?

Cosmo is read by 39 million women and Valenti promotes her book on the "Today" show, but somehow my right-wing "incivility" is the real menace? Come now, Cassandra -- whatever my faults and failures, I think you're taking aim at the wrong target.

It's National Offend A Feminist Week, you see, and the ridiculous insistence that no man should be permitted to call a slut a slut is a byproduct of feminist ideology. It's all about The Sisterhood, an Us-vs.-Them mentality in which even conservative women are supposed to align themselves in sheltering Jessica Valenti from the thorough condemnation she deserves.

Remember what Buckley said about successful indoctrination? Conservatives who instinctively invoke feminist concepts -- e.g., non-judgmentalism toward promiscuity -- might want to contemplate Buckley's observation in silence, and stop superficially criticizing those of us who have already spent many years examining the ideological infrastructure of the Left. Just because you don't know what I'm doing doesn't mean that I don't know what I'm doing.

And if anybody wants to hit the tip jar, now would be a good time to do it. Being "openly shameless" can be a tough row to hoe.

No pun intended.

Welcome to the National Council for the Old America!

Unlike Eric Cantor's National Council for a New America, our organization is not interested in "dialogue." We're a bunch of old codgers and we're going to tell you upstart, smart-alecky whippersnappers how things are supposed to be, just like they were back in the good old days.

We are a not a "broad-based coalition" and we aren't about "new ideas." We're not going to have any workshops with Dana Perino, Ed Gillespie and Tony Fratto. Because we're sick and tired of you whiny little brats moping around, wearing all-black clothes, and listening to that crappy music.

It's my way or the highway! Shape up or ship out! As long as you live under my roof, kids, you'll live by my rules! And if you punks don't like it, you can move out of the basement and pay your own dadgum way.

And get a haircut. You look like a freak.

Ruh-roh: Malkin vs. Grover Norquist?

Oh, man, if this doesn't make me forget my little go-round with Cassandra, nothing ever will. In targeting the gutless tax-and-spend California Republicans, Michelle Malkin calls out Grover Norquist:

Grass-roots activists have watched state GOP chairman Ron Nehring drive the party into the ground -- and spend their money doing it. Nehring is a protege of open-borders, credibility-undermining Grover Norquist. It was under Nehring's watch that the California GOP hired Norquist's friend, Michael Kamburowski, to serve as the California Republican Party's chief operating officer in charge of the multimillion-dollar budget of the nation's largest state Republican Party -- despite being here illegally with no work visa or valid work permit.
The episode became the butt of late-night jokes, but neither Nehring nor Norquist suffered any consequences.

Two giants of the Right, in open conflict. Stay tuned.

Show of hands: Who wants to watch Malkin and Norquist do an hour-long debate on Hannity?

UPDATE: In the comments below, Dark Horse doesn't like my suggestion of a shout-show talking-heads debate on Hannity, wants a full live debate, and accepts my alternative suggestion of Andrew Napolitano to moderate.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at Malkin's listing of the lavish expenses that California GOP boss Nehring ran up, prompting her to remark:

If he had something to show for it all, maybe it would be worth it. But what has he done? Flushed party dues down the toilet and the state GOP’s credibility and electoral prospects along with it:

Which reminded me of something I wrote in a very long piece yesterday:

Never mind whether Consultant Y actually delivers winning campaign strategies. He's a longtime Republican who's got all the right friends, says all the right things, and wears the right "Reaganesque" suits, so he keeps getting hired and keeps losing elections. . . .
If people don't want to be in the "Big Tent" nowadays, maybe it's because they can't stand the stench of heaped-up bullshit.

If Malkin's aim is to do something about this smelly problem, she'll have a lot of support.

UPDATE II: Ed Driscoll on the "Golden State Mobius Loop." You might also want to check out my post from February, "California: Zimbabwe U.S.A." Republicans would do better if they were willing to lose elections by standing full-strength against the parasitical public-employee unions, instead of trying the Schwarzenegger compromise approach. It's like trying to compromise with a shark -- there's no future in it for anyone except the shark.

Attention Boston Globe employees

The New York Times Co. is planning to close your newspaper and put you out of work. However, David Brooks still earns $300,000 a year as a columnist for the Times. And they've just hired Harvard-educated boy genius Ross Douthat, too.

Just thought that news might cheer you up.

The Fundamentals Still Suck

My latest American Spectator column:

It was Black Monday, Sept. 15, 2008. Major financial institutions were sliding into bankruptcy and the Dow Jones average was plummeting. Sen. John McCain, however, was speaking confidently. "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," the Republican presidential candidate told supporters at a Florida campaign rally.
A chorus of GOP mouthpieces echoed their candidate's assertion, but four days later, after Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined the Bush administration's bailout plans, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin erupted in fury. "I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the 'fundamentals of the market are great!' line," Malkin declared. "The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged."
Malkin was right. The market closed that day with the Dow at 11,388.44, nearly 3,000 points below its October 2007 peak, but if you had sold all your stocks that day…

Please read the whole thing.

READ MY LIPS: NO MORE BUSHES!

Just in case you started reading this blog since I said this the last time, the lesson that the Republican Party should have learned over the past 20 years is simple: Lie down with Bushes, wake up with Democrats.

The first President Bush betrayed the Reagan legacy and handed America to Bill Clinton.

The second President Bush betrayed the Reagan legacy and handed America to Barack Obama.

Maybe you're starting to see a pattern here. Therefore, whatever Jeb Bush says, (a) ignore his advice, and (b) don't even think about letting him anywhere near a Republican presidential nomination.

Arlen Specter becomes Democrat, gains miraculous power to cure cancer

Or something like that. Via Hot Air:

Here's the money quote:

"If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine."

This is the liberal fallacy of infinite resources:

Liberal: "We could cure cancer if we spent more money on research."
Conservative: "How much more?"
Liberal: "More."

And no matter how much the conservative agrees to spend, the liberal will always say it's not enough: "More, more, more!" It is as if the liberal believes that anything can be done if we only spend enough federal money to do it. But the problem is, there is not an infinite amount of money in the world, and thus there are limits to how much can be budgeted for any given purpose.

I would be willing to bet that federal spending on cancer research has increased every year since 1970. Arlen Specter always has been, and always will be, a selfish, arrogant man. It is only because of his vanity -- his desire to be called "senator" -- that he did not retire many years ago.

UPDATE: Linked by Tigerhawk and Dad 29. Thanks!

UPDATE II: Human Ipecac!

The Demographics of Dhimmitude

DEMOGRAPHIC CRASH

How to Argue With a Woman . . .

. . . if you must. Look, I didn't wake up one morning and decide to start a Rule 4 flame war with Cassandra at Villainous Company. It was she who criticized me for my Rule 5 postings about Carrie Prejean. And so when I replied, "Tu quoque," it was by way of slipping a fastball under her chin to say "stop crowding the plate."

Well, now Cassandra accuses me of "missing the point," as does Little Miss Attila, to both of whom I will reply with the famous words of The Outlaw Josey Wales:

"Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

In this context, i.e., don't insult me and then pretend you didn't intend to insult me.

"Oh, you missed the point" = "You're too stupid to understand my argument." No, I'm just too busy (or perhaps too lazy) to bother with a point-by-point forensic engagement with your argument.

To assert that my Rule 5 blogging is sometimes indecorous is to state the obvious. Being indecorous is kind of the point. We live in a world constrained by political correctness, including the feminist insistence (backed by threat of federal lawsuit) that even the mildest workplace acknowledgement of a woman's beauty is vicious "harassment."

So it occurs to me that normal red-blooded guys might need some kind of "safe zone" exempt from this uptight neo-Victorianism. Out there in the cruel world, a guy could be professionally ruined if he were overheard to remark, "Hey, nice stems on that blonde." But here? Heh.

Cassandra, perhaps you didn't catch the significance when one of your commenters, Joan of Argghh, observed: "I don't even get the idea that he is being serious, it is almost a parody of Ace's site."

Bingo! Ace of Spades is like the John Galt of the 'sphere in this regard. I was an anonymous AOSHQ Moron for a long time before I started this blog, and even if I am a second-class imitation Ace, at least I chose a first-class model to emulate. (Never emulate mediocrity. There is already one too many of David Brooks.)

Some explanation is in order. When I first started reading AOSHQ, I was then employed as a news editor at The Washington Times, where I was forbidden to have opinions, and could have been "dooced" if my anonymous contributions to the moronosphere had been discovered. Meanwhile (after nearly being fired for my commentary on Ralph Reed at my old Donkey Cons blog), I assumed the role of unofficial blogospheric ambassador for the newspaper, promoting our news content to conservative bloggers.

This role continued up until I quit the paper in January 2008, after which (a) Matthew Vadum and I threw the most kickass party in the history of CPAC, and (b) Ace won "Blogger of the Year" honors at CPAC. Those two events are associated in my mind because it seems to me that, if the GOP has any future as a vehicle of conservatism, we need to put the "party" back in the Republican Party.

Look, I'm an ex-Democrat. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 but have since co-authored the most thoroughly documented compendium of Democratic Party scandals ever published. My background gives me a distinctive, if not indeed unique, perspective on why so many voters hate the Republican Party. (As they most certainly do.)

Nothing hurts the GOP worse than the perception that Republicans are a bunch of stuffy, uptight, plastic, hypocritical, think-they're-better-than-everybody phonies.

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting telephone conversation with Andrew Breitbart, in which we each expressed our own perspective on this phoniness problem that plagues the GOP. What Breitbart said, to paraphrase generally, is that there are too many Republicans who think that wearing a nice suit is what it means to be "Reaganesque." This superficial, phony, cookie-cutter faux-Reaganism is destroying the Republican Party. Why?

First of all, it allows sub-standard ability and unsatisfactory behavior to be tolerated. Congressman X may have voted for all kinds of bad legislation, he may be a puppet of lobbyists and a closet homosexual, but so long as he looks good in a suit and sounds "Reaganesque" in his speeches, well, he's all right with the "base."

And ditto for all the campaign consultants and operatives who helped the national Republican Party spend nearly $800 million in the 2008 election cycle. Never mind whether Consultant Y actually delivers winning campaign strategies. He's a longtime Republican who's got all the right friends, says all the right things, and wears the right "Reaganesque" suits, so he keeps getting hired and keeps losing elections.

The other, and more profoundly problematic, aspect of this imitation-Reagan schtick is that it attracts phonies to the Republican coalition while driving away many Ordinary Americans who, while they might embrace basic conservative values, can't stand the phoniness and the dumbed-down RNC talking-points style of discourse emanating from the GOP. If people don't want to be in the "Big Tent" nowadays, maybe it's because they can't stand the stench of heaped-up bullshit.

Ace of Spades HQ is a bullshit-free zone. Ace does not hesitate to call bullshit when he sees it and, even if he sometimes has to chastise the morons who push things too far, he is basically hostile to the kind of weak, defensive, cowardly craving for Republican "respectability" that is the essence of the GOP's current problems.

Look, I am not in the business of politics. I am in the business of journalism. I Write For Money. My objective is to make a gazillion dollars. So far, this greedy profit scheme hasn't exactly worked like a finely-tuned machine. However, let me point out to you that there are quite a few people out there who claim to be philosophical idealists -- disclaiming any interest in filthy Mammon -- who have gotten rich in politics.

Ralph Reed collected something like $5 million from Jack Abramoff's clients, OK? And he sure as hell isn't the only guy in GOP politics who's hustled a fortune out of Conservatism, Inc. (People talk a lot at Washington cocktail parties, especially if they don't take you too seriously. Hint, hint.) So if I act the part of a clown, if my blogging doesn't always exemplify Christian values, if I make a point of being a greedy capitalist blogger, maybe it's because I would never want to be mistaken for one of those pious, uptight, power-tripping 501(c) phonies.

Think back in your mind to 2004-2005, when with the help of Ohio "values voters," it seemed that Karl Rove had achieved the Permanent Republican Majority. Now, ask yourself what happened. Did the GOP piss away its majority because . . .

. . . Ann Coulter said mean things about John Edwards?
. . . Rush Limbaugh said mean things about Donovan McNabb?
. . . Ace of Spades killed too many hobos?

Maybe you're starting to get my drift here. There is zero evidence for the contention that the GOP's woes can be blamed on "mean-spirited" remarks by various conservative media personalities. On the other hand, you may wish to ask whether the GOP pissed away its majority because . . .

. . . Jack Abramoff got a bunch of Republican congressmen neck-deep into an ugly influence-peddling scam?
. . . the ambitious try for Social Security reform allowed Democrats to scare Grandma that those mean Republicans were going to take away her check?
. . . the average middle-of-the-road "swing" voter couldn't understand why keeping Terri Schiavo alive was an issue requiring emergency legislation in Congress?
. . . "compassionate conservatism" meant compromising with Ted Kennedy in such a way that the "conservatism" kind of got lost in the process?
. . . we invaded Iraq without a coherent exit strategy and the president declared "Mission Accomplished" about 3,000 dead GIs too soon?
. . . Rep. Mark Foley showed a keen interest in House pages, Rep. Vito Fossella showed a keen interest in fathering an out-of-wedlock child, and Sen. Larry Craig showed a keen interest in an undercover cop?
. . . the open-borders "immigration reform" promoted by President Bush and Republican Senate leaders was 180 degrees opposite of the kind of policy that most voters actually wanted?
. . . the Republican Party nominated as its 2008 standard-bearer a short, bald, grumpy old guy who had managed to be on the wrong side of nearly every issue since 1998?

Like I said, maybe you're getting my drift here. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we can all agree that there were plenty enough policy miscues, personal scandals and political blunders to explain the electoral misfortunes of the Republican Party, without scapegoating Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter or anyone else who isn't a former Republican president or a senior senator from Arizona. I don't know about you guys, but when Republicans fuck up, I tend to want to blame the fuck-ups.

Maybe I'm an asshole. Or maybe I just play one on the Internet. Miss Attila has met me on at least four occasions (CPAC 2006, 2008 and 2009, plus a 2007 shindig in Santa Barbara), and I hope she would testify that, despite my legendary weakness for the double-entendre, I can be reasonably civil and at times downright courtly. Certainly, after that 2008 blowout party, I cannot be accused of a lack of hospitality.

Ace of Spades isn't my only role model, you know. Watch this video of two excellent role models in action, in the library of Twelve Oaks:

Accused of wrongdoing, Ashley protests his innocence, seeking to ease Scarlett's hurt with words of kindness. She maligns innocent Melanie. When Scarlett slaps his face, he stiffens in a dignified manner and silently departs. Well played, sir!

Ah, but then that "black-hearted varmint" Rhett makes his appearance, scoffing at Scarlett's pretended virtue, returning insult for insult with frankly lecherous insinuations. Scarlett is outraged, denouncing Rhett, who sends her off with masculine laughter ringing in her ears. Well played, sir!

Shall I manifest the spirit of chivalry or mischief? Dear ladies, forgive me if my irreverent remarks about Carrie Prejean's fake boobies offended your delicate sensibilities. Please understand that years of youthful association with companions of low character have irretrievably corrupted me, rendering me permanently unfit for polite society. Whether or not my apologies are accepted, let me directly address this question:

"How does one celebrate human sexuality and sexual differences in a way that’s still fundamentally respectful?"

Why, Miss Attila, do you mean to suggest that this question never entered my mind? Or rather, do you suppose that I must also balance other considerations, such as how to generate enough traffic for my blog so that I can occasionally sling a bit of traffic toward my friends? And do you suppose that I am the only blogger on the planet who realizes the traffic to be gained by being the first to blog about, inter alia, "Sarah Palin bikini pics"?

Imagine the concupiscent fellow out there who Googles in quest of such a keyword combination. Would you prefer that the traffic thus generated be monopolized by liberal sleazebags like Perez Hilton? Should such traffic go only to people who hate Sarah Palin and hate Carrie Prejean and hate everything they stand for? Or do you think there may be some redemptive value if occasionally -- perhaps only in 1 out of 100 such random Google hits -- that fellow clicks onto a conservative site?

Hey, maybe some of these guys might decide to vote Republican. And maybe some of them will be intrigued enough by my crazy-ass blogging that they start clicking around the site and read some of the more serious stuff I write. Maybe some few of them will look at my blogroll and say, "Who is this Little Miss Attila?"

Click. You're welcome. "Hits is hits," eh?

Sometimes, when I do one of these autobiographical things, especially in Rule 4 situations, the object of the lecture will link my rebuttal and accuse me of "incoherence." Excellent. If there is method to my madness, do you suppose I'd write an instruction manual to the method and post it on my blog, all in one place, so that any random left-wing asshole could e-mail it around for analysis?

It was enough that I posted The Rules -- a few tips without much explanation of the underlying philosophy -- and if someone wants a more thorough understanding of the method (or the madness) they've got two choices:

• Pay me for it; or
• Keep reading and trying to figure out exactly what the hell I'm up to.

Look, I spent years reading Allah, Ace and other top bloggers. For most of those years, I was prohibited from doing personal blogging. But I studied hard to try to figure out how this whole blogosphere doohickey works, and fancy that my scholarship has not been in vain.

In his novel, The New Austerities, my friend Tito Perdue wrote a scene where his protagonist, a man of tremendous culture and erudition compelled by penury to labor for an insurance company, is called into his boss's office. The protagonist notices that, in this entire magnificent office, there is only one book, The Tao of Management -- a satirical reference to all those silly how-to-succeed books that are consumed by philistines. In that one tiny detail, Tito expressed a whole lot about what is wrong with the world.

Pastor Sam Childers (a Christian missionary whose book Another Man's War has been prominently displayed on my sidebar for the past two months) told me something that has stuck in my mind. Sometimes, Sam will go to one of these big pastor's conferences and find himself sitting in a seminar on a subject like "effective leadership," and the guy in charge of the seminar can hardly even be considered an adequate public speaker, much less an effective leader. So why is that guy getting paid to run this seminar, while Sam -- a natural-born leader -- is paying money to sit in the audience, bored and annoyed at the waste of his time?

We seem to be suffering from what can only be described as a "meritocracy of mediocrity," a system of perverse incentives, a faulty mechanism which guarantees that only second-rate people rise to the top. (Tim Geithner? Arlen Specter? Joe Biden?)

"Personnel is policy" was a maxim that conservatives learned during the Reagan era. If you get the wrong man for the job, don't expect the job to be done right. When things go wrong -- and things have gone disastrously wrong for the GOP in recent years -- you can be assured that incompetent, dishonest, stupid or just plain wrong-headed people have weaseled their way into key positions.

Lately, the Republican Party seems to have been operating a full-employment program for the congenitally clueless, and until people wake up to the true nature of the problem, it's never going to get fixed.

Is this "incoherent"? What does this have to do with Cassandra and Attila criticizing my boobie-blogging? I began this post by saying they had insulted me, and they have.

If Cassandra thought my blogging was offensive, my e-mail address is not exactly a secret, and even if my inbox is always overflowing, I might have been expected to notice an e-mail from a lady with a clever subject line. But rather than criticize me privately, she held me up to public ridicule. And when I threw the "tu quoque" brushback pitch, she insinuated that I was too stupid to understand her argument. Attila, my friend, was more gracious, but certainly a friend might have considered not piling on as she did.

What should I do in response? Well, I could have stiffened and ignored the insults. But this would have left them believing a lie. So instead I have devoted time to pointing out the nature of their mistake: Just because you don't know what I'm doing, don't jump to the conclusion that I don't know what I'm doing.

Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing fails like failure. I've seen enough of both to know the difference, and when I see success, my habit is to emulate and praise it. This habit has led some to accuse me of being a suck-up: "Oh, he just says nice things about [insert successful conservative blogger] because he wants the traffic."

Of course I want the traffic, you morons! But if Michelle Malkin or Glenn Reynolds deserves praise, should I be silent rather than risk the accusation of suck-uppery? I also praise M. Stanton Evans, Phyllis Schlafly and Thomas Sowell, who don't have blogs, to say nothing of my praise for Edmund Burke, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Ronald Reagan -- dead men who don't throw a guy a lot of traffic. I didn't praise Hayek out of a desire to be named "a top Hayekian public intellectual," but because Hayek was a great genius who wrote great books that deserve to be studied by everyone who wishes to understand economics.

While we're on this subject, perhaps somebody could testify how hard I work -- admittedly in a haphazard way -- to lift up conservative bloggers who are not in a position to throw me any huge amount of traffic. If somebody's doing good work out there, trying hard to improve their blog-fu, I consider it an obligation to help them, in the same way other bloggers have helped me. Blogging is a cooperative enterprise, which is the not-so-secret philosophy of Rule 2. It gets lonely as hell out here, sometimes, and reciprocal linkage is like that cold beer and an "attaboy" to let you know you've got friends.

Way back in May 2007, I helped organize a roundtable discussion of conservative bloggers to address the basic question: Why is the Left kicking our ass out there? It was plainly evident after the 2006 election that the Right didn't have its mojo working online, and one of the answers that came up at that roundtable was this: Conservative bloggers don't cooperate effectively as activists the way bloggers on the Left do.

You can make of that what you will, but I think it's a fair criticism, and we need to ask ourselves why this is so. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that conservatives take pride in their independence and individuality. They don't want to be seen as part of an amorphous blob, which is why the right doesn't have anything remotely like DailyKos, with umpteen-thousand diarists and 700 comments on every post.

Well, OK, fine. I don't go for the blob mentality, either. But this same individualistic pride leads to two harmful and interrelated tendencies on the Right:

• The Praise Deficit -- The Left is never afraid to praise its leaders and heroes, but many on the Right seem to feel they are somehow diminished if they praise others. Every once in a while, it would be nice if some conservative columnist would devote 700 words to pointing out what a tremendous thing Rush Limbaugh has accomplished. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the man single-handedly created talk radio as we know it today. If many columns like that have been written, I haven't seen them, and there ought to be more of them. People who are out there doing good work need to be celebrated, and held up as role models for others to emulate, and we on the Right don't do this -- at least until these great people die.
• The Criticism Surplus -- As soon as anyone has any meaningful success as a conservative, a flock of Republican ravens sets upon them, denigrating everything they say or do. The same people who feel themselves diminished if they praise others tend to feel that they can build themselves up by tearing other people down. Has Ann Coulter said some things I wish she hadn't said? Yes. But is she also a powerful conservative voice who regularly fills auditoriums on university campuses, exposing untold thousands of students to a message they never hear in their classrooms? Hell, yes. But oh, don't the likes of Megan McCain and Kathleen Parker love to take cheap shots at Coulter!

So I've tried, in my own relatively insignificant corner of the 'sphere, to reverse these tendencies. I've trashed people like David Brooks, who have "succeeded" by never doing anything useful for the conservative cause (if there's anything the New York Times loves, it's a thoroughly useless "conservative"), and I've praised people like Malkin, Limbaugh, Instapundit, and Coulter, who have striven mightily to accomplish something.

And, yes, I've done a little blogging about boobies. "Respectful"? Well, maybe there are more respectful ways to blog about a great rack. But I call your attention to the Arthur Koestler quote at the top of the page:

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

I wish Carrie Prejean hadn't gotten breast implants, and that's the ruthless truth. Crucify me.

One hears a lot of chatter from Republicans nowadays that conservatives need to be more tolerant and "inclusive" toward gays. Well, how about a little tolerance and inclusiveness for heterosexuality, huh? I mean, if we don't want people to think we're the party of clueless, uptight fuddy-duddies, how about we stop acting like a bunch of clueless, uptight fuddy-duddies?

And how about some consideration of the possibility that if I go a little bit overboard (OK, a lot overboard) in this regard, maybe it's because I'm trying to smack some people upside their thick heads so they'll pay attention to the real nature of some of the problems in the conservative movement?

Like I said, Cassandra, just because you don't know what I'm doing doesn't mean that I don't know what I'm doing. You've insulted me and sought to humiliate me, and then -- here you caused me to invoke the Josey Wales Principle -- pretended I was too stupid to understand that I was being insulted.

For any genuine wrong I have committed or offense I have caused, I am always willing to apologize. When others do me wrong, I am sometimes hot-tempered in response, and for this I also apologize. But still, don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.

And here's WHY 'hot young Susan Boyle' wasn't a superstar of the 1980s

I got 'Lanched for my post about the 1984 "hot young Susan Boyle" video, and several commenters were saying "get the tweezers," suggesting her thick eyebrows had thwarted her singing career, which is demonstrably nonsense. (Hello, Patty Smyth!)

Now, there are always plenty of talented musicians who never make it big, just as there are always relatively untalented performers who soar to inexplicable stardom. So it may be that why Susan Boyle's amazing voice went undiscovered for 25 years needs no explanation. Nevertheless, it is not entirely mysterious.

• GENRE -- Susan Boyle has clearly always preferred the dramatic ballad, from "The Way We Were" in 1984 to "I Dreamed a Dream" in 2009. Which is all well and good, but you're not going to get a lot of bar-band gigs with that kind of repertoire. It is almost always the case in the pop music business that singers (or groups) must first establish an ability to perform upbeat dance tunes before they can have a chance to score a ballad hit. The Beatles broke through with "Please Please Me" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" before they ever got around to "Yesterday." Elvis was famous for rockers like "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Hound Dog" before he recorded "I Can't Help Falling in Love With You."
• STYLE -- Susan Boyle's simple, unaffected voice is, well, simple and unaffected. Lovely as her voice is, there is no attention-getting stylistic distinctiveness that would set her apart from the crowd. (Think of Rod Stewart's distinctive rasp.) So while she might have been a success if some manager or producer had been able to connect her with songwriters who could provide her with new tunes she could make her own, she was never going to become a star merely by singing "cover" tunes.
• LOOKS -- If her thick eyebrows (a look that was quite fashionable at that time) didn't hinder Susan Boyle's early singing career, her overall look wasn't quite right, even in 1984. Or rather, especially in 1984, which was the year that Madonna zoomed to stardom on the strength of her hit-filled 1983 debut album. However you rate Susan Boyle's appearance at age 22, her wardrobe and hairstyle were not remotely what the MTV audience wanted to see.

And here we must take a long digression to discuss the impact of MTV on the music industry. Folks under 40 may dimly remember the pre-MTV era -- back when they actually played music videos -- but no one under 30 has any idea what music was like before the cable-music network debuted in 1981. The very first video played on MTV was The Buggles' "Video Killed Radio Star," and it was prophetic.

The Kevin Cronin Syndrome
You kids today have no idea what sort of butt-ugly guys played in the great rock bands of the '70s. As long as a dude had shaggy hair and could play his instrument, he was in like Flynn. Back in the pre-MTV days, the ugliest guy in Molly Hatchet got laid by a different lovestruck groupie every night.

It was always the case that a top act tended to be led by an attractive front-man (think Steven Tyler of Aerosmith), and that a solo performer like Peter Frampton or Billy Squier was almost always a looker. But Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon? Ten pounds of hair hiding 130 pounds of homely and scrawny.

The advent of MTV put a new premium on looks and just about the only great band of the '70s that survived the cut was ZZ Top, where the bearded guys were clever enough to make Penthouse models and '32 hot rods the stars of their videos.

If MTV weeded out a lot of ugly guys in the music business, it was far more brutal on women. You ever took a close look at Janis Joplin? Dude, I don't care how much brown acid you ate at Woodstock, Janis could never have made it in the MTV era. Compared to Janis, Susan Boyle was Bar Rafaeli.

A superstar, but . . .
Even if Susan Boyle wasn't Olivia Newton-John, she was sufficiently attractive that -- with a more flattering hairstyle, a flashier wardrobe, a good backup group and a repertoire that included some up-tempo original tunes -- she might still have made it big as a singer, but . . .

But she never had a manager or a record producer who (a) was professionally competent, and (b) really believed in her talent. Again, I make reference to the careers of Elvis and the Beatles:

• Elvis was just another hillbilly with a guitar until Sun Records owner Sam Phillips recognized his talent, and then Colonel Tom Parker took over as his manager.
• The Beatles had bounced around Liverpool and Hamburg for years before record-store owner Brian Epstein took over as their manager and then record producer George Martin signed them to a contract.

Even all these decades later, the combination of a smart manager and a great producer remain the key to turning a talented performer into a chart-topping sensation. Even in the case of a solo performer, success requires teamwork, and the most important members of the winning team are not necessarily the ones under the spotlights on the stage.

Well, Susan finally got her big break and, as Little Miss Attila says, she's got some catching up to do. The lesson we should take away from this teachable moment, it seems to me, is that there might be some undiscovered talent -- musical or otherwise -- among your acquaintances. You might know someone who, with the right advice, the right kind of support, promotion and encouragement, might blossom into a superstar. It is incumbent upon you, then, to be that person who makes a difference in their life.

If the next Susan Boyle spends 25 years in obscurity, you have only yourself to blame.

Monique Stewart, Impressing Feminists

By Smitty
HotMES sounds as though her Master's thesis, which probably won't be finished this week, will be a strong contender for That Which Offends Die Drachen most. It's a thesis on our national scourge.

That the American public is fooled into thinking that this is about a woman’s right to choose, or a child’s right to life but, realistically, this is about a multi-billion dollar industry.

Monique reveals this in a post concerning a conversation with such a "fierce woman" in I’m sorry, I don’t speak retarded. Go, Monique, go!

Why? Because Obama hates women

"[Democrat feminist blogger Melissa] McEwan became increasingly unnerved by what she saw of the sexist coverage of Clinton, and how the progressive blogosphere, having embraced Obama, let so much of it pass without comment. . . . Worse was the fact that over time, she couldn't shake the feeling that portions of the netroots were actually pushing the sexist stuff."

(Bloggers: Join the celebration!)

Princess Kennedy for SCOTUS?

By Smitty
HillBuzz scoops it:

Ladies and Gentleman, I come to you today not as the daughter of a former president, not as the daughter of a former first lady known around the world for her style and grace, not as the niece of a shameless drunk who left a woman to drown in his submerged Oldsmobile, not as the embarrassment to herself and, you know, others who tried to claim a Senate seat that didn’t belong to her, not as that same embarrassment who then thought she could be Ambassador to the Vatican, despite the Pope’s personal protests against me, and the fact the last Ambassador Kennedy did as much damage to US-British relations as was humanly possible.
No, today I come before you, my reddish-brown mane never looking better, my diamonds never sparkling more, as not any of those previously mentioned things that make my mother, father, and brother roll over in their graves. No, today I am standing before you as just Caroline Kennedy, the woman who now wants to be a Justice on the Supreme Court. The woman who once had that pony you all remember and loved. . . .

Ah, yes. Read the rest.

UPDATE (RSM): Speaking of princesses and ponies, John "Silky Pony" Edwards is under investigation for suspected campaign finance violations.

Rule 5 Sunday

By Smitty
Stacy did a great job yesterday with the clone bot output I sent him entitled "From Moab Journey Ridiculous Anchor Tags". He apparently lacks my backronym fetish. However, the loyal readership may not have copied him on all the Rule 5 inputs, so I'll just get a little something put together.

As we're hitting the road early tomorrow from Moab to take in Mesa Verde, your choice are to mailbomb Stacy with updates, or let me queue them up for next Sunday, which will probably be posted from Lost Wages. But enough distraction.

• W.J. Perry features Danica Patrick looking for directions to...something. And speaking of directions, we will include this link, with a stern warning about the last photo: this kind of thing and Yasser Arafat are two examples of Shootin' Offenses on Rule 5 Sunday. You may administer punishment with a water pistol at your leisure, and are admonished to sin no more, sir. Later in the week, he nominated Megyn Kelly for the SCOTUS. All is forgiven.
• The Physics Geek features a healthy collection of lovlies.
• Kirbside initiates a Rule 5 mystery. One only hopes the answer isn't too anticlimactic.
• Jeffords comes down on the negative side of the timeless BIB? question. I thoroughly agree with his answer and his sensibility.
• Dustbury has a great retro shot of Shirley Jones. Nice [large cat]!
• The quotable Mark Freeberg:

  If visual pleasure is one of the Muses, incarnated into flesh and blood and sent down from Mount Olympus to walk upon the earth…this young lady is undoubtedly her.

• Donald Douglas sounds as though he's in full agreement with Freeberg on Bar Rafaeli
• Paco's string of silver screen sensations remains unbroken.
• Pat in Shreveport comes through with some Russell Crowe goodness. Bows are so masculine. But can she do Ted Nugent with a bow? If nothing else, he's old enough to meed Stacy's Bonham Rule. Nugent, BTW, is one of the only people I can think of who makes Stacy seem sedate in comparison.
• Mildly Rude URL Pun of the Day goes to the WyBlog, for go-go bars feel the economic pinch, which shows up in the post title as 'downturn'.
• Check out this caption contest over at Cowboy Blob's Saloon and Shootin Gallery.
• Fausta has beaten Pat and Carol to Sean Connery. I'm almost tempted to drop everything and move to Scotland to work on the accent.
• Chris Muir has Governor Palin in "sexy" positions.
• The Track-a-'Crat has been doing yeoman work on his blog, handing out floggings to deserving (mostly Lefty) targets, and slid in a picture of two people he claims are him and his bride. We also know that US schools are less than scholarly. Apparently US schools in his neighborhood have been giving off excessive Lousy Grammar Radiation. Here we have a Brit saying: "...this photo is of my wife and I at our wedding reception eight days ago."
  Now, if it was just you, Jonathan, you'd have said "...this photo is of me". If her, "...this photo is of my wife". So why does it become "my wife and I", for Shakespeare's sake?

Relax, everyone, I only let the grammar fascist out of his cage for Jonathan, because he secretly craves the abuse. As noted above, I'm out looking at natural beauty, like these two "ships of the desert" on the way in to Canyonlands National Park:

(work with me, people) So you can either email updates to Stacy for inclusion here, or mail them to Smitty for inclusion next time.