THE NINE-ELEVENING PART X: REV UP THE FIST-SHAKING PANTS-WETTER OF DOOM!

(photo via Don Van Natta Jr.)

We're finally getting to see what Iraq-War-style hysteria would look like without Bush and Cheney standing ready to make the fantasy real, and, surprise, just as in olden times, the usual press dopes have got their terror drums tuned and in sync, paradiddling as one: be afraid be afraid be verrrrry afraid...

In other words, it's not just buffoons like the Fake Woodsman above; we also have Dana Milbank telling us that Obama is scaring America by not vomiting over the podium in fear.

President Obama is not worried. And that is unnerving.

Yes, the UK's David Cameron is harrumphing to beat the band, but Dana Milbank didn't get a harrumph outta that guy Obama!

A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 54 percent of the public thinks Obama is “not tough enough” in foreign policy. Americans are not necessarily asking for more military action — Pew’s polls also have found a record number of Americans saying the United States should mind its own business — but they seem to be craving clarity. As National Journal’s Ron Fournier put it: “While people don’t want their president to be hawkish, they hate to see him weakish.”

In other words: when you can't dazzle them with drone strikes, baffle them with bullshit. (Or: That's Bullshit -- Boy, Do We Need It Now!) Milbank and Fournier know from years of flogging crap stories that the American People won't pay attention to a summer shower but will tune in twice nightly for a Killer Storm. And so they're out there pitching doom, each hoping the panic surges of traffic run in his direction.

This material is much tamer, at present, than what's coming out of the meth labs of the Right: at National Review, Deroy Murdock ululates, "Pulverize the Islamic State" -- and he doesn't seem too worried about who else gets blown up along with them ("drone-based projectiles, air-to-ground missiles, 500-pound bombs... As Eric Clapton once sang: 'Let it rain'"). This article has it all: Judicial Watch's claim that "high-level federal" sources reveal ISIS is comin' up from Mexico; James O'Keefe dressed as Bin Laden crossing the Rio Grande; Obama golf argh blargh ("If Obama would give his putter and tin cup a rest, he just might find time to craft a strategy for the U.S."), and a bunch of messages from terrorists meant to terrify Americans, all relayed with relish by Murdock because that's what he wants, too.

And once again we undergo a national attention-span test. Here's hoping this time we pass.

UPDATE. In comments, whetstone says David "Bobo" Brooks "shows us how a real pro does it. Since 'ISIS is a material threat to America' isn't going to fly, especially in the context of the last war in Iraq, Our Mr. Brooks wants us to consider ISIS as an existential threat. In the philosophical sense: 'We are not living in a moment of immediate concrete threat, but we are in a crisis of context... Putin and ISIS are not threats to American national security, narrowly defined. They are threats to our civilizational order'... It's the domino theory applied to any fucked-up government or insurgent wanna-be government (provided they make the front page). 'Oh shit, it's a CRISIS OF CONTEXT. CODE RED CODE RED.'"

"Existential threat" reminded me of something from Twitter:

Recognize the existential threat! Take no options off the table! Sounds like Fournier has been to too many management retreats. Or maybe he's reading this off an old Dr. Bronner's bottle.

UPDATE 2. In comments TGuerrant asks a relevant question: "How is it these squealing bundles of suet haven't noticed that the Kenyan Pretender has just droned Hellfires on al-Shabab in Somalia?" More to the point is, what happened to "Obama the bloodthirsty drone maniac" as portrayed by conservatives only last year?

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT.

You probably saw that survey last week that showed women don't think Republicans are on their side. Maybe that's what motivated Christine Sisto to write "No, Catcalling Is Definitely Not Flattery: Why conservative skeptics are wrong about street harassment" for National Review, gently explaining to her colleagues that, bullshit New York Post stories to the contrary, women really don't like guys on the street screaming about their tits, particularly when it leads to less-verbal aggressions. (The comments to that article are everything you'd expect.)

Well, guess what: National Review apparently decided assholes should get equal time. Nicholas Frankovich.

At some level, a man who catcalls wants the woman to reciprocate. “Guys, I see attractive men all the time,” Christine Sisto remarks, “but I don’t feel an urge to loudly request to see their genitalia.” But they might be psyched if she did.

Also, if a beautiful woman followed me down a dark alley and started ripping off my clothes, I'd be totally psyched, so what's your problem, bitch? Then Frankovich gets into some PUA yap about "social rank and mating-market" for however many of his readers hadn't already started beating off at the thought of women giving them the Rita Moreno speech from Carnal Knowledge at high decibels on a streetcorner.

Also, Molly Powell tells Sisto "if we [women] are treated as mere pieces of meat, we bear at least some of the responsibility," which you have to admit sounds slightly less repulsive coming from a fellow female than from Whiteman P. Republican, which is why Molly Powell will never miss a meal. Also: "When you are fat and gray-haired and have three chins and cankles, I wager that no one you will catcall you." (Hot Air's Jazz Shaw said "an opinion like this coming from a woman – particularly the insinuation that women might bear some 'responsibility' for the responses of men – produced the predictable head spinning on the Left," which I guess is wingnut for "Mrrow! Catfight!")

Meanwhile, if you've been horrified by how that female gaming critic was chased out of her home by misogynist creeps, Breitbart.com's Milo Yiannopoulos is here to tell you that you have it backwards, because it's actually "FEMINIST BULLIES" who are "TEARING THE VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY APART" by spoiling fanboy boners with their femmy complaints. As the thing is full of lines like "let's be honest. We're all used to feeling a niggling suspicion that 'death threats' sent to female agitators aren't all they're cracked up to be," clearly the point is not to sway fence-sitters so much as to assure MRA douchebags, "yep, Breitbart.com's the place for you!" (Tears are also spilled over "threat hysteria... designed to stifle debate and silence critics," because Yiannopoulos needed one more space to win Wingnut Bingo and "Powerless People's Opinions Are Oppressing Me" was sitting right there.)

I guess they think they don't need the votes so badly that they'll give up being jerks to get them.

UPDATE. In comments, @goofoffartiste: "From the Yiannopoulos article: 'There's even a theory floating around that she is planning to have herself beaten up at an upcoming conference.It's an unconfirmed internet rumour, but it illustrates Quinn's credibility.' This must be some of that journalistic integrity they keep claiming this is all about."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the ISIS yap last week. Those of us who remember the run-up to the Iraq War will know the drill.

The brethren's current fist-shaking reminds me that, had Al Gore been elected President -- excuse me, had he been inaugurated President -- we might not have had the clusterfuck we wound up with in Iraq; and if Romney had been elected in 2012, we might already be running back there full-strength. I know what George Wallace said, but to paraphrase Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, hurrah for that dime's worth of difference.

FRIDAY AROUND THE HORN.

Happy Labor Day folks. Take it easy, but take it.

•   Rod Dreher's going on again about how the atheists are persecuting the Christians. (The casus bellow this time is, two years ago Vanderbilt University kicked a Christian student org off-campus because they wouldn't sign a non-discrimination agreement.) This is from Dreher's gloss on some other Jesus freak:

He goes on to say that Christians — the untame ones – need to learn how to deal with the coming scorn with “a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art.” Why were the martyrs joyful? Because they were confident that from their suffering, new life would emerge. So too should we be...

“Blessed are you when they persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” What if we lived as if that were true?

Dreher, as you may know, lives off writing and royalties and is always fucking off to Paris. Some martyr! When they send the lions after Dreher I can see him trying to throw them off the scent with a coq au vin. "But it's free range" will be his last words.

Believe it or not, though, there's someone worse on this subject. Well, we can't be too surprised, it's Erick Erickson in the tertiary stage of whatever's wrong with him:

A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

Do conservatives never drink cocktails? Or are my cheap beers now rendered "cocktails" just because I, a filthy liberal, am drinking them? Well, I always suspected P.J. O'Rourke was full of shit.

...You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God...

Yeesh. Here's a serious question: Does this sound like a spiel you'd expect from a movement that was gaining adherents? (Also: Did someone actually show Erickson this shirt? Well, at least his friends have a sense of humor.)

UPDATE. In comments, right out of the gate, (the good) Roger Ailes: "I think Eerick Eerikson could pull off a trendy naked Leena [sic] Dunham tee-shirt. And by pull off, I mean masturbate into."

•    But I thought conservatives loved it when businesses got tax breaks to promote job growth... oh, it's communist TV shows, nevermind. Key phrases from Dennis Saffran's City Journal article: "contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites," "crony capitalism," "corporate welfare," etc. Key missing phrase from his article: "trickle-down."

CULTURE WAR IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO THE CULTURE WARRIORS.

I've mentioned before that Armond White had a good record as a legit if insane film critic before he joined  National Review. I suspect they hired him because he occasionally says mean things about liberals (either that or there's a reeeaally big Spielberg fan over there that I don't know about), but the readership seems not to be responding well to him. I think that's because White is not sort of doctrinaire doofus they usually go for  -- not like Jay Nordlinger, for example, and his "this is really a lovely scherzo in Beethoven's Ninth, it reminds me of how liberals love Castro" horseshit. White is on a mission, and unlike his colleagues he doesn't appear to have read it from a telegram from the High Command.

For example, while NR's Jesus freaks were all in spasms about The Giver, because it's supposed to be anti-abortion or something, White gave them "The Giver: Pseudo-Rebellion for Conservative Sheep." The comments to that one are lovely (sample: "I'm going to see it tonight. Cal Thomas recommended it and I value his opinion on any subject. This movie reviewer? Never heard of him").

Who knows what they'll make of White's last few efforts: First, he describes 2004 as "the year film culture broke" because it saw "the media’s lynch-mob excommunication of Mel Gibson and his film The Passion of the Christ, soon followed by the Cannes Film Festival’s ordination of Michael Moore’s anti–G. W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11." So far so compatible, but White works up a rich froth that might have even the regular punters backing away from the podium:

It was moral vandalism, sullying ideas and totems sacred to many. Such a fundamental offense devastated civilized behavior in ways many still have not realized. It drove a wedge between the public and the elites who make movies; the very ground we walked upon as enlightened, cultured people was scorched like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center... 

From 2004 on, even “entertainment” movies were made and received with deleterious political and moral bias.

This is loony and conspiratorial even by culture-warrior standards, but wait, there's more: Later White listed "20 signs of a broken film culture," a list of entartete kunst including some films I'll bet National Review readers like, including The Dark Knight ("used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy"), Knocked Up ("Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety"), and Lincoln ("Spielberg succumbs to Tony Kushner’s limousine-liberal cynicism to valorize Obama-era political chicanery"). Comments to that one so far are also delightful ("How many times are they going to see the comments and realize we don't like him?").

There are all kinds of ways to look at this, but the big point for me is that people who are serious about the arts -- not serious about using the arts as a way to spread the usual dreary propaganda, but about the arts themselves -- are not just capable of surprising readers, but extremely likely to do so. And that's terrific. I hope National Review surprises me and hangs onto White so he can rave away like this on their dime. Who knows, maybe one or two of them will be improved by his example.

DEATH CULT.

Some of you may remember my column last Spring about what I characterized as the new conservative position on climate change: roughly, "Hey, everybody dies (literally)". In other words, even if you stupid libtards are right, environmentalism is futile and we should just all prepare for an earlier-than-expected deliverance unto the loving arms of Jesus.

Mind you, my analysis was largely based on extrapolation of the texts. But it turns out RedState kingpin Erick Erickson is willing to say so out loud:

I Simply Do Not Care About Global Warming

We’re all going to die or something according to the latest hysteria from the United Nations now that government bureaucrats have sufficiently added hype and hyperbole to the IPCC report on global warming a/k/a climate change.

Folks, I do not care. Let me assure you that the world is not going to end and we are not going to cause ourselves to go extinct. This report is written by a bunch of people who believe in the evolution of humanity, but somehow think mankind is unable to adapt to changing circumstances. 

The simple fact is that, if they are right and the world is warming, there is nothing we can do short of economic Armageddon to stop it. We’ve already told most of the third world they have to hide under nets or die of malaria because we do not want them using DDT. We should not now tell them they have to turn off their electricity and never improve their existence because of global warming.

The DDT thing is total bullshit, by the way --  scientific management of a dangerous chemical is not politically-correct reckless endangerment, it's the opposite of it. But does Erick Erickson care about your so-called "science"? Erickson then gets to his secondary argument, which is eat it you stupid libtards:

This is all orchestrated left-wing crap that a bunch of private jet setters and twitter liberals can worry themselves over. I have never once met a person who treats global warming as the most significant issue of our time and is a well adjusted, happy person. From Al Gore to the nuts on Twitter who’ll fill up my timeline in outrage over this, they are maladjusted, angry people in need of prayer to a realer God than Gaia. 

Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it. Expect a series of these "who gives a shit" items, and not only from Erickson, on banking regulations, race relations, foreign policy, etc. As my archive shows, all these guys have left now is resentment, racism, and rifle worship; it's about time they abandoned argument altogether. At least it'll be an improvement over that "conservative reform" bullshit, in that they'll no longer be pretending.

SILENT UPON A PEAK IN DERP-IEN.

A. J. Delgado's scolding of Nicki Minaj is so duh-what that I'm not even going to add my own jokes. I mean, everywhere you drop the hook you catch a beauty. Here's my favorite:

This openly sexual, anything-goes mentality may have taken off several years ago, with Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” in which the non-bisexual Perry nonetheless suggested to girls that experimenting with bisexuality is sexy and playful. (The truth is, bisexual acts when one isn’t naturally disposed are a dangerous opponent to morality and female empowerment, as it is often done purely to please a male onlooker or due to the influence of drugs and alcohol.)

Feel free to offer your own exegeses in comments. Yeesh. She makes Martha Bayles look like Anton LeVey.

HOW TO PISS OFF A PROPAGANDIST.

As reported by Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog, retired Air Force colonel Morris Davis, who's sick of wingnuts pretending Obama's a traitor ("battling faux patriots" is one of his hobbies), posted a tweet tailor-made to attract that crowd: It claimed Nixon and Bush had attended the funerals of generals killed in action, and Obama was breaking tradition by skipping the funeral of Major General Harold Greene, who was recently shot dead in Afghanistan. Turned out the claim wasn't true, and Davis had only made it to prove a point I make here all the time: that for many conservatives "too good to check" and "stop the presses" are pretty much the same thing.

Steve's got his own angle, but for me the most interesting thing about the incident was the reaction of Byron York, who got stung by the colonel's tweet. In his column York describes the evolution of the story at length, and gets very stiff whenever discussing Davis:

On Sunday, I sent a note to Davis asking why, given the credibility that comes with his military career and law school position, he had distributed information he knew to be false. As he had in his earlier tweet, Davis claimed the falsehood was "sarcasm"...

Here's York's closing graf:

There are several lessons to be drawn from the affair. The first, and most important, is to be skeptical about everything one sees on the Internet and make a good-faith effort to ensure that information one passes on is accurate. I will certainly redouble my efforts on that score in the future. The second lesson is that when one makes a mistake, correct it as quickly as possible, more than once if necessary. And the final lesson, narrower but still important, is: Never trust a word Morris Davis says; it might be "sarcasm."

Now, York's one of the more high-class conservatives when it comes to this sort of thing -- that is, rather than just circulating any old bullshit, as so many of the low-rent types do, York prefers to explain why hearsay and innuendo is sort of okay if it's for his side, as in this classic bit:

Rick -- Sure there were lunatic preoccupations in the Clinton years. The boys on the tracks story, for example, was a peculiar fascination at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Mena was something similar for The American Spectator. There were others, although most conservative publications simply ignored things like the "Clinton Chronicles." Clinton himself found some of that stuff useful, and cited it in his public remarks, because it allowed him to cast his opponents as nuts. Hillary used it too -- in the famous "vast right-wing conspiracy" appearance on the "Today" show in 1998, she world-wearily said that the right was "accusing my husband of committing murder, of drug running." 

On the other hand, what about the stories that were grisly but true? Clinton led a colorful life and hung out with colorful people. Troopergate was probably the most bitterly denounced of all the anti-Clinton stories, and some of Clinton's defenders wrote off anybody who took it seriously as a hater and a kook. But the core allegation of the story -- that Clinton used his Arkansas security team to facilitate his philandering -- was true, and the story was, in retrospect, the most accurate predictor of the kind of behavior that Clinton so disastrously exhibited in the White House in the Lewinsky matter. So the haters and the kooks were right on that one.

This kind of classy mendacity, however, is a world away from circulating Snopes-worthy falsehoods -- especially when you're duped into it and then caught at it.

That would make York mad enough, but I think he was extra pissed off because he had been burned by someone with "the credibility that comes with [a] military career and law school position" -- that is, the kind of brass hat a conservative should be able to count on to provide York and his buddies with solid anti-Obama ordnance.  Once a wingnut could just accept on faith that all the uniformed types were on their side, but now each one must be vetted before York can trust him. Think how discouraging a thing like that must be!

UPDATE. Forgot this other York classic: "I didn't intend to rekindle the old [Vince] Foster-suicide questions... But I do agree that the Clintons did everything in their power to make it look suspicious." That's how the pros do it, folks! Original posts here and here.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Obama's golfing and how it's destroying America. The brethren have been on about this since 2009, of course, but for various reasons it's a hot topic right now.

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Hey, guess who got in on Ferguson: Maggie Gallagher. I'm not kidding! If you know her work as head of the Anti-Sex League, you'll know her passive-aggressive style, which she replicates here: A lot of shit about Michael Brown ("'That Indian clerk he roughed up was so small. He must have been so scared'") and love for the cops,  followed by a bullshit plea for tolerance:

We have to find a way out of tribalism, back to America.

During my years leading the fight against gay marriage, there were so many efforts to paint a picture of me as motivated by anti-gay hatred, and there were so many people hoping I would respond in kind. Some who opposed gay marriage even criticized me for refusing to strike back. They saw my gestures of respect for gay-marriage advocates as a desperate attempt to placate, rather than as a refusal to become the caricature my opponents hoped to make me.

To make something good improbably come out of Ferguson will require work from both sides of the racial and political divide.

If this were a vaudeville sketch, this is where the cops and the protesters would stop fighting and unite to beat up Maggie Gallagher. Also in the article: "I don’t want to respond with tit-for-tat stories about race," followed by tit-for-tat stories about race, and many other such examples of the Gallagher method which lead me to believe that even the racists won't be returning her calls.

•  At The Federalist, Daniel Payne is disgusted that Richmond, Virginia joined the National School Lunch Program so those little moochers statists like to call "children" will get free food:

It’s bad enough that we’ll have more students belly up to the government food trough (if you’ve never had a taste of “free” government lunch, consider yourself lucky); instead, consider RPS Superintendent Dana Bedden’s positive gushing about the new program: “I like it for the health and nutrition aspect, but this also removes the stigma of free lunch. Everyone can eat.” 

Ah, “stigma:” one of the last great impediments to full-blown government dependency.

Whereas if we had the little bastards clean toilets for their gruel, it'd be morally-educational. Alas,  "The Left wants the citizenry as dependent upon government as possible," says Payne. Because what other possible reason would they have for using tax dollars to feed children?

•  The strenuous efforts of Reason editors to pump up their moment in the media spotlight despite the avalanche of demurrers and protests from the conservatives on whom they rely for coalition -- here's the latest one from lawn-order scold John Podhoretz -- have convinced me that the Libertarian Moment is something  like the Summer of George.

HOW THE SHITTY HAVE FALLEN.

Since George F. Will got a gig as a Fox correspondent, his standards (such as they are) have certainly dropped:

In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields. Its political corollary is the Cupcake Postulate, which explains everything, from Missouri to Iraq, concerning Americans’ comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government at all levels and all areas of activity. 

Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet..

[Blah blah food police Moochelle broccoli argh blargh]

What has this to do with police, from Ferguson, Mo., to your home town, toting marksman rifles, fighting knives, grenade launchers and other combat gear? Swollen government has a shriveled brain: By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence. So it smears mine-resistant armored vehicles and other military marvels across 435 congressional districts because it can.

So, the explanation is: The connection between these two things is that they are stupid, and so is Big Gummint.

Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences.

"Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences." Maybe he's just going senile?

THE WORLD IS SO FULL OF A NUMBER OF THINGS...

Since that Robert Tracinski column about Ayn Rand's heroes looking for love I've been checking out his venue, The Federalist, and I must say it's a treasure-trove of old-fashioned virtues-'n'-values nonsense, with titles like "If Millennials Want Liberty, They Need Virtue Too." (Author Rachel Lu promotes something called "virtue-interested libertarians," or as we call them around here "the worst of both worlds.")

I could go on about it all day, and I'll certainly have more later, but for the moment I'll just leave you with this wonderful passage by D.C. McAllister:

If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?

The title of this essay is "Stop Pretending Sex Never Hurts." Amazingly, there's no cross-promotion with Astroglide.

I have to say I'm enjoying the conservative movement's Libertarian Moment much more than I expected.

THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED.

When we last paid attention to Robert Tracinski in 2013, he was telling the GOP how to be winners again. The whole piece is ridic, but Tracinski got a little interesting (that is to say, heated) when he talked about a certain author:

Yet the biggest failure of the right is that it has lost the economy’s technological elite. Admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels can immediately grasp why this is so important... 

Today’s John Galts and Hank Reardens are not in a valley in Colorado. They’re in a valley in California. The Hank Rearden of Silicon Valley, an innovator who started out in a garage and built a company which became the most valuable in the world, was Steve Jobs. But Jobs was—let’s be honest here—kind of a hippie. He had many of the virtues of an Ayn Rand hero, but a very different personal philosophy...

He never did finish this thought, probably because the vision of turtlenecked Producers transported him. Anyway, Traciniski's back at The Federalist, and he's really letting his Rand flag fly in something entitled "All An Ayn Rand Hero Really Wants Is Love." I have read the whole thing and I'm pretty sure it's not a joke.

His big point is: you littlebrains think Rand was for the rich and against the poor, but nuh-uh, because several Atlas Shrugged characters renounce their wealth  and go Galt -- and get rich again, but on their terms because they're naturally superior to the horrible statists like you. [retucks shirt]

Edifying as this lecture and its presumed effect on the crowds on his bedroom wall may have been for Tracinski, he seems unsatisfied, so he goes One Step Beyond and tries to us tell us not only that these characters are better at life and inventing and managerizing than the sheeple, but also that they are better at emotions:

...one of the very first things we learn about these tough, pitiless Ayn Rand heroes is their emotional vulnerability. One of the big themes that drives the plot throughout Part 1 is the loneliness of the producers.

The Loneliness of the Producers should definitely be the name of a slashfic site.

The novel projects a culture in which what they do is not recognized, valued, or rewarded. Or rather, since both Dagny and Rearden have been very successful in economic terms, they have been rewarded only with money, and they treat that as if it is the least important reward.

You even see them sighing and weeping sometimes, but eventually they find and form "family" with a bunch of other rich fucks and they all live productively ever after. They are so not cheesy antique wish-fulfillment objects for the little children inside who never got over their playmates' laughter.

The punch line? Tracinski's working on a reader's guide to Atlas Shrugged, and directs us to another site where, now that he has our attention...

My target is to raise $25,000 to buy back more of my time from other projects and focus on completing my Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged in the next few months. Please, if you think this project is valuable, go to www.TracinskiLetter.com/subscribe to contribute. 

This is the kind of project that might normally be funded by a think tank or foundation, but my readers know that I have always been an independent voice.

By my life and my love of it, that's rich! When next I'm out on the street, I'll front my begging bowl with a sign that says INDEPENDENT VOICE SEEKS CROWDFUNDING, see how that works, and recalibrate my opinion of mankind accordingly.

UPDATE. In comments, cleter has a brainstorm:

"No amount of car elevators could fill the emptiness in Mitt Romney's heart. He didn't need more wealth, all he needed was love. And there, standing next to his Mercedes, he wept. All he wanted was slightly over 50% of America's love...."
From "Atlas Shrugged II: The Secret of Romney's Gold," by Brian Herbert and Ayn Rand Jr.

IT ONLY TAKES A MOMENT.

This week has pretty much clarified what "the libertarian moment" really is: While that Times article  portrayed it as a historical moment, events show that it has become an actual moment -- something lasting only briefly, but calculated to have a long-term effect.

Take, for example,  "Why the ‘War on Journalists’ in Ferguson?" by Rick Moran. Readers of his impeccably rightwing venue, the PJ Tatler, may from the headline expect one of those columns featuring, in the words Timothy P. Carney, "wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives" -- that is, conservatives of both kinds united to fight the power of Big Police.

However, Moran is actually with the cops:

It is unrealistic for reporters to think that police approach anyone not wearing blue during a riot with anything but suspicion. This is especially true when they are under gun fire, and Molotov Cocktails and rocks are being thrown at them. It appears that many of the detentions have occurred when reporters either got in the way or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And on and on like that. But! Then Moran drops this:

On the other hand, there have been some questionable actions by police directed at reporters, like the incident mentioned above at the McDonald’s last week where two reporters were roughed up and dragged off to jail.

That done, it's back to stuff like

Do reporters think they should have free rein to run around a riot ignorantly, putting themselves and the police who try to assist them in danger?... That ignorance is going to get one of them killed unless they’re more careful.

That "on the other hand" section may seem to normal readers like a weird hiccup -- only there because of a nervous editor, perhaps, or a debilitating stroke.

But that was the actually the column's "libertarian moment" -- that is, the short part of it where the conservative writer pays homage to this libertarian thing they're all supposed to get with.

You can see something similar in Jonah Goldberg's latest. Mostly it's a fist-shaking fart-cloud about stupid liberals and black people who are always rioting for reasons he can't understand. It might have been written after an Abner Louima demonstration, that's how old-school this joint is -- Goldberg even namechecks the Nation of Islam, and the column is illustrated with a photo of Al Sharpton! But you don't get to be a top Professor of Liberal Fasciology by ignoring what the new breed is up to, and in his summation Goldberg makes room for the trope du jour:

Nearly everything about this story is ugly: the gleeful ideological and bureaucratic point-scoring, the spectacle of a militarized police force and bunkered police leadership, the self-congratulatory advocacy journalism, the Molotov cocktails and despondent victims of looting, the feeding frenzy of Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and countless lesser activist remoras, and — perhaps most of all — the constant soul-corrupting rationalizations of lawlessness that come with seeing the right “context.” (Context! Is there nothing it can’t do?)

See? He got the militarized police in there, nestled among the usual bullshit, so you New Age types can enjoy your racism and authoritarianism with a clear conscience.

You'll be seeing many such libertarian moments sitting on many conservative columns, like cherries on shit sundaes, until this whole thing blows over.

UPDATE. In comments, Bizarro Mike: "Maybe they could sell Libertarian Moments™ collectible figurines. You know, like Precious Moments™, but standing on their own, facing off the tax man come to make them pay grazing fees."

A DREAM DEFERRED.

In my Voice column I mentioned some folks who thought Ferguson would prove a libertarian inflection point for conservatives, and I see some of them are still at it. Under the headline "Ferguson Is The Beginning Of The End For Conservatives’ 'War On Crime,'" BuzzFeed's Evan McMorris-Santoro offers the testimony of Grover Norquist and Chuck DeVore, two conservative factota who think they see an opening here:

“On the crime stuff, a Republican can stand up and challenge the aggressiveness of the cops,” said Grover Norquist, top dog at Americans For Tax Reform and a supporter of criminal justice changes. “Democrats are surrounded by the images of people who defend Mumia or whoever that guy is who killed those cops"... 

“If our policies were in place,” DeVore said, Ferguson might not have the some of the divides he sees as at the root of the turmoil this week. 

“Perhaps there would be lower unemployment,” he said. “Perhaps there would be more two-parent households.”

The opportunistic tone, at least, is convincing. But I fear the moment is passing. As I said yesterday, take a look at National Review to see which way the stagnant wind blows. Charles C.W. Cooke, who has been among NR's stronger civil-libertarian voices on this subject, has retreated to his comfort zone -- i.e., nuh-uh-you-stupid-liberals, America still rules  -- as his colleagues go full lawn-order all around him.

The latest such salvo comes from Victor Davis Hanson, who is enraged that some measure of order was brought to Ferguson's streets, because it was New Black Panther Malik Shabazz who brought it. Imagine, when Jesse Jackson freed Navy Airman Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, even Ronald Reagan said "you can't argue with success" -- but for Hanson, Shabazz's assist represents "at least a partial erosion of legal authority in Ferguson," which he finds "emblematic of our times in which the sanctity of established law exists only to the degree that it is considered useful in promoting a more egalitarian agenda. In the matter of the recent influx at the southern border..." You can smell it coming: the lawless-Obama shtick, and how all his crimes from Benghazi to immigration have led to this moment:

And so we get the disreputable Malik Shabazz as a Robespierre-like street arbitrator of calm or violence in Ferguson, various ethnic pressure groups as de facto legislators adjudicating who will be granted access to the United States, and the current administration able to pick and choose which particular existing federal law is deemed fair and useful and which discriminatory and counter-productive — and rendered therefore null and void. 

In all these cases, any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice — and so it can be replaced immediately by a sort of revolutionary justice with the full backing of the administrative state.

Did I miss something? Was the cop who shot Michael Brown lynched? Or even arrested?

If none of that means anything, then let's just make it this:

Blacks and whites have sharply different reactions to the police shooting of an unarmed teen in Ferguson, Mo., and the protests and violence that followed. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to say that the shooting of Michael Brown “raises important issues about race that need to be discussed"... 

Reactions to last week’s events in Ferguson divide the public by partisan affiliation and age, as well as by race. Fully 68% of Democrats (including 62% of white Democrats) think the Brown case raises important issues about race that merit discussion. Just 21% of Democrats (including 25% of white Democrats) say questions of race are getting more attention than they deserve. Among Republicans, opinion is almost the reverse – 61% say the issue of race has gotten too much attention while 22% say the case has raised important racial issues that need to be discussed.

Contra Norquist, "challenging the aggressiveness of the cops" has got nothing to do with it. The plain fact is, Republicans (and the conservatives for whom they serve as avatars) can't back off law-and-order because their cracker constituency demands it.

But don't worry -- you'll hear all these arguments again, only louder and unanimously, if someone tries to arrest Cliven Bundy.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B responds to Hanson's fantasy that under the Kenyan Pretender "any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice":

What law was judged obsolete and by whom? The people of Ferguson, who believed in the Right to Assembly and Free Speech only to meet with the Hermann Goering Division, Mayberry Company? Or the cops themselves, who saw fit to murder a kid, then go ballistic on the people who got mad about it? Doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of law left at the particular moment, but thanks for being racist, VDH. It's clarifying. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the situation in Ferguson and the related rightblogger identity crisis: Should they let their lipstick libertarian experimentation go beyond the vanilla stuff, and into kinky places that might outrage Jennifer Rubin? Questions remain!

Lots of excess material here: In the section about rightbloggers claiming Ferguson has something to do with Second Amendment rights -- as if America would tolerate black citizens open-carrying en masse; forbid it almighty Reagan! -- I'd hoped to include this Tim Cavanaugh rant at National Review, in which Cavanaugh is so enraged that Tom Toles alluded in a disparaging manner to the NRA in a Ferguson cartoon that he starts emitting stank from every hole -- calling Toles "The Worst Cartoonist In America," snarling about "cheap and half-baked premises" and "barnacle-encrusted clichés," comparing Toles to "monstrous dictators," saying he "keeps his finger right on the pulse of 1979," calling his draftsmanship "visually repulsive" (not aurally repulsive, I guess)... it's so unhinged that Cavanaugh's lack of a coherent point doesn't explain it. Maybe it's a Nast/Tweed or a Goebbels/revolver thing?

UPDATE. If you want some idea of how the Ooga-Booga Squad is whipping the Lipstick Libertarians among conservatives, look at The Corner at National Review this morning. Samples:

• "Ferguson Protester to Cop: ‘F*** You, N*****’." (The protester is black and the cop is white, so you can imagine how this will enrage your typical NatRev reader.)
• Victor Davis Hanson: "The gratuitous looting and street violence, the almost instantaneous rush to blast the police by soon to be presidential candidate Rand Paul; the arrival of the usual demagogues — Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson ('state execution'), and the New Black Panther Party... so reminiscent of the Trayvon Martin Case..." If you're playing the Racist Pundit Talking Point Drinking Game, that's four stiff shots right there.
• Jay Nordlinger: "Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops." Once again white people get the short end of the stick! Also: "Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting" -- which is to say, from Nordlinger's perspective, not at all.

FERGUSON FRAUDS, CONTINUED.

Glad to see things look a bit calmer in Ferguson. Meantime the conservative festival of bad faith continues -- Here's the loathsome Ben Domenech, trying to get with the lipstick-libertarian program at The Federalist:

This isn’t to say that only libertarians are suspicious of cops. There has always been a strain of conservatism very skeptical of government power...

Whereas liberals love cops. Remember Chicago in '68, where they were hugging their nightsticks?

The officer draws his gun and fires. The youth flees. He is apparently shot dead in the back from a distance. The story does not look good, at all. As my colleague Sean Davis noted yesterday, if a civilian had done this – even one who had truly been assaulted and feared for his life – they would be in jail right now waiting prosecution as opposed to on paid leave funded by the taxpayers.

Well, if he were white, maybe -- a black guy would just be dead, like Michael Brown. Moving on to secondary targets. Domenech acknowledges it was bad that the cops bullied the press in Ferguson, sort of, theoretically, but...

Journalists love nothing more than to write about themselves, and particularly to write about themselves as martyrs or heroes. So you can bet they’ll be paying attention, and writing some more pieces about their harsh abuse, as the streets descend into further violence. It’s not that your rights don’t matter, of course, it’s just that their rights, you see, are just more important. Some people are more equal than others.

Reporters aren't the only ones who are asking for it:

But have no fear, good people of Ferguson – the tragedy there has done nothing to interrupt the party in Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama toasted Vernon Jordan and danced the night away. It is good to know that no matter what troubles the populace endures, the monarch’s show goes on.

The real villains of Ferguson: Reporters and Obama. If you really want you head tied in knots, go see Mollie Hemingway talk about how Ferguson shows the value of the Second Amendment -- as if any black person who showed up packing during Ferguson's hot nights wouldn't have had his head blown off. I wonder if Hemingway even remembers what her hero Ronald Reagan did about black folks with guns. Christ, what a passel of frauds.

UPDATE. Comments are lovely. Whetstone:

I expect that Ben Domenech would be whistling a different tune if cops tear-gassed people who looted others' prose.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, FERGUSON EDITION.

I'll have more on Ferguson, MO this weekend, but here's a good template for how it's going down with conservatives, from Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at Right Wing News: First, you lay out all sorts of they're-just-animals stuff --

As far as it is being told, Brown, who was a big boy, resisted arrest as he was being put in the cruiser. A tussle ensued where Brown tried to get a hold of the officer’s weapon. He then fled the scene and the cop pursued him...

The real festivities began after the shooting as riots began. Store owners stood outside their businesses with baseball bats and guns to protect their livelihoods. Which explains in part the quadrupled sales in guns across the St. Louis area – looks like the good residents there have a lot more God-given sense than previously thought... 

Rob at Joshuapundit astutely put it: “There’s nothing that says ‘social justice’ like smashing up and looting a convenience store, a grocery or a Wal-Mart.” Indeed. It’s a free for all baby and the crowd is into letting it burn, while yelling “death to all cops"... 

The guy pulled a gun on the officer and was shot for it. No tears here, but it will escalate things. Nearby, a woman was shot in the head in a drive-by. She’ll live, but if this keeps up, the bodies will start to pile up. Let the protests begin.

-- then, having mollified your ooga-booga constituents with this miserable display, you suddenly change gears and pitch it to the up-and-coming "libertarian" crowd (because it's their moment, y'know) --

As awful as the shootings and the senseless waste of life is, the underlying story lies with the police force itself in my eyes...

This is the evil gift of Obama’s governmental control fetish. He has facilitated police forces whose attire is fashioned after the US Marine Corps MARPAT camouflage pattern...

Not very professional conduct on the officer’s part and not how I choose to remember the men in blue who I have looked up to my whole life. I’m not sure when all of this morphed into the police turning into Obama’s new army.

This is not to excuse Obama, whose approach to the issue of cop-militarization expert Radley Balko calls "more of the same, and in some cases worse," but the police have been turning into mini-militaries for decades. Calling it "Obama's new army" is like calling it Obama's Iraq War -- which of course they've also been doing.

To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.

RETURN TO LIBERTY ISLAND!

We've had some fun with Adam Bellow's band of merry rightwing littérateurs at Liberty Island, and now they're having some fun with us -- their current lead item is announced on the front page as "Liberty Island Makes 'Em Crazy -- A Sampling of Liberals Being Driven to Incoherence by Our Eloquence and Moxie." They link to our and others' bad reviews and say what silly liberals we all are. Good for them, though I must say Norman Mailer did it better.

They're still turning out unique material. Here are some passages from "The Enforcement of Happiness" by Jamie Wilson, which as you'd never guess is about some dystopian future OR IS IT when Gummint micromanages everything about us:

"We're from the Racial Relations Council? Health and Human Services?" The slight young man stepped in hesitantly, followed by a tiny Hispanic woman in a sensible black suit and an older black man wearing a pristine white lab coat. Marcus held his smile, though his forehead wrinkled a bit in confusion. What, he wondered, was up with the entourage? 

"I understand you needed to talk to me about racial compliance. As you have no doubt seen for yourself, our hiring patterns are--" 

Smith waved him off. "We have your records, sir. Blue Screen International has done a stellar job of racio-sexual/gender/ethno balancing."

Spoiler, Lloyd Marcus twist:

"And your wife is Mrs. Leticia Jackson, born in Biloxi, Mississippi. You yourself were born in Harlem?" 

"My parents worked hard to get me out of Harlem," Marcus said almost reflexively. 

The semi-autonomous Harlem, effectively a gang state, had a very bad name these days...

Damn liberals ruined that Harlem. You probably don't need or want any more hints, but here:

"So we're here as a courtesy. We would be happy to provide you with our new free government service, Racial Reassignment Treatment. One quick little prick--" he chuckled, "--and your insides match your outsides. It's tragic that pseudo-African-American people like Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice did not have this option. It would have made their lives so much easier."...

The dark-skinned man in the lab coat leaned over Marcus. "Race traitor," he whispered. "Oreo. Uncle Tom."

It's the good black people versus the bad black people, which you have to admit is pretty classic.

THE FUGS.

Latest new thing to criticize about Obama: He doesn't know how to swear. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line:

After reviewing a transcript of President Nixon’s secret tapes, Norman Mailer commented in The New Yorker, “He lacks the simple New York smart to keep the obscenities in. . . We still do not know if he even swears well.”

As for President Obama, we now know that he doesn’t...

For the record, and trust me on this, “horseshit” means bad; “bullshit” means wrong.

To be fair, Mirengoff updated:

I’m getting push back on my definition of horseshit. It seems that these days, the two words — bullshit and horseshit — have become closer in meaning...

You can't go too far wrong if you have a poetic sensibility and righteous indignation.

UPDATE. Elsewhere on the "They try -- man, how they try!" beat, Obama spoke at a fundraiser on Martha's Vineyard and joked about how the water was colder there than in Hawaii. Here's how Breitbart.com headlined it:

AT MARTHA'S VINEYARD, OBAMA COMPLAINS ABOUT COLD OCEAN

It's like a variation on the old Can't Swim joke. And, per the rule of three, here's a link to really ruin your day: Something called "Truesbury," in which some guy takes old Doonesbury strips about Republican Presidents and, I'm not kidding, sticks references to Obama into the world balloons. Who says conservatives can't do culture?