AFTER-PARTY.

The Oscars should be about the simple joys of life -- gambling and vanity -- and not about politics, but I see Charlie Pierce has people expecting me to talk about those poor nuts who hate-watched Libtard Hollyweird from their survivalist treehouses. Most of the best ravings have been well picked over, but there are a few morsels left to enjoy. First, Matthew Clark, "Associate Counsel for Government Affairs and Media Advocacy with the [wingnut front group] ACLJ" and author of the dystopian epic "Hollywood’s Self-Indulgent Delusional Demagoguery." Sample:

For anyone who has an ounce of critical thinking ability (critical thinking, not PC dogmatic zombism), [the Oscars are] almost unbearable to watch (it’s like watching sausage being made, with rotten meat, and then watching someone eat it, on prime-time TV).

This guy has a future in slasher films. Oh, also:

What if an actress said this award wouldn’t have been possible if my mother chose to abort me? 

Sarah Silverman hasn't done this bit yet? Get on it, Hollywood!  Next we have Young Cons and their wonderful headline:

Sean Penn Makes “Racist” Remark At The Oscars, Everyone Forgets His Party Affiliation

Similarly, when Jane Fonda does something stupid, the media just sits back and lets everybody think she's a Republican. My favorite, though, is the line from IJReview's "5 Hollywood Actors for Conservatives To Root For At This Year’s Oscars," introducing their #3, Michael Keaton:

Michael Keaton may not be a conservative, but his speech at the Golden Globes this year espoused strong conservative principles, even if he didn’t realize it...

Also, #2 Reese Witherspoon: "While she may not be a conservative, she espouses some refreshing ideas regarding modesty..." If this kind of thinking spreads, I could wind up on this year's Best-Dressed List. Thank you, good night!

OSCAR PICKS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

I should add a review of The Imitation Game to my other on to Oscar posts, but it's almost magic time, dammit, so, quickly: We have a cryptographer-hero who's so ahead of his time he may as well be bringing penicillin to neanderthals, and who's also a gay martyr forced into chemical castration and suicide, plus he's possibly on the autistic spectrum, plus he sticks up for women's rights (well, one woman's) -- all this, as they say, and World War II! A Beautiful Mind meets Casablanca! It’s such perfect Oscar bait that I had to admire it, despite hearing each gear-tooth in the machine clicking — click, the platonic love of the smartgirl makes him try to be sociable and he’s humorously inept, click, but they’re going for it, and they stand up to The Man, click, etc.  Keira Knightley as always seems like a little girl playing at grown-ups and once again Charles Dance is made to be the Wicked Witch of the West. But Cumberbund or whatever his name is -- I thought he was supposed to be a pretty-boy and a joke, but in this he's not only believable and affecting in his swallowed anguish, he's absolutely magnetic, a real screen-filling star. Maybe the kids know something after all.

OK, on to this annual death march. I've been good and I've been awful, so make sure you can spare the money:

× Best Picture: The Imitation Game. People are talking Boyhood and talking Birdman. But those movies are probably too weird to win -- look at the past winners -- and will I believe knock each other off. As I just said, The Imitation Game is big-time Oscar bait, and has all the right nominations including Actor, Director, Screenplay, even Editing. (I half-expect -- maybe one-quarter-expect -- a late miracle surge for The Grand Budapest Hotel, so remember that if chaos ensues.)

× Best Actor: Michael Keaton, Birdman. I really was thinking Eddie Redmayne, but Glenn Kenny got me thinking about it -- Redmayne's performance has some nice shadings but nothing like the wells of anger and sorrow that, say, Daniel Day-Lewis gave Christy Brown in My Left Foot. And despite the gags about going full retard, disability is good for getting Oscar nominations, but not so much for winning the prize. In Birdman Keaton was acting his ass off, in both the good and bad ways, and the Academy gives points for effort (if you are or ever have been a star).

× Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon, Wild. I didn't see any of these movies except The Theory of Everything, so here's my half-assed but not necessarily wrong reasoning: The surge of enthusiasm for Julianne Moore in Still Alice reminds me of the alleged sure thing that was Julie Christie in her Alzheimer's drama Away From Her. Also, I hear great things about Witherspoon's performance, and people love her.

✓ Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash. The odds are too steep for anyone else, plus I'm making too many wild picks and must cut my losses somehow.

✓ Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood. Ditto.

× Best Director: Richard Linklater, Boyhood. If it's not the picture of the year, it's the stunt of the year (or past 13 years) anyway. This is exactly the kind of thing that wins directors Oscars in year when their films don't win.

× Best Original Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, The Grand Budapest Hotel. I think the Academy likes Wes Anderson but has been waiting for him to dispel their suspicion that all his movies were written to be performed by children, and that Anderson was having a laugh by using big Hollywood stars instead.

✓ Best Adapted Screenplay: Graham Moore, The Imitation Game. Now, one or two craft awards and we've got a believable Best Picture card.

✓ Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Birdman.

✓ Best Production Design: Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

✓ Best Costume Design: Milena Canonero, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

✓ Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Frances Hannon and Mark Coulie, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I think Birdman's camera trick carries so much of the movie's feeling that the voters will go for it. Also, now that Budapest has caught their attention, they can lavish rewards on his stunning visuals. (I am violating my own rule on costumes this year -- that the earliest period gets the award, particularly if there are ruffs and crinoline -- so Mr. Turner may make a fool of me. But I am prepared.)

✓ Best Film Editing: Tom Cross, Whiplash, because it's got drumming, and I bet there's a lot of rhythmic stuff going on (almost as good as a car chase!).

× Best Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Imitation Game. And there's your Best Picture winner craft award! I still like Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Theory of Everything music very much, but Desplat has been a bridesmaid too often.

✓ Sound Mixing: Whiplash. Drums!
✓ Sound Editing: American Sniper. Guns!

✓ Visual Effects: Interstellar. Ugh, what do I know. Speaking of which, I didn't have time to meditate and my Ouija board is broken,  so I'll refrain from predicting the other awards, though I will say I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't throw one to Glen Campbell just to fuck with us.

UPDATE. I cleaned up on the minor awards and wiped out on the major ones. Until they got to Best Score I was flawless, baby, solid gold, and even there I got the right composer. (Not predicting shorts, docs, and cartoons really helped my percentage, though, I had no idea what the fuck was going on there.)

But Desplat getting it for GBH rather than The Imitation Game was a tipoff that my big bet wouldn't clear. Guess the WWII-winning loner who's also gay, autistic, and bullied was a bit too on the nose; maybe it would have won if they'd just extended their rewrites of history and  given Turing the happy ending he deserved, perhaps ascending into heaven with Christopher like at the end of Gladiator. (And why not? I'm with Graham Moore, fact-checking the water lilies is stupid.)

I have to admit, if you'd tipped me that The Imitation Game wouldn't win and that Keaton wouldn't win, I still would not have guessed Birdman would win. It may be the most avant-garde (in relative terms) winner since All Quiet on the Western Front. Even other arty winners like American Beauty and No Country for Old Men give viewers some old-fashioned hey-that-star-is-a-guy-like-me thrills, or at least entertaining chase scenes, before it all goes existential; Birdman is the kind of headscratcher people used to associate with Europe and make fun of. Well, forty years of future studio execs going to film school have paid off. 

My Birdman review here.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

At first I thought, "O God no Joanna Newsom is trying to sneak back get the spray-bottle" but this song is kind of sticking with me.
•   Jonah Goldberg's column today could have been titled, "I'm not lazy and stupid, you're lazy and stupid!" He says Obama is dumb because he won't admit Islam itself is responsible for the nuts who kill in its name. The President's anodyne ecumenical statement is, in Goldberg's view, the same thing as saying "Michael Jordan didn’t play basketball" or  "We didn’t win World War II" in that, durr, that's stoopid too, right? The analogy invites deeper analysis, so step well back as Goldberg executes his logic-fart:

“No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the president proclaimed, “people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

Now obviously, there’s some truth to this. We judge people more by their actions than by their beliefs. But reasonable people also recognize that our actions often have a causal relationship with our beliefs. This is hardly a controversial — or even debatable — insight. Orthodox Jews don’t avoid bacon because it tastes bad; they do so because they’re keeping kosher. One cannot intelligently discuss why Mother Teresa helped the poor without referring to her faith. And one cannot discuss why the Islamic State burns, rapes, and enslaves people without taking their religious beliefs into account.

See -- Jews have wacky eating habits, Christians are nice, and Muslims are savage rapist-murders; Q.E.Doritos Cool Ranch! While I attribute the lack of retribution I've suffered for my anti-Mohammed cartoons to global respect for my artistry, I think Goldberg is safe because most non-conservatives can't make out what he's trying to say.

•   Speaking of legacy pledges and the next GOP President, Bill Kristol worries that Hillary Clinton is getting better numbers in the reps-the-future-not-the-past category in a CNN/ORC poll than any Republican Presidential candidate. (Scott Walker's numbers are least bad, perhaps because voters relate his social-net-shredding record to the dystopian future of The Handmaid's Tale or Idiocracy.) Kristol thinks he sees a way out:

Perhaps some new set of concerns in 2016 will overwhelm all the past/future talk. Given the state of the world, that’s quite possible. We could easily have a foreign policy election in 2016. And then people might not mind a steady hand, even if one from the past (think Richard Nixon in 1968).

One thing Americans  seem to have learned from the last clusterfuck in which Bill Kristol had a hand is, let's not do that again. In fact Kristol himself was complaining about "American war-weariness" only last year. Yet now he thinks beating the drum for Gulf War III might get one of his ringers elected. I suppose that's because he has more than average faith in the power of yellow journalism and jingo. After all, he is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which is very influential among people who never read anything they can't get for free on the New York-DC shuttle; that's got to count for something.

•   Whether or not I get to see any of the other big films (see my "On to Oscar" posts), at some point this weekend I'm going to stick my fool neck out, as I have in years past, and predict Sunday's winners. So watch this space! (And the easy way to do this is to get on my Twitter feed, where I announce posts sometime and dish out apothegms.)

•   Yeah it's late and who cares, but there are a few wonderful things about this Noah Rothman Hot Air column defending noted asshole Rudolph Giuliani and the asshole thing he said this week. I mean, it's mostly terrible on the level of Twitchy (look at the sickburn takedown of the media by "Florida-based political operative Rick Wilson"!), but in his flailing Rothman does bang into an interesting defense:

What are we to make of this frenzied attack on Giuliani, in which the whole of the political press reacted as though a man who left office 14 years ago had insulted their mothers?... 

Oh, but he was a leading presidential candidate in 2007, don’t you know? And he delivered the keynote address at the GOP’s nominating convention in 2008. And he’s a frequent guest on cable news, so he must be influential (a claim that could only be made by someone who rarely appears on cable news). But observing Giuliani’s diminished stature today when compared to the last decade renders the media’s reaction even less explicable.

I hope someone in Rudy's retinue told him, "It's okay, chief -- Noah Rothman says it doesn't matter 'cause you're a has-been!" Oh but the very, very, very best is the correction at the end:

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the chairman of the RNC as Ron Fournier

May your weekend be as serendipitous.

WHAT YOU REALLY NEED IS TO MEET A NICE GUY. LIKE SCOTT WALKER!

At National Review, Mary Eberstadt denounces "jailhouse feminism" -- that is, feminism acting all mad and pushy, you know, like guys. Her examples include Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham NO DON'T RUN AWAY YET this is actually funny. Eberstadt starts with the feminist reclamation of  the world "slut," which inspires this Rotary-Club-dais-joke-slash-non-sequitur:

Of course this approach takes for granted the sexual revolution’s first commandment, which is that any such act ever committed by any woman is by definition beyond reproach.

Hm, I don't remember that one. Ladies, when did that go into effect? And when was it repealed?

...Even so, something deeper is at work here than ideological tussling over a word that no halfway-civilized person would use anyway. The promiscuous slinging of “slut” is only the beginning of the obscenity- and profanity-saturated woman-talk these days, from otherwise obscurantist academic feminism on down to popular magazines and blogs.

Previously the word was only used by fathers toward their daughters if they didn't like how they were dressed,  by accused rapists' lawyers in court, etc. But now ladies (even the obscurantist ones) are using it, and also "the b-word," which is grounds for concern.

The interesting question is why. A cynic might say it’s just smart branding. After all, sex sells; women talking about sex sells; and even women talking about women talking about sex sells, too. Everyone knows that slapping a salacious word into a title will pull more eyeballs to the screen or page. Maybe it’s time the objects of exploitation got some of their own back. Why shouldn’t enterprising modern women perform some commercial jujitsu exploitation, via the promiscuous use of “slut” and other rough talk, to sell their stuff? A play called “The Private-Parts Monologues” would have folded on opening night

Same thing with Slutwalk. You think it's about preventing rapes, but these women are actually just trying to make a fast buck by working blue!

But there's something deeper going on behind this, says Eberstadt:

All of which leads, finally, to a sad and monumental fact. Beneath the swagger and snarl of jailhouse feminism is something pathetic: a search for attention (including, obviously, male attention) on any terms at all.

[Blink. Blink.]

If that means being trussed up like a turkey, so be it. If loping about on TV in your birthday suit does the trick, so be that, too. And if getting smacked around from time to time...

Whoa, some segue!

...is part of the package — if violence is what it takes to keep an interested fellow in the room — that is a price that some desperate women today will pay.

See? Feminism caused Fifty Shades of Grey, twerking, and assault -- or rather, feminism happened to be standing around when a culture cop needed to make a collar on thousands of years of abusive behavior and attitudes toward women, and so why not pick her up? It's not like they haven't pinned lots of men's crimes on feminism before.

There's more -- endlessly more -- but I'll just leave you with some key words and phrases: "ethos of recreational sex," "decline of the family," "draconian speech codes on campuses," "the defunct Pussycat Dolls," "Amanda Marcotte," "Jessica Valenti," etc. (Maybe I should have put these up top -- but then you never would have read past them, and I would have been lonely. Now we suffer together!)

Oh OK, one more pull-quote:

The result is that many, many women have been left vulnerable and frustrated. That’s why a furious, swaggering, foul-mouthed ideology continues to exert its pull. Jailhouse feminism promises women protection.

Like butch dykes in those women's-prison movies! See, we told you this would happen if you started wearing pants.

FURTHER COMMENT SUPERFLUOUS.

When you see Obama holding up one finger in a photograph, F.W. Burleigh of the distinguished conservative journal American Thinker will have you know, he isn't telling someone to wait a minute, nor calling for attention, nor witnessing for Christ like Archie and the Gang, nor doing the Lindy Hop --

Obama and the Muslim Gang Sign 

Is President Obama a Muslim? A lot has been written about this, but if photographs speak louder than words, then a photo taken at last August’s U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in Washington D.C. might shed considerable light. 

It shows Barack Hussein Obama flashing the one-finger affirmation of Islamic faith to dozens of African delegates...

The one-finger display is the distinctive Muslim gang sign: The index finger points straight up while the thumb wraps underneath and presses against the digital phalange of the middle finger. The remaining fingers are squeezed against the palm in order to highlight the extended forefinger...

There's even semiotic analysis of a grainy photo detail:

The reaction of Togo president Faure Gnassingbe, at the top row second to the left, is less approving. Through his face you can read the mind of this Sorbonne- and George Washington University educated leader. His mind is screaming, “You gotta be kidding!”

I could go on, but why spoil it? If you're a fan of Crazy, this is a treasure trove.

UPDATE. John Bridges, among others, sees the problem.

AND THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR WHINING.

I think most of my readers will agree that the murder by ISIS of Christians in Egypt is bad, right? Well, that's not enough for conservatives -- you have to agree with them that Christians here in the States are persecuted, too, or you suffer from "anti-Christian bias." Here's Rod Dreher's brain-teaser on the subject, from his evocatively-titled post "Lions & Christians in America":

The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like. Yet it is also the kind of thing that people in this country who fear and loathe Christians point to as an argument-ender when Christians complain about social injustice against themselves, e.g., “Get back to me when they’re chopping Christian heads off, then we’ll talk.” I would point out that ISIS is throwing gay men out of high windows to their deaths, and the crowds below are finishing off the job with stones. No secular liberal would — nor should — accept the argument that gays in the US have no right to complain against discrimination because they don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed.

Based on this, if some nut on the other side of the world is persecuting your affinity group, you're being persecuted here as well, or should at least be treated as if you were. I wonder if Dreher knows that ISIS is a champion killer of Muslims, and would agree that we should for that reason hold our domestic Muslims as a persecuted group as well, and tell their stateside critics like Pam Geller and Daniel Pipes to fuck off.

No chance of that -- you can read farther down Dreher's post about the media's "normalization of homosexuality," just a small number of paragraphs after Dreher was using gays as a point of comparison with Christians. At National Review, Jim Geraghty also thinks the newsies are unfair to American Christians; he heads toward the same affirmative-action argument we often get about conservatives in the press, but is smart enough to realize that most reporters are probably at least nominally Christian -- or else Jewish, and he can't complain about that; think what Bibi Netanyahu would say! -- so he takes an interesting tack:

Last night I argued that in most media newsrooms, the notion of Christians as victims doesn’t fit their usual narratives. Fournier argued that there are a lot of Christians in the Times newsroom, and that the Times has a lot of reporters in the Middle East, covering ISIS, at considerable risk to themselves. Both points are true but neither really refutes my argument. 

For starters, sure there are Christians in the Times newsroom, but not particularly representative ones. Here’s Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, back in 2003: “Nearly all of us in the news business are completely out of touch with a group that includes 46 percent of Americans. That’s the proportion who described themselves in a Gallup poll in December as evangelical or born-again Christians.”

So it's not enough for reporters to go to some modern Church where anything goes -- one has to roll hard and roll holy! Picture the new breed of newsroom quota-Christians: Fear-God Gump and Barebone McGillicuddy, working on a Style section piece about a hip new way to handle snakes.

My own solution would be regular cats-for-Christ slideshows, which should give everybody what they want, or at least deserve.

UPDATE. Mmm, them's some good comments, e.g., Megalon:

[Dreher says,] "The mass martyrdom last week of the 21 Egyptian Copts at the hands of ISIS is a sobering reminder of what real persecution looks like." 

Yes it is. That's why you and your cohorts in this country trying to claim that having to accept a paying job to bake a gay wedding cake means you're being persecuted the same way is so offensive. Especially when it's coming from a man who often talks like he's about ten minutes away from converting and joining IS himself.

Also, Hob runs down Kristof's shady "a group that includes 46 percent of Americans" = fundies claim and finds it possibly lacking. I wouldn't be surprised, but then, the claim is 15 years old -- maybe since then millions of Americans have got born-again, moved to the haunts 'n' hollers, and stopped voting, which explains how Obama won twice.

UPDATE 2. If we ever get Cats for Christ (no not this one) off the ground, I think we have to use ADHDJ's topline: "I'm not purrfect, just furgiven."

ON TO OSCAR, 5.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

The Theory of Everything. As I've said before, the biopic is a minor form that usually tells us why some famous person was famous and doesn't spare much time for the demands of art. The Theory of Everything stretches the formula a little -- it's not just about Stephen Hawking, it's about him and his wife Jane -- but it's still an inspirational famous-person story, with both Hawking and his doting wife rising through suffering to redemption. In some ways it's just the sort of gush you'd expect: for example, Jane doesn't seem to think about cheating on her increasingly enfeebled husband (with her saintly choir director, no less) until well past the halfway point -- and at that moment, hundreds of miles away, Hawking starts spitting up blood. And every so often someone gets the opportunity to tell the world what a genius Stephen is (most melodramatically, a big-time Russian scientist who carries the crowd with him at a crucial turn). The inspira-biopic formula is faithfully followed.

And yet... the Hawkings' relationship is genuinely interesting. Their meet-cute is pro-forma -- he's gawky but obviously impassioned and fun, she's sincere and sweet and too real for those other boys, and their life at Cambridge is sunny and full of promise. But when Hawking begins to have medical problems, their relationship is stepped up -- though Stephen wants to give her an out, Jane insists she's in for the long haul and that she has the steel for it.

The haul is indeed long, far longer than the two years Stephen is originally given to live, and both parties work hard at sustaining it, and at Stephen's career. Jane's other interests are subordinated, and over time it wears on her, as Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, brilliantly shows: She doesn't become shrewish or embittered -- it turns out she does indeed have the steel -- but she does stiffen; she sees that she may break, and begins to look for ways to sustain herself.

Stephen meanwhile is both increasingly driven and dependent, and like Jane is smart enough to find out how to keep from collapsing. His academic success everyone knows about, but his way of dealing with his physical dilemma is more interesting. Eddie Redmayne is great at conveying the effects of Hawking's ALS, and at showing how Hawking uses his wit and charm, even when deprived of most conventional means of expressing them, to avoid despair in both his own life and his marriage. Still, eventually he, too, has to look outside the relationship to sustain himself. (Though putting across delicate and painful emotions while physically challenged is an Oscar-season punchline, I can tell you that in Redmayne's case, when Stephen has to have the marriage-ending discussion with Jane, it absolutely works.)

So this inspirational story is about what from some perspective might be called a failed marriage. The most obvious argument for its success is Hawking's glorious career. As for Jane's success, that's a little trickier; the film suggests that when Hawking finally acknowledges the possibility of God, which for Jane has always been a certainty, it's because she has made God real to him by her devotion. It seems a small enough victory, though you could say that any good relationship between educated people is to some extent an extended conversation, and that Hawking's admission is not so much about Jane winning a point as it is a sign that they have all along been talking the same language.

All the craft elements are very fine, but I especially liked the lushly romantic score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, which in the grand Hollywood tradition not only underlines but exalts the characters' feelings; it's up for an Oscar and I wouldn't be shocked if it won.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting Music Times column handicapping the Best Score race; it's always nice to hear from someone who knows what he or she is talking about, though the author's view that Alexandre Desplat's double nomination won't work against him is contradicted by history.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   I thought yesterday's First Things article -- about how, thanks to 50 Shades of Grey, BDSM will lead followers to the Church, thereby reversing the usual pattern -- would be an anomaly. But now I see it's becoming a wingnut-Christian trope, executed today by Mollie Hemingway, who I guess is the new The Anchoress. At least Hemingway starts with a perfectly entertaining review of the film; she finds the sex scenes "pretty tame" and names other BDSM-themed stories she prefers, which as a former Catholic I appreciate. But then:

Anyway — if, as a character written by G. K. Chesterton said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” let’s ponder what women who are into this awful literature are seeking.

Ugh, that quote again -- and I might have known it was Chesterton, that's how the more high-class God-botherers always announce themselves.

I want to say this before the days when such statements are branded hate-speech worthy of re-education camp...

And the same goes for ridiculous persecution fantasies.

...but a hell of a lot of women would, if forced to choose, prefer to be in a loving committed relationship with a dude than get successively better office jobs on the way to the corner office.

Also, they'd rather go to heaven and lounge on clouds all day than go to your liberal-secular schools. Thereafter Hemingway just spools out the usual bullshit: Girls who try to make something more of themselves than dutiful wifemothers end up bitter hags with frozen eggs; men are boycotting marriage because of bitter hags with frozen eggs; women don't want feminism, they "want to be lost in a relationship, completely submitting to a man who is dangerous enough to need rescue but loving enough to notice what makes them beautiful," etc. Well, one good thing may come of this; in future, Jesus-friendly films like God's Not Dead will have a lot more nudity, and missals may come with bodice-ripping illustrations and Fabio on the cover as Jesus.

•   I don't usually pimp books here, mainly because I'm sub-literate, but I can say this about Dead is Better, by my wife's friend Jo Perry: If you liked my own neo-noir Morgue for Whores (and if you haven't read that, what's stopping you), you'll probably like this. Actually, that's not a pre-condition -- Dead is less grimy and sleazy than my novel, which surprisingly does not make it less interesting. The narrator is a dead guy, murdered, and he's just getting the hang of the afterworld. He figures out how to locomote in his new "frictionless" plane of existence, and even to hitch rides in cars, pretty quickly, but he's slower to make sense of what he's learning about the people he left behind in meat world -- and of the dog, also dead, who appears to have adopted him. Murder, mystery, redemption -- all that. Oh, and very sharp writing. Have a look.

•   It's become de rigueur for conservatives to defend Scott Walker's college performance -- we Charlie Pierce fans call this "the C-plus Augustus maneuver." Jonah Goldberg ups the ante and defends Walker's punt on evolution. Goldberg calls it "Darwinism," a popular schtick among the brethren, and says no fair you're trying to make us look dumb:

To borrow a phrase from the campus left, Darwinism is used to “otherize” certain people of traditional faith — and the politicians who want their vote.

Same thing with those citizens whose Constitutional right to treat epilepsy with leeches is mocked by them there pointy-heads. Then Goldberg gives his own I-din't-come-from-no-monkey speech on grounds of moral grandeur:

Beneath the surface, the salience of evolution as a political football is ultimately about the status of man. Are humans moral creatures whose actions are judged by some external or divine standard, or are we simply accidental winners of an utterly random contest of genes?

A God that works through evolution -- why, it's too fantastic to even contemplate, just like universal health care. How I'd love to see the big courtroom scene in Inherit the Wind re-written for Goldberg -- especially if they replaced Brady's Bible citations with quotes from Animal House and "he who smelt it dealt it."

TURN ME ON, DUMB MAN.

As enjoyable as the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon is to make fun of, I haven't read it so I shouldn't really; besides, everyone's entitled to his or her kink (as long as it's consensual, which I guess lets out Andrew C. McCarthy). Still, anything can be taken too far -- Here's Joseph Heschmeyer at conservative Catholic magazine First Things:

Beyond surprise, the series’ success has generated a good deal of alarm, as the book glorifies a sado-masochistic relationship containing rape and sexual violence against women. The series’ popularity testifies to something quite at odds with the traditional Christian vision of love and sexuality. While these concerns are well-founded, there’s another dimension of the phenomenon to consider: What accounts for the series’ sudden popularity? If Fr. Smith, the titular character in the Bruce Marshall novel, is right that “the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God,” what are fans of the Fifty Shades series seeking? 

One answer is that there’s a hunger that’s not being satisfied: Namely, for men who are unabashedly masculine, who aren’t afraid to take control, and to lead. That is, there’s a longing (even a lusting) for men who aren’t afraid of what’s classically been called “headship.” To this end, while Fifty Shades subverts Christian sexual morality, it subverts the modern crusade for “genderlessness” all the more.

I have to say, this is a reversal of the process I grew up with, whereby the Tridentine Mass, scratchy uniforms, and mean nuns with rulers awakened fantasies of dominance and submission, not the other way around.

(Give Heschmeyer retro credit, though: It's been a long time since I saw someone cite Free to Be... You and Me as anti-masculine propaganda.)

THE SECRET OF HIS SUCCESS.

The Daily Caller's Patrick Howley, one of whose previous efforts for the cause -- a column called "Liberals want to stop men from checking out women," in which he suggested girls longed for him to stare at their tits -- was covered here in December 2013, has not changed his game. His latest is called "Liberal Hipsters Make Race Relations Worse," but before we get an explanation we have to hear how cool Patrick Howley is because he lives among black people:

Now as white people go, I get a fair amount of respect, even with my generally conservative political views. I don’t look like I have way more than other people because I don’t. I live alone, I don’t bother to shave a lot of the time, I’m skinny and mediocre-looking. I dress frumpy. Nobody dates me for very long. I get crapped on by others in my profession while hacks take my material and get famous with it. My adolescent desire to be Norman Mailer didn’t really pan out and I wear the shrugging disappointment on my face.

In other words, I get a pass. I don’t get hassled if I’m chain-smoking outside a Spanish laundromat at two in the morning on a Wednesday. I carry myself like I’m supposed to be there. I keep my head down, I don’t judge anybody, I don’t smile, I don’t make trouble, I don’t let anybody touch me, I’ll give somebody a cigarette if they need it. It’s fine. (THAT’s how you gentrify, kids. Take notes).

THAT's how you get a ghetto pass, kids -- shamble about like vintage Tim Roth and emanate self-loathing. And no touching! Black people respect that.

But some cats can't hang --

But lo and behold, this other white guy in line at Wendy’s was reading a book. Some frilly little kind of book. It could have been Emily Dickinson for all I know. He was dressed in smug glasses with a little scarf and some kind of twee little indie petticoat... 

He ordered some kind of salad-type thing and a chicken sandwich with all kinds of preconditions: no this, no that, like, uh, no I don’t want that on it. Whatever. It was thoroughly disgusting. I felt the angry eyes of other people in line linking me and this loser together as though we came as a socioeconomic couplet. I almost had to apologize to the crowd.

I half expected Howley to swagger up and offer this young gent from cubesville some new colors for his paintbox. Then I remembered: No human contact!

How did this person turn out this way? Is he really so oblivious that he can’t even go to a downmarket Wendy’s without stoking an undercurrent of racial tension that everybody went to the restaurant on a Sunday to just forget about?

You could feel it, brah. Dudes be like "damn!" What? No, they didn't say "damn" -- it was in the undercurrent!

Is he actively trying to be a punchable asshole?

And here’s the bitter irony: THAT guy is probably some kind of liberal blogger who makes his living accusing Republicans of being racist.

Wait. Waaaaaait.
He didn't just --
Okay I double-checked, he did.

THAT guy is exactly like the kind of dweeb who would Tweet at me after this column runs and tell me I’m making all sorts of culturally insensitive “microaggressions.” 

Also the kind of dweeb who'd hog the couch at this party, talking to this chick when I'm tuh-RY-ing to get with her, TODD!

Much has been made lately of Felix Salmon's advice to young journalists, but really, the best thing to tell them is this: Angle for a wingnut welfare sinecure, and pray for a boss who's too busy to read your copy.

UPDATE. Comments are just too good. From Another Kiwi:

Moby Dick by Patrick Howley. Call me Ishpatrick. A fucking white whale, are you kidding me? In this neighbourhood? Man, get your frilly petticoat ass out of here before the black folks take to you with torches and pitchforks. Me, I'll be down at the Sudz 'n' Spin ignoring all those dumb fucks. Now watch some bastard steal my writing, yeah, it figures.

Also enjoy dex's comment, which begins "i don't say he's a great man. patrick howley never made a lot of money..." and several others.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES: AN ONGOING SERIES.

Haven't looked in for a while on Acculturated, the culture-war jump school for would-be Douthats that has given me much pleasure in the past. There's currently a post-Grammys piece there by Mark Judge, the artist formerly known as Mark Gauvreau Judge, beginning thus:

Don’t make Sam Smith gay. 

That is to say, don’t make Sam Smith a representative of the gay community and a symbol for all things gay.

See, Judge hates it when people see sexual orientation -- that is, when gay people recognize gay people -- and also when people see color -- like when black people tell Iggy Azalea to fuck off. It all goes back to a youthful trauma:

When I was in college, the British duo the Pet Shop Boys were key contributors to the soundtrack of my young life. The Pet Shop Boys are gay.

[Blink. Blink.]

When I heard their first album Please in 1986, I felt that delirious swoon of falling in love with a piece of musical art...

I followed the Boys for years, but something started bothering me: they increasingly became known as a gay band and not just a band. Great songs like “King’s Cross,” “Liberation,” and “It Always Comes as a Surprise” were subordinated to the larger theme of homosexuality. The Pet Shop Boys were not brilliant songwriters who could touch the hearts or people all over the world—they were “queering pop.” It was like only selling Van Morrison’s music in Irish pubs...

I was a suburban kid at a Catholic university who occasionally snuck a look at Playboy. If I was to listen to the journalists, and the political club goers, and the subculture police, I would have turned myself away. Because I wasn’t the target audience.

The Gay Gay Gay took my babies away! The subculture police with their phallic nightsticks tried to drive Judge out of the disco, just as the black radicals tried to spoil his appreciation of Motown, I suppose. I'm surprised he survived with his perfectly-unexceptional tastes intact.

This is a high point of the issue, though you might also enjoy Acculturated's "Celebrities Behaving Well Award" nominations, including "Taylor Swift for reaching out to one of her adoring fans to give her real, thoughtful, honest advice about an unrequited love," "Kate Middleton for maintaining a certain level of class and decorum in the pop-culture sartorial scene," and "Justin Timberlake for his unprecedented awe and humility during his recent visit to Israel" (by which I assume they mean he didn't come onstage wearing a BDS shirt and a keffiyeh). "The winner of our contest will be announced on Monday, February 23," Acculturated says, "and we will award their charity with a $2,500 donation." $2,500! Dunno who's giving this ad-free site its wingnut welfare, but if they can come up with that kind of scratch  for a contest, I'd be happy to explain to their readers (for a reasonable fee) how my heart was broken the day Camryn Manheim became a fat activist.

UPDATE. In comments, tigrismus encapsulates Judge's problem: "He gets to decide what's universal, and quelle surprise, it's him."

AXELROD, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD.

This is masterful trolling:

Barack Obama was "bullshitting" his opposition to gay marriage and support for civil unions during his 2008 presidential campaign, according to a new book authored by former senior White House adviser David Axelrod. 

Time magazine reported Tuesday that the longtime Obama confidant said in his new book, "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," that he counseled then-senator Obama to soften his position on gay marriage for political reasons. 

"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod wrote, as quoted by Time...

"I’m just not very good at bullshitting," Obama told Axelrod after one of those events, as quoted by Time.

Normal people will go, "Yeah, so?" Even Lincoln was doing the "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" thing as late as 1862. Getting elected President in a nation always verging on a majority makeup of Snopeses requires some finesse.

But among the abnormal, by which I mean conservatives, it's a different story. So roll out the argh-blargh and mutter-sputter! Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart.com:

OBAMA’S GAY MARRIAGE LIE WAS A LIE ABOUT HIS FAITH, TOO... 

"Obama Misled Nation” is almost a perennial headline–it applies to nearly everything the president does. Yet it is important to be clear about the nature of this particular lie. 

Obama did not just pretend to oppose a controversial position. He pretended to hold that view as a matter of his Christian faith. 

Thus he made Christians look bigoted -- by acting the bigot and thus getting them to vote for him! HE IS THE FATHER OF LIES! Next, Noah Rothman at Hot Air:

Obama... spent the next 16 years hiding his politically inconvenient opinions from the public until they became acceptable to a majority. There’s nothing especially shocking about that, but the fact that this fails to astonish is itself a lamentable condition. 

[Blink. Blink.]

...This level of cynicism, the expectation that obviously our political leaders would mislead us about what they truly believe, cannot be healthy in the long run. 

Yeah, the first two hundred years of knowing that politicians lie were alright, but now it's getting a little old. I know, let's elect that Duck Dynasty guy.

Most of the brethren apply their traditional Crisis of Credibility bullshit -- "It’s liars all the way down in this administration," hehindeeds Ole Perfesser Instapundit; "Obama lied about opposing gay marriage, contrived the 'God’s in the mix' stuff, isn’t an Honest Politician," huffs Guv'nah Charles C.W. Cooke; "Obama Adviser Says Obama Repeatedly Lied About Gay Marriage for Political Gain... Related: They Lied: Obamacare’s 12 false premises and broken promises," report those lovable libertarians at Reason (read the comments for extra libertarianism, by which I mean loss of faith in humanity).

But we see their point -- the political repercussions could be severe: Maybe word will spread to Alabama, and the Democrats will have a hard time winning elections there!

UPDATE. Oh man:

That monster! Or maybe the Daily Caller doofus who wrote this thinks Sasha and Malia are the monsters, for helping Nobama pretend he used to be regular Christian fag-hater in order to hornswoggle the American People into gayness. Just look at them in the picture, acting like a regular family!

Next we have neo-neocon. The entire tortured mess is hilarious -- sort of Murder in the Cathedral meets Blood Feud -- but there are two stop-the-show moments:

Over the years Americans have become cynical about lying presidents. Some date that cynicism—or at least a great leap forward for that cynicism—to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the fact that Clinton survived it. The left, of course, says “Bush lied” about WMDs, but the right points out that Bush relied on intelligence reports around the world that were mistaken, and that is different than a lie, and that a lie would have been wrong.

So what if he turned a formerly functional Middle East republic into a slaughterhouse and killed thousands of innocent people? He may be a war criminal, but he's not a liar!

[NOTE: I haven't seen any reactions from the black religious community yet, but it's possible they might be quite displeased at this news. It's one thing to change your mind on something; it's another to lie to religious people about your religious beliefs.]

"Why is that white lady staring at us from the bushes? It's like she wants ask us something but she's scared."

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT!

You read Bob Dylan's great MusiCares speech, right? Remember the part where he talks about the grand tradition of folk and blues and how it affected him? Excerpt:

For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once. 

If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.

Dylan is so clear about this that you wouldn't think he could be misunderstood. But then you'd be forgetting libertarians! Take it away, Ed Krayewski at Reason:

Bob Dylan's Makes the Case Against Today's Copyright Climate
In a 20 minute speech, Bob Dylan explains how copyright is detrimental to cultural heritage without mentioning the word

Ain't even kidding.

...Were these different folk standards composed in a legal climate such as today's, they would never be "standards." They'd be copyrighted and would lose their status as musical currency that can be passed around, performed, revised, and rewritten and so forth.

And some old black men might have gotten paid. I wonder if Krayewski reached out to Dylan and told him he was on the right track, and should now read some Hayek and oh, yeah, put his catalogue into public domain to stimulate freedom. He might also try that on Kid Rock, Nick Gillespie's latest libertarian rock star -- see how he goes for the idea that copyright is "detrimental to cultural heritage."

These guys have got me believing in life on other planets because they can't possibly be from this one.

ON TO OSCAR, 4.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.

There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”

This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.

So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.

If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.

This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.

Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.

One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.

Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.

I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.

(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)

NEXT WEEK: PINOCHET WAS NO ANGEL BUT AT LEAST HE WASN'T A SOCIALIST.

There's plenty of argh-blargh over Obama mentioning the Crusades and the Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast, on the apparent grounds that Christians aren't like that any more, whereas all Muslims are ISIS sleeper agents waiting for the word of the Prophet to leap out of their taxicabs and convenience stores and do jihad. (Also Obama mixed in slavery and Jim Crow, and that was totally the Democrats!)

Most of the brethren are content with ordinary, meretricious bullshit ("Obama uses National Prayer Breakfast to compare Christianity to ISIS," lies Some Guy at RedState); but making everything worse as usual is Jonah Goldberg, who has a long history of defending the viciousness of the Church (particularly toward Galileo, which Goldberg describes as a sort of innocent misunderstanding among friends) and, roused by an Obama news hook, stumbles onstage with his Inquisition Was Not So Bad crib notes:

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

It's like when your friend says that boring lecture was "torture" -- just a figure of speech! Yet libtards get mad when you subject a Gitmo detainee to the equivalent of a boring speech.

I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.

Hitler has a bad rap but if only you'd seen him with his dogs, etc. The thing you have to remember about this yap is, it's not meant to convince normal people, who will be giving it that Springtime for Hitler stare, but to soothe whatever vestigial sense of shame is left among the true believers. (Goldberg even brings up Martin Luther King to defend Christianity, which for conservatives is definitely like knocking down chairs behind you when you're on the run from the cops.)

Goldberg also says that Inquisition stuff was a long time ago, but take a look at Goldberg himself and all the freaks and monsters with whom he associates; you just know that if the coast were clear, if the effects of the Enlightenment (including the founding of this Republic) were completely dead and faded, they'd be burning and beheading to beat the band.

UPDATE. I am grateful for the reminder from Chauncey DeVega at Alternet that, regarding the Big Long Time Ago objection to speaking ill of the godly, some horrific lynchings of black men were performed within living memory. Klansmen didn't burn giant question marks on people's lawns, y'know, and Bizarro Jesus is often an honored guest at outbreaks of American mayhem.

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson has spoken:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is.

He's got a point. There's no evidence that Obama beats his children, fucks his cousin, goes out of his way to make other people miserable, seethes with hate at the unfair advantages enjoyed by the poor, or many of the other traditional hallmarks of Christendom. Being a politician, though, he does lie habitually, so maybe he can be redeemed.

MAKES A PERFECT GAG GIFT.

Look what you can get for as little as $1,699:

Join Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit and one of America’s foremost Second Amendment Scholars, Dana Loesch, author of Hands off My Gun as well as Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Mark (Rip) Rippetoe, Roger Simon, Helen Smith and Kevin Williamson for a weekend dedicated to the Second Amendment. 

In addition to scintillating seminars we will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights at a luxurious hunting and shooting retreat. Rough Creek Lodge not only has world-class hunting and shooting opportunities, but a wide range of other activities available to our guests. 

Because of a very low speaker to guest ratio (1:9), guests will have the opportunity to schmooze, eat, drink, ride ATVs, go zip lining, shoot model rockets, use the golf driving range, hunt and shoot with our speakers.

A weekend at a richie resort with the worst people in the world! Not sure why they're booking so far in advance, though -- by December the Obama apocalypse may have come, and all the deposits will have been made in worthless government fiat scrip. (There is, believe it or not, no provision to pay your way in gold or bitcoin.) Know what else seems wrong? Check out the "free activities":

Zipline And Rock Climbing
Watch A Movie
Catch And Release Fishing

"Catch And Release Fishing"? What is this, some eco-Nazi love-in? Real men and their ladies' auxiliary catch those suckers and stare them down as they thrash out their last breaths! Also:

Petting Corral

Come on, now. There's also a shitty blog ("I couldn’t wait to leave NYC when I graduated law school. In California I met my first real gun owners"), but maybe you just want to wait for the police reports.

EVERYTHING IS POLITICS TO THESE PEOPLE, PART ONE GAZILLION.

I ignored the Super Bowl on Sunday, and a good thing too, as Ed Driscoll tells me if I had watched I would have been subjected to a barrage of liberal propaganda. No, this isn't the old Rush Limbaugh idea that the NFL itself is left-wing; it's about the commercials:

So starting with one of the first Super Bowl-only ads, the legendary Ridley Scott-directed 1984-inspired Apple advertisement to launch the Macintosh, Madison Avenue ad reps began to use the platform to have fun. Ad reps created brilliant demo reels for themselves, and buzz for the clients’ products, which sometimes, with a little luck, even translated into increased sales.

That formula began to grate a bit in the postmodern naughts, as a formula began to evolve that featured men as the butts of jokes, part of a larger trend in the media overculture that Glenn Reynolds and others were first commenting on well over a decade ago. But those seem like pretty carefree days compared to what we witnessed last night...

Even worse than dumb husband jokes? Steel yourself, my friends:

By my rough count, there were at least two ads featuring people with no legs, one with a missing father, one with misogynistic anti-male crack from comedienne Sarah Silverman, and one ad bullying a ten year old boy because he said someone “plays like a girl.” (The horror.)

The ads with people with no legs, I suppose, were meant to make you feel sorry for them, which is a classic Democrat trick, and the father was probably missing because of no-fault divorce.

And perhaps most infamously based on comments on Twitter and even the London Daily Mail, one dead ten year old boy, thanks to Nationwide. (And if you don’t approve of this understandable media gruel, you’re an Internet “hater” — says Coca-Cola?)

I'm not sure why the famous dead kid ad is left-wing: was he murdered in the womb?

A friend of mine watching the game at my house last night, a fellow member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy bivouacked behind enemy lines in Deep Blue Socialist California, dubbed it “The Nanny Bowl.” He’s definitely on to something. As journalist Kevin P. Craver tweeted to me last night, “I fell into an alternate universe in which the party that loses the November election gets to write the Super Bowl ads.”

Actually, the people who write the ads do so because they are paid by clients, who carefully vet the ads and then pay millions of dollars to get them on during the game. Contrary to Driscoll's paranoid fantasy, they aren't doing it so the ad guys can have fun, or as a donation to the Democratic Party; they do it so people will talk about their brands, and then remember them when they go shopping. It's as pure a capitalist spectacle as can be imagined. The League, the network, and the sponsors can hardly help it if no one ponied up for a #Benghazi infomercial.

Rush Limbaugh has been talking for years about how hard the left has been trying to undermine football...

OK, this is where we came in. Oh, wait: Driscoll eventually gets someone to explain the dead kid-Democrat connection:

The modern left’s ideology is one big Nationwide ad. Submit to our practices or your kids will die. Only our mandated health insurance will treat your Bain cancer or protect you from global warming...

It's like he had a mole in the focus group! I look forward to Driscoll's column on how the left was responsible for Daniel Bryant getting screwed in the Royal Rumble.

NEW MEME: LESBIAN MOTHERS HATE WOMEN, STEAL BABIES!

Children-of-gay-marriage-against-gay-marriage really may actually be a thing. In addition to Katy Faust, whose case we examined yesterday, we have The Federalist's Rivka Edelman. Unlike Faust, Edelman doesn't describe her gay-mommy childhood positively ("My mother, you know, she had some of that pornography around and the books and stuff..."), so from her we don't get the absurdity of a happily-raised child of gays arguing no one else should be raised that way. We do, however, get a heapin' helping of bad faith and bile:

LBGT Demands For Other People’s Children Are Misogynistic
The misogyny of the LGBT movement flings women backward to a dark era, when the rule was prejudice against single mothers and unintended pregnancy... 

The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children, often claiming that if gay adults can marry the children they are raising will benefit from broader “protections.” This is doublespeak. The “protections” consist of the gay adults’ access to and control of children as commodities.

Edelman engages the Supreme Court case in which two lesbians adopted a child who had been given up by his homeless birth mother:

Daughtrey is sure to note of the biological mother, “She surrendered her legal rights.” How did the birth mother do this if she was “impaired”? The unstable and impoverished mother is a useful trope in misogynistic and classist discourse. I wonder what was done to find this biological mother housing so she could in fact leave the hospital with her son. It is likely that few if any good-faith attempts were made to keep “N” with his mother, let alone find his father and enforce child support or at least compel some kind of connection so “N” could know his origins...

That's some gooood trolling: You libtards say you care about homeless people, well how come you let the State steal their children and give them to dykes?

The new social justice dictum is that society owes LBGT people the flesh and blood of other people’s children because they are “married” now. Let’s be honest. Love does not make a family in this case. Human trafficking does.

It's like, look, she's gay -- now will you listen to our gay baby-stealing stories? I hope some conservative movement types are grooming Edelman for a larger role in the gay-marriage fight; I'd love to see what Mr. and Mrs. America make of her argument. I guess the ones who are willing to countenance baby-stealing stories about Jews and Gypsies might go for it.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

Rod Dreher:

It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent... 

The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.

Throughout his post, you will find hundreds of words about how Dreher is really just talking about proper communication, and hey, he softens his accent when he goes on the radio so what's the big deal, and "who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered 'white'?" etc. He seems to be afraid the big bad multiculturalists want to make his beloved NPR sound like a ghetto barbershop.

But it's the quoted bit that really lives for me. Imagine Dreher bristling as some insolent Dominican pronounces his own name too Spanishy! I suppose he gets it from this:

The rest of his posts are about political correctness, natch.

MY GAY PARENTS RAISED ME RIGHT, AND MUST BE PUNISHED.

Remember the "My Daddy's Name is Donor" movement, in which adult children of sperm-bank poppas pleaded for Congress to force their fathers to reveal themselves, because you can't put your arms around a turkey baster? Here's something else in that line: From the Witherspoon Institute, a nuthatch from which we have derived pleasure before, comes Katy Faust, the daughter of a gay couple who says, with love in her heart, that her two mommies raised her wonderfully, and the Supreme Court should prevent something like that from ever happening again:

When you emphasized how important the voices of children with gay parents are, you probably anticipated a different response. You might have expected that the children of same-sex unions would have nothing but glowing things to say about how their family is “just like everyone else’s.” Perhaps you expected them to tell you that the only scar on their otherwise idyllic life is that their two moms or two dads could not be legally married. If the children of these unions were all happy and well-adjusted, it would make it easier for you to deliver the feel-good ruling that would be so popular. 

I identify with the instinct of those children to be protective of their gay parent. In fact, I’ve done it myself... 

I cringe when I think of it now, because it was a lie. My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life. While I did love my mother’s partner and friends, I would have traded every one of them to have my mom and my dad loving me under the same roof. This should come as no surprise to anyone who is willing to remove the politically correct lens that we all seem to have over our eyes.

If you weren't politically correct, you'd see how Faust suffers! (She also tells us, "many are of the opinion I should not exist," just to up the victimization ante.) Anyway, gay unions like the one Faust grew up in may look nice, and Faust has many kind words to say about her own blended family (perhaps to decrease the tension at holiday get-togethers), but they're really evil, because "the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents." Really, they prosecute football players for whipping a kid, but they let parents separate? How does that make sense?

As for the so-called "studies"  that say gay parents are great, Faust's got this compelling counter-argument:

Does being raised under the rainbow miraculously wipe away all the negative effects and pain surrounding the loss and daily deprivation of one or both parents? The more likely explanation is that researchers are feeling the same pressure as the rest of us feel to prove that they love their gay friends.

Just like them climatologists! In a few years, the only scientists conservative will not have accused of making it all up for the Politburo will be the guys who come up with new boner pills.

The big thing that jumped out at me, though, was this: She's 38 years old? Isn't it about time she stopped whining about this?