Off the Mark

Thank you, National Review’s Mark Krikorian. I was having a rough time of it today. I was starting to get burned out on reading hacks’ bullshit, contributing to that bullshit, and most of all getting working myself into a hateful frenzy. I stared at my computer screen and sighed. Maybe I should be doing something more productive to society.

And then I saw you defending that syphilitic sac of pus Lou Dobbs, and oh yes, all the hate came roaring back. The image of that croaking old toad dropping trou and letting loose a big steamy one right into the heart of America is Viagra for the vicious.

What have we got today in aggressive ignorance, Mark?

But the chief target of this two-year hate has been Lou Dobbs. The “Drop Dobbs” campaign, to get CNN to fire the only anchor on their network whose show anyone watches, is sponsored by — surprise! — La Raza, the SPLC, Media Matters, LULAC, et al. Last Wednesday, October 21, saw a series of coordinated protests by open-borders groups in cities around the country. The following day, Geraldo Rivera said in a speech that the opponents of amnesty have been “reckless beyond imagining” and that Dobbs in particular “is almost singlehandedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country.”

Really, Mark? Lou Dobbs is the victim of a “vicious hate campaign” by people who are sick of his vicious hate campaign against Latinos. Now, back in the day this would have been called “karma,” or “reaping the whirlwind,” or, if you’re a fan of the late John Hughes, “mess[ing] with the bull [and] get[ting] the horns.”

But now we have an oh-so-politically correct culture where nobody has to take responsibility for the things they say as long as there’s a brown boogeyman out there to accuse of being “hateful” and having an “agenda” for daring to object to being slimed.

Lou Dobbs should feel lucky that he’s only a victim for having Lou Dobbs’ greasy skin and speaking Lou Dobbs’ guttural, hate-laced language, not because his skin and language are associated with points south of the border. And this country would be a much better place if it there were a lot more of the “hate” directed at lynch-mob leaders like Lou Dobbs and a lot less of the Lou Dobbs Brand Communal Hatred.

And Mark? You know Lou Dobbs is all kinds of a shitsack when you have Fox News anchors like Geraldo fretting that he’s stirring up too much hatred.

But, unusually for you right-wing bloggers, there is a point buried somewhere in this piece.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, their efforts are starting to pay off. No, CNN hasn’t decided to fire Dobbs (which would cause them to drop behind the Hallmark Channel in viewership). Instead, someone fired a shot at Dobbs’s house. As reported today by Fox News (!), a shot was fired on October 5 at Dobbs’s home while he and his (Mexican-American) wife were out front; New Jersey State Police took the bullet for analysis.

I’m all for taking potshots at Lou Dobbs and his house, but I probably shouldn’t be. It’s wrong that La Raza, SPLC, Luis Gutiérrez, or whoever’s hiding in your closet this week opened fire on poor Lou Dobbs and his obligatorily Mexican-American wife. And turnabout is fair play; the left was asking the same sort of questions after the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

Except Lou Dobbs didn’t die. He didn’t even get shot. From the source you cited, Fox (ugh) News:

New Jersey State Police Sgt. Steve Jones said troopers were called to the Dobbs’ estate in rural Wantage, N.J., at about 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 5. The investigators who responded to the call were told that Dobbs and his wife were outside their home when they heard a gunshot, and a bullet struck their attic.

“It struck the siding and then fell to the ground,” Jones said.

Really? A bullet hit the top of a house in rural New Jersey? Damn you, Mexicans! And yes, we know it was them because, wait, how do we know it was them?

Same source:

“It’s a shot fired that struck the house,” Jones continued. “We’re not sure what the intended target was. It’s still under investigation.”

…

William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC), said it’s very likely Dobbs’ outspokenness on illegal immigration led to the shooting.

So to recap: bullet hits house in boondocks; nobody sees shooter; police tell Fox they’re not sure who fired the shot, why or at what; Fox asks random sympathetic activist about case, and activist responds it can only have been attempted moida! Dust off your hands, boys, because this case is closed thanks to another stellar piece of investigative reporting by Fox.

But this is enough to go on for you. After all, in the conserv-a-verse there has to be some kind of liberal counterpoint to Scott Roeder and the culture that incubated his murder of Tiller. So it must be Brown Berets out in the woods in New Jersey, winging bullets off Lou Dobbs’ siding.

Solid work, Mark. Maybe, with a little hard work and elbow grease, you could go on to become a great Texas attorney.

Cast out of the country club

Charles Krauthammer, no offense, but you’ve always physically reminded me of the Grinch. And since we’re both feeling particularly grinchy today, I guess you’re it.

The theme? Another kvetch about the “War on Fox News.” Jesus Christ, is everything a full-scale war over there? Although I suppose I can’t single you out because absolutely everybody in the media-plus is using this phrase.

Here’s the heart of your argument:

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led [by] and following Fox.”

I can’t say most of what you’re quoting isn’t true. Fox News is opinion journalism masquerading as news. And it’s silly to deny that Fox doesn’t lead the other networks around – look at the comparative sizes of the 9/12 Tea Party and the 10/11 National Equality March (about the same), and the disparate media coverage of the two events. One was organized and boosted on-air by Fox News (not to mention at the event itself), which then shamed the other cable networks into covering it endlessly by crying liberal bias. The other was shamefully, roundly ignored by all of cabledom, once again led by Fox News.

But I digress, though my digression does point out what a crock of shit Fox is. And I do find it troubling the White House is starting an enemies list of press organizations. Because, as you say, Fox News is a legitimate journalistic outlet that dares to speak truth to power. And what are those great truths?

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing “green jobs” czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

…

Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices.

Fox News, #1 in the nation at uncovering politically incorrect statements Obama appointees made in passing! It’s worth noting that, along with Doughboy Dobbs, Fox also ran the white angst mill over statements by Sonia Sotomayor, and is still beating the dead horse of Reverend Jeremiah Wright into dog food.

So Fox’s major claim to fame, according to you, is being able to find people who say things you don’t like and link them to Obama. Now there’s some two-fisted, hard-hitting journalism. Just don’t ask them to report on anything that can’t be boiled down to an agitprop sound-bite by a sputtering, weeping white man.

But completely independent of Fox’s journalistic value to society is the privilege Fox News and the rest of the corporate media are granted with access to Obama in the first place. And it is certainly a class privilege. Stroll through my neighborhood and you’ll see a lot of news boxes – Chicago Sun-Times, Hoy, Chicago Reader, Redeye, La Raza, Lawndale News, etc. Only one of these, the Sun-Times, is deemed worthy of having the velvet rope lifted for it into the White House pressroom.

Granted, some of those publications wouldn’t have a use for a White House correspondent even if they were allowed one. And the White House pragmatically tries to issue passes to the publications with the largest reader-/viewership. But ultimately, what determines whether a garbage paper with a wide readership like USA Today gets in over smaller papers like Hoy and the Chicago Defender is the favoritism of the administration. And the chosen few get to make the “news.”

Which is why the good ol’ boy press administration went apeshit when the White House, generally not a hotbed of leftism, free thought, or spine, challenged the legitimacy of bigger = better in news journalism. One of their corporate “sister organizations,” as ABC’s Jake Tapper put it. It’s not healthy for the corporate media that their intrinsic value, especially their value over more independent news sources, be publicly challenged. And so we get headlines about the “War on Fox News.”

Fox News may be the fat gorilla in the room, in terms of volume and viewership (and there is an unfortunate correlation here), but they have no reflexive right to invoke those two great liberties so often claimed by the Republican Party: the freedom of speech without consequences and the entitlement of the moneyed.

Maybe a few years in the desert after the paw-in-claw Bush years will help them rediscover journalism, and the virtues and consequences thereof. In the meantime, I’d like to see more independent voices in the Press Room, which would be a true victory for democracy, not more shouting by you and your hegemonic friends.

Final thoughts, Chuck?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Maybe she’d be better off at Fox?

Dump Dobbs

Oh yes, Lou Dobbs, and believe me when I say you’re getting off easy today. I could pick out any one of the dozens of racist vomitings that drip from your slug mouth every night, but I’d rather talk about what other people are saying about you.

First, from the Huffington Post:

CNN is declining to carry a national advertisement, purchased by two progressive groups, which attacks its host Lou Dobbs for his controversial views on immigration.

If CNN had anything vaguely resembling a soul, they’d dump you on the side of the road and let the vultures feast for years on your carcass. You are, after all, a white supremacist-supporting motherfucker who has made life in this country hell for Latinos undocumented, green-carded and native-born alike.

You’re Richard Nixon and George Wallace reincarnated (and stuffed into the same body). Your “War on the Middle Class” is thinly-disguised agitprop against the poor of this country, especially the dark-skinned ones, and when you talk about ACORN you might as well be shouting it from the head of a lynch mob. I caught you on TV bad-mouthing Chicago the night before the Olympics vote came down, and while the Olympics plan was an unpopular debacle, I’d better not catch you here, ever.

Every single word you choke out on behalf of Normal Middle Class White America echoes “Let’s get that [insert racial slur of choice here – I won’t]!” You’re a poison on this country, and I dream fondly of the day when your eyes roll back in your head and you choke to death on your tongue or however the hell Jabba the Hutt died in Star Wars.

So to summarize, I disagree with CNN’s decision not to run an ad criticizing you.

Although there have been whispers lately that the shame problem might be solved by sending you to a shameless network. There’s idle talk you’re considering jumping ship to Fox News.

(Note to Fox News: Even your viewers can’t be stupid enough to ignore how you’ve been poaching CNN’s conservatives and then complaining about how liberal CNN is. Can they?)

I think it’s a good move for you. For some reason, CNN is still viewed as a credible, nonaligned network instead of the media equivalent of a frightened hamster running frantically on its wheel, trying to crawl into bed with the White House while at the same time fighting off charges of liberal bias by giving airtime to any racist freak with a misspelled sign and a stack of Heritage Foundation checks. (Worth noting is that CNN still considers leftist protesters like the ones at G20 criminals, but that’s an entirely different diatribe.)

So I wholeheartedly endorse a transfer to Fox News. Have them send the crane to lift you out of your studio. I’m sure Bill O’Reilly’s having a tough time pulling double duty as a racist and a sexist anyway. If you show up, he can devote himself full-time to misogyny.

And hey, there’s always the possibility that on your way from one studio to the other, a flock of hungry birds mistakes you for a giant blob of cookie dough and pecks your eyes out. But that’s just gravy.

Rape states

I just didn’t fucking believe it, 30 Republican Senators. When I first saw the link on Feministing that read “GOP backs corporate rape,” I thought it would go to The Onion or the Daily Show or something, because no matter what David French wants you to believe, feminists do have a sense of humor.

But no. It turns out three-quarters of you Republican senators think it’s a grand old idea to keep sending money to multinational corporations who lock up and threaten rape victims if they try to report their rape.

From ABC News:

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

All the male KBR staff involved deserved to be locked up in a shipping container for a very, very long time. And then shot into space.

Tell me, why should we keep sending taxpayer money to KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton? Anyone?

Jeff Sessions?

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., called it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.”

Oh, right. How silly of me. It’s a just political vote to defund a political contract granted to work on a political war. The rape thing? That’s just incidental.

Iraq contractors are living in the Wild West. And sure, the Democrats don’t bat an eye when it’s mercenaries, who the Bush Regime claimed are immune to American, Iraqi and international law. It’s a bipartisan wink-and-nod when they massacre civilians.

But when there are no international loopholes they can exploit and the victims are Americans, even the Democrats say enough. It’s a good start to bringing some accountability to companies working in Iraq, but there’s still more work to be done.

But no, you all whine in unison, it’s a political hatchet job by Big Rape Victim to smear the good, honest lizard-folk at KBR/Halliburton. Well, you can all go to hell.

Or maybe just back to the South. It strikes me that the vote was even more geographic than partisan in nature. Your comrades who voted “Yea” seem to be the Republicans clinging to life in the Northeast and Midwest. (They also happen to include all four women in the Republican Senate.) Even both of Mormon Utah’s senators voted “Yea.”

On the other hand, there are a troubling number of states where both senators voted “Nay,” mostly concentrated in the Deep South, high plains and mountain west.

In fact, even among the states where the senators’ votes were split, only one, New Hampshire, was located outside this region.

So I would like to put the tired old cliché of “red states” to bed once and for all. Instead, I present to you the Rape States, represented by two of you putzes who voted against Amendment 2588:

Rape States

• Alabama
• Arizona
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Mississippi
• Oklahoma
• South Carolina (anyone surprised?)
• Tennessee
• Wyoming

If I had my druthers and an actual audience, “Rape States” would be picked up by the blogosphere to describe the most backward, reactionary states in the union and the reactionary movements there who keep sending you to Congress. As it is, I’ll just have to awkwardly keep working the phrase into conversation and hope I don’t become known as “the rape guy.”

But seriously, fuck you guys. And the next time I hear any of you talking about “family values” I’m throwing a brick at your head.

John Perry, computer caudillo

[Note:  I read this blog in its original context, from which it has been yanked and replaced by a weak apology/claim of plausible deniability. As of press time, quotations are pulled from a copy made by Media Matters, which I can verify is the same column.]

Maybe I’m a little late to this party, John L. Perry, but what’s the matter with you?

I’ve found that the best way of discrediting the hacks and nutbars on this blog is letting you speak for yourselves:

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

Never mind that the “Obama problem” seems to be democracy. Never mind that under the absolutely non-radical, agenda-less Bush Regime, this would have been called “sedition” and you’d have been pressed to death under a giant rock like Giles Corey in The Crucible. And never mind that the model for this misadventure seems to be the recent “gentleman’s coup” in Honduras, which has taken a decidedly (more) repressive turn and has been roundly condemned.

None of that matters, you tell me, because Obama has a “radical agenda,” he’s an “enemy of the Constitution,” and it’s time for the military to drag his democratically-elected ass out back in order to save democracy.

Really? I’m not even going to discuss the strong overtones of a lynching (“a last resort to solve the ‘Obama problem’”). But really? You want the military to overthrow the President? In order to preserve our freedoms and our Constitution?

I hate invoking the cliché “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” and I thought I’d be rid of it after America finally pink-slipped Dick Cheney’s ring of pint-sized caudillos and their “9/11 changed everything” rhetoric, but you leathery old crytpo-fascists just keep dragging it up again.

OK, fine, you have an 8-point argument. Those points being, as paraphrased by someone who thinks you’re a scumfuck:

Point One:  The officers in the military haven’t sworn a loyalty oath to the President. I haven’t sworn an oath to Obama either, but if I tried to drag him out of the White House, put on some medals and declare myself the Dictator of Freedom, I’d be shot.

Point Two:  The economy is apparently being nationalized, which according to you might be slightly less constitutional than parking a tank on the White House lawn and demanding the President come out with his hands up. Well, tell it to the IMF. Wait, don’t, because it turns out they pull this trick all the time.

Point Three:  Americans don’t like Obama, at least not the Americans you talk to. And you believe there’s some kind of Constitutional clause that lets the military remove an allegedly unpopular President from power, even though it was OK that nobody liked the last guy.

Point Four:  The economy is bad. Time to call in the Army economists, I guess.

Points Five, Six, Seven, Eight:  There’s a bunch of bullshit in here about how Obama is putting the country in danger by doing something-or-other generic that isn’t really explained. In fact, none of this is really explained in legal terms. But who need legalese when you’ve got the military?

We have a culture that worships the military, a motley collection of bright, ambitious kids and high-school dropouts. We shake their hands, we defer to them, we consider being in the military the highest form of being an American. And you, John, have dragged this to the logical conclusion of thinking the military can run the country better than elected leaders, at least for a while, because the line is that the military defends our freedom and therefore a military government must be freer than a democratic one.

So we get rid of the “Obama problem.” When do we have elections again? Ask the Egyptians when the military declared the “state of emergency” over and agreed to hold elections. Ask the Burmese what happened when the military did hold elections, and they lost. Ask the Hondurans how their pro-democracy protests are being treated by a military regime that claims to be constitutionalist, free, and merely transitional, of course.

In fact, ask the military. I can’t find anywhere where it says you served, you Dick Cheney-looking motherfucker (although to be fair, I’m not sure where to look). I haven’t heard anything to suggest that the military is waiting for John Perry’s wink-and-nod to march into DC and line all the liberals up against a wall.

I’ve ragged on the military a little, but the fact is, in the United States the overwhelming majority of people who enlist really do believe they’re defending freedom and spreading democracy. It’s hacks like you and the political wizards of the self-serving, democracy-wary right who use them as a political bludgeon. Draft dodgers send them off to war and accuse anyone who protests or asks why of “not supporting our troops.” Karl Rove gets the nation to sneer at John Kerry’s Purple Heart. And here you are, some nudnik on a right-wing website (apparently it’s a magazine too), demanding they violate their oaths in order to squash democracy and depose their commander-in-chief just because America voted wrong according to John L. Perry.

If you have one ounce of respect for the troops (and this coming from someone who’s told off plenty of recruiters), you won’t treat them like a pack of German Shepherds to sic on your political enemies. But I wouldn’t count on it. This last stunt was pretty shameless.

The mob says no.

[Note:  I listened to the original recording of the interview, but most of the juiciest bits had already been transcribed by The Hill .]

Republican Rep. Steve King (Iowa’s 5^th), you are far from the first politician to piss me off, but you’re the first to cross me since I got my blog up. You’re trying to convince people to rescind same-marriage in your home state.

I was, frankly, bored by most of what you said on some talk show. It’s old hat, really. Sanctity of marriage, the Bible, a slippery slope into hot man-on-platypus nuptials, the usual. Self-described culture warriors make much more interesting claims about the gays than that. But then you said something that made me mad. As quoted in The Hill:

If there’s a push for a socialist society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they have to go to, same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation, they want access to public funds and resources.

Oh boy. Where to begin? Communist regimes, which hide behind collectivism as an excuse to micromanage their citizens’ lives, never recognized same-sex marriage. Neither did feudal societies, which considered all rights of the peasantry to be gifts from their overlords. Theocracies and dictatorships with strong religious influence often criminalize being gay itself.

What do these types of regimes have in common? Not only are they unfree, their basis for being unfree is that the regime claims to regulate or embody the communal standards of its subjects. On the other hand, same-sex marriage (along with civil unions) is recognized only in liberal democracies where the state has surrendered its authority to enforce communal standards.

Communal standards, Steve, constitute the argument you make against legalized same-sex marriage. So in reality, your problem with same-sex marriage isn’t that it undermines individual freedoms, it’s that it undermines the communal freedom to void the individual freedom of same-sex marriage.

So you say “the people” don’t want gays to get married? You reserve the right of “the people” to crash their weddings by venting their prejudices through the state, and apparently this constitutes freedom to you. You can keep it.

But I’m not quite done with you and your horror show yet, Steven King. (Groan if you like, but you had to know that was coming.)  The Hill also quotes you as blaming the legislature’s failure to crush gay rights in your state on the influence of “a number of very, very rich homosexual activists.”

Well, I just finished reading a book about Simon Wiesenthal (shameless plug), and it made my blood chill to read that back, comparing what I’d just read to what I was reading, substituting “Jews” for “homosexual activists.” Try it:  Iowa’s legislature won’t revoke the rights the Supreme Court granted its small Jewish minority, even though they’re different from Iowa’s traditional (read: Christian) values, because they’re in the thrall of “a number of very, very rich Jews.”

Pretty ugly, isn’t it? Next you’ll be claiming the gays have horns.

I grabbed this quote of yours from the tape, too: “There’s not a very good understanding about what homosexual marriage does to the overall institution of marriage itself.”

And that’s why people keep sending you to the House, Steve.  Let’s hope they figure it out before same-sex individual rights are submitted for communal approval.

Grab yer plungers, it’s purgin’ time!

I guess it was only a matter of time before I had to wade into the open sewer that is The Great Glenn Beck Debate. Don’t take it personal, Dan Riehl. There are probably 50 other people out there sharpening the same knives as you. You just got lucky.

Dan Riehl, you tell me Glenn Beck, recent King Shit of the astroturfed conservative underworld, isn’t really a conservative at all. In fact, your headline is “Simple, Beck is not a conservative.” And you also said this:

Only a media that doesn’t know what one is, or is more interested in defining them to be what they want them to be, as opposed to what they really are, would mistake Glenn Beck for a conservative.

Well, one could make the case that he was plenty conservative for Fox News (aka “The Media”) to toss him a rope out of the merciless quicksand pit that is HLN, hand him a pulpit from which to McVeigh (oops, sorry, I probably meant “inveigh”) against the liberals, and in no way support his Tea Party and 9/12 pet projects.

But that’s neither here nor there. What’s interesting, Mr. Riehl, is why the entire conservative blogosphere has, overnight, become as unseemly obsessed as its liberal doppelganger with chopping off Glenn Beck’s crazy head. At the drop of a hat, one might say.

Well, Glenn Beck did say he would have voted for Hillary Clinton over John McCain , and that it’s better that Obama was elected President over McCain [ibid.] Perhaps Beck had a rare flash of insight that absolute power had corrupted his party absolutely, and that the only way to purify it was an extended stay in the desert, eating centipedes and licking toads. Or perhaps, as the cliché goes, he may be crazy, but he’s not stupid; I have no doubt he pulled the lever for Obama himself, just to give him a black, cosmopolitan, allegedly liberal president to use as a combination punching bag/ATM for the next four years. Either way, he’s committed High Heresy and you, Dan Riehl, have a duty to smoke him out for it!

Oh, and apparently he’s discovered actual libertarianism, as opposed to the Bush-boosting, cop-calling neolibertarianism running rampant on the right these days. (Socialism no, Fatherland Security yes!) This brings me to the frightening point of concurring with several things Glenn Beck has said. He said United States troops are positioned overseas as part of an imperialist project (which apparently isn’t self-evident in this country); that the parties are essentially interchangeable [ibid.], a point our president seems intent on proving as he rockets through centrism on his way to the right; and- well, I guess I’m done agreeing with Glenn Beck, and good riddance.

Having anything in common with Glenn Beck made me feel dirty and sad. Cheer me up, Dan.

Get your mind around one thing right now, a Perot or Paul-like fracture in the Republican Party in 2010, or 2012 is a guarantee  that Euro-socialism will prevail in America.

…

Them’s the facts, folks. Ignore them at your peril and American conservatism’s complete demise.

I’m not going to lie to you, Dan. This is going to be immensely fun for me, watching that rabid mutt and his army of jack-booted fleas have it out with the pack of snarling dogs fighting to take his place at Master’s feet. If the “populist” revolt in the comments section of your article is any hint, I should be able to look forward to the political equivalent of watching two big, ugly monsters duke it out over Tokyo, only Tokyo is the Republican Party and I’m not cheering for either monster, just so long as it gets good and smashed up.

So have it at, already. I’ll put on the popcorn.

Noonan remembers my 9/11 for me

I almost hate to go after you for this one, Peggy Noonan. On the surface of it, it seems fairly benign – you just talked to some people around my age and asked them about their impressions of 9/11. Where’s the harm in that?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I was blindsided by this self-serving schmaltz:

It was a life-splitting event. Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, “a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack,” and a crowded theater was “a source for concern.” Every one of them used the word “bubble”: the protected bubble of their childhood “popped.” And all of them said they spent 9/11 and the days after glued to the television, watching over and over again the footage—the north tower being hit by the plane, the fireball. The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down.

Yech.

Peggy, you forgot to ask me about my 9/11 experience. And since the other thing my generation’s always getting pinned on it is narcissism, I’m going to tell you.

I was 14 years old on September 11, 2001. I was in Homeroom – or was it Reading? Same teacher, same room – when the planes hit. The teachers were ordered not to talk about it or let us watch it on TV. My science teacher, Ms. Patel, had CNN on, and the Vice-Principal came in and yelled at her until she turned it off. No one was let out of school, like in your version. We walked home from school like normal, and my little sister and I were very upset when we turned on the TV:  We were missing our Saved By The Bell reruns.

The President went on TV and promised to kill some people. Kill some people he did, but not the one we were after. He rammed the Patriot Act and Homeland Security through Congress in the name of protecting freedom. He and the corporate media started making threatening noises at anybody who disagreed with him. I heard about people disappearing in the night and the government looking over my shoulder at the library. That was when I started getting scared.

Time passed. No Mahdi Army came swarming out of the hills. We weren’t dumb kids; we didn’t expect them to. Our school had rallies. One day we dressed up in red, white and blue, spelled the letters U-S-A in a soccer field and had a helicopter take a photo. We had to watch Bush on TV declare a moment of silence, which no one really observed. We had an America Day where we had to wear “patriotic” clothes to school. I’d never had strong feelings about 9/11, but whatever I felt was buried in the kitsch.

The behavior of the Bush Regime and the media did, however, turn me into a flaming liberal. Feel free to publish that in your follow-up story, although I doubt you will because it will tip your sacred cow right over.

Truth about 9/11? Not to diminish the human horror of it, but on a psychic level, it really wasn’t that bad, at least not out here in Chicagoland.

Oh, and this is total bullshit, Peggy:

They’ve been marked by 9/11 more than they know. It was their first moment of historical consciousness. Before that day, they didn’t know what history was; after that day, they knew they were in it.

…and even you know it.

Drinking illiberally? No, thinking delusionally

Congratulations, National Review’s David French! You’re the first to be tossed into the Oh Yeah?! ring. This blog’s Glass Joe, if you will. [Note to readers:  Mr. French being “Glass Joe” was not intended as a bad pun, but wasn’t it a happy accident?]

You made the list because of an interesting piece you wrote for the Review. (“Interesting” is still the polite euphemism for “bat-shit loony, but in an inane, non-threatening way,” is it not?) You’ve concocted the argument that kids in college feel compelled to drink and fuck each not because they’re college kids, or because it feels good, but just to piss off the liberals.

I’m sorry, David. I’m reading that back, and I’m sure I’ve misrepresented your argument. I’ll let you set the record straight.

Millions of college students have answered political correctness with hedonism, defying feminist and multiculturalist scolds with hoisted beer glasses and libraries full of Girls Gone Wild DVDs. If this is the current state of student rebellion (and it is), then it’s terrible news for our culture and a disaster for conservatism. It is the rejection of one form of vice (leftist thought control) for other, equally destructive vices that will have enduring, negative effects on our civil society.

Oh. Well, at least on a computer I don’t have to awkwardly nod while backing slowly out of the room.

You tell me there’s proof of this in the person of Tucker Max – drinker, man-whore, date rapist – and a lecture he gave at the University of North Carolina.

But wait a minute, David! Aren’t the liberals the ones who teach kids about The Sex and then send them out to have it sloppily and indiscriminately in our public places, while the clergy audibly weeps in the background? This guy would debate you on the point that students have sex to flummox the liberal establishment – he seems to think that the EVIL LIBERAL UNIVERSITY ESTABLISHMENT itself supports the scene with a wink-and-a-nod. You should tell him what’s up, being older and wiser and all.

Or did you metaphorically walk into that room, look at the smirking sleazeball and his frat legion on one side and the feminist protesters (“Sapphic PC-Nazi witches,” in your parlance) on the other, and make a snap decision that while black-and-white has its uses, sometimes you need a splash of another color that still contrasts with the black while blotting out the less-savory aspects of the white?

And so you’ve given us a splotch of Hedonist Red. It’s quite a savvy, bold color. Not some morally confusing shade of gray, Hedonist Red vibrantly announces that it’s completely separate from the pitch-darkness of the left and the glistening purity of the right, utterly mutually exclusive, apolitical except in the sense that it’s a neither-nor.

The Hedonists, you tell me, don’t vote or hold opinions on anything other than drinking and fucking. Neither the left nor the right, meanwhile, ever touches alcohol or the opposite sex, because of the right’s dedication to the baby Jesus and the schoolmarm glares of the dowdy, man-hating femi-Leninists on the left.

Now that you mention it, David, I do remember a couple of friends mentioning they pulled the lever for the Drunken Fornicator Party last November, because they passionately politically hated the parties and wanted to make a statement about their love of pub crawls. Then they humped in the voting booth. (I’m just kidding, of course. Voting booths are an anachronism. They totally did it on the registration table in front of all those blue-haired old ladies. Kids these days, huh?)

So what’s the answer, David?

The answer to both totalitarianism and hedonism is, of course, ordered liberty — the connection of freedom to moral responsibility and a sense of duty. Ordered liberty rejects the de jure limits to freedom so favored by the campus Left. No speech codes. No compelled speech. No mandatory thought reform. But ordered liberty also rejects hedonism.

…

There is no doubt that, as the advocates of ordered liberty charge the ramparts of campus culture, there will be cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them. After all, if there is one thing that a feminist and a hedonist can agree on, it’s that traditional virtues are a real buzzkill.

Ordered Liberty! I see it now! You just want to restore Liberty to the campus. Of course, as you freely admit, a small contingent of everyone on campus opposes and resents Liberty As Dictated By David French. Ooh, I can’t wait to hear the Why of students deserving to have their own worldview and personal freedoms trampled in the name of David French’s Ordered Liberty, and how it’s a good thing. And also how it’s not “social engineering” or “rightist mind control.”

David? Hello?

That’s it? Huh. Maybe somebody got him at the ramparts. And after that not-at-all shady associate professor the University fired for stealing and spying for the Iranians told him that he’d be greeted as a liberator-

-Oops, one rant at a time. Besides, I’ve got to be going. I’m a good leftist, and I’m off to Campus to crush the Rebel Alliance. Cue the Imperial March!

DUN DUN DUN DUH-DE-DUN DUH-DE-DUN!