FRIDAY!

Sen. Coburn came in for some heat this week from conservatives irritated that he hasn't signed on to Sen. Cruz's defund tactics. He's pushing back with this Q&A explaining why he is opposed.

The MRC had its annual gala last night, during which the audience voted on the media's most biased pronouncements over the year. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Twitchy has recap.

Links to last week's podcast are below the fold, along with some music. The new podcast should be up this afternoon, with guest David Burge aka Iowahawk. Have a great weekend. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (337)
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Legends and the Sorelian Myth

A longish article by Ed Driscoll. I'll just bait you with this quote by Lee Harris on why socialism will never die.

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed - yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism - if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual's lives. Thus for Sorel there was "an.analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual - a gigantic task."

Is It Time For Conservatives To Sit Down In The Snow?

A classic column by William Jacobson. Even more apropos today than it was in 2008.

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Yeah, I know no one says "TNF." I'm a style-maker, see?

Posted by: Ace at 04:59 PM | Comments (194)
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Have you seen this? I watched it last night. You can check Twitchy for my live-tweet review. 90% of my comments were direct quotes from C.S. Lewis.

Video below the fold.

Jack Straw suggests you read this WSJ piece: Just allow ObamaCare to happen, and let it collapse, and Let It Burn. The idea here would be to permit liberal policy to bloom such that it will be disastrous and therefore discredited forever.

Yeah: Let it Burn, baby.

And two from the Could This Possibly Be True Or Is This Just An Internet Make-'em-Up Department:

Chick freaks out over perfectly polite break-up, and then says she has no regrets;

and then there's this bizarre Craigslist posting, in which some guy is either fantasizing about weird sex with Lena Dunham (you already lost me; can't get there, brah) or is describing weird sex that happened with Lena Dunham, or is some kind of weird celebrity-centered slash-fic or... I don't know.

Don't know.

Don't wanna know.

Highlight with your cursor to read the following excerpt. Or better yet, don't. Content Warning.

I know I confided in you that I read all the Baby-sitters Club books. And that, yes, I like the occasional finger up the butt. But you know I'm not gay. I guess this was just you fucking with me.

So, so many questions I don't have.

It actually gets worse.

And Open Thread.

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Posted by: Ace at 04:16 PM | Comments (186)
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Yeahhh... I'm leaving this post as a testament to my incompleteness as a person, but if you see a huge error coming up, keep reading. I get around to correcting it eventually:

You've probably said this. You've definitely read it: C.S. Lewis' quotation that, "When I became a man I put away childish things."

Well, some of you might know the quote, because many of you probably know C.S. Lewis a heck of a lot better than I do.

But for those, like me, who are mostly ignorant of him, and who thought all these years that the quote was an urging towards Adult-like Seriousness...

Nope! The exact opposite.

Courtesy of Hal, here's the full quote.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Now I suppose I should feel a little embarrassed for being ignorant of this quote. And I guess maybe I do feel a little embarrassed.

But only a little. Because I'm not ignorant anymore. Oh, I was ignorant, a half hour ago. But not now. I've now learned it. So I don't have anything to be ashamed about any longer.

We can all sit back and have a good laugh at my Half Hour Ago Self.

But he's gone now, because he learned something today.

Wow: Well, we're not quite done laughing at my ignorance yet: CS Lewis repurposed the quote from 1 Corinthians, where it means, yes, exactly what I always thought it meant.

CS Lewis then took that meaning and gave it a new spin.

I blame "Hal." Who I'm not as fond of as I was a half hour ago.

And... now! My ignorance on this quote is (I do in fact pray) officially behind me.

...

Incidentally, the idea of this brought up a useful bit of pushback to my earlier attack on "Numminess." I certainly wouldn't want to push the idea that We Must At All Times Be Serious. Obviously I don't believe such a thing; not even close.

To the extent I might have suggested that, I expressly disclaim such a noxious idea. I think the spirit of play (and, in fact, pleasure-seeking) is important and shouldn't be dressed in the hairshirt and paraded in shame.

But not everything is "fun," and not everything should be "fun." The most deeply rewarding things in life are not particularly "fun."

What concerns me is not that there are people who prefer some fun with their politics -- I'm one of them.

What concerns me are people who prefer fun to everything. And to the extent politics is not fun, they reject actual political thought in favor of its "fun" analogues -- sending Silly Viral Animal Pictures to friends and Liking #BoicottBarilla on FaceBook.

Our nation has not become merely incurious, or unintelligent; it has become downright juvenile and stupid.

That's a problem. Not playfulness and not humor. And not fun itself.

But the inability to do things which are not "fun."

Dumb is Easy and Easy is Holy. That's the national motto. We should just put it on our dollar bills.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:28 PM | Comments (238)
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She'll be running on the YOLO Ticket.

Gotta get that Public Awareness rating up for the MSNBC show. What I figure is that it will be a talk show with an audience, running from 1-3 PM every day, which discusses the problems of "Real Women Like You." Obviously it will just be called...

Wendy!

Or possibly

Making a Stand,
With Wendy!

...and there will be a little logo of a pair of little girl's pink tennis shoes.

But anyway, for now, she's pretending she wants to be Governor.

State Sen. Wendy Davis of Texas will run for governor next year, two Democratic sources familiar with the planning confirmed to CNN.

The Democrat, who gained national fame after her 13-hour filibuster over a controversial abortion bill, was already scheduled to make an announcement about her political future on October 3.

The New Republic apparently thinks her chances are improving.

Earlier Nate Cohn's piece was headlined:

Why Wendy Davis is Doomed

But apparently their exclusively arch-liberal readership was bothered by that, so now his piece is called:

Wendy Davis Doesn't Stand a Chance of Becoming Texas Governor

So, that's an upgrade.

You can read the piece if you like to find out why she's doomed.

But I'll give you the basics of it, after the SPOILER SPACE.

SPOILER

SPOILER

SPOILER

Because it's Texas.

SPOILER

Posted by: Ace at 02:40 PM | Comments (208)
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Adam Carolla had a rant.

Of course he did.

The rant was about Starbucks Moccachino coffee-shakes, topped with lots of whipped cream.

And the rant was about adults drinking these beverages. Not just as a treat. But as a daily thing.

His rant was about what he called our culture's hard turn to the "nummy." To childish tastes.

Everyone likes sweets, of course. But he was getting at the idea of reversion to the juvenile. That adults, rather than simply attaining the taste for actual coffee, and you know, drinking coffee, were instead reverting to their Childhood Palates of insisting that all things be "nummy."

That they be very sweet, and even very cute. "Moccachino." That's cute, isn't it?

And what adults had historically done, he said, was embrace adult tastes. Cigars taste good to an adult cigar smoker because he has cultivated that taste. Oysters don't taste good to a kid; oysters taste good to an adult who has cultivated a taste for oysters. Cognac isn't good because it's sweet. Cognac is good because we have embraced adulthood and trained ourselves to embrace more sophisticated tastes.

He mentioned something dirty too which I won't mention because Family Blog. Let's just say the point of that was that not everything good that adult might do should involve sickly-sweet Numminess.

A moccachino, topped with lots of nummy whipped cream, is not a sophisticated taste. We emerge from the womb craving the sweetness of sugar, after all.

Again, it's one thing to indulge in a treat. But it's another thing to decide to simply revert to one's childhood self.

Now when he was on this rant, I thought he was full of shit and just being annoyed because Being Annoyed is how Adam Carolla makes his rent.

He also, I'm sure, went off on his typical rant about adult men watching Super Hero Movies, which does in fact hurt my butt. And I'm sure he connected that to the New Nummy.

But looking at the White House's new "Adorable Care Act" Cute Overload animal pictures, and the continue rise of BuzzFeed, despite, you know, everyone knowing it's a big of a joke, I now appreciate there was a deeper level to his rant about the problem of Numminess in America.

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we're rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. "We" -- and by we I mean Americans, not "we" meaning us here right now -- increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

Why boycott Barilla? Do we really support a world in which every utterance, act, thought, belief, or gesture must be pre-cleared with the 100-million-strong leftist Committee of the Whole before we dare it?

We don't think about things like that. We think in terms of Nummy. Barilla is being Non-Nummy towards Gays, who are themselves très Nummy. Ergo, to be One with the Nummy, one must spit up soft little pieces of half-digested pablum, like a collicky baby, and then one can take satisfaction in Thinking Nummy Thoughts.

Over at Slate, a guy writes this about the contrived Barilla Nummy Controversy:

Barilla is not your enemy and Absolut is not your friend; they are just businesses with PR departments that are at different points along the road toward realizing that influential, “taste-maker” minority groups are worth courting, both for direct patronage and easy image-boost-by-association. It’s unfortunate, I guess, that Barilla (or at least Guido Barilla) is behind the times on this matter, but the earnest anger I’m seeing online about that fact is perplexing. I mean, are you really so starved for approval that you need it to come packaged with pasta?

Why, Yes, actually. Because having all of your trivial cultural preferences flattered by impersonal corporations at every turn is itself Very Nummy Indeed. All little girls want to be told that they're the Best and Prettiest Little Girl there is, and all little boys want to be told they will play for the Yankees when they Get Big.

To have one's head patted and cheeks pinched by Admiring Grown Ups at all possible times is the Nummiest Nummy Thing there is.

Years ago, when Titanic ruled at the box office, Hollywood began chattering: Will culture -- I mean, popular culture -- be determined by the tastes of the 16-year-old girls who turned that film into a billion-dollar bonanza by repeat viewings?

I think they rather overshot the mark. The culture is now dominated by the tastes and preferences of Tweener Girls. Or, in reality, 50 year old men and women attempting to channel their inner Tweener to appeal to a population which has decided that they were fools to have ever turned 13 at all.

You know, thirteen -- when you lost your innocence. When you stopped thinking Smurfs were All That and a Bag of Gummy Bears.

Now I have to caveat this: Prior to Tweener Girls becoming the default National Tastemakers, our national culture was determined by the tastes of 19 year old boys, per the Zanuck Postulate.*

So this isn't just a sexist thing. It's about losing at least those seven years of maturation, too.

We are drowning in nostalgia and crushing debt and we can't see the latter because we've checked out into our Happy Place to chase the former.

I can't blame the White House or BuzzFeed for these trends. They're pushers, but they didn't create the sad addiction. This stuff works in America.

But why? Why does it work?

When did we all check out of adulthood to revert to tweenerhood? And when did we stop thinking that might be a little indulgent and shameful?

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Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (536)
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So yeah, this is where the Elevated Discourse is now.

There is some pushback.

Low Information Voters? I think they're a myth.

How about No Information Voters?

That parody thanks to @matthops82

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (290)
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This isn't creepy at all.

“I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don’t agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role,” Reuters reports Mr. Barilla as saying in a radio interview Wednesday.

According to Reuters, the gay rights group Equality Italia already has called for a boycott of the pasta over Mr. Barilla’s “offensive provocation.”

“[If gay people] like our pasta and our advertising, they’ll eat our pasta, if they don’t like it then they will not eat it and they will eat another brand,” Mr. Barilla said during the radio interview.

Yes I can see why that's so offensive that you'd hit the Outrage Button with both hands and a heavy shoe.

He has walked back the comments... sorta.

"With reference to remarks made yesterday to an Italian radio program, I apologize if my words have generated controversy or misunderstanding, or if they hurt someone's sensitivity," Guido Barilla said in a statement. "In the interview I simply wished to underline the central role the woman plays within the family."

Gay marriage is not legal in Italy.

He added, "For clarity, I would like to point out that: - I have the utmost respect for anyone, without distinction of any kind.

- I have the utmost respect for gay people and for everyone's right to express themselves. I've also said -- and I would like to reiterate -- that I respect gay marriages.

- In its advertising, Barilla represents the family - because it's what welcomes everyone and what has always been identified with our brand."

But the #boicottbarilla hashtag is heating up. One English-speaking twit twits:

Sigh. I'd like my pasta without the side of homophobia, thanks.

Yes, not clapping hard enough for the sexual choices of gays constitutes "homophobia" now. "Intolerance" now means "an uncivilized lack of moist enthusiasm."

I've always dreamed in living in a world where I was Free to Celebrate precisely those cult objects that the left demanded I Celebrate. I always dreamed of a world in which I was Free to be rentlessly henpecked, anklebitten, bullied & boycotted by well-funded leftist groups paid to harass citizens every waking moment of every single day.

Actually... It seems to me the question was asked for this reason: The gay lobby wants Barilla (and all other corporations) to affirmatively campaign for their political agenda. Ergo, Barilla's statement that they won't be doing that is now defined as "homophobia."

I say "now" as if this is a new wrinkle. Of course it's been going on for a quite a while.

I notice you're not applauding quite frequently or vigorously enough, Comrade.

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Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (467)
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Independents looking very red. But can the GOP actually make a sale?

Democrats Need to Keep an Eye on Republican-Tilting Independent Voters

With polls showing the two parties neck and neck, independents could heavily influence the midterms—and they're leaning right.

He notes generic ballot questions consistently overstate actual Democratic performance by an average of two points. So you'll see him just docking the Democrats two points in the following.

Looking at Hart and McInturff’s totals, the 2010 merged data—as would be expected, given the very strong Republican performance that Election Day—showed a GOP edge in the generic-ballot test of 45 percent to 43 percent (2 points, but treat it as 4 points to account for the Democratic tilt). In 2012, a good year for Democrats, the party led 47 percent to 42 percent, a 5-point advantage, but again, we’ll knock it down to 3 points for the purposes of this analysis. With these numbers for 2010 and 2012 in mind, how has the generic ballot looked for the past almost four months? The answer: Democrats hold a lead, 45 percent to 42 percent. Adjusted, this works out to a 1-point lead, essentially suggesting a draw at this point.

Something that might be of concern to Democrats, however, is that in this yearÂ’s data, independents are tilting Republican by 18 points, 43 percent to 25 percent. This is even more than the 14-point edge that the GOP had in the 2010 polling (40 percent to 26 percent) and dramatically different from the 1-point Democratic edge in 2012 (35 percent to 34 percent).

He notes that Independents don't vote very much in midterms, but that is offset by the fact that some core Democratic blocs (such as minorities) also skip the midterms.

He notes in a video report that Republicans simply have to get their favorables up in order to capitalize on the weakness of Democrats and their cult leader Obama. (My words, not his.)

Thanks to Charles, or, as I call him, Chrales, because typo.

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