Wing notes

Latest signs, below, I really do need to ramp up my efforts to carry out the dream I've had since high school - permanent residency-cum-citizenship in Iceland or Denmark. At this rate, I may even take Upper Volta (I know, Burkina Faso, now) under consideration - but would such  lands afford me the one thing that within these corn-fed shores is as oxygen to me - an apparently inexhaustible supply of paisans capable of rendering the fan in me of unintentional comedy via the brutal inegalité in the distribution of cranial amplitude tearblind and gutsore a hundred times daily and long before bed?:
Conor Friedersdorf for the win on the ignorance and the ideological bigotry, in an inversion of the old-style paranoid schematics (or schismatics) of "knowing" finger-to-bridge-of-nose c. 1937 Marxists, that has metastasized among those on the talk-radio/FNC right who don't know enough to STFU (Speak The Fewest Utterances) already about the "liberal" bias of the "lamestream" media. Commenters add insights re the equally-widespread wingnut-as-victim shtick, contra the earlier rightward sneers at the left (or should I say ... the Left: hide the children!) for fomenting reflexive victimhood.
Friedersdorf on how "Libertarians Aren't All Selfish Jerks: They're said to only care about themselves. So why do they toil for other people's freedom?"
Conor again, on Limbaugh pinch-hitter Mark Steyn's use of a subservient and monolith reactionism toward that ravenous beast, "the Left" to grant the benefit of the doubt to racist, &c., excess, provided it comes from those on the "Right". 
Also at The Atlantic, Robert Wright on telling colorblind social cues wholly ignored by the now-notorious John Derbyshire in his replacement of them, in the name of a presumed telling of hard truths, with a uniform racial-essentialist dragnet.
Noah Millman at The American Conservative with A Quick Word On The Derb, with a few fairly thoughtful comments, mixed with the usual howls of assorted vapors-fainting wounded virgins for whom "political incorrectness" is more tribalist end than incidental means, in the lively and fissiparous thread beneath. Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic agrees:

"Anyway Millman's piece is probably the best I've seen on the subject. I get the sense that a lot of us didn't even want to be bothered with debunking. It's only right that this take place at the American Conservative. Also, the comments on the piece are serious and impressive. I don't know if they are moderating or what. But there's some good stuff in there."

Pub date, fittingly enough, on May Day

Jonah Goldberg, fresh from his 2008 one-man Allied invasion of talk-listener coffee tables in an intrepid assault upon Liberal Fascism, continues his hardcover essays in flushing out threats to the republic lurking otherwise unnoticed in our latter-day Reign of Terror by hippies out of a c. 1972 number of MAD (or, sigh, a[ny 1955-] 2012 number of National Review) he chooses for the sake of his latest red-baiting book contract to call "liberals", who, though they bear little enough resemblance to the sort of ostensibly center-left 100% Amerkun antitotalitarians I tend to enjoy when I shiver in the fire escape over the occasional five-minute cig-break of cultural history from otherwise 9-to-5 slapstick,  provide me with the perfect pretext to substitute "conservatives" across his parody-is-disarmed book description with no loss whatever in plausibility:

The bestselling author of Liberal Fascism dismantles the progressive myths that are passed-off as wisdom in our schools, media and politics.

According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that they're not ideological.

Today, "objective" journalists, academics and "moderate" politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun aphorisms.  Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason and sticks to one refrain above all others: he's a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and dogma of the right, solely concerned with "what works." And today's liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as:

• One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?
  
• Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with the British empire and ended slavery.
  
• Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer: So you won't mind if those ten guilty men move next door to you?
  
• Diversity is strength: Cool.The NBA should have a quota for midgets and one-legged point guards!
  
• We need complete separation of church and state: In other words all expressions of faith should be barred from politics …except when they support liberal programs.
  

With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan Horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the grand Progressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false-flag of reasonableness is alive and well.  And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

Seeing the attached blurbs from J-Pod ("Jonah Goldberg is the voice of the post-Reagan conservative generation"; I gather the word "alas" was smudged in Mr. Pod's copy of Roger's International Puffers' Thesaurus), Vince Vaughan, and, not least, a David Mamet who, having apparently tired of himself as avatar of leftist groupthink, seized the main chance of sweet relief glittering before him in a switch-throwing leap into the abyss of ... rightist groupthink,*

*And spare a thought, O do, for pitiful portable Victor Davis Hanson, apparently so excited unto cigar-passing glee by the new Goldberg arrival in the bibliotextual maternity ward rightward, that Five-Foot Shelf for the Six-Inch Man, he couldn't even bring himself to a becoming finish: "Goldberg draws on both the Great Books and popular culture to rip apa ... "

I can only wish Mr. Goldberg and his audience of angry blue-haired retirees – the women, too -  safe passage over every one of their future NR  post-election Fall Cruises, as the thought of either him or them, after one glass of Merlot too many over an evening of red-faced tableside finger-jabbing, providing overboard chum to roving swarms of Alinsky-and-Piven-schooled sharks with tie-dyed dorsal fins is too gorgeous horrific to contemplate.