In a garden, growth has its season. There is spring and summer, but there is also fall and winter.

As the above photo found on the Fail Blog humorously notes, it’s definitely back to school time, and for students, while resistance is indeed likely futile, how much you’re assimilated into the leftwing collective is up to you. At the American Interest Website, Walter Russell Mead offers some excellent advice for those going “Back to School.” Here are two of the more noteworthy tips, but definitely read the whole thing:

2.  Most of your elders know very little about the world into which you are headed.

Your parents and your teachers want what is best for you (with the usual regrettable exceptions), but in many cases they don’t understand the challenges you will face.

Especially for those of you who come from white-collar families, the kinds of careers that your parents have had may not be around for you.

Even if you go into the ‘learned professions’ you are going to have to be entrepreneurial and flexible.  Technology is going to rock your world and economic changes and upheavals are going to change the rules on you over and over.  This is not how the  knowledge professions (law, medicine, teaching, the civil service) used to work.  In the old days, you got the right degree from the right school, got a job with a good employer and rose steadily through the ranks through a long and increasingly distinguished career.  At the end you had a safe pension.

Almost certainly, this is not going to happen to you.  At times, your career is going to feel like Eliza’s run for freedom across the half-frozen Ohio river — jumping from ice floe to ice floe with the hounds of hell behind you.  It won’t be all bad; there are rewards to this kind of life as well as risks, but you are going to need a different outlook on life and a different set of skills to cope.

Most faculty members, especially the tenured ones, have worked  and lived in a world that is passing away.  In many cases it’s hard for them to imagine the kind of lives you will live, and you need to keep this in mind.  Even if you want to make a career in education, you are likely going to have to deal with an environment in which tenure is disappearing, universities are shedding overhead, and both public and private universities face tough revenue squeezes.  Some especially vulnerable institutions (like mainline Protestant seminaries) are closing in droves; turmoil is likely to spread because the current financial path of the higher ed industry is as unsustainable as Medicare and the federal debt.

* * *

Fifth, learn to write well.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation.  I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well.  This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

(Via Mickey Kaus.)

“Take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Reading the William Shatner profile in New York Times that the Professor linked to, I couldn’t help but think, hadn’t I read this before? At the start of the year, GQ profiled Shatner — the magazine had finally found the perfect man to match its own slightly campy tone, and the result was one of the most readable and just plain fun articles that otherwise moribund magazine had produced in ages. In contrast, the Times’ profile of Shatner just feels like a case of me-too-ism.

But then, this is the sort of magazine the Times has long been chasing, as Joseph Epstein wrote in 1994 in his lengthy, brilliant Commentary article titled, “The Degradation of the New York Times.” (It’s pay-to-read, but it’s a great read. Especially considering it was written before Howell Raines became executive editor, and began to really inflict his own unique style of damage on the Gray Lady in the crucial period during and immediately after 9/11):

Whatever its shortcomings, the old New York Times took itself seriously in a way that, in comparison with the new New York Times, now seems most salutary—even noble in aspiration. Where the new Times feels it quite natural to have a piece entitled “Behind the Scene With a Rock Impresario” dominate the front page of the Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section, in the old Times the same spot might have been given over to, say, a Renoir retrospective. Like all good middlebrow institutions, the old Times felt duty-bound to educate and elevate its readers. The new Times aims no higher than entertainment and catching its readers up on popular culture. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., the forty-two-year-old son of Punch Sulzberger and now the publisher of the Times, has gone on record as saying that people should read his newspaper “not only because it is the best newspaper in the world, but also for the fun of it.”

* * *

As his comment about “fun” suggests, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. is a man intent on saving his family’s newspaper by softening it up still further. As he puts his mind to the task, the Times is in danger of becoming one of those newspapers that Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent, refers to as “written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” For all that the old Times may have been stuffy and dull in its high pretensions, the new Times is thin and frivolous in its celebration of all that is new and young and with-it. It was after Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. took over from his father that the new gaudy “Styles” section was inaugurated, and it is under him, too, that there has occurred the notable increase in so-called “life-style” and other soft stories.

“It seems to me,” wrote the English poet Philip Larkin, “that the apparatus for the creation and maintenance of celebrity is vastly in excess of the material fit to be celebrated.” Nowhere does this seem truer than at the contemporary New York Times.

As Ace wrote about Newsweek a while back, it thought it was in competition with magazines like Time and the Economist; instead it had lowered its standards so much that in reality, it was in competition with People magazine. And for what People covered, it certainly had more fun doing its job than Newsweek did.

Similarly, Rolling Stone and Conde Naste supermarket publications like GQ and Vanity Fair were essentially the level that Pinch wanted to transform the New York Times into. That’s quite a descent for any newspaper, let alone one that staked out such haughty turf as the Times of old. But between getting an American general fired and writing a better celebrity profile, it shouldn’t surprise him that lately, these pop culture magazines, however sclerotic they’ve also become over the years, do a better job handling their own self-designated turf than what’s left of the even more ancient Gray Lady.

The great Thomas Sowell stops by PJM Political today. If you missed it on Sirius-XM, click here to join host Stephen Green of VodkaPundit.com for a look at Washington and beyond:

• Somehow having recovered from drunkblogging President Obama’s speech on Iraq, Steve discusses the speech, and the state of the midterms, with Ed Driscoll.
• Ed interviews veteran columnist and economist Thomas Sowell about his new book, Dismantling America.
• Steve interviews Tim Burns, the GOP candidate running for the seat previously held by the late Rep. John Murtha in Pennsylvania.
• Glenn Reynolds interviews Jay P. Greene, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas on the topic of a possible bubble about to burst in the demand for higher education.
• Bill Whittle has a warm tribute to Jack Horkheimer, the recently deceased PBS astronomer, who gave Bill his first job.
• Produced by your humble Blogospheric narrator.

Click here to listen!

“This inscription, said to be on the wall of a public restroom somewhere in China, gives us a reason to be thankful for one of the few freedoms we have left.”

On the other hand, Sheryl Crow’s use of toilet paper as propaganda continues to roll on, moving progress backwards, one sheet at a time.

As spotted by James Poulos at Ricochet:

Politico reports on the latest Dem tactic to throw off a heavy whiff of desperation:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s attorneys sent Simon & Schuster a letter Thursday, hinting that the publisher may have violated several campaign finance laws that prohibit in-kind contributions by corporations by posting on its website a promotional video for a book penned by three top House Republicans.

At issue: the publishing house’s promotion of “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders” by Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia, Kevin McCarthy of California and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. The DCCC’s attorneys at Perkins Coie sent the New York-based publisher a letter saying it’s improper for a corporation to host a video on its website that directs viewers to a website that solicits contributions for Republican candidates for Congress.

Presumably, Websites that solicit contributions for Democratic candidates for Congress are fine, though.

And speaking of American freedoms, at Red State, a call on the next Congress to Save The Lightbulb:

Dear John Boehner, Ted Poe, and Members of the incoming 112th Congress,

If you do only one thing in your time in Washington, and frankly I hope you do only one thing given your propensity to expand government (other than eradicating Obamacare), it is this: SAVE THE LIGHT BULB.

People may not realize it, but one of the first acts of the Democratic Congress in 2007, was to ban the light bulb effective in 2014.

Seriously.

Now, you may say that this is an exaggeration, and it is a bit, but the incandescent light bulb is the light bulb of choice for millions of Americans. It turns on instantly, it can be tossed in the trash without summoning a hazmat team, and is cheap.

The compact fluorescents cannot be treated that way and cost more. Likewise, we are forced to deal with China for every purchase.

If Republicans want to bring change, they need to save the incandescent light bulb. From christmas trees to kitchens, the incandescent light bulb is a staple of the American household and Congress’s ban is offensive.

We should get every Republican out there to pledge their support to saving the incandescent light bulb when they take back Congress.

Amen, brother, amen.

…but savor the sweet, sweet, schadenfreude.

Henry Payne of the Detroit News explores “The irony of Jesse Jackson’s stripped SUV:”

Add Jesse Jackson’s ride to prominent vehicles being stripped in Detroit.

Following the embarrassing news that Mayor Dave Bing’s GMC Yukon was hijacked by criminals this week, Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.

Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large.

“We need an economy that creates employment that can’t be shipped overseas,” the Green Rev wrote for CNN about the march. “Home-grown American labor will be installing windmills and solar panels. A green economy is not an abstract concept.”

Well, its certainly abstract to Jesse, but I digress.

As Mort Sahl once said of Jackson, he’s a man of the cloth — cashmere!

No word yet if the pacifistic man of God will do this if he catches the vandals:

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The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson: so on the cutting edge of journalism that he’s writing from 60 days into the future! Or as Ace writes, “OMG: ‘Temper Tantrum’ Makes First Appearance In Media, Two Months Out From Election:”

In 1994, Peter Jennings at least had the decency to wait until his boys lost to announce “tonight, the nation threw a temper-tantrum.”

Bernie Goldberg was noting this on O’Reilly last week — this time, they’re not even waiting. They can see it coming, so they’re getting out their recriminations over their rejection early. Precriminations for prejection, I guess.

I linked Eugene “I have no obvious qualifications” Robinson’s headline earlier, but I must link it again, now that Matt Lewis informs me he is so fucking stupid he trotted out Peter Jennings’ infamous line, without even being knowing enough to realize what he was doing.

Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they’re ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans — for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn’t an “electoral wave,” it’s a temper tantrum…. In the punditry business, it’s considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.

Matt Lewis notes:

Robinson stresses that his argument is not a “partisan” one, but one can’t help but notice the convenient timing: Now that voters are swinging to the Republicans, they are throwing a “temper tantrum.” (One wonders whether they were throwing a similar tantrum when they got fed up with Bush and voted-in Barack Obama?) …

Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan asks, “How Do You Stop an Elephant Charging?”

Eight weeks out and you don’t have to be a political professional to feel what’s in the air: The Republicans have a big win coming.

The question in the House races is: Will they get to 218? Will Republicans pick up the 39 seats they need to win control of the 435-member chamber?

Another way of asking: Is this 1994 again?

That year the Republicans swept the House races, picking up 52 seats and getting, for the first time in 40 years, a Republican majority and a Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich. Even then-Speaker Tom Foley (D., Wash.), lost his seat that year. (Speaker Nancy Pelosi is famously in no danger—she won her seat with 72 % of the vote in 2008—but it probably means something that she appears to have gone missing from the national scene. CBS, in March, had her at 11% approval among registered voters.)

A Gallup survey of registered voters this week had Republicans beating Democrats in a generic ballot by 10 points, 51% to 41%. In the 68-year history of that poll, the GOP had never led by more than five points. RealClearPolitics has Republicans ahead in 206 races and Democrats ahead in 194, with 35 too close to call. The Cook Political Report puts 68 Democratic House seats “at substantial risk,” while judging less than a dozen GOP seats to be in real trouble. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made news a few weeks ago by conceding the obvious: that the Republicans could take the House. Top Democrats have told the same to Politico.

The news is so good it’s prompting mutterings on the right: The liberal media are trumpeting the inevitable GOP triumph to make the base complacent and the party peak early. Anything but a Democratic debacle will be spun as proof that Obama’s support, while soft, endures. “The Republicans had a typical off-year chance to win back power and failed. The reason? Voters just don’t trust them.”

I think Noonan is spot-on that “The liberal media are trumpeting the inevitable GOP triumph to make the base complacent and the party peak early.” And obviously, complacency is something to be avoided this fall, for numerous reasons. But is the incredibly bitter and divisive “blame the readers” style the MSM has adopted, as illustrated in the Robinson quote above, from an article astonishingly titled “The Spoiled-Brat American Electorate,” a byproduct of their going all-in to help the Democrats?

The MSM’s roomtone these days is very much the mirror image of the material the JournoList-tainted media cranked out in from the summer of 2008 through early 2009, when they were trumpeting an inexperienced presidential candidate as literally the second coming of some of the most revered and battle-tested presidents in American history. (When they weren’t comparing him to God.) But no matter what happens in November at the ballot box, what happens to the MSM afterwards, when these publications have to go back to their readers for subscriptions and advertising revenue?

Will their readers forget how badly they’ve been dumped on in recent weeks?

Related: While one journalist with the WaPo is trashing the voters, another is attacking the founding fathers. Red State spots JournoList founder Ezra Klein saying:

I think our veneration for the Founders is something that occasionally perplexes me.

Go figure. Personally, I like to think that the founding fathers are, at their best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

But your mileage may very.

Roger Kimball wonders what H.L. Mencken would have thought of President Obama’s speech on Iraq this week:

An erudite reader, responding to my judgment that it was “one of the worst speeches in modern memory,”  sent along a bit of tonic abuse from H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s perfromance as a speaker: “It reminds me,” wrote Mencken:

“of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm (I was about to write abcess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

I thought it worth sharing Mencken’s little detonation with you. I have a feeling it will come in handy in the months ahead.

Mencken has also been quoted as saying, “The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

QED:

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In today’s Ricochet podcast, (and welcome back to the Blogosphere, Mark Steyn!) when the Ricochetistas weren’t discussing modern-day dam busters (hmm…that topic rings a bell for some reason), the gang explored Hollywood’s rich fantasy life when it comes to building the perfect president. As they noted, 1997’s Air Force One was particularly fascinating in that department. Hollywood imagined the president as a 50-something tough-on-terror Vietnam-era vet extremely comfortable behind the controls of a modern day jet aircraft — and then threw an eight year hissy fit when voters elected just such a man three years later.

Or did they?

Perhaps not according to Newsweek, who last year, gave us an imaginary look at President Al Gore’s kick-ass eight years in office. In yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks proffered the logical follow-up — an imaginary alternate history of his successor’s first glorious eighteen months in the oval office.

Then there’s wacky far left Florida Congressman/wannabe MSNBC host Alan Grayson, who blurts that the participants at Glenn Beck’s rally last weekend were KKK members 25 years ago. Setting aside the Klan’s historic allegiance to Beck’s bete noire, as Allahpundit jokes, “I was a bit young at the time so I can’t be sure, but was the Klan really some major force in … 1985?”

Meanwhile, linking to an post debunking “Errors In Jane Mayer’s New Yorker Article Attacking the Kochs,” the Professor adds:

Hey, it’s not easy living amongst the tiny mummies.

Finally, there’s this, via Jim Treacher:

Yesterday, [Sarah Palin] was on Sean Hannity’s radio show and said this about the [Vanity Fair] story:

“Impotent, limp and gutless reporters take anonymous sources and cite them as being factual references. It just slays me because it’s so absolutely clear what the state of yellow journalism is today that they would take these anonymous sources as fact.”

Whoa. Criticize the media all you want, Sarah, but what’s with the gay-bashing? That’s right, I said gay-bashing. Just ask The Advocate:

Is Sarah Palin using code words to slam gay journalist Michael Joseph Gross, a frequent Advocate contributor who wrote the much-buzzed-about profile of the former vice presidential nominee in this month’s Vanity Fair?

Palin didn’t mention Gross by name while talking Thursday on Sean Hannity’s WABC radio show, but she seemed to be referring to the article — and pointedly used emasculating words that have long been used as euphemisms for homosexuality — when she called reporters who publish “rumors” about her “impotent,” “limp,” and “gutless.”

Now, everybody knows I love The Advocate (which I read for the articles), but if you’re gay and you think “impotent” and “limp” are words that people use to describe your sexual activity, well… maybe you guys aren’t having as much fun as we all thought.

Heh.™ Clearly, for the left (and whatever ideology Brooks considers himself a part of these days), a little projection can be a dangerous thing.

Related: Jennifer Rubin links to Brooks’ Fantasy Land Obama and compares it to the Star Trek mirror universe — which I suppose would be where Thomas Friedman would love to reside — and writes:

This says something about the pundits who believed they were getting un-Obama. They were impressed with image and with pants, but failed to comprehend what Obama was all about. They painted an un-Obama vision — moderate, responsible, evidence-based, unifying. The list could go on. All ludicrously off-base, except in some alternate reality. (Like the Star Trek episode where Spock had a beard.)

Moreover, the real “alternate history” would have to include this:

The mainstream media and liberal pundits – who had been derided by conservative critics as out of touch or as actively engaged in a conspiracy to present a pleasing but false image of Obama – were vindicated. The liberal print media and broadcast news networks enjoyed newfound credibility. The conservative pundits were thoroughly discredited. The New York Times, basking in the glow of its reaffirmation as the “newspaper of record,” saw a dramatic improvement in its balance sheet. Meanwhile, Fox News closed its doors, the blogosphere shriveled, the conservative activists hid under their beds, and the center-left coalition cemented its gains in the 2010 midterm elections.

Yeah, no resemblance to reality. Whatsoever.

And that’s precisely the fantasy word the left tried to cocoon themselves in during the first half of 2009 — and as we saw on MSNBC, had endless hissy fits declaring virtually the entire planet as racist when the rest of us wouldn’t bury our heads in the cocoon.

Meanwhile, at the Weekly Standard, this seems very much related to the much more recent fantasies above: Michael Weiss explores some of the reasons why historically, the left have been so quick to be useful idiots to totalitarian regimes.

I’m late to this, but I wanted to mention a great find by Kevin D. Williamson at the Corner, who takes one for the team, reading Paul Krugman so the rest of us don’t have to:

You know, this actually explains something important, and, yes, I am serious. Paul Krugman writes in re: Isaac Asimov:

Asimov, and specifically the Foundation trilogy, was my great inspiration; I became an economist because I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior.

The psychohistorians use mathematical models to predict the course of human civilization, and the founder of the science of psychohistory, Prof. Hari Seldon, takes on a kind of godlike role in guiding human history. Of particular interest are what are known as “Seldon crises,” which, as Wikipedia sums it up, “are part of the field of psychohistory, and refer to a social and political situation that, to be successfully surmounted, would eventually leave only one possible, inevitable, course of action.” One unique solution to a sociopolitical problem, determined with mathematical precision by a very powerful professor with friends in government. Talk about your fatal conceits!

On Earth, unhappy wretches that we are, we must labor under constraints. In politics, one of the most important of those constraints is the “knowledge problem” articulated by Mises and Hayek: Even the smartest, most motivated, best-intentioned bureaucrats cannot plan complex human undertakings—such as the workings of the economy, or subsectors of the economy—because they do not and cannot have access to data sufficient to make those decisions, the data being too complex and in constant flux. (Question: If governments actually know how to macromanage economies, why are there recessions?)

I love the Obamaesque narcissism contained within Krugman’s admission that “I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior” — it’s his personal equivalent of the hoary cliche of newspaper journalists who, ever since the 1970s said they joined their profession to “change the world.”

(Has anybody ever asked a journalist “What would you like to change it into?”)

This isn’t Krugman’s first public embrace of a Galbraithian command and control economic worldview, of course. Last year Krugman even praised Richard Nixon, as part of the 37th president’s strange new respect among liberal journalists for similar reasons). It also brings to mind the cri de coeurs of Thomas Friedman, Krugman’s fellow Timesman, for totalitarian China.

Well, that at least answers the “how would you like to change the world” question for Friedman!

Of course, totalitarian regimes keep their dissent just offstage, unlike the out-in-the-open messiness of democracy. Which not surprisingly, the New York Times has little patience with, particularly when the voters aren’t in sync with the Gray Lady, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters:

The New York Times Friday called many of its readers “appalling” for their opposition to the Ground Zero mosque.

As NewsBusters reported moments ago, the Times released a new poll Friday finding that 67 percent of New York City residents are against the proposed location for the Islamic center.

At the same time, the Gray Lady, clearly not concerned about offending its dwindling number of patrons, chose to insult portions of its remaining readership with the following editorial:

It has always been a myth that New York City, in all its dizzying globalness, is a utopia of humanistic harmony. The city has a bloody history of ethnic and class strife. [...]

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are two pinnacles of American openness to the outsider. New Yorkers like to think they are a perfect fit with their city.

Tolerance, however, isn’t the same as understanding, so it is appalling to see New Yorkers who could lead us all away from mosque madness, who should know better, playing to people’s worst instincts.

That includes Carl Paladino and Rick Lazio, Republicans running for governor who have disgraced their state with histrionics about the mosque being a terrorist triumph. And Rudolph Giuliani, who cloaks his opposition to the mosque as “sensitivity” to 9/11 families without acknowledging that this conflates all prayerful Muslims with terrorists, a despicable conclusion. [...]

New Yorkers, like other Americans, have a way to go.

That’s a heckuva way to treat your patrons as well as prospective customers.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around these days, isn’t there? Or as James Taranto puts it, “Times to City: Drop Dead.”

Fortunately, most New Yorkers are made of heartier stock than the effete Gray Lady, as this humorous (and alas — language warning –it’s filled with plenty of New Yowk F**#&#&@-style language ) mock New York Post commercial implies.

As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal likes to note, the Democratic Party has, over the years, had many powerful orators.

• Andrew Jackson is often attributed as saying, “One man with courage makes a majority.”
• Franklin D. Roosevelt comforted the nation when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
• Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here.”
• John F. Kennedy reminded Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
• Rahm Emanuel: “F*ck the UAW”

But of course, he’s merely a sheep in Rahm’s clothing; no member of the far left would do anything to endanger the milk cow with 300,000  tits, to borrow Alan Simpson’s rather colorful phrasing.

Meanwhile, there’s this:

• Emanuel’s spout about the UAW came during early debate on whether the administration should even try to rescue GM and Chrysler.

• In his first post-election talk with advisors about GM and Chrysler, Obama asked “Why can’t they make a Corolla?”

• Rattner describes Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne as “one of our biggest headaches.” He also describes a showdown between Marchionne and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger; when Marchionne lectured about the need for autoworkers to accept a “culture of poverty” instead of a “culture of entitlement,” Gettelfinger fired back: “Why don’t you come and sit with me and tell a seventy-five-year-old widow that she can’t have surgery and that you killed her husband?”

File that last quote away as the rationing of ObamaCare snakes its way closer to becoming the law of the land.

Apparently believing that they hadn’t shrunk their readership enough in recent years, Time decided to resume the process last week by declaring their audience “Islamophobic” because they didn’t fancy the idea of a mosque in a building so close to the WTC that parts of one of the aircraft involved in 9/11 had crashed through its roof.

As Steve Green noted on Thursday, Time decides to double down. Hey you people in the blank space between Manhattan and California on the New Yorker cover, you don’t like the GZM? Fine, be that way. But surely you dug the president’s “Stimulus” plan, right?

In a Time magazine piece, reporter Michael Sheerer (and David Axelrod with the assist!) trying out a new meme to explain away President Obama’s descent through the polls: Blame his victims. Here’s Exhibit A:

One explanation for Obama’s steep decline is that his presidency rests on what Gallup’s Frank Newport calls a “paradox” between Obama and the electorate. In 2008, Newport notes, trust in the federal government was at a historic low, dropping to around 25%, where it still remains. Yet Obama has offered government as the primary solution to most of the nation’s woes, calling for big new investments in health care, education, infrastructure and energy. Some voters bucked at the incongruity, repeatedly telling pollsters that even programs that have clearly helped the economy, like the $787 billion stimulus, did no such thing.

“The stimulus has clearly helped the economy.” That’s quite an assumption, given that by the President’s own yardstick, the thing has been a dismal flop. Furthermore, I think voters understand that the stimulus was yet another attempt to borrow from the future to make today a little nice — which is exactly how we got into this mess. So, contrary to Sheerer’s assertion, the American public seems to be quite a bit smarter than your average Beltway reporter and not the other way around.

And now, Exhibit B:

When challenged about his declining popularity, the President tended to deflect the blame — to the state of the economy, the ferocity of the news cycle and right-wing misinformation campaigns. [Hey, if anybody had any doubt, nice of Time to triangulate themselves with that line -- Ed] Aides treated the problem as a communications concern more than a policy matter. They increased his travel schedule to key states and limited his prime-time addresses. They struggled to explain large, unpopular legislative packages to the American people, who opposed the measures despite supporting many of the component parts, like extending health insurance to patients with pre-existing conditions or preventing teacher layoffs. “When you package it all together, it can be too big to succeed as a public-relations matter,” says Axelrod.

See? Americans are just too dumb to understand that the health bill is good for them — we can’t see the forest (Obamacare) from the trees (all those “component parts”) we tell pollsters we like. That this bill was passed in the most outrageous way, and that we can plainly see those bits we like are smothered in horse waste — well, we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about the little technical details.

So your average reader, of which Time has literally tens, [Heh--Ed] might read this thing and wonder if maybe he didn’t get it all wrong, if maybe he judged Obama too harshly. And we’ll see lots more of this stuff, going into November.

Don’t fall for it.

If you’re a regular PJM reader, I don’t think there’s much chance of that happening.

In a related item, in his syndicated column today, Jonah Goldberg adds:

There was a lot of talk in the late stages of the Democratic primary about how Obama couldn’t “close.” People liked the Hope and Change stuff, but he fell short on convincing people he could transmogrify the rhetorical gold into reality. Sure, he won in the end. It was a change election, and he was the ultimate change candidate, with no real record to serve as ballast for all of his hot air.But then came the governing, when the steak needed to outrank the sizzle. Obama has had remarkable success cramming his agenda through Congress — often thanks to the sorts of backroom deals he swore to oppose — but he hasn’t made a sale outside of the Beltway. For instance, despite a year of infomercial-level hawking, Americans still don’t want his health-care reform (The American people loved the fantasy car he described, but they’ve balked at both the clunker and the financing). He’s gone straight from messiah to Michael Dukakis.

In fairness, he’s tried to sell. He claimed the Gulf oil spill proves we need cap-and-trade. He told us from the Oval Office this week that we owe it to the troops to unite around his economic agenda. But these weren’t arguments so much as condescending harangues. No one who doesn’t already agree buys such nonsense. Rather, they ask, “How stupid does this guy think we are?”

Just as often, Obama confuses explanation for persuasion, as if simply telling us that because he thinks X, then X must be the way to go. More infuriating, nearly all of his explanations assume that disagreement with him must stem from ignorance or villainy. That pose worked a little when he could claim that opposition was synonymous with Republican partisanship. But now that disagreement has moved to the mainstream, he seems to have an adversarial relationship with the people he’s supposed to represent.

Funny how the MSM’s adversarial relationship with American readers, and Obama’s adversarial relationship with American voters is coinciding at precisely the same moment.

Jonah’s article is titled, “Obama Could Use Some Clintonesque Salesmanship” And as the old term associated with salesmanship goes, “people don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.”

Unless by chance you consider yourself a member of America’s Ruling Class, it’s safe to say that the White House and the MSM don’t care very much about you or me.

Hopefully they won’t be all that surprised if we feel the same.

Update: At Ricochet, Dave Carter is “Getting Ready For November:”

Over 200 years ago, free men won our independence. It was free men, through their respective states, who gave birth to the federal government. For generations, free men and women have fought our wars. And in 2001, it was free men and women who gave their lives, literally saving one or more branches of that government. To show it’s appreciation, the government has proceeded to bankrupt us and our descendants. It orders our lives according to its priorities, running roughshod over the very Constitution it was instituted to preserve. It refuses to perform it’s most basic function, leaving us defenseless against a virtual invasion across our borders and then sues us when we try to defend ourselves.

And how do our public officials view us? When we exercise our right to protest, we are called racist. When we call for a return to the Constitution, we are accused of turning back the clock. When we express our concern over a mosque built as a provocative act on the ashes of thousands of our people, we are called xenophobic. The list goes on and on.

In fact, we are not any of these things. We are citizens, free men and women, and we vote. The ruling class works at our pleasure, as we will demonstrate in a few short months. November can’t get here soon enough.

Don’t miss the snazzy — and very much related — video that Carter links to as well.

(And speaking of Ricochet, I’ll never look at a bottle of Dos Equis the same way again…)

Update: At Hot Air, Doctor Zero explores what happens “After the Fall:”

Jim Geraghty of National Review relays some sage advice from his political mentor: “This election is not about Obama.  It’s about what Democrats have been since 1972.”  It’s also about preventing them from assuming their twisted and ravenous state in the future.  We need healthy opposition parties.  The long-term prosperity, and perhaps survival, of our nation requires the improvement of the Republican Party… and the transformation of the Democrats.  That is the great task awaiting us, after the fall.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Update: And again.

Jim Geraghty checks in with his pollster/political consultant guru, “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” for a look at the next two months. As “Kenobi” tells Geraghty, expect “October Surprises, maybe every day and all day,” predict them, and plan for them. I think “Kenobi” is right — “Just tell the people that the White House and Democrats will try and control the media dynamic and narrative,” so that when crazy stuff starts happening — and it will — that it’s the just the normal background noise at election time from the fever-pitch left:

OWK: Well, Gallup has an historic GOP lead and Dick Morris is predicting over 80 seats . . . The vote has taken shape much earlier than usual, which means when it makes its final break it could be just that devastating.

[I would offer the cautionary note Dick Morris also wrote a book in fall 2005 entitled Condi vs. Hillary.]

Q: The atmosphere can’t stay like this for two months, right? Something has to go wrong for Republicans.

OWK: Can the Democrats outplay the GOP in the closing weeks and save just enough to hold on?

One problem area is that Republicans don’t usually get the media dynamic. Look at the week of the Obamacare vote — while Republicans were focused on legislative maneuvers and talking amendments, the White House created the right media climate, one where wavering Democrats could feel comfortable by citing the support of the Catholic nuns and the hospital associations and the CBO in a nice little series of TV set-pieces.

Remember that Politico piece about the daily phone call of Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Begala, and George Stephanopoulos on the White House line of the day? ABC News has been tracking pretty accurately on the White House various pitches this spring and summer — the Tea partiers are haters or Timothy McVeigh types — then the whole setup for the NAACP convention launched the “they’re all racist” theme, etc. So keep an eye on ABC, especially Stephanopoulos and also First Read and Politico — they’re usually the first-wave transmitters of the White House line. Believe me, they’ve already got a pollster or two who’s ready to bend some numbers and journalists ready to write about the “sudden Democratic surge.” I’d love to know which week they have picked for the “Democrats are back in business” story. They have tried it twice this summer, but neither polls nor events carried the storyline any further. They will badly need the networks’ news departments to come through if there is a real domestic terrorist incident or some ugly display by someone on the right.

This fall they will know no checks — October Surprises, maybe every day and all day. What this means, I don’t know — bombing Iran? Capturing Osama bin Laden or some other big name and announcing the news two days before the election? Get tough with Paris Hilton and send her to Guantanamo?

[I am fairly certain my mentor is exaggerating. Having said that, I hope Paris pays her lawyers well.]

Q: What can the GOP do?

First, predict it. Just tell the people that the White House and Democrats will try and control the media dynamic and narrative. This is what they do. They don’t really know how to govern for the public good; if they could do that, they would be in better shape. What they do know to do is use media events to hold onto power, to go on television and blab.

Second, Republicans ought to be using the words “October Surprise” endlessly. Hold a contest to see who comes up with the most creative suggestion for what the Dems might do.

Third, and above all, they need to cut off the one escape route the Democrats have, particularly the “moderate” Democrats who are trying to run away from Obama. Get the word out that this election is not just about Obama — he is just a symptom of what the Democratic party has been since 1972.

There are no moderate Democrats in Congress, because when you vote for a supposed Blue Dog you are voting for the enablers — the ones who keep the House and Senate run by liberals.

And don’t sit on the lead — throw the damn ball! Keep the issues coming and keep the Democrats off balance. Berwick’s appointment was an amazing double down by the White House and the biggest gift of the campaign season. Every GOP Senate candidate can talk about the rationing that is coming to their state with this guy as the personification of it. He wants to decide whether grandpa or for that matter Dad gets his medical device or drug.

It’s a little encouraging what Boehner is doing — calling for the economic team’s dismissal, and then going to the national-security issue. For the first time in a long while, the GOP is selecting issues and talking to a national audience and trying to influence the media dynamic.

In other words, stay on the offensive, but realize that in sharp contrast to 2006, the trend is your friend: note the headline on this Real Clear Politics piece.

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Coming clean in a somewhat similar fashion to former New York Times Ombudsman Daniel Okrent’s admission in 2004, Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general admits to the Daily Mail that his network swings to the left:

BBC Director General Mark Thompson has admitted the corporation was guilty of a ‘massive’ Left-wing bias in the past.

The TV chief also admitted there had been a ’struggle’ to achieve impartiality and that staff were ‘ mystified’ by the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. [See also: Epistemic Closure -- Ed]

But he claimed there was now ‘much less overt tribalism’ among the current crop of young journalists, and said in recent times the corporation was a ‘broader church’.

He claimed there was now an ‘honourable tradition of journalists from the right’ working for the corporation.

His comments, made in the New Statesman magazine, are one of the clearest admissions of political bias from such a senior member of its staff.

Gosh, who knew?

Similarly, “This Just In: Washington Post’s Milbank Admits He’s a Lefty.”

Elsewhere in the annals of strange doings at the Post, “Washington Post sportswriter suspended for Twitter hoax,” AFP reports:

A Twitter experiment that went awry has landed a sportswriter for The Washington Post with a one-month suspension.Mike Wise, a respected Post columnist, was suspended by the newspaper on Tuesday, a day after he posted a fake report on his Twitter account.

“Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told,” Wise wrote on his Twitter feed, @MikeWiseguy, on Monday in a reference to the length of the suspension handed down to Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

In fact, Roethlisberger’s penalty for an offseason incident in a Georgia nightclub has not yet been determined.

Wise told the Post that he “tweeted” the made-up report as a social media experiment to to see how widely it would spread in the media, a move he said later was a “horrendous mistake.”

“I’m not a journalism ombudsman,” Wise told the Post. “And I found that out in a very painful, hard way. I need to take my medicine and move on, and promise everybody this will never happen again.”

Think of it as a miniaturized version of the Janet Cooke story, done in Twitter-style, in 140 characters or less.

Didn’t we learn anything from the Mary Tyler Moore Show?

Well, we all do.

Business blogger “Donny Baseball” links to a piece in the New York Times and reprinted by the Daily Caller titled “Why Wall St. donors are deserting Obama” and responds:

This is too funny. (Reagan?) Of course, most of us here on Wall Street know that super-rich dudes like Loeb don’t really want the policies that Democrats peddle, they only want to be Democrats so that you know they care. In other words, whereas Republicans hate their RINOs, Democrats love their DINOs – they want Democrats who talk the talk but won’t upset their sweet apple cart. Wall Street is waking up to the fact that Obama ain’t no DINO. The fact that he is clueless about business doesn’t help either. I have many friends and associates just like Loeb and I have been telling them not to cry to me – they made their bed. Still, they won’t learn, they’ll still stick with the Dems in order to move in the best social circles, but they might be a little more circumspect about buying Dems that stay bought in future.

(Emphasis mine.)

That dovetails remarkably well with this passage from Kevin D. Williamson’s “Losing Gordon Gekko” piece on Wall Street in National Review in early 2009, which also has a replacing religion with aesthetics angle of its own:

Wall Street isn’t politically agnostic, and there’s more to its politics than money. Culture matters, and you won’t find a lot of Pentecostal churches in Greenwich, Conn. Wall Street guys, for the most part, do not have time for social conservatives. “Of course these guys aren’t conservative,” says one longtime bond trader. “Why the [expletive deleted] would they be? We’re talking about guys who live in Manhattan, guys with manicures and eight-figure bank balances. And their wives–their wives aren’t showing up at parents’ day at Brearley with a Sarah Palin button. It’d be like showing up in flip-flops from Wal-Mart. Like showing up in a [rather lengthier expletive deleted] tracksuit.”

This cultural divide is particularly visible in New York City politics. “Ten to 15 years ago, half of the Upper East Side [officeholders] were Republican,” says John Mills, executive vice president of the Lexington Democratic Club. “There’s not one Republican there now. Abortion and gay rights are two of the biggest issues, and there are a lot of Jewish voters here not comfortable with Christian conservatives.”

Wall Street has no love for the southern, rural, and evangelical. But it’s not just the Jesus stuff–the southern and rural parts matter, too: Republican congressmen tend to represent places like Glasscock County, Texas, America’s most Republican jurisdiction, which reliably gives 90-odd percent of its votes to the GOP. Those districts are not going to feel the pain of the financial markets the way New York, New Jersey, California, and Connecticut are. The bailout is not very popular in farm country. Wall Street knew there was a gathering storm in the markets, and it didn’t want to find itself at the mercy of small-town and rural Republicans’ riding to the rescue.

In other words, it’s all fun and games until the business-friendly Clinton-style Democrat you thought were backing turns out to be anything but.

And it’s also a reminder of something that Sean Trende wrote in Real Clear Politics last year, when he asked, possibly quite prophetically, “Can The Clinton Coalition Survive Obama?”

The historical base of the Democratic Party for two centuries has long been what Jay Cost and I call Jacksonians: Culturally conservative, hawkish, and populist whites located throughout the South and Border states. They began breaking away from Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s – their reaction to the Party’s embrace of unions, blacks and liberals is a story is so well known there’s no need to rehash it here.

But this group remained at least in play for the Democrats. Clinton inherited a coalition consisting of minorities, liberals, urban voters, and a decent remnant of Jacksonian voters in the Ohio River Valley and the South, who still preferred a moderate-to-conservative Democrat to a Republican. This coalition became a majority coalition when Clinton used a combination of fiscal conservatism and social moderation to bring suburban voters on board. This was a huge innovation for Democrats; suburbs like Nassau County, NY, Orange County, CA and Fairfax County, VA had fueled the rise of the Republican parties in those states. Clinton moved them substantially toward his side. This coalition allowed him to win by eight points in 1996; absent Perot and a last-minute fundraising scandal, he probably would have won by more.

Clinton intuited that suburban voters are, generally speaking, culturally cosmopolitan – they don’t like it when you call someone “macaca,” and aren’t crazy about the religious right. But they’re generally not particularly socially liberal either, and are fans of “law and order.” They like taxes low and appreciate economic growth, but like good schools and a clean environment. Having to balance a bunch of spending priorities with somewhat limited income in their daily lives, balanced budgets are the ultimate “good government” indicator for these voters.

Clinton delivered on all of these issues, keeping tax increases fairly small, and balancing the budget for much of his term. In so doing – and this is very important – he re-branded the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, moderate taxes, and smart government.

Of course, that was the post-’94, post-GOP Congress Bill Clinton, something that voters, including those far beyond Wall Street, forgot in 2008. Fortunately, they seem to have gotten the wake-up call this year.

Related: “No Kidding… Disgraced Obama Economic Adviser Admits: ‘We Didn’t Understand the Recession.’”

Ann Althouse on James Lee’s enviro-psycho “manifesto:”

The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs [I'd say he got it and a half -- Ed], because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That’s such a childish list of animals, and not just because of “Froggies.” These are the animals in a children’s picture book or Noah’s Ark toy.

Cue Denis Leary’s early rant about the animal “rights” movement being driven by aesthetics:

Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-f**king-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision. Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it’s about. “I don’t want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals.” Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He’s so cute. My fluffy little dog.. He’s so cute — There’s the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don’t we? Yeah. Why don’t we just have animal auditions. Line ‘em up one by one and interview them individually. “What are you?” “I’m an otter.” “And what do you do?” “I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands.” “You’re free to go.” “And what are you?” “I’m a cow.” “Get in the f**king truck, ok pal!” “But I’m an animal.” “You’re a baseball glove! Get on that truck!”

But then at some point in the last 125 years or so, we really did replace Religion With Aesthetics.

Related: And speaking of replacing religion with aesthetics!

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(H/T: Mark Hemingway.)

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Your quote of the day, courtesy of Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA), unhinged by the Beck rally in DC on Saturday.

Wait, did I say rally? I meant, the chance collection of a slightly larger than usual number of tourists passing between the monuments that day, according to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who Beck has lots of fun goofing on, here:

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Meanwhile, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz has an interesting take on what he sees as Beck’s strategy:

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

And causing America’s Ruling Class to become utterly unhinged (well, even more so) in the process. Read the whole thing.

“Won’t Al Gore please stop it with his extremist, eliminationist rhetoric before he inspires still more violence,” Glenn Reynolds insta-quips in response to the incident at the Discovery Channel offices today:

ECO-TERRORISM? Gunman who took hostages at Discovery Channel inspired by Al Gore. “Lee appears to have posted environmental and population-control demands online, saying humans are ruining the planet and that Discovery should develop programs to sound the alarm. . . . Lee said he experienced an ‘awakening’ when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”

Won’t Al Gore please stop it with his extremist, eliminationist rhetoric before he inspires still more violence?

UPDATE: Reader Lois Brenner sends this:

A manifesto posted on a Web site registered to a person named James Lee, who gave a post office box in Canada as his address, lists several demands to the Discovery Channel, saying the station “MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet.” It lists 11 demands about airing shows that would promote curbing the plant’s population growth, finding solutions for global warming and dismantling “the dangerous US world economy.” . ..

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions,” it reads. “In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.”

The manifesto was published on http://SavethePlanetProtest.com. Law enforcement sources said they believe the site was operated by the same person who is inside the building. Lee has lived in Hawaii, California and the D.C. area.

“Parasitic human infants” — well, that’s the logical conclusion of the “deep ecology” view. Eliminationist rhetoric indeed. Brenner also comments: “If this is more zeitgeist tie-in publicity, Franzen has a genius working for him. By the way, the book stinks.” Oh, well.

Here’s a reprint of a post from a couple of days ago linking to a couple of recent items for and against such apocalyptic rhetoric. First up, on the negative side, Fred Siegel spots the moment when self-styled “Progressivism” turned on itself, in a must-read piece in City Journal titled, “Progressives Against Progress — The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism.” As Siegel writes, “In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim:”

If one were to pick a point at which liberalism’s extraordinary reversal began, it might be the celebration of the first Earth Day, in April 1970. Some 20 million Americans at 2,000 college campuses and 10,000 elementary and secondary schools took part in what was the largest nationwide demonstration ever held in the United States. The event brought together disparate conservationist, antinuclear, and back-to-the-land groups into what became the church of environmentalism, complete with warnings of hellfire and damnation. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day, invoked “responsible scientists” to warn that “accelerating rates of air pollution could become so serious by the 1980s that many people may be forced on the worst days to wear breathing helmets to survive outdoors. It has also been predicted that in 20 years man will live in domed cities.”

Thanks in part to Earth Day’s minions, progress, as liberals had once understood the term, started to be reviled as reactionary. In its place, Nature was totemized as the basis of the authenticity that technology and affluence had bleached out of existence. It was only by rolling in the mud of primitive practices that modern man could remove the stain of sinful science and materialism. In the words of Joni Mitchell’s celebrated song “Woodstock”: “We are stardust / We are golden / And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

In his 1973 book The Death of Progress, Bernard James laid out an argument already popularized in such bestsellers as Charles Reich’s The Greening of America and William Irwin Thompson’s At the Edge of History. “Progress seems to have become a lethal idée fixe, irreversibly destroying the very planet it depends upon to survive,” wrote James. Like Reich, James criticized both the “George Babbitt” and “John Dewey” versions of “progress culture”—that is, visions of progress based on rising material attainment or on educational opportunities and upward mobility. “Progress ideology,” he insisted, “whether preached by New Deal Liberals, conservative Western industrialists or Soviet Zealots,” always led in the same direction: environmental apocalypse. Liberalism, which had once viewed men and women as capable of shaping their own destinies, now saw humanity in the grip of vast ecological forces that could be tamed only by extreme measures to reverse the damages that industrial capitalism had inflicted on Mother Earth. It had become progressive to reject progress.

Rejected as well was the science that led to progress. In 1970, the Franco-American environmentalist René Dubos described what was quickly becoming a liberal consensus: “Most would agree that science and technology are responsible for some of our worst nightmares and have made our societies so complex as to be almost unmanageable.” The same distrust of science was one reason that British author Francis Wheen can describe the 1970s as “the golden age of paranoia.” Where American consumers had once felt confidence in food and drug laws that protected them from dirt and germs, a series of food scares involving additives made many view science, not nature, as the real threat to public health. Similarly, the sensational impact of the feminist book Our Bodies, Ourselves—which depicted doctors as a danger to women’s well-being, while arguing, without qualifications, for natural childbirth—obscured the extraordinary safety gains that had made death during childbirth a rarity in developed nations.

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Hey, nobody said it would be easy to put the toothpaste back into the tube, while still wanting to own your private plane, live in a lavish mansion, and sell multiple director’s cut edition DVDs.

Which brings up this item on director James Cameron, last seen decrying Hollywood production of DVDs — while having three different Avatar discs to promote. Apparently Cameron was attempting to make an offer that those wishing to be debate him on global warming/cooling/climate change would refuse — and punted when they didn’t. Click over to John Nolte’s post at Big Hollywood for the run-down on what happened, which ended with a meltdown from Cameron, and a modest proposal from Andrew Breitbart:

The incontrovertible evidence of Cameron’s bad faith – the proof that his only goal was to get a conservative on the line in the hopes of being increasingly unreasonable until they backed out so he could hold up their scalp in victory, is in this email from Greene to everyone on our team dated August 20th:

What do you two think of an intelligent “Roundtable” where all 6 sit around with a glass of wine or coffee and have a serious conversation in order to try to find some common , ground. Instead of spinning around and around in an adversarial way with both parties claiming “victory”, what about honoring all the participants as “Thought Leaders”, fully listening to their perspectives and showing the American people that both Andrew Breitbart and James Cameron, in their own way and from an authentic perspective, really care about their country. It would even allow Marc Merano [sic] to be more understood and to be considered as such.

How nice. A bottle of wine, a good conversation, a little common ground, and the honoring of all as “Thought Leaders” who “really care about their country.”

Doesn’t that sound pleasant?

Well, the very next day Greene unceremoniously pulled the rug out from under that pretty picture, stating Cameron would only debate Glenn Beck or Senator James Inhofe.

One day after that, before an adoring crowd of Aspen sycophants, here’s how both Greene and Cameron referred to climate change skeptics, the same skeptics they once wanted to find common ground with over a bottle of wine:

Cameron: “I think they’re swine.”
Greene: “Effing demagogues.”

Here’s Breitbart’s response:

“I challenge James Cameron to lead the charge with Big Hollywood to stop eco-unfriendly Hollywood film and television production. We’ll call our initiative: “Lights Off, Camera Off, Action Now!” We can start with an immediate moratorium on wasteful and redundant sequels. Then we’ll create a government bureaucracy to decide what can and cannot be made, with a heavy entertainment surtax for the producers to incur. Our delicate and depleting ecosystem cannot handle more energy-sucking television and film production, especially the size and scope of the average James Cameron production. And anyone that disagrees with me is swine and an effin’ demagogue.”

Banning eco-unfriendly Hollywood film and television production? Say, that idea rings a bell…

Here’s what I proposed in 2007:

Wouldn’t banning movie production be a way to save resources? Films involve miles of celluloid, a petroleum-based resource. Plus the fuel involved in transporting the celebrities, crew, and equipment. They involve thousands of watts of electricity for their lighting. Imagine what the lights themselves are doing to the ozone. Then more reels of celluloid when the finished product is shipped to theaters. What about the chemicals involved in processing the film? Then all of the DVDs, which are made of plastic.Then there are the forests cut down to produce magazines to promote them, such as Vanity Fair. And what about the obesity issues caused by theater concession stands? Is the popcorn grown organically? Is the CO2 in the Coke machines harming the atmosphere?

I call on Leonardo DiCaprio to put his money where his mouth is. He’s made enough. It’s time to (a) quit the film industry and (b) call on studio executives to voluntarily cease production of all movies and television shows.

And if they won’t do it, perhaps it’s time for Sacramento to swing into action.

Leo? James? What say you? As Cameron recently told the Washington Post, DVDs and by inference the digitized films they hold are just “a consumer product like any consumer product,” after all.

Related: Speaking of Eliminationist Doomsday rhetoric emanating from Hollywood, Hollywood actor John Cusack Calls for “Satanic Death” of prominent cable TV channel and associated politicians.

But he’s merely ragging on Fox News and the GOP, so he’s granted the left’s patented “botched joke” get out of jail free card.