Slightly sanitized below, but pithy nonetheless:

For many, many years I wrote cover lines, ad copy, captions, pet copy, and many other assorted items for Penthouse Magazine. From this experience (which is seared, seared!, into my memory), I think I am more qualified than 99.99% of all the human beings that have ever lived to know pure, prime, steaming hot bulls*** when I see it, and this sign delivers. As a former bulls*** artist second to none, I know power bulls*** when I see it, and I have to say this placard contains enough high-velocity bulls*** to drop a charging rhino at fifty yards.

Read the whole thing.

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.)

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

Ghost of a Flea's take on academia up in the 49th parallel (to namecheck a superb movie about a much more humanitarian Canada long since gone), sounds remarkably ominous itself:

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office - all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications - where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a "human rights" commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their "private" lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a "private" life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

Can't say I blame him--though I imagine life in America's elite universities probably isn't much different. Like the man said: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

(H/T: SDA)

Jacob Sullum writes that "There are two kinds of people in the world":

The kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

Add the zero-intelligence tolerance insanity of the crotch inspector to school junk food patrols and the asthma Nazi, which the late Cathy Seipp reported on back in 2002.

In the Grauniad, Oliver Stone asks, "How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

I don't know--how does anyone recover from a substance abuse problem and successfully rebuild his career in a brutally competitive industry?

STONE: I think drugs are very much a part of my generation's experience. We were not only the Cold War generation, we were the drug generation, And marijuana, with its origins in the Sixties, was good. It was a force for good. As was acid. It transformed consciousness. And in Vietnam, it certainly kept us sane.

PLAYBOY: What was your drug use like?

STONE: After the war, I took it to excess. I was using as much LSD as anybody. Even slipped it into my dad's drink once. What I did turned bad in the sense that it got heavier. My usage became heavier, but not for a purpose. It became an indulgence.

PLAYBOY: How much and what were you using?

STONE: Well, I started more acid, and grass, I suppose, in the beginning. And then I touched on some other things here and there.

PLAYBOY: Heroin? Cocaine?

STONE: Cocaine, certainly. But that was in the late Seventies. Cocaine is what took me to the edge. I finally realized that coke had beaten me and I hadn't beaten it. So in 1981, 1 went cold turkey on everything. Except an occasional drink here or there, or an occasional, you know, thing, but basically cold turkey. I moved to Paris that year and wrote Scarface, which was a farewell to cocaine.

PLAYBOY: Scarface became a cult hit. Had you quit using cocaine before or after you wrote it? .

STONE: I wrote it totally straight. But I researched it stoned, because I had to research it in South America, in various spots where I had to do it in order to talk with these people.

PLAYBOY: Before you quit, how deeply were you into it?

STONE: I would say it was an everyday thing. Hollywood in the late Seventies was-there was a kind of cocaine craze. And it lasted until later in the Eighties.

But assuming that Stone's movie hits theaters before November, it might serve as a key teachable moment for the left. It could reinforce the lesson they've been so gently trying to teach voters these past eight years, so that they won't elect another president this fall who both didn't serve in Vietnam, and who has admitted a youthful dalliance with not just alcohol, but other controlled substances as well, as ABC's Jake Tapper wrote last year:

In his 1996 memoir, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," Obama wrote candidly about his high school-era drug use: "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though."

And note that Obama may still continue to ingest what most on the left consider the most dangerous, evil, vile drug on the planet, as Tapper noted yesterday.

(HT: LGF)

Update: Related thoughts from BeldarBlog:

Recklessness is a quality that Americans voters should and do try to weed out of their presidential candidates, if you'll excuse that pun.

Even in the nanny-state America that your party is trying to move us toward, Senator, in which cigarette smoking will eventually become a criminal offense — anywhere and everywhere, even by consenting and well-informed adults who are heavily taxed for the privilege — the Nixon Rule will still prevail: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that brings down most politicians.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who quips, "Call it coffin-nailgate."

Heh, indeed.^TM

Geez, haven't any of these people ever been in a Hooters before?

(Via Breitbart.com)

UPI reports, "More die because helmet laws repealed":

U.S. motorcyclist fatality rates have increased in states that repealed their universal helmet laws in the past decade, researchers said.

The nanny state doesn't understand that freedom is also the freedom to potentially stupid things. Or as P.J. O'Rourke once said, "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

Indeed we could, but this latest round of "pushers" aren't exactly the best material to write the backstory for Superfly: The Next Generation. Up on the Drudge Report is this headline:

School candy ban spurs underground 'sugar pushers'...

Who, other than the nanny staters, didn't see this one coming from a mile away?

The great Victor Davis Hanson wonders why none of the candidates will get serious about discussing America's energy needs:

In terms of energy, we continue to delay coal plants despite our vast reserves, we dither on nuclear power, we won’t drill off the California coast or in tiny parcels in a vast Alaska, while we talk grandly of wind and solar and hydrogen and all the other solutions that are decades away from contributing in major ways to our energy needs—while our enemies in the Middle East are building trillion dollar reserves that will find their way into the hands of those who want to kill us. Do we think Nigeria or Russia is easier on the environment than we are when drilling oil, or that the Chinese have cleaner coal plants? If we really live on planet Earth, then isn’t it incumbent on us to exploit our own resources safely to ensure others less careful do less damage to our shared globe?

Can’t we find a single Presidential candidate who says: ‘Hang on. We are going to get serious. We our going to build coal, nuclear, more hydro-electric plants. We want as many Americans as possible to buy a second electric plug-in car for urban driving; we want more efficient gas and diesel engines; we are going to cut spending, radically so, to balance the budget, pay down the debt, pay off our foreign debt, and raise the value of our currency. Tighten your belts: federal spending is frozen for five years; we are going to raise the Social Security retirement age and reform the system. The borders are going to close, and citizenship is going to mean something again.’

Should McCain say that, it would trump ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and the 1960s tired old agenda, adopted by both parties, that got us in the mess we’re in.

What's really fascinating is that even a sclerotic leftwing organization such as this one is willing to engage in a more sensible conversation about America's energy needs than any of the remaining candidates on either side of the aisle.

As I noted three years ago:

Joanne Jacobs writes that all too frequently these days, pushers supplying contraband are roaming the halls of American schools--who have only themselves to blame.

The contraband in question back then? Candy, which is increasingly verboten on school property. And a bag of illicit Skittles has derailed (temporarily one hopes) an eighth-grade honors student in Connecticut.

Fascinating that boomers did all sorts of really illicit substances in the 1960s, and endlessly shouted "question authority." But now, as they approach their dotage and are the authority, they get the vapors from trivialities as silly as a bag of candy in school.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Update: "School clears kids in contraband candy caper", AP reports. And the student learns a valuable lesson regarding how juvenile the alleged leftwing grown-ups running his school are.

Johnny Carson was once quoted as saying, "New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most of it unsolved."

Not the least of which is how this staggeringly idiotic anti-Big Apple screed came to be published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

A couple of years ago, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

And no one conflates the two like the Ultimate Nanny Stater, Nurse Bloomberg.

"A U.S. study suggests marketing plays a role in how often parents buy fast food for their children."

I need a study to tell me this?

As David Frum, our guest this week on PJM Political wrote in How We Got Here, the 1970s was an era loaded with bad ideas (not to mention even worse aesthetics). One of the few bad ideas that America dodged was converting to the metric system--but that's not the case in EU-ifed England. Debbie Schlussel warns, "Beware the metric jihadis. Consider me a fellow member of Al Anti-Metricaeda."

As part of his series with Reason's TV division, Drew Carey notes that the Nanny State has no rhythm:

The anti-smoking brigade's work is now complete.

(Forewarned is forewaxed: Accompanying photo not for the faint of heart.)

"Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says":

"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

I need a "health economist" to tell me this? Fifty years ago, in those less enlightened times, less obssessed with counterknowledge, this was called "common sense."

Do not taunt happy fun trial lawyers; heed the important safety warnings that Laurie Kendrick has assembled.

"Please do not bring any alcoholic beverages into the newsroom. Let’s go out like the professionals we have been these last, difficult weeks."

Ben Hecht, Lou Grant and Ben Bradlee would simultaneously weep upon reading that, except they were real men (Well, OK, Grant was fictional, but you can't have everything, as they say in Cairo) who didn't do that kind of stuff.

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale":

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?

For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.

Well, yeah.

George Jonas writes "The newsweekly Maclean's and the brilliant Steyn are the best and biggest to find themselves in the jaws of [Canada's] Human Rights Dragon, not the first":

In the summer of 1977, shortly after it came into being, Manitoba's Human Rights Commission took it upon itself to caution Maclean's for Barbara Amiel having used the word "Hun" with reference to Germans in an article about the war-years. The Commission felt it had a mandate to express a government-sanctioned disapproval over a journalist's choice of words. The post-liberal state's action against Maclean's and Steyn comes on the 30th anniversary of the post-liberal state's warning against Maclean's and Amiel. This doesn't show a liberal agenda hijacked or kidnapped; it shows an illiberal agenda that was there right from the beginning.

Someone should write a book about this topic.

Megan McCardle looks back at America's wild and carefree recent history:

The wild, drunken office Christmas party used to be a staple of television, books, and movies. Now I feel as if it's dropped pretty thoroughly out of the popular imagination; the only example I can think of recently is a fleeting scene in Bridget Jones' Diary. Were office holiday parties really that much wilder in the past? Or have we just stopped noticing, literarily?

Something tells me that David Harsanyi can answer Megan McCardle's question.

(By the way, note the reference to AMC's Mad Men series in the comments.)

Return with us now to the era of Woodrow Wilson, Carrie Nation and Margaret Sanger, as "Progressive" New Puritans continue their sweep through government, devouring your freedoms.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and the author of Nanny State writes that it's the return of the most obvious form of puritanism--prohibition:

Drinking is under attack these days in ways we haven't seen since the failed experiment with national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, for many neoprohibitionists, that experiment wasn't a failure at all, since it did cut alcohol consumption, which is all that matters. We can see that mentality today in policies that go beyond preventing drunk driving or punishing drunk drivers and aim to discourage drinking per se.

But food is also under attack; in San Francisco, where the progressive dream can be seen in the US in its full glory: out-of-control vagrants harrass an otherwise shrinking but ever-so-environmentally correct population, fireplaces could soon be banned. (And they may already be banished in some Bay Area suburbs.)

And then of course, there's the story making the rounds on the starboard side of the Blogosphere and cable TV this week:

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”…

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

Where it all ends only knows Gaia, but here are three examples of taking environmental absurdity to its most absurd destinations.

This New York Times article on the upcoming DVD version of the first season of Sesame Street is on the one hand a hoot, and on the other rather depressing in terms of how badly the nanny state has made inroads into American society since 1969. Back then, it merely wanted to educate your kids about reading, writing and 'rithmetic (in the form of taxpayer-funded shows like Sesame Street). These days it wants to go much, much further than that:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

Yet another great moment in surveys--not to mention headlines: "Bars, nightclubs linked to more drinking".

"You can have my Ho Hos when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!" is the rallying cry that seems to emerge from Andy Kessler's recent Tech Central Station piece. Which isn't the first time the Cali Cupcake Cops have reared their ugly new puritan heads--recall this post by Virginia Postrel from a few years ago on a very similar theme.

Related: Gee, that only took about 15 years! NBC has only just now figured out that maybe, just maybe, there's a nanny state.

More: Meanwhile, Iowans--particularly right around this time each year--fear the dreaded Pumpkin Police!

Frank Martin explains why Harry Reid's poll numbers in Nevada are so low, even the crack forensic scientists of CSI: Las Vegas couldn't find them.

Truth be told, I don't think that Reid actually believes any of this stuff, but when you're a spokesman for an ideology that's headed far, far to the left in recent years, you've got to toe the party line.

Why yes, this is a textbook case of "Not loving thy neighbor."

As Allah writes, "Look on the bright side: after Arafat, Carter, and Iranian marionette Mohammed ElBaradei, the award couldn’t possibly be more degraded."

Steve Hayward has some additional thoughts on Al Gore's Nobel prize, and a bold prediction: "In 20 years Gore or his climate alarmist successors will be lucky to appear on cable access TV, and Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment". If that sounds harsh, simply compare Gore with Paul Ehrlich, the most prominent Malthusian of the 1970s, when modern eco-hysteria began:

It’s never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem.

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the “population bomb” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and there were government commissions launched here and abroad to ponder whether we needed an aggressive anti-natalist policy. The effort to develop a population policy in the U.S. collapsed quickly and quietly when someone pointed out that any anti-natalist policy would disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Oops.

Population pressures were and remain a genuine environmental concern, but it gradually became clear that Ehrlich and other alarmists had way overestimated the problem, and it looks very different today. (Indeed, the great social problem of the end of this century may be population that is falling too rapidly.) And while Ehrlich is still peddling the same Malthusian gloom, he never turns up on the Tonight Show any more; in fact, he doesn’t even make it on Hardball or Countdown with Krazy Keith.

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998?

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Reynolds writes that "in some quarters, patriotism is the highest form of dissent. Er, or it would be..."

(Somebody should put that on a bumper sticker!)

Back in 2004, Jonah Goldberg looked at the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic and wrote, "The Atlantic is still a great magazine, but it seems to be inching urther and further into official Liberal Magazine Land."

That destination is concluded, with an article that begins:

If the American idea was to subdue Native Americans and place them at the disposal of European settlers, to import several million Africans to the New World and subject them to a lifetime of slavery, to impose on Asian immigrants a lifetime of discrimination, then perhaps the American idea was not so admirable.

And thus, the post-JFK strain of punitive liberalism rears its ugly head again. Or as Ace of Spades quipped a while back, "Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism."

Thus winning the eternal support of Katie Couric, her fellow newscasters, Hollywood, and other compassionate head-tilters, "Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin", AP and Drudge breathlessly report.

In contrast though, John Stephenson isn't losing much sleep over this transnational tempest in a press release.

Update: More from Pajamas HQ, Hot Air, and Michelle Malkin.

Thank you for smoking, Matt Lewis writes:

I didn't watch the Dem debate last night. But, as Marc Ambinder reports, every candidate except Hillary and Obama said they would favor a national ban on smoking ...

But what about the growing Hookah Parlor Gap?

"Manolo says, Ayyyy! The Irony! One minute, you are looking like Hooters Girls, and the next you are escorting them off the plane for indecency."

Don Draper wouldn't recognize today's world.

Update: Now it makes more sense. But we'll do our best to follow-up with a response from Catherine Tramell ASAP.

The BBC--and who could harbor a negative thought concerning such a well researched, unbiased news agency?--reports: Guinness may indeed be good for you.

To understand how far to the puritanical left America has traveled since the Manhattan of 1960 depicted in AMC's Mad Man, it's worth revisiting this quote by David Frum:

They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men gird­ing themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some im­pressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office with­out fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.

Compare that quote with the videos that AMC has uploaded to promote Mad Men--there's something like a half-dozen different clips on the dangers of smoking, not counting the endless hectoring of the show's premiere episode itself. Did Basic Instinct have warnings on the health hazards of unprotected sex? Superfly or Scarface on the dangers of illegal narcotics? A Christmas Story on firearm safety? (OK, I guess the constant warnings of "You'll shoot your eye out, Ralphie!" count.)

And as Tim Blair notes, the bar has certainly been lowered in terms of scandal. Whereas Brian Jones and later Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had to consume kilos of illicit drugs in the 1960s and '70s for the police to bother with them, all it takes now is for Keith to light up a Marlboro 100 onstage, and it's truly Exile On Main Street time.

Does it get any better than this for Michael Bloomberg? He just experienced the ultimate moment of nanny state auto-erotic nirvana, as he bans himself: "Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States."

Bloomberg gave his scoop to a struggling cub reporter named D. Rather, at an little-seen TV network called HDNet. Considering where he made his fortune, I think it's great to see that Bloomberg is still supporting new and alternative media!

Update: More good news! With Bloomberg out, "Accordingly, We Expect Much Less Discussion of Trans-Fats on the Campaign Trail". But it's not exactly like the Nanny State solely resides in him, of course.

Dean Barnett asks, "What other industry goes to such lengths to make the vast majority of its customers know they’re second class citizens?"

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden notes that the paradoxically pacifistic Party of Rage can really get their freak on when they're treated like second class citizens:

Rep. Bob Filner is facing an assault and battery charge after an incident at Dulles Airport where he allegedly pushed an United Airlines bag claim employee as first reported by ABC7/Newschannel 8.

… Filner, a Democrat from California, allegedly attempted to enter an employees-only area on Sunday night.

Van Cleave spoke with several witnesses who said they heard Filner yell “You can’t stop me,” before pushing aside the employee and refusing to leave the office.

Filner disputed the account in a statement issued by his office.

“Congressman Bob Filner is on his way to Iraq, visiting our troops, and will have a full statement when he returns. Suffice it to say now, that the story that has appeared in the press is factually incorrect - and the charges are ridiculous,” the statement said.

Jules dubs it "pre-traumatic stress syndrome", or rage induced by encounters with someone not up speed with their DYKWIA--"Do You Know Who I Am". Or perhaps its guilt-induced paranoia caused by a fear of committing the left's newest, and yet most heretical sin.

In any case, thanks to the media, we may not know which party they are, when they emphasize their disapproval in such physical outbursts. Curiously, this rarely warrants the same response from these ordinarily ultra-sensitive souls.

Update: "It’s easy to see why he’s so anti-gun. He thinks we all have as little self-control as he does."

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote back in June:

When I was growing in rural California in the 1950s and 1960s, my FDR parents winced at the nut right-wing fringe. This was, remember, the era of bulk mailings on pink paper, crazy “Did you know?” unsolicited newsletters detailing the names of local and national communists, usually sent from strange addresses in the Sierra Nevada foothills. At seven and eight, we used to pick them up from the garbage and ask our parents, “Hey, Mom, are Lucy and Ricky really communists?”

My cattleman uncle Tango used to stop by with John Birch literature, warning us about the impending fluoride conspiracy to make us all impotent.

Needless to say, things have come full circle since: "It's a hugely beneficial liquid in a slim cylinder of plastic, but for US environmentalists, it is the new public enemy number one: bottled water."

NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog links to Frederick Hess's article on the limits of what is commonly described in today's shorthand as "tolerance":

Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up."

The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, "no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful."

If history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, here's the San Francisco counterpoint to the above east coast incident, which Cinnamon Stillwell recently linked to:

Many Jewish customers have refused to enter Rainbow Grocery — the hippie-dippy worker-owned cooperative that preaches an "inclusive environment that is welcoming to everyone" — ever since two departments de-shelved Israeli products in an apparent anti-Israel boycott in 2002. (Store employee Naomi Jelks says it was done without store authorization, and the boycott was later shot down by an employee vote.)

Now the Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint by ex-customer David Nahmod, who says he was called a "stupid Jew" more than a year ago by a cashier who employees say identifies as Palestinian. Nahmod, a 51-year-old freelance writer and dog-sitter, says he motioned to the woman's "Free Palestine" T-shirt and asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if they could all live in peace?" He alleges that she responded with the epithet and that suicide bombers should kill as many Jews as possible.

I worked in a retail store a couple of decades ago. Back then, the typical response to "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up", would have come from the store's manager and had the words "you're fired, schmuck" somewhere in the sentence.

Of course, the above incidents could have easily have escalated into something even more insane: at least no latex balloons were involved in either transaction!

(H/T: GR)

In the late 1960s, before his movie career launched, Woody Allen made several television specials, including one in which he interviewed Billy Graham. Late last year, when Ann Althouse linked to the YouTube clips of this somewhat surreal moment, "Dirty Harry" of the conservative Libertas film blog wrote:

With all the acrimony and right against left and poisonous debate going on during this election season, I thought I’d pass on this very charming clip of Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham. They’re both very funny and obviously enjoying each other’s company though they agree on little. (Letterman could learn something from this.)

Such moments in which prominent members of the "Two America" publicly debate in a colligate spirit seem to occur much less often these days; Bob Tyrrell blames it all partially, and I believe somewhat tongue-in-cheek, on William F. Buckley:

What claims the attention of major media today is a phenomenon called Kultursmog. It is the popular culture of the United States, polluted utterly by a weird politics, a politics that is often called liberal but is actually simply leftish and adolescent. It has no fixed values or ideas other than to disturb the peace, which the legally attuned will recognize as a misdemeanor in most jurisdictions of the civilized world. Kultursmog is a culture that mixes rock stars in with fashion models and the ideas of Al Gore. Occasionally the smog actually includes the Hon. Gore, along with those other "rock star" personalities, the Clintons. The Kultursmog is always politically correct, ever sensitive to the whims of the Democratic National Committee, and increasingly anti-intellectual.

What makes it anti-intellectual is that the ideas behind public policy today are almost completely derived from Buckley, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, and other less well-known conservatives and neoconservatives. In fact I think I can argue successfully, if ironically, that Buckley is personally responsible for the anti-intellectualism that has spread throughout major media over the past 25 years. There once was a time when the late night television shows, the morning chat shows, and the personality sections of print journalism would occasionally feature the likes of Buckley and his most frequent liberal opponents, John Kenneth Galbraith and Gore Vidal. The time is long past. Buckley finished off his opponents years ago, and no young egghead was up to taking on his wit or erudition.

In any case, it's hard to argue that the gatekeepers of the overculture are infinitely more hostile to conservatives than they were a few decades ago.

Case in point: Mark Finkelstein notices that "Time Puts Horns on the Reverend Billy Graham:"

Just when you thought the MSM couldn't sink any lower . . .

Could there possibly be an American who doesn't admire the Reverend Billy Graham? Apparently, yes. Have a look at the cover of this week's 'Time.' Of all the ways the editors might have positioned the logo, they managed to do so in a manner in which the 'M' in 'TIME' is transformed into horns protruding from the good reverend's head.

Tucker Carlson and Willie Geist took up the matter on Tucker's MSNBC show this afternoon.

MSNBC'S WILLIE GEIST: A guy who has advised presidents, the Reverend Billy Graham on the cover of Time Magazine this week. I know the media is secular, but do they have to rub it in? A nice picture there of the reverend praying, but look at the horns above his head. A not-so-subtle message that maybe he's, well, Satan incarnate.

MSNBC HOST TUCKER CARLSON: That is actually . . .. Have people complained about that? Because that's unbelievable.

GEIST: Yeah, there's some chatter on the internet right now, and there's sure to be more.

Glad to oblige.

Is the juxtaposition purely a strange coincidence? Maybe, but then so was this, which received gallons of ink in 2000. And note how often these strange coincidences seem to occur in the MSM, and whom they frequently involve.

Related: If you can't use 'em, bruise 'em.