"Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is... because... the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!... That's a Hoosierism. You've got to get used to that!"

Are you getting used to Hoosierisms?

But that's not the Hoosier Pete Buttigieg. The elision after "because" was "in 1988." The quote is from Dan Quayle speaking to the California delegates at the Republican National Convention in 1988.

That just happens to be the top quote on the Dan Quayle page at Wikiquote where I went looking for another quote.

I also found this really Trumpesque line: "This is what I say about the scorn of the media elite: I wear their scorn as a badge of honor."

And here's one where it really seems that he's talking about Trump: "People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history."

Quayle really was a man who looked into the future: "In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get the future"/"The future will be better tomorrow"/"I believe that I've made good judgments in the past, and I think I've made good judgments in the future." So why not credit him with predicting the Trump presidency?

The quote I was actually looking for was his awkward riff on "A mind is a terrible thing to waste":

What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.

I was thinking of that and how true it is, when I saw the headline "The Great Liberal Freakout Has Begun/Biden is fading fast, and Democrats are losing their minds." That's by Robert Stacy McCain in American Spectator. Excerpt:

In a panel discussion following Friday night’s debate in New Hampshire, [Chris] Matthews went on a rant against socialism, recalling his Cold War–era visits to Vietnam and Cuba: “Being there, I’ve seen what socialism is like. I don’t like it, OK? It’s not only not free, it doesn’t freaking work. It just doesn’t work.” As his fellow MSNBC panelists looked aghast, Matthews continued, saying that if “the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed, and certain other people would be there cheering, OK?”

I'm reading "Tucker Carlson unapologetic over ‘misogynistic’ comments on statutory rape, insults against women."

In WaPo.

Carlson was widely criticized on Sunday following a report from the nonprofit Media Matters for America that compiled and transcribed more than a dozen instances of the host appearing on the “Bubba the Love Sponge Show,” a popular radio program broadcast from Tampa [recorded between 2006 and 2011]...

On at least two separate occasions, Carlson voiced opinions on underage marriage and Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is currently serving a life sentence for child rape.... “Now this guy may be . . ., may be a child rapist,” Carlson said. “I’m just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her.”

Three years later in another segment on the radio show, Carlson clarified that he was not defending underage marriage but added, “I just don’t think it’s the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.... The rapist, in this case, has made a lifelong commitment to live and take care of the person, so it is a little different,” he said... ... Carlson continued to argue on behalf of Jeffs, saying he was in prison “because he’s weird and unpopular and he has a different lifestyle that other people find creepy.... He’s like got some weird religious cult where he thinks it’s okay to, you know, marry underaged girls, but he didn’t do it. Why wouldn’t the guy who actually did it, who had sex with an underaged girl, he should be the one who’s doing life.”...

In other segments, Carlson called for the elimination of rape shield laws.... “So if I’m alleging rape, I have the protection of anonymity. I can say whatever I want while hiding behind anonymity, while the person I accused, whether he’s guilty or not, has his life destroyed. That’s totally unfair.”

Then, in an October 2009 show, Bubba the Love Sponge launched into what appeared to be a hypothetical description of the young girls at the boarding school attended by Carlson’s daughter experimenting with each other sexually. “I ain’t got my mom and dad here telling me that they love me and tuck me in bed,” the radio host said. “So, here’s Trixie, she wants to explore my body a little bit, so hey, let’s go crazy.”

Carlson responded: “If it weren’t my daughter, I would love that scenario.”

[On another occasion he] said, “I love women, but they’re extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.” In another appearance, he implied that women like being instructed by men to “just be quiet and kind of do what you’re told.”...

In May 2010, Carlson said he felt sorry for [Elena] Kagan, then a Supreme Court nominee, who was “never going to be an attractive woman.”

“I feel sorry for unattractive women,” he said, adding that the “problems” with Kagan’s physical appearance were “fundamental.”

He called [Arianna] Huffington “a pig” and used the c-word when discussing [TV personality Alexis] Stewart, noting that he wanted to “give her the spanking she so desperately needs."...

It's useful to know that he said these things, providing material for that Howard-Stern-type radio show. And it's useful to people who would like to get him off the air to get all excited about these things now. I'm resistant to getting excited about something somebody said years ago because somebody is telling me that's what everyone is supposed to get excited about today.

What's the real news? What is actually happening now? The news seems to have turned into the news of what old thing has been served up as news.

And what about the gratuitous collateral damage to Elena Kagan? These get-Carlson people have decided to make her looks today's topic of conversation. That's pretty rude. It was also rude for Carlson to have said what he did 9 years ago, but that rudeness had been forgotten, if it was ever noticed.

ADDED: Robert Stacy McCain writes: "Tucker Carlson must have read Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie, because he is following Vox’s advice to those under SJW attack: Do not apologize!"

Robert Stacy McCain reads Jessica Valenti's memoir "Sex Object."

Excerpt:

Dear God, what awful choices she has made in her life! Her personality was warped by insecurity, a problem made worse by the way her parents burdened her with their own ambitions and, of course, there was New York City itself.... The working-class neighborhood where Jessica Valenti grew up was frequented by hookers and their customers, and when she traveled to school via the subway, she encountered the notorious “flashers” and “mashers” (exhibitionists and frotteurs) who have menaced the city’s public-transportation system for decades. Ms. Valenti doesn’t seem to understand this as a uniquely urban hazard....

Sometimes the best inclusion is done by exclusion.

I'm trying to read this column "The Day Free Speech Died at Harvard Law School":

In late 2014, during my second year at Harvard Law School, a student group called Students For Inclusion created a blog entitled Socratic Shortcomings. Its commitment, we are told, is to “[foster] productive and contextualized conversations on matters related to race, gender and class.” The site allows students—and anyone really—to post anonymously about events at Harvard Law School.

The site quickly picked up steam, as students gravitated toward a safe and faceless forum, where they could voice their displeasure. For a short while it appeared that the site might encourage open dialogue and actually inspire change.

However, soon thereafter, students began to complain about submissions vanishing into thin air. The moderators, we eventually learned, were selectively publishing submissions and denying others without further explanation. It seems that the Students For Inclusion only wished to include some students....

Isn't this a case for: Get your own damned blog?

The blog is moderated. It doesn't "allow" "anyone" to post there. You can see how it's operated. That's what it is. It's a blog that takes anonymous submissions and has a point of view or a set of points of view that it publishes. Here's the submission page as it looks right now. It "reserve[s] the right to maintain this blog" as "a safe space." There are moderators, and they have standards. They have a vision of the place and they mean to preserve their speech by excluding those who interfere with their idea of the place. That's not anti-free speech. Free speech didn't die.

It's not like Twitter kicking Robert Stacy McCain out of Twitter (which is discussed in the column) because Socratic Shortcomings is on Tumblr and nothing prevents the voices excluded from Socratic Shortcomings from setting up another Tumblr account and inviting submissions and putting them all up without moderation or moderating them to put up exactly whatever they think is excluded from Socratic Shortcomings — the shortcomings of Socratic Shortcomings. Start something like that of your own and you may gain some appreciation for the speech that is furthered by selectivity.

Subtraction is part of creation....



What you don't say is part of what you say. Speech doesn't "die" by editing. It lives. Ask the reader. And get your own damned blog.

"Men are enemies and oppressors of women, sexual intercourse is an act that 'perfectly expresses' male domination..."

"... every male is potentially a rapist, male and female roles are the 'pathology of oppression,' and sex roles must be destroyed — this is what feminists believe. If you do not believe these things, guess what? You are not a feminist."

Robert Stacy McCain makes an argument for a very strong and quite offensive definition of feminism.

This is an interesting form of argument, where you take a central term that people have infused with various meanings, adapting it to their preferences and purposes, and present evidence that the truest, most historically accurate meaning of that term refers to things that those who've been embracing it would find repellent.

One post down, we see something similar in Garry Kasparov's argument — aimed at Bernie Sanders supporters — about socialism.

I'm interested in words, and I go back, as I do so often, to my personal favorite go-to wordsmith, Bob Dylan. As soon as I wrote the sentences you see above, this verse played in my head:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now 

"Equality," that's your word, and it's suppressing a better word: "liberty." Watch out for those untrustworthy oldies who are calling you to ruin with their word "equality." You know what's really happening under the "equality" banner? Well, let me tell you.

Signed,

A state-ordained professor.

A pretty face.

If Hunter Park were an Islamic terrorist or a progressive activist, he'd be on the cover of Rolling Stone. pic.twitter.com/YeTzyYUY6X

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) November 12, 2015

ADDED: Remember Jeremy Meeks? There will be none of that sort of love for Hunter Park, whose face the world suddenly sees as he is arrested for (allegedly) sending the Yik Yak messages: "I'm going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see" and "Well tomorrow mizzou will really make national news. Don't go to campus tomorrow."

"Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature."

It's Robert Stacy McCain's book about feminism. I'm resistant to his extreme form of aversion to feminism, but he's plowed (wrong word??) through a lot of books I can't be troubled with. Ah, there, I used his word: trouble. Why go looking for trouble? One reason is: to write a book about trouble, sex trouble. Why buy such a book? One reason is: to blog about it. Also, it's only $1.99 in Kindle, whence I can cut and paste things here for you.

"The Weirdest Story About a Conservative Obsession, a Convicted Bomber, and Taylor Swift You Have Ever Read."

"Benghazi, Robin Williams, Islam, Twitter, and a convicted bomber from the 1970s came together in a court case against right-wing bloggers."

Thanks to David Weigel for presenting this story, which I've avoided blogging because of its complexity and moral ambiguity. Where do you start? I've only copied the Daily Beast's headline and subheadline here, and it's an odd list of things. Robin Williams and Taylor Swift aren't actually important, but passing references. "Islam" is much more generic than "Everyone Draw Mohammad Day" (which I always said was a bad idea, but, of course: free speech). And the word "pedophilia" doesn't even appear on the list, but it's at the core of this defamation case.

Excerpt:

When he called McCain to the stand, Kimberlin handed McCain a print-out of a 2009 blog post about how to get traffic, and asked him to read tip number four: “Make some enemies.” Kimberlin, having made his point—this guy was starting a fight to make money—tried to take back the document. McCain snatched it and kept reading.

“At the same time, however, don’t confuse cyber-venom with real-world hate,” said McCain, giving a drawled, dramatic reading of one of his favorite posts. “Maybe Ace of Spades really would like to go upside Andrew Sullivan’s head with a baseball bat, I don’t know. But at some point you understand it’s just blogging about politics, and you start wondering if maybe it shares a certain spectator-friendly quality with pro wrestling. For all we know, Ace is spending weekends at Sully’s beach shack in Provincetown.”

McCain plunked the document back on the witness stand. “A sense of humor is not a crime in this country,” he said.

The right-wing bloggers win in the end, and when they win, they look like this.

"The Left must constantly re-write its own history to create the appearance of consistency in its advocacy of progress..."

"... but the Left’s definition of progress is itself constantly changing, and feminism’s embrace of pornography — celebrating objectification as 'empowerment' — is but one example of this re-definition project."

***

Here's a book that was published in 1990: "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism."



I have that on a shelf in my office, along with many similar tomes of the time.

About that 38-year-old woman extracting egg-freezing money as her husband disentangles himself from the marriage that didn't get her pregnant.

Robert Stacy McCain took issue with my use of the phrase "best fertility years":

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

I responded:

So, I should have said her last good fertility years. When a woman marries at age 30, she's right if she thinks she's comfortably on track for childbearing. But if she turns out to have difficulty getting pregnant, as this woman did, what seemed like plenty of time can turn into an anxious struggle. I don't know what led to this particular divorce, but needing fertility treatments and enduring them without success must create pressure that some people don't handle very well. There's something very sad about a woman's desire to continue her struggle by extracting support from the husband who failed to make her pregnant. I recommend handling divorce with grace and realism, but a lot of economic advantage-taking can ensue, and you rarely know the whole story of who did what to whom and why a stepped-up legal attack seemed like a good idea. This is, above all, a failed relationship, and you can never see the ground level of that failure.

Another hate crime turns out to be self-generated — another "victim" threatened herself.

"The University of Wyoming Police Department issued a citation Monday afternoon in Albany County Circuit Court for Meg Lanker-Simons, a woman allegedly threatened last week in a social media post authorities now contend was a hoax.... 'Subject admitted to making a controversial post on UW Crushes webpage and then lied about not doing it,' according to the citation."

The post was made to the UW Crushes page April 24 on Facebook and described Lanker-Simons as "that chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn't care who knows it."

The post also referenced a graphic, sexual act against Lanker-Simons. "One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican (expletive)," the post read. The post created a stir on social media and at the university, with school officials issuing statements denouncing the post against Lanker-Simons and campus police opening an investigation....

"This episode has sparked an important discussion reaffirming that the UW community has no tolerance for sexual violence or violence of any type," UW spokesman Chad Baldwin said. "The fact that the Facebook post apparently was a fabrication does not change the necessity for continued vigilance in reassuring that we have a campus where everyone feels safe."

While you're continuing all the vigilance, how about a little vigilance about self-dramatizing fraud? People need better bullshit detectors! Arm the students for real life in every possible way.

I love the contradictory notions of vigilance and feeling safe, especially in the context where a fake threat supposedly made people feel unsafe, and the university spokesman wants to concentrate attention on the importance of eradicating all feelings of unsafeness without condemning the phony stirring up of such feelings.

I say let's be vigilant about everything: vigilant about the possibility that some other human beings might want to have sex with you, vigilant about the way a few of them might use inappropriate or ever violent methods to fulfill this desire, vigilant about how anyone might lie or manipulate you to get things they want, including sex but not just sex. There are people who want to control and dominate the culture, to scare and repress and make life bland and boring and conventional — in old-fashioned "traditional" terms and in relatively recent "feminist" terms. Watch out for all of this! Vigilance!

Feeling safe? You want to feel safe? You need to be vigilant about the people who manipulate you with the idea of your feelings of safety, especially when they cite this aspect of your feelings to keep you from becoming vigilant about those who are scaring you with a photoshopped picture of what's really dangerous in this world. You should want to be safe, not just feel safe. Don't have tunnel vision on one danger that other people are telling you is The Danger that you need to feel safe from. You need to do your own vigilance, not outsource it to the authorities who assure you of their caretaking prowess. Protect yourself, even from these caretakers.

Pamela Kandt, co-convener of the Episcopal Women's Caucus and a Casper activist, came to Lanker-Simons' defense Tuesday. Last week, after the controversial post went public, Kandt lobbied university officials for a "swift response to this outrage."

"I will tell you, I believe Meg is innocent of this outrage," said Kandt, adding she believes the citation issued by police is a "classic case of blaming the victim."... UW Police, Kandt said, "have bullied her and they have pulled a bluff. This is the worst episode of 'Law & Order' you can imagine... I mean, my God, who would do this to herself?"

Do your own vigilance. Anyone might be lying. The student feminist on Facebook. The police. The Episcopalians.  

My God, who would do this? I take it the Episcopalian is querying her God because she, herself, is innocent of the imagination needed to project herself into the brain of a hypothetical person who would demonize others by writing a threat that said all the things she'd need a threat to say for a threat to be useful in promoting her cause and making herself the center of attention. Will God answer the Episcopalian's question? Or is He thinking, Come on, Pamela. I gave you a brain. You're supposed to think for yourself!

(I arrived at that link via Robert Stacy McCain, via Instapundit.)

ADDED: I have some more thoughts here.

"Some people just can’t cope with failure. They lack resourcefulness and are psychologically fragile."

"Then their dreams of glory come crashing down and... 'charred human remains.'"

Robert Stacy McCain, seeing the pun in "charred human remains."

"'Candyass Blogger' Update: Free Speech Absolutists Who Banned Mr. Althouse UPDATE: 'These Are Historical Dildos.'"

I wasn't going to wade into the Loomis lunacy, but that headline caught my eye. I won't even try to summarize the post, by Robert Stacy McCain, other than to say that I read it out loud to Meade and we both laughed a lot and that it contains the phrases "Everest's testicles" and "historical dildos."

As for Loomis, I lean heavily toward academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the comprehension of metaphor, but against the hypocrisy that for purposes of this blog goes under the tag "civility bullshit" and against the appropriation of a child massacre for diversion and propaganda.

"In numerous phone interviews beginning in April, Thomas initially told The Post, in hushed tones, that Erwin was responsible for the crimes."

"He said that 'Erwin would show up' and things would happen in the middle of the night, and that 'he only comes around when I’m lonely.'"

Isn't it interesting that The Washington Post drops its long, sympathetic article about a rapist after the election is over? Rape (strangely) became a huge issue in the past campaign season, and it dramatically hurt the Republican Party to have 2 senatorial candidates that said something stupid related to rape (both inept efforts at pro-life sentiment).

And now here's this big WaPo article about a man who committed many rapes — "more than a dozen rapes by his count, although police think there were probably many more."

The man was arrested in March 2011, so it's not as if this is late-breaking material. This is an elaborately worked-out invitation into the mind of the rapist that expects us to care about his struggle to understand himself. "It’s awful. It’s scary. . . . I don’t know why I couldn’t just stop." And: "I understand I need to be punished... Now tell me what the hell is wrong with me."

ADDED: Robert Stacy McCain takes a different perspective on the article:

To me, it relates to the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention: The petty criminal — the burglar, the thief, the minor dope dealer — is potentially capable of serious crime. The defiant anti-social personality who finds himself able to get away with petty crime will tend to develop an arrogant contempt for the law, which leads to the pattern of escalating [recidivism]. Thus, more stringent enforcement of laws against relatively minor offenses will ultimately tend to reduce the number of serious offenses.

"If ESPN is going to treat Olympic athletes as sex objects..."

"... why cheat the deluxe-size ladies out of their moment of nude glory?"

"As a cultural ideal, women’s gymnastics is kind of weird."

Writes Robert Stacy McCain.

[I]’s not a sport for grown-ups. Pubescent girls can perform at levels that no mature woman can hope to match, and the petite physique type which is ideal for women’s gymnastics is ideal in no other sport....
Responsible adulthood, however, requires us to resist the mindless consumption of whatever TV is selling, and “Olympic fever” is a made-for-TV commodity whose value should be viewed skeptically.

If there is to be a competition to determine which nation has the most highly-skilled diminutive adolescent girls, it is my patriotic duty to hope that America wins the contest. But I reserve the right to observe that this is a freakishly weird thing to compete over.

I remember when this topic came up at the 1988 Olympics, and I opined about it in a letter to the NYT:

In ''Gymnastic Girls, Not Women'' (Topics, Aug. 1), you suggest there should be a separate competitive category for women in gymnastics, similar to the senior players' tour in golf. The notion that women past the 17-year-old mark resemble seniors should give us pause and make us examine some of the underlying problems in gymnastics, which reflect generally prevailing assumptions about women.

Charging with fists raised at Althouse: from the right, it's Robert Stacy McCain, from the left, it's Thers.

I'm thinking of ducking down the alleyway and letting the 2 men collide with each other. I'll find a high vantage point and watch the fracas. First one to unball his fists and put his palms up defensively loses... unless the other one, sensing a touch to the chokepoint on his neck, backs off and shrieks "You choked me."

Robert Stacy McCain should be pleased that Thers decided to attack me on the same day, because I wouldn't have rewarded his attack with a link if it wasn't funny to find myself in the "Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right" position.

McCain's post is titled "Ann Althouse: Rube." The word "rube" denotes a dumb rural character, but McCain uses it not for it's actual meaning, but because he's noticed there's a way that Glenn Reynolds uses it, and he seems to imagine that using Glenn's word will bring Glenn in on his team. Which is fine with me, because I've ducked down the alleyway, and Stacy is going to be fighting Thers, who might have "Eli" with him. I doubt if Glenn answers to the dogwhistle "rube," but I do think the fracas will be more amusing with Glenn there. (By the way, the expression "hey, rube" is traditionally "a rallying call, or a cry for help, used by carnies in a fight with outsiders." It's not a way of saying "I think you are a dummy from country.")

Anyway, Stacy's in a dither because, last Friday — predicting Obama's 2012 campaign strategy and referring to the emotionalism of the 2008 Obama campaign — I dropped a footnote to say that even though I voted for Obama, I wasn't caught up in the emotionalism. I observed it and critiqued it. I was in my high vantage point. I was sober and rational, but — confronted with the 2 major party candidates — I picked Obama. I have never apologized for that choice, because I still think McCain — John McCain — would have been worse, and the Republican Party would be in a far weaker spot right now if McCain were President. You can disagree with me, but don't portray me as another "Yes We Can" dreamer. My 2008 posts are all there in the archive. You can see how distanced I was from the Obama love cult.

But Robert Stacy McCain doesn't seem too familiar with the Althouse blog... or even the one post he purports to write about. He's bouncing off of some other blogger's post about me (in the style of Emily Mills who attacked me using material she got not from my blog but from some other blogger who purported to know what I'd written). (Stacy also nicks a photograph from my Flickr stream and uses it without complying with the Creative Commons license I was nice enough to provide.) Anyway, Stacy's point seems to be that I was wrong to vote for Obama. But my post wasn't even saying I made the correct choice, only that I chose based on sober reasoning, not emotionalism.

In any case, R.S. McCain doesn't say I should have voted for John McCain or that every rational person choosing between McCain and Obama would have picked McCain. In fact, sounding damned emotional, he says: "If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger." He calls McCain "a treacherous bastard." Okay, then, why wasn't it rational to vote for Obama? At the point of voting, either McCain or Obama was going to be President. Pick one. No, R.S. McCain voted for Bob Barr. Like that was rational!

At least McCain's commenters are critical. Donald Douglas is the first commenter, linking to his own post: "Ann Althouse a Rube? Nah, Robert Stacy McCain's Just Trolling for Traffic." He accuses McCain of liking to post my picture, and Douglas posts another picture of me. (Douglas does make that picture link back to the Flickr site, but he too fails to follow the Creative Commons license, because he doesn't include the photographer's name. Douglas chose a picture taken 30 years ago by my first husband. McCain chose a picture taken last year by my present-day husband.)

Now, let's swivel leftward and see what's going on with Thers. Thers has been attacking my blog for many years, and usually I ignore him. I don't know why he's so fixated on me. He didn't post a picture of me, so take that for what it's worth. He illustrates his post with a video clip called "Detachable Penis" from a band called King Missile, so apparently he's trying to waggle his wiener in my direction. Thers is writing to defend his confrere Eli, whom I took a shot at yesterday, because he said something stupid that everyone was attacking yesterday because it was on Memeorandum. I don't know who, exactly, detached Eli's penis, but I got my cut in, and I understand that it caused Thers sympathetic pain.

Thers quotes me saying something that exemplifies the way I speak when I'm observing the fray from a high vantage point: "People who are immersed in politics ought to take a good look at their own minds." His idea for a comeback is pretty prosaic. Do you even have to go over there and read it? You can guess: I don't follow my own advice. It's the "I know you are but what am I?" Pee-Wee Herman-type riposte that's supposed to answer a personal attack, which that quote of mine isn't. And Thers, of course, doesn't follow my advice either. He's not self-reflective. He attacks me:

All the evidence shows that Althouse has been long separated from her mind; if she originally removed it in order to give it a proper gawking, that is a perfectly laudable motive. 

A grisly image. A man who's musing about his detachable penis pictures a woman with her brain removed from her skull.

And let us be charitable! 

A reflexive line, by a man whose conscience perhaps nagged him. He knows that after the Tucson massacre, we weren't supposed to be using graphic metaphors like that. He could have edited that out, but writhing over Eli's detached penis, he had to lash out.

Perhaps there is a perfectly sound reason that as soon as her mind departed her skull it promptly escaped, never to be heard from again; and very likely all she had on hand to fill the resultant cranial void was Franzia and guano.

He's straining so hard for comedy, and he can't decide whether to call me a drunk or a shithead. And what's with the Franzia? Didn't he get the memo about Paul Ryan? Yesterday was the day to attack right-wingers for drinking expensive wine.

Then he gets to my little joke on Eli: "I have no interest in these hysterical little men who obsess about whether their 'base' is getting served or stiffed." He rolls his eyes and says:

Althouse is watching consonants whirling through onion rings, yet once more. 

See? Go to those links. He's been reading my blog for a long time, and he remembers my old comic riffs about genitalia. Unlike Stacy McCain, he's familiar with the archive here, and he's been trying to to get the better of me in the genitalia humor department for years. But he can't. He says:

She’s got a dirty mind, don’t she, Yossarian? The dirtiest. 

So... a reference to "Catch-22"... disembodied. The book is funny. The detached reference? The sad waggling of a man who would be erudite, who's trying to show that he's smart and the woman is dumb. A literary reference. I typo'd "litterary" a Freudian slip, indicating that I think his writing is trash. He ought to pick that thing up.

I've got a "dirty mind"? Oh, okay. Thanks. I suppose Freud had a "dirty mind" too. Isn't it funny the way lefties are, at bottom, puritanical about sex? Sex is dirty? As Woody Allen famously said: "Only if it's done right." And if it's done left, it's done with a detachable penis. Put some ice on it.  Maybe you can get somebody to sew it back on.

Quick, because here comes Robert "Stacy" McCain, fists a-flying!