"[L]ibertarianism is basically conservatism for people with social anxieties."

A good aphorism from Roy Edroso, in his Village Voice column which reviews what "rightbloggers" are saying, this time focusing on that NYT article "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?"

The moment for reading that article never arrived for me, but I'm seeing Edroso's piece because Instapundit linked to Matt Welch at Reason, who quarrels with Edroso about the relative extent of Reason magazine's advocacy of gay marriage and the religion-based rights of businessfolk to discriminate against gay people.

You guys can fight amongst yourselves. I liked the aphorism, but unlike the relative number of statements in Reason about gay marriage and religion-based rights, it's hard to figure out what to count to check its truth. My sense that it's true comes from the embodied intuition and empathy that I feel is relatively lacking in libertarians.

"[T]his moronic New Republic thing, 'Liberals Are Killing Art: How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty'..."

"... my response to which, based on years of bitter experience with actual kulturkampfers, is basically WTFingF. For the moment I will only mention that author Jed Perl cites absolutely no allegedly art-killing liberals of the present time that you've ever heard of, and that his first references are to Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint (1993) and Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950), which basically makes me want to say, why don't you and Roger Kimball go back in time and fuck each other on a pile of old New Criterions?"

Roy Edroso reads and reacts to a New Republic essay that I noticed in the middle of the night, between sleeps, endeavored to read, but I nearly lost my mind. I was saved by second sleep, overslept, and awoke refreshed enough to know I didn't ever have to figure out whatever it was Perl meant to say or what nightmares I might have had and forgotten about Lionel Trilling and the rest of the old-time culture-cogitators who beset the minds of old men.

But how old is Perl? Wikipedia tells me he was born in 1951, and I am brought up short. I was born in 1951. "Jed Perl initially trained as a painter." Well, hell, I was initially trained as a painter (not that "trained" is the right verb, but I did squander my undergraduate journey in the painting studios of my university's art school).

I should be sympatico with Perl, but he seemed to be citing all the characters that seemed so important to our parents' generation. I can't believe it matters, but then again, I can't seem to care at all about any art that got made in the 4 decades since I escaped from art school. If Perl knows, he's not expressing it in a form that gets past my filters.

"These guys are often described as libertarians; I think it's the gay and torture things."

Lefty blogger Roy Edroso, seeing that "the Washington Post has formed some kind of alliance with The Volokh Conspiracy," picks through his archives to find the most terrible (to his lefty readers) things various VC bloggers have written over the years.

Roy has made it his thing to monitor "right-wing" bloggers for the amusement and horror of lefty readers, so you'd think he'd be able to cherry-pick more horrifying material, and he lacks the grace to say you know, these guys pretty much are libertarians.

That makes you the hack, Roy.

Going Galt means different things to different people.

Observes Roy Edroso, reading Will Spencer:

[W]e've seen folks Go Galt by leaving lousy tips, by alerting local merchants that they planned to "buy nothing – other than vacations out of the country – until the president exits," by quitting smoking, etc. Or at least talking about doing it.

I had despaired they'd ever get serious about it. Spencer, though, has an impressively meticulous list of tactics...

So next time some guy at the DMV fills in his license application with scribbles, then winks at you; or sneakily takes a whole stack of change of address forms from the post office; or takes a government job and, unlike any other civil servant you've ever seen, goofs off — then you'll know the revolution is afoot. This time for sure!

"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.

But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

"Rightbloggers on the Death of Osama Bin Laden: Eh, No Big Whoop. Thanks, President Bush!"

Roy Edroso has his funny — and highly biased — summary of the rightbloggers' reactions.

"Who'll get in more trouble -- the guy who wasn't spreading salt, for his egregious waste of the city's time and gas, or the guy who was spreading salt, for double-salting and dangerous multitasking?"

Roy Edroso asks some good questions. I have one for him: What would he say if he were looking at 8 minutes of raw footage showing 2 large municipal vehicles cruising around the square blaring horns in apparent support of a big Tea Party rally?

"Actually, I find it useful to contemplate my white privileges..."

"... and any other privileges into which I was born, like being a citizen of the richest country on earth, and did not obtain for myself," says Roy Edroso.

In fact, when I was growing up, it was customary for adults to remind children of such luck as they had inherited, like the food we had and "people starving in other countries" didn't. This was meant as a spur to gratitude and humility, and to not being such a whining little shit.

He's reacting to a program that in which government officials are prodding adult citizens to think about how privileged they are. The analogy to a parent-child relationship comes so easily to the left-wing mind.

And what kind of families — back in the olden days — encouraged their kids to think about how lucky they were to be white? Only racist parents would have said anything like that. Kindly parents back then had a simple message for their kids on the subject of race: There is only one race, the human race. It wasn't hard for them to figure out that that was the right thing to say, and it wasn't at all hard for kids to understand it.

Argument by nostalgia is highly manipulable.

Roy Edroso imagines that Leslie Savan had the courage to "dispute Muslim articles of faith."

He's presenting something I wrote to his readers, who follow his direction and call me an idiot, but he's got it wrong. I blogged (and agreed with much of) Savan's piece in The Nation and tweaked her by asking if she was "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs?" I also snarked that "I didn't know you could do that in The Nation."

Roy Edroso pretends to laugh at my joke ("Tee hee") and lobs the sarcasm: "Because libs are so cowardly they cannot dispute Muslim articles of faith. Which Savan proves by just having done so."

But Savan did NOT do so in the paragraph that precedes my joke. Savan savaged Americans. First, she said:

Regardless of what the Muslim world may or may not believe, this whole seed fixation is profoundly un-American. 

In other words: Put the beliefs of Muslims to the side; I want to talk about American values. Then:

It says that genealogy is destiny, that a man is Muslim regardless of what he espouses or believes. It’s all about descent—and nauseatingly close to the “one drop rule” of the post-Reconstruction South. That rule held that if a person had any African or Indian ancestry whatsoever, he or she was classified as “colored” and subject to anti-miscegenation laws, voter disenfranchisement, and segregation at large. At least eighteen states adopted some form of the rule; Virginia’s 1924 law, for instance, was called the Racial Integrity Act.

Having purported to limit herself to American values (as opposed to universal truths), she goes through a litany of historical wrongs, committed by Americans, a comfortable and familiar place for readers of The Nation. This is the point at which I asked my question whether she's "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs."

I think she thought that she'd limited her inquiry at that point to American values and American racism. Although some Muslims are Americans and could presumably be swept up into an inquiry about American values, Savan has specifically set aside what Muslims believe. Plus, she's switched to talking about race. What interested me is something I don't think she meant to do but only unwittingly implied.

Did Edroso even understand my point? I deliberately write in an elliptical style sometimes. You have to think a minute to get it, and I don't think Edroso did. The writing may look simple, but there is a challenge in that simplicity that you'd better be sure you see and meet before you decide you've done the easy reading and are now in a fine position to call me stupid.

I'll be heavy-handed so he can rethink his insolent attitude toward me. I think that Savan didn't mean to say that the Muslims are repellent if they believe that a person is a Muslim because his father is a Muslim. She only meant that Americans violate American values if they perceive someone — such as Obama — as Muslim because his father is a Muslim. I would guess that she subscribes to the cultural relativism that accepts Muslims (even American Muslims) viewing their religion as a genetic matter. I don't think she wanted to deal in higher level philosophy about individual freedom and autonomy (which is the subject that I went on to talk about, quoting James Madison).

So, Roy, imagine that an editor at The Nation had responded to Savan's draft with these direct questions: Did you mean to imply that you are disgusted by a Muslim's belief that religion is inborn? Did you mean to say that that Muslim belief is like racism, because it looks like you may have implied that? I think you probably meant to say that Muslims should be judged by Muslim values and that you are leaving that judgment for other Muslims, and that you only mean to say that Americans are judged by American values and that you are all about being very critical of Americans who say that Obama was a Muslim — right?

Do you think Savan would have answered yes or no to those questions? If she answered yes, don't you think the editor would be likely to say: Could you rewrite this to make that really clear? And if she said no and wanted to make that absolutely clear, don't you think that the editor would have killed the piece?

Apparently, I stand alone among conservative bloggers...

... appreciating the conservatism of Obama's decision to decline to stamp new human bootprints into the face of the moon.

"Obama's Afghan Surge Proves He's Trying to Lose, Say Rightbloggers."

Roy Edroso summarizes the "rightbloggers." Including me, of course.

The sexual power of Carrie Prejean.

I've been checking my Site Meter quite a few times in the last day. I've been pleased and then a little ashamed of myself as I see the phenomenal power of one particular post title to attract search engine traffic. This post was originally titled "Things the Site Meter dragged in." I've tweaked it a little to make my point. I'm not traffic-greedy — not too much. Just trying to make my point.

While I was hanging out on Site Meter, a couple other things got my attention. It's my general policy not to respond to bloggers who attack me — otherwise it would be a traffic-building strategy to attack me — but I do make exceptions as the whim strikes me. So, let's look at what Roy Edroso — of Alicublog and the Village Voice is saying about me.

He takes my Carrie Prejean post and intersperses it with comments in fisking fashion, and I'm going to fisk it back at him. Ready?

THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

Despite his inclusion of that St. Paul quote, Edroso cuts my quote of Alinsky's Rule 4, which happens to use Christianity as the example of the effectiveness of demanding that your enemies live up to their own rules. Alinsky wrote: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity." It's hardly some odd quirk of mine to combine scripture and Alinsky. Edroso, in his usual fashion, looks for ways to make me look flaky — along with the other bloggers he's made it his business to mock. (The link to The Anchoress hints at Edroso's approach. Check out his latest Village Voice column for a more comprehensive example of how he works.)

Back to Edroso:

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect...

What argument? Where did I argue that Christians aren't responsible for hypocrisy? I simply don't.

.... is by now an old rightwing favorite....

So just pull it out of you frumpy bag of liberal complaints about right-wingers. I thought you were trying to fisk my post, Roy. But, no, I'm either this distinct writer that you love to make fun of or I'm indistinguishable in the blurry mass of rightish bloggers that you've looked at before and have grown weary of squinting at.

... and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days.

Well, you haven't come close to nailing anything I've said in this post, so why bother to be specific about anything I've said in the past? You can't even read the post currently in front of your face, yet you think everyone already knows what it is I've said in "the old days." Maybe Roy is tired and on autopilot. But maybe, as he worked his way through what I'd written, confident in his ability to spew snark, he saw that my post actually cohered and that it was pretty damned sharp and funny, and he consciously decided to blur his observations so he could still get his post up. The poor wilted man. The option of actually liking what I'd written is inconceivable within the little framework he's built for himself. What would happen to that Village Voice gig?

But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments...

He couldn't figure out anything to say about what I wrote — "the Jesus stuff" — and, desperate, he dove into the comments looking for something repulsive. What he came up was from Florida, a specific, familiar commenter here:

... a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

"Jesus stuff"... "stuff like this"... Roy is not editing and dealing with sloppy word repetitions, and, worse, he's not bothering to figure anything out. It's just stuff. He found the most unsightly quote and then — without reason — counted on his readers to believe that it exemplifies what is generally in the comments at my blog. How utterly flabby and lame.

Now, as for the comment he cherry-picked, Edroso has no idea what it means and makes no attempt to figure it out. He has not, like the regular comment readers here, been exposed to the way Florida writes and the things he writes about. He doesn't know about Florida's longstanding Roman Polanski theme — which began here and which involves a fair amount of antagonism toward me. It's likely that Edroso thinks he's come across some rabid homophobia, but, in context, I know that "butt-buggering sodomites... rapists of 13-year-old children" refers to Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him. Florida's comment is not part of a mass of "stuff like this" in the comments. It's something particular, incisive, and satirical, and, if you are going to focus on it, you'd better take some time to figure out what it means. But Edroso is happy to see something that looked like shit and to splatter it onto his post and then, childishly, to demand that onlookers see how ugly things are over at Althouse.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments...

Huh? Where did that come from? What comments does he think I've removed? He's trying to pin that one comment on me by asserting that I moderate the comments, so that anything that is left, I've approved of. That is either a lazy mistake or a nasty lie. My approach to the comments is well known: I have a strong free speech policy, and I leave vile things in. To imply that whatever is left has my stamp of approval is cheap and unethical.

... perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

He ends with a comic image, intended as a play on my name, the "old house" that he's used in his post title. Unfortunately, he hasn't built the foundation for what could have been a well-written joke. The material he thought he had just wasn't there.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

Roy makes a second attempt at humor, and, while I'm familiar with Den Beste, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny. Althouse is The Anchoress... Althouse is Den Beste? Everything is melting in the mind of Roy Edroso.

"Rightbloggers Observe Kennedy's Passing Pretty Much the Way You Would Expect."

Roy Edroso exposes those awful right bloggers — including me — for the edification of Village Voice readers.

"I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone who ever read her blog would want to meet her in person let alone marry her..."

A commenter over at Roy's place. Roy himself is being okay.

Roy Edroso enjoys that "Rightbloggers Not Really Enjoying the Inauguration."

A good link fest.

"Rightbloggers: Blago, Richardson Prove Obama Corrupt, Dems Racist."

I always enjoy Roy Edroso's pithy, pissy roundup of opinion in the "Right-Wing Blogosphere" in The Village Voice — especially when he includes excellent quotes from me.

Here's my post on his first one, which had Tom Tomorrow caricatures of all of us on what I assumed was some kind of Rightblogger A-List. There's a Tom Tomorrow caricature on today's column, but it's not of anyone from that A-List. Who the hell is that guy supposed to be? Tomorrow has a spiffy graphic style, but he's not the best at capturing a likeness — kind of a liability for a caricaturist. Is that supposed to be the left-winger's vision of the generic right-winger — a balding white guy in a desert-camouflage T-shirt? Or is that some actual guy I should recognize from Tomorrow's feeble visual cues?

"An Obama presidency would be great for comedy, as it signals a rise in the intelligence level of America..."

ADDED INTRO: Welcome, Village Voice readers. Roy Edroso sends you here with the lines "The news in the final days of the campaign offers scant hope for rightbloggers... In the final hours before their presumed electoral Armageddon, the rightbloggers' last, desperate assaults have sprayed fire at all kinds of collateral targets." But you ought to know that Edroso's characterization of me is entirely wrong. I took a vow of "cruel neutrality" on March 4th -- intended to last until at least October -- and "spread the attacks around and [gave] credit where credit is due." On October 7th, I revealed my emerging support for Obama. Over the past month, my posts have still been balanced, but my support for Obama has crystalized. I'm no "rightblogger," though Roy is clearly a leftblogger, and a pretty dumb or dishonest one. With that correction, please read the original post, which follows.

***

"... which makes for better, more ironic and layered jokes."

From an article about how an Obama presidency will change comedy, that's a quote from a famous American comedian. Try to guess which one before you look. I guarantee you'll be wrong.

So, anyway, there's the issue whether it will be too hard to joke about Obama. There are really 2 problems:

1. He so wonderful and well-liked -- at least by the usual comedians! -- that there's no basis for edginess, anger, and sarcasm. We're not going to laugh at jokes about how there's nothing to joke about. So what can be funny?

2. He's black, and white comedians feel they can't go all-out exploiting that characteristic for jokes. If McCain wins, comedians can make jokes about his age and his rage, the way they mocked Bush's speech and stupidity and Clinton's gluttony and lechery. But wait, I had 2 conventional characteristics for the others, so comedians could get past Obama's race and pick... something funny. Not that he's so articulate. Maybe that he's pretentiously professorial and consequently boring.

From the article:

"Comedians haven't been hitting Obama that hard because he hasn't made a lot of missteps - yet," says [Carol Kolb, head writer of the Onion News Network]. "If he actually becomes President, there's no way he will please everyone. The left-leaning comedians are supporting him in opposition to John McCain, but they're probably not going to agree with all of his policies. He'll be working in government and dealing with bureaucracy and pleasing voters, so he'll start making mistakes.

"I have no fear that there will be something to make fun of. It may take awhile for that to emerge, but when it does, the humor will be more nuanced and informed. We will pounce when the time is right. Now we're just biding our time."

Blah! I despise all the comic writers who have held their fire because they so want Obama to win. Comedy first, you traitors to your craft. And, by the way, Onion News Network is unwatchably dull. The Onion has been fun to read for years, but the translation to video sucks, perhaps because the writers have been so keen on helping a politician win. (But it's not just that.)

"No particular aspect of Obama's life will be off limits for us," says the Onion's Kolb. "That's just not how we do things at the Onion. I'm sure there's some joke to be made about race. Just give us time."

Something tells me Kolb will never be funny... about anything.

African-American comics, though, may not have to wait. From Chris Rock to D. L. Hughley to "30 Rock" star Tracy Morgan, this may be a watershed moment for comedy as in politics.

"Here's the thing," says Larry Wilmore, the "Senior Black Correspondent" on "The Daily Show."

"If you're in power, you become The Man. If Barack Obama becomes The Man, you've got to make fun of The Man. Those are the rules.

"But you know, McCain may win. And then you have to work on an 'angry Obama' impression. That might be much more fun than his being President, really."

Here's Carlos Mencia:

"If Obama becomes the first black President ... to make fun of his blackness is going to be great. Like, he's not black enough, or maybe he's too black. If we find Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and he drops a bomb in Pakistan, that's thug, man. You're going to be like, 'I didn't realize he was that black! I thought he was just Huxtable black!'"

Obama has not won yet, so what these folks are saying is still what they say before he's elected. Mencia reflects the current situation, in which non-white comedians get to make jokes the white comedians avoid. Will that change? Or will the shows rely on the use of black comedians to tell racial jokes?

I think the best solution is to observe Obama closely and find specific things about him instead of giving yourself permission to fall back on racial stereotypes for humor. (I know, I'm being transracial, which is still in the pre-Obama admininstration mode, and is also not at all edgy or funny.)

"It’s like trying to claim that John Hawkins is unfairly labeled a 'right wing news blogger' ..."

"... and then providing a link to his site, which is called RIGHT WING NEWS."

Rachel Lucas cracks me up as she lashes into a lame Glamour blog post that complains about how female "political bloggers" are getting marginalized as "feminist" bloggers while citing 2 bloggers whose blogs are completely concentrated on feminism.

Surveys have shown that most political blog readers are straight men. Now, why on earth would straight men bookmark sites that have articles about periods and fashion and the Weekly Feminist Fuck You when they could just as easily bookmark a site that doesn’t?...

Let’s say the majority of political blog readers were straight women, as were the bloggers themselves. And say there’s a ton of male bloggers out there, too, trying to “break into” this Girls’ Club. How well do you think it would work for them to name their blogs things like Masculinity.com and had entire categories devoted to hot rods, power tools, mens’ fashion, and things like “The Monday Man-centric Fuck You”?

And Dr. Helen adds:

My guess is that some "feminist" blogs ... get the attention they do because they are feminist blogs, not in spite of it. As Rachel points out, they don't even mention real political blogs such as Michelle Malkin (nor do they mention Ann Althouse) both political bloggers who happen to be women. I wonder why.

Eugene Volokh says:

[A]s Rachel Lucas points out, how do you ask "Why are all the big political bloggers men?" and miss Michelle Malkin? And if you mention some of the somewhat lower-traffic but still prominent bloggers, why ignore Megan McArdle and Ann Althouse (an omniblogger, but with a good deal of political and policy content)?

To answer the second question, I think that when you don't hew to the hardcore all-politics style of political blogging, people are less likely to list you as a political blogger (as Volokh's ambivalence about me indicates). Now, I got included in that Village Voice survey of the right-wing political blogosphere, but look how much I confused the author (Roy Edroso):

ORIENTATION: "Moderate" Democrat who disapproves of nearly everything the Democratic Party does

TONE: Free-associative...

CANDIDATE: No coherently stated preference...

MODUS OPERANDI: Favors piquant reversals...

WHAT TO EXPECT: Something—a news photo, a quote, a gum wrapper on the sidewalk—will annoy her and she'll go to McCain....

The truth is I'm not a normal political blogger (or a normal law blogger). And by "normal," I kind of mean... male-style. I'm not surprised to be left off any normal list, and I was pleased that Roy included me and took the trouble to understand me as well as he did — which was on the level of one of those male comedians who do routines about how women don't make any sense.

I am doing something different here. It's something that feels instinctively right to me. This blog is a true expression of my mind — and I am a woman. I'm not saying there's one style of blogging that is the real female kind, but I think there is something female about what I am doing and what I want to do. (I think something of the same thing is true about Megan McArdle, who drives some people crazy. And I give credit to Roy for including her in his Village Voice survey and trying to understand her too. He called her a "lipstick libertarian" and identified her "tone" as "self-referential.")

So maybe Glamour has a bit of a point that Rachel Lucas missed, which is that the idea of what a political blogger is has been defined by what male writers tend to do. Women can do it too, but a lot of women writers, like me, want to do something else. I'm gratified that I get noticed as a political blogger at all, because I'm not the political type. I don't think like John Hawkins or Markos Moulitsas. I operate in the political sphere and drive political people crazy by completely indulging myself being myself. I'm glad this gets to count as political blogging and that, being on the inside of political blogging, I can have something to do with stretching the definition of political blogging.

"The Official Village Voice Election-Season Guide to the Right-Wing Blogosphere."

Roy Edroso puts a lot of work into this thing, and it would have hurt my feelings if he'd left me out. So don't cry for me. And, check it out, they got Tom Tomorrow to draw a cartoon of Glenn Reynolds.

ADDED: Should I take care what I put up now, as the new readers from the Village Voice click over? How many? You might wonder. Based on the Site Meter, 29. Ouch.

AND: I see that Tom Tomorrow has illustrated all of us, including me. I feel really weird about that... mainly out of vanity.

MORE: Armed Liberal says:

[A]side from being a juvenile jackass, [the author Roy Edroso is] a tool. Why? Because while nonsense like this is great for making the 15% of True Believers feel Really Really Good about themselves, ... it makes the other 36% that we on the left need to do things like - you know, win elections - pretty pissed off at the smug arrogance that's so proudly on display....

We're in an election cycle where the GOP candidate should be staked out like a sacrificial goat waiting for the knife. Instead, we get Democratic thinkers worrying - appropriately - that the Democratic candidate is going to actually lose in November. And one of the big reasons is that the public voice of the Party is cranky, smug yuppies.

I agree. It's counterproductive. Why do people like Roy want to demonize me? Roy even designates me as a "moderate 'Democrat'" and notes that I voted for Obama in the primary. If that's enough to make you a stupid, evil right winger, how do the Democrats hope to get enough votes to win?

AND: A comment over at the Voice by David on Wed Apr 16, 2008, 09:26:

I think this tripe is what David Mamet was referring to in his "Why I am No Longer a Brain Dead Liberal" article a few weeks ago. Heck of a job, guys.

Exactly.

Charles Johnson — another target of the Voice piece — like me, notes that there's hardly any traffic clicking over from there: "Since this article was published, we’ve received a grand total of ... count ’em ... 32 hits..."

Protein Wisdom says: "It’s wry, amusing, and demonstrates perfectly the left’s contention that if you disagree with them, you’re either stupid or evil, or some combination of both."

Megan McArdle rants (her verb) about the term Roy applied to her: "lipstick libertarian."

I do wear lipstick (well, usually gloss), and more than occasionally eyeliner and mascara and a little shadow. And what the hell does that have to do with my political ideas?

... I'm annoyed that a typically female narrative style, which touches on personal experience, is derided as fundamentally unserious--particularly when it is so derided by people who admire it in feminist bloggers.

Yes, the lefties think sexism is quite okay when it's used to attack their opponents. I'm too thick-skinned — despite the routine application of moisturizer — to let things like that annoy me anymore. But I don't mind saving the evidence to use against people like Roy when my wily feminine emotions tell me to attack.

And I'm perilously close to despair at finding that so many of my correspondents not only believe that pointing out that I am 35 and unmarried is a devastating insult, but apparently expect me to share that opinion.

Despair!? I recommend pity aimed at those who flaunt their incomprehension of the benefits of singlehood.