Britney and K-Fed, then Jon and Kate, now . . . Ace and Allah splitsville?

Little Miss Attila brings us rumors of the latest celebrity breakup. Before Christmas, Ace of Spades trashed Mitch McConnell as a sellout bastard. Allahpundit responded with a contemptuous sneer.

Next: Ace loads up to .13 on Valu-Rite vodka, gets slapped around like Mrs. Charlie Sheen. Then Allahpundit hires publicist Stan Rosenfield to say, in effect, "that bitch Ace deserved it."

Four out of five doctors agree: Health care debate causes mental illness

Things are getting crazy, with lots of Left-on-Left action. Via Ace of Spades, Obama's apologists are excoriated by . . . wait for it . . . Glenn Greenwald:

We've long heard -- from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself -- that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it's not his fault because he's totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn't possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he's instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.

Barack Obama has indisputably performed his first true miracle. A year ago, Rush Limbaugh was the only guy talking like that. Charles Johnson to accuse Glenn Greenwald of raaaaacism in 3, 2, 1 . . .

Ace: 'Foam-flecked buffoon' Sullivan doesn't have 'stupid queerbait readers'

Sorry, Ace, I disagree with your walkback. If "queerbait" is a homophobic putdown, it's a putdown that a lot of gay guys employ, generally to describe an ostensibly straight guy who seems . . . well, potentially available.

Like Charlie Crist. Or Rahm Emanuel, so my gay sources tell me. And those same sources say that gay men in Chicago swear there used to be a tall semi-Kenyan guy who was, as we might say, no stranger to the community.

But that stuff is mere gossip, and is not germaine to the question of whether it was fair of you to use "queerbait" to describe Sully's readership. The larger point, I think, is that not all gay people run around looking for excuses to be offended, and are themselves not averse to applying certain pejoratives -- "nelly," "swish" etc. -- to other gay people, especially ones they don't like.

And as for "queerbaits," who doesn't know the type of person described? I just noticed Little Miss Attila referencing a post by Cynthia Yockey about appropriate use of the term "dyke." Well, not all lesbians are dykes, and some women who look or act like dykes are actually straight.

If we didn't all have our insensitivity detectors set on "stun," tiptoeing around in fear of accidentally offending someone, maybe more people would be encouraged to criticize Sullivan's ongoing melodrama -- and the stupid queerbait readers who dig it.

Andrew Sullivan was outed by Michelangelo Signorile and, rather than leading Sully to question the hyper-politicization of sexuality, the experience led him to become SuperGayMan, the caped crusader for same-sex marriage. Sully let himself be trapped in a box, defined by his enemies, taking refuge in a ridiculous more-gay-than-thou stance.

His sexual persona is intrinsic to his politics and vice-versa. You know who he reminds me of? Bill Maher, who hates feminism and Christianity with equal fury because both belief-systems stand opposed to selfish little worms like Bill Maher gettin' some.

So I don't think you should have walked back the "queerbait" putdown, Ace. The rest of your critique of Sully is pure genius.

P.S.: To any readers intrigued by my assertion of familiarity with gay culture: (a) I majored in drama in college, (b) I was once the only straight guy working in the men's wear department of a department store, and (c) I hang out with lots of libertarians. However, (d) my wife and I have been married 20 years with six kids. If I'm overcompensating, I'm doing it right.

P.P.S.: Meredith Baxter gay? That's a big loss for the team. But what about her 15-year marriage to David Birney? Was she just fakin' it? Her inner lesbian straining for release? And why didn't her inner lesbian break free earlier, say about 1982, in a video with Phoebe Cates?

Never mind . . .

Whereas Stacy and I were not bright enough to think of this

by Smitty (h/t Little Miss Attila)

Ace has the details of that whole pesky 'accuracy' problem over at the Daily DogDish.

That mindless 'integrity' thing seems a real disadvantage. When we keep things as accurate as possible, admit fault when it occurs, and seek to spread the credit as much as possible, it really gets in the way of building an air of invincibility.

Stacy, should we consider a bout of cretinism, for purely scientific purposes? It worked for Al Gore, didn't it? Maybe this fetishing of fact is foolishness.

UPDATE: Credit Where Credit Is Due
By Robert Stacy McCain
Last night Aleister at American Glob called me to talk blogging and during the course of our conversation, I mentioned that Ace of Spades and Allahpundit were the two bloggers whom I most strived to emulate when I began blogging.

It's the irreverence toward Big Shots, see? Also, the self-deprecating humor, the running jokes, and the knowing attitude toward the interests of the readership. Beyond the value of the news aggregation and commentary, there is a shtick, so that regular readers feel themselves part of the gang, sharing the inside jokes.

Blogging is by its nature a collaborative effort. No blog is an island, and to pretend that one blogger is omniscient and omnicompetent is a pretense that won't fool anybody who pays attention.

Did I notice Patrick Appel's response to complaints from Sullivan's readers about the guest-blogging situation? Yes, it was briefly noted here Tuesday morning.

Did I give it the Mother Of All Fiskings that Ace has provided? No, I didn't. And considering that he actually beat me to it by three hours or so, thanks to Smitty for giving Ace props for making the most of the motherlode:

Because like a lot of people who never had any particular talent, Sullivan was endlessly promoted far beyond his abilities, and now that he is a "name," he intends to sell the only thing of any value he has -- that name -- and simply pay some hacks intern-level wages to ghost-blog for him while he conducts in-depth examinations of Sarah Palin's upper fallopian tubes.

Among the Daily Dish hacks paid intern-level wages? Conor Friedersdorf. Just sayin' . . .

And just sayin' is, of course, also stolen from Ace. The hacks here are unpaid, not even intern-level wages.

'Your secret racist buddy'

Ace is not him:

If you have a racial axe to grind, if you are kind of pissed off about minorities, stop posting on the subject. You are embarrassing yourselves, you are embarrassing me, you are embarrassing everyone else here.
If you think that I am secretly winking at you telling you I just hit the Racism Button and it's okay to start with the racial jibes, you are wrong.
If you think I am your secret racist buddy, who speaks in "code" but you "get" what I'm really saying, you are wrong. I hate you. I despise you. . . .

Ah, yes. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink. The experience of Michael Douglas's Falling Down character in that military surplus store, where the neo-Nazi says, "You're one of us!" and Douglas says, "No, I'm not!" (And kills the guy.)

Last year I went to New York to cover Bob Barr's appearance on The Colbert Report. Afterwards, there was some kind of debate at the Lolita Bar. I didn't cover the debate, but filed my American Spectator report from the bar, which has free Wi-Fi.

There was this young guy who seemed fascinated that I was actually a real honest-to-God journalist, and he started talking to me, asking questions, which is annoying when I'm on deadline. Anyway, I tried to be polite, but there was a kind of stalker thing going on, which I couldn't figure out.

So finally, the debate ended, I hit my deadline and filed my story. Then we all got taxis and went to a cigar bar in Greenwich Village, where Barr and the Libertarian Party brain trust could relax and socialize.

The younger stalker guy was at the cigar bar, too, and started talking to me again. He engaged in the kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of talk that such people do -- trying to draw me out on some subject alien to my knowledge or interest -- until finally he satisfied my curiosity: He was a Jew-hater.

So I made a quick and diplomatic disengagement, and avoided the guy thereafter. You can't reason with people like that and there's no point talking to them. Because they are often mentally unstable, however, you have to be careful how you deal with them or they could flip out and make your life hell.

Kooks in the Office Lobby
This wasn't my first such encounter, BTW. Why do these anti-Semites tend to react this way when they are introduced to a real honest-to-God journalist? They're like the people who periodically show up in the lobbies of newspaper offices with axes to grind -- usually against their ex-wives -- claiming to be the victims of foul miscarriages of justice that they expect you, the newspaper staffer, to rectify by doing some of that "investigative journalism" stuff they've seen on TV.

For the past 16 hours, I've been effectively offline because of a computer glitch, so I haven't had time to figure out exactly what is happening in the blogosphere regarding the Patterico situation. Dafydd ab Hugh has written a couple of guest posts there, evidently engaged in my defense, and some of what he says in this post is worth considering.

Mike LaRoche at South Texian is also on the case, as are others whom I don't have time to link right now, since I'm on a borrowed computer and have other work to do. Let me quote a passage from my 1996 debate with white separatist Dennis Wheeler that I think is being overlooked or underemphasized:

To say that one wishes better racial relations in a real sense is not to endorse the prevailing view of "diversity through homogenization." I recently saw a young black woman that I had once knew when I was a smalltown sportswriter and she was a high school track star. She is originally from New York and had just gotten out of the Air Force a few months earlier and returned to Georgia. After some friendly banter, I asked her if she thought race relations were better or worse in the South than elsewhere in the country. About the same, she said, but then she immediately began a discussion of interracial relationships and how these are less accepted in the South.
This struck me as odd: Why should attitudes toward dating/marriage between the races be considered a litmus test of racial harmony? After all, as she later made clear, many blacks are extremely disapproving of such relationships. And yet an acceptance of "Jungle Fever" (Spike Lee movie about blackwhite dating, for those who've missed their multicultural sensitivity training sessions) is held out to us as the ultimate test of whether or not we're "racists."

So you see that, rather than engaging in some hypothetical third-bong-hit-in-the-dorm-room discussion of an idealized utopia, I was citing a particular real-world example -- an actual conversation with a personal friend, whom I could name -- that seemed relative to the debate. And my young friend was talking in particular about black people in the South being less approving of interracial relationships.

That ought not be overlooked. I'm not trying to pull the "some of my best friends" defense, merely pointing out that I was trying to explain reality, rather than to express my own personal ideal.

In his own introduction to the debate, Wheeler notes that "several people adopt a Libertarian view on race," and in response to the same long post I've just excerpted, Wheeler says:

Reduced to its essence, this was another manifestation of the Libertarian argument of "get the government out of the issue."

What Wheeler says, intending "Libertarian" as a pejorative, certainly ought to serve as a stout defense to any accusation that I am a "white supremacist." The two accusations are fundamentally incompatible.

Harshing a Utopian's Mellow
What Wheeler couldn't get past, really, was the problem that racial reality -- life as it is actually lived -- does not conform to his own theoretical ideal. Only by extremely coercive government measures could Wheeler's racialist utopia be obtained; even if one endorsed such coercion, there is nothing like a political consensus to pursue such a policy; and if there ever were an effective majority in favor of a racial-separatist policy, this would lead us straight to the conundrum of minority rights in a democratic society.

Wheeler's programme -- and Daffyd ab Hugh notices I used the British spelling, as I'd been immersed in reading Winston Churchill in 1996 -- was a non-starter, and whatever anyone thinks of Wheeler's racial opinions, his argument amounted to an attempt to persuade people to follow him in a lemming march off the cliff into the abyss of an irrelevant fringe.

Labels like "libertarian" and "pragmatic" are used as epithets by some conservatives, who insist that a particular ideal (and always their own ideal, of course) must be the object of conservative thought and that no practical considerations should prevent the pursuit of that object. Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" nonsense was one form of this idealistic conservatism, a philosophy that tended toward a disengagement with real-world politics, even as it made foolish concessions to liberalism. (See Jonah Goldberg's lengthy response to Dreher's book or my own brief review.)

If by "pragmatic," you mean that we are seeking to deal with actual problems with realistic measures, who would argue against pragmatism? It does not mean we are unprincipled, only that we aren't engaged in mere academic speculation about rainbow-and-unicorn utopias. And if you say we are "libertarian," does this mean that we have no ideals beyond the limitation of government? Of course not.

So you've seen how I dealt with Wheeler's white separatism, and his accusation that my "Libertarian view on race" was an apostasy. Now, more than a dozen years later, I find myself dealing with an entirely opposite accusation, that I am some kind of hateful bigot -- based in large measure on the arguments I made against Wheeler!

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Ace isn't "your secret racist buddy." There seem to be some people who want you think I am. My cosmic point, however, is that it doesn't matter whether you're "racist" or not, or whether you think I'm "racist" or not. Your opinions are your own, and even a fool has a right to his folly. (There's that libertarian thing again, see?)

The Road to Johnsonism
Patterico's liberal troll TimB said I should "be separated from the mainstream dialogue" -- that is to say, TimB has appointed himself Mainstream Dialogue Czar.

What part of "fuck you" is so hard to understand, Tim?

A commitment to free debate doesn't require Ace to let his comment field fill up with noxious stuff. He has one of the most wide-open comment fields on the Internet, and whatever caused him to brandish the banhammer, it must have been pretty bad.

The comments here are moderated. I don't ban people. There are just some comments I don't approve. And maybe I approve some that I shouldn't. Pixels are free, but I am proprietor of this particular slice of bandwidth, and trolls -- who try to hijack discussions for their own purposes, including efforts to disparage the very purpose of the blog -- are not welcome.

TimB can log into Blogger and have his own blog (call it "TimB's Dishonest Liberal Troll Blog") in a matter of minutes. Alas, Charles Johnson has already cornered the market on that.

Patterico, as blog aficionados are aware, is an assistant D.A. in California, and he seems to display a prosecutorial zeal toward me. Hell, the only time I ever set foot in his jurisdiction was when I changed planes at LAX. What's his beef?

My readers are hitting the tip jar to send me to Pasadena, so if the D.A.'s got a warrant, maybe he'll send some detectives to get tough with me next month on my way to the BCS championship. Which is why I'm thinking of bringing my Samoan attorney along for the ride . . .

THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES . . .

Some topics are best left to Ace of Spades

For example, the suicide of 52-year-old Mike "Christine" Penner, two years after the L.A. Times sportswriter wrote a column with these immortal words:

During my 23 years with The Times' sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. . . . Today I leave for a few weeks' vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation. As Christine. . . . I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.

Many years to "work up the courage" -- and two years later, he/she kills him/herself. Over to you, Ace.

Booze-blogging?

Stephen Green of VodkaPundit is widely hailed as the inventor of drunk-blogging -- i.e., live-blogging an event while under the influence. I had the opportunity during the 2008 Democratic National Convention to actually watch the master at work, and attest that the man can, as the late poet Ronnie Van Zant once said, "drink enough whiskey to float a battleship around."

I've never tried drunk-blogging myself, at least not on purpose, although there may have been occasions -- including Election Night at the Hotel Saranac -- when the deadline pressure required me to self-medicate to counteract the effects of my massive coffee intake.

All of that, however, is prelude to a discussion of booze-blogging, which is blogging about booze. Given that this site is the originator of Rule 5 Sunday -- the weekly babe-blogging roundup -- you might suppose that the natural booze-and-broads pairing would replicate itself on the 'sphere. Yet until this morning, I didn't even know there was such a thing as booze-blogging.

Then I got an e-mail from Doug Winship of the Pegu Blog, who informed me that he found "How to Get a Million Hits" inspirational. Doug wanted to pass along the news that, just as political bloggers are encroaching on the Old Media's turf, so it is that booze-bloggers are exposing booze bias among the snobs:

Unless you spend a lot of time in wine chat rooms, you may have missed the recent controversies involving critic Robert Parker. The short version: Parker's publication, the Wine Advocate, was found to be violating its own strictures against freebies and fraternizing with wine importers, and a contributor he hired gave a high rating to a wine based on a sample that seemed to bear little resemblance to what was available on retail shelves. The back-to-back scandals . . . came to light via several wine Web sites, including Parker's own online discussion board. The Internet angle is actually the most significant aspect of this story, for it underscores how profoundly technology is changing the relationship between wine critics and consumers -- the relationship between you and me.

Personally, I avoid wine just like I avoid whiskey (ever since Jack Daniel and I had a bad night at Ralph and Millie's Christmas party a few years ago). Above all, however, I avoid snobbery.

Beer snobs get on my nerves. It pains me to see these poseurs pestering a bartender in quest of some obscure imported premium ale -- dark as sin, with the flavor and texture of a peat bog -- just so their friends won't see them drinking a Bud.

The Internet revolutionizes everything it touches, from poker to politics to porn. The 'Net has also apparently revolutionized snobbery, enabling status-seekers to go online and find highfalutin stuff with which to impress their peers -- including pricey call girls. But a whore is a whore is a whore, and a beer is a beer is a beer, and all these Veblenian status-displays don't change the basic facts.

Fortunately, Doug Winship appears to strive against such bibulous pretensiousness, although he hasn't gotten down in the gutter with Valu-Rite vodka, the favorite swill of hobo-killers.

You've got to admire the populism of a guy who writes about drinking at Disney World. No cork-sniffing epicurean would admit such a thing, lest he be shunned by sommeliers.

Good luck with that, Dr. Jones

“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?"
-- Dr. Phil Jones, trying to explain the "hide the decline" e-mail in the massive scandal now known as ClimateGate

Thanks to Ace of Spades for catching that. Y'know, it's the darned irony that makes me smile about this.

It would seem that Dr. Jones is claiming that he's been smeared on the basis of somebody else's writing taken out of context. Terrible when things like that happen . . . right, Stogie?

You'll pay for this, Jules Crittenden!

In writing about Andrew Sullivan, the city editor of a Boston newspaper manages to use two painfully suggestive terms, "bottomless" and "cavernous." I'm billing him for two cases of industrial-strength brain bleach.

Meanwhile, I previously overlooked the latest not-to-be-missed Ace beatdown on Sully's latest excursion to insanity. And Michelle Malkin is moved to mercy:

Perhaps the publisher and editors of the august Atlantic magazine should consider giving the man an extended sick leave.
Or at least some Zyprexa.

About three bottles of Zyprexa ought to do the trick, if washed down with enough whiskey. Mercy.