Rush to Irrelevancy?

The CD changer in the Zed Drei's trunk crapped out years ago, and the cassette player in the head unit followed it shortly thereafter.

There's so much wind noise at highway speeds that getting a new stereo hasn't been high on my priority list, anyway.

Therefore I listen to the radio, and that means I just keep it tuned to NPR. It's not a good audio environment for music, so that means talk radio.I suppose I could listen to right-wing talk radio, but I prefer to be lied to polysyllabically.

Driving cross country is like island-hopping from NPR island to NPR island with little zones of country music and radio preachers in the interstices. Usually.

However, once past Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I couldn't find a good NPR signal until I was almost on the outskirts of New Orleans. On the way down to Tac-Con, I got preached at across Mississippi, but on the way back, I decided to listen to Rush Limbaugh.

I swear to God, from Hattiesburg to the Alabama state line, that dude did nothing but bitch about Millennials. Is this a new conservative thing? Because declaring your movement off limits to an entire generation is, well...it makes poor Rush sound ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray, if you know what I mean.
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Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

As you may recollect, NPR had a fair and balanced debate between the Anti-Gun and Even-Antier-Gun sides the other day, in regards to McCarthy's shrill magazine ban bill.

As it turns out, prior to the show, a blogger of my acquaintance received the following email:

From: Matthew Baskin mdbaskin@gmail.com
To: XXXX
Sent: Fri, January 14, 2011 1:32:22 PM
Subject: NPR show On Point needing progressive gun guest

Hi Mr. Blogger,

My name is Matthew Baskin and I work for the NPR program On Point with Tom Ashbrook. I’m writing to ask if you’d be able to speak as a guest on Monday, January 17. We’re looking for a gun owner and 2nd Amendment supporter who is not opposed to the forthcoming McCarthy bill re: limiting magazine capacity. I’d be very grateful if you could put me in touch with any gun owner who is not opposed to regulation. Let me know if anyone comes to mind. Thanks very much.

Best,
Matthew Baskin

Which just goes to point out the Totally Unbiased nature of the debate.

Imagine the howls if the email had read "We’re looking for a civil-rights activist and 14th Amendment supporter who is not opposed to keeping the black man down just a little bit..."

Remember: Your tax dollars fund NPR. Be sure and let your elected congressthings know how happy that makes you...

It's the economy, stupid.

Scott Brown wins, Air America goes Tango Uniform... My gloating muscles are getting sore.

Air America cites declining ad revenues as one of their woes. Really, I couldn't see any reason to listen to that stuff when you can get the same dreck, commercial-free, on NPR. And I'm already paying for NPR, so I might as well use it, if for nothing else than to keep track of the enemy's mood.

Meanwhile, in other economic news, Obama opens his mouth and stocks slide another two hundred points. They've been in there a year now; you think they'd have noticed that little synergistic effect and convinced Barry to keep his piehole shut for the sake of the DJIA.

Neon lights, Nobel Prize...

It's been pretty much all-Messiah, all the time on the TeeWee and NPR all weekend.

Saturday after the fun show, Shootin' Buddy and I went to the Sushi Bar on Broad Ripple Ave, and the whole time I was eating lunch, the television over the bar was tuned to CNN, which was alternating between shots of the president and first lady making googly eyes at each other while painting a bookshelf on the "National Day of Service", montages of Michelle's hairdos, and a bunch of anchors sitting in folding chairs on a lawn in DC where, presumably, the anointed one would be re-anointed in 48 hours... no, 47 hours and 59 minutes... 58 minutes...

NPR had an hour-long talk show about Michelle's inaugural ball gown Friday and NBC had a fifteen-minute spot on the First Portuguese Water Dog yesterday.

Funny, I don't remember all this hooraw in January of '05...

Heck, by comparison, the media only kinda-sorta liked Clinton a little bit. They've got a boner for this guy and everything associated with him like he was JFK risen from the grave...

Data may be skewed...

So I was monitoring enemy radio transmissions in the car the other day, and they had a financial program on the radio. Listening to collectivists discuss business is usually amusing, so I turned it up so as not to miss the good parts.

They were chattering about how the government had given all this free money to bail out the big banks and then the big banks weren't loaning it out to small businesses. To prove this, they had opened a discussion on their Facebook page, asking small business owners (or prospective small business owners, I suppose) if they were having difficulty getting loans.

You gotta wonder what kind of small business owners will be commenting on an NPR program's Facebook page...

"Uh, yeah, my name's Joe Wilson, and I have a store called 'Tees For The People' that specializes in organically-grown Fair Trade hemp T-shirts with ironic slogans for riders of fixie bikes, and I couldn't get approved for a loan..."

or

"This is Tiffani from Racine, and even though I had a business plan and everything for my combination used book store and feral cat spay & neuter clinic..."

There's nothing like a couple hours of NPR to remind one of that classic Thomas Sowell quote: "Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from."

Pravda means Truth.

I'm going to fink on Shootin' Buddy: He listens to NPR in his truck a lot. Which means that, when I'm in his truck, I listen to the news from The Land Through The Looking Glass, too.

It's sort of like an auditory version of HuffPo, for those of you who don't indulge. The news is interspersed with entertainment programs where liberals will sit around and feel better than other people, which is apparently a big source of comedy for collectivists; I guess because it feels risque after a hard week of struggling for social justice with other people's money. And then there's this one where some deadly dull guy from frickin' Minnesota comes on and tells stories about paint drying and grass growing, which triggers laughter in the studio audience, for some reason, I guess because they all secretly wish they were in New York.

Anyway, back to the news on NPR: Thanks to a commenter in this post, I was led to this editorial in the Lincoln JournalStar, which seems to be decrying a certain even more TASS-like turn at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Your tax dollars at work, comrades!

The worst thing...

...about being mired in the middle of the Great American Kulturkampf of This Current Year, and having friends across all points of the political spectrum, is that everyone... and I do mean everyone ...feels free to walk up and dump their current political gripe right in your lap.

"Oh, my God! Can you believe what that [harpy/moron], [Pelosi/Trump] just did? [She/He] wants to [raise your taxes to 100% to send crackheads to college/kill all the brown people]!"

Because surely every right-thinking person is as worked into a total lather over this issue as they are.

Look, if you can't even talk about politics without sounding even more distraught than [Alex Jones/the average NPR call-in listener], it's time for a complete news fast. I prescribe three weeks without FaceTwitter, talk radio (either AM or NPR flavored), and TV news.

Unclench. The world won't stop spinning while you're gone.
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Everybody else is doing it...

Since I've seen this in various places on my daily rounds, I figured I'd play, too. (The list, for the two of you that didn't know, is the "100 Best SF/Fantasy Books" based on a poll of NPR listeners. The meme that's going about its to bold the ones you've read.)

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King (Only the first two.)
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

It's obvious that this was a poll of NPR listeners. I mean, The Handmaid's Tale? Really? (And was The Road actually SF or Fantasy?)

Same planet, different worlds...

From the alternate universe where Spock has a beard (also known as the comments section of an article at npr.org):

- Here's the thing: Americans have got to make up their minds. Either they want to follow the model of the modern Western world, which is Leftist or they want to return to the short brutish lives under Rightwing regimes.

We've chosen to dismantle our democracy, and we are removing the last of our social safety nets. The Koch brothers have actually started challenging bike paths and parks in courts all over the country, and, in many areas, they are buying up public parks for pennies, as we transfer all of our public domain to corporate hands.

When Americans chose to embrace old pre-Enlightenment forms of govt over our democracy, it left us to pay the price of the stability of those Rightwing govts. Our life expectancies will fall, and, typically, people will have no real value beyond the age of 30-35. So, dying early and being replaced by the next poor generation (like kleenex) will be the natural course of things.

Left and Right are opposites. The policies of one destroys the other. They're incompatible.

Wow. Just wow. I wonder what color the sky is in that world?

I read her words and I am not sure that there can be peace between our weltanschauungen. This runs into a comment I left at Joel's place regarding that "government is the only thing we all belong to" sound bite that the more disingenuous on the right have been making hay with, despite the word "belong" being used in the sense of "I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church":

These people do not have the worldview that you and I do. The government, to them, is not a separate entity, but rather is composed of all of us enfranchised citizens. Remember: They’re down there in Charlotte engaging in a veritable orgy of democracy, proving to themselves that we all belong to this wonderful organization called the American Government, which is made up of We The People, and that ‘the system works’.

It is hard to reach a compromise with someone when, not only do you not share a worldview, but you in fact use the same words to mean completely different concepts. Where does one hire an English-to-English cislator?

Ducking Autocucumber

Predictive text on my various iThingies is really quite good at analyzing my frequently-used phrases. 

For instance, on Facebook I can type "Still waiting on that eyeroll react, Zuck" entirely using predictive text just by typing "Sti".

On the other hand, while I have never in my life typed "ducking shirt" intentionally, autocorrect would have me doing it twice a day if not manually overridden.

Supposedly, though, the latest updates to Autocucumber are going to fix that.

"In 2014, Naomi Campbell congratulated “malaria” on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. (She might have meant “Malala.”) According to Wired, employees at Goldman Sachs were upset that Microsoft Word corrected their company’s name to incorporate a profanity. The phrase “autocorrect made me do it” has become a way of explaining away embarrassing substitutions such as “sex” instead of “sec.”

Jillian Madison, who curated a website of autocorrect blunders, released the book “Damn You, Autocorrect!” in 2011. “If you say, you know, ‘I’m going to run and pick up the kids,’ it often turns into, ‘I’m going to run and pick up the LSD,’” she told NPR."

"What time is it, boys and girls?"

"It's machine guns and great big explosions time!"

That's right, it's Knob Creek time this weekend. I'll be headed south today with Shootin' Buddy so as to hopefully take in the Patton Museum at Fort Knox again (and this time not forgetting my camera,) before going to the shoot proper tomorrow.

While I'm at the gun show there, I'm hoping to find

...a rapid-fire variant of lower part of the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a type of firepower component that was outlawed in America for a decade before then-President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress allowed the assault-weapon ban to expire in 2004.

...because that would be awesome. Hopefully it'll include the shoulder thing that goes up.

Then I'll mutter and seethe in inchoate rage, as I hear and pass along strange, racist conspiracy theories about socioeconomic factors that are far over my little peasant head, what with its prognathous jaw and hint of an occipital bun... Or at least that's what Will Bunch would have you believe I'll be doing there.

Shootin' Buddy likes to refer to Sunday's NPR entertainment as "liberals sitting around and feeling better than you," and that's the exact same vibe that comes out in the writings of Bunch, a guy who writes about the hinterlands west of the outer suburbs of Philly (and their inhabitants) with the same mixture of patronizing pity and repressed loathing that characterized the journals of Victorian Brits roaming the backwaters of the Zambezi. Want another sample?

And on that human level, the common denominator I found time and time again was fear -- whether it was folks whose jobs vanished when they were in their late 40s and early 50s who turned to Glenn Beck or a group like the Oath Keepers to figure out who to blame, or people seeking an outlet for their "discomfort" over a rapidly changing America that had so suddenly placed a black man with an unorthodox life story in the Oval Office. But in a group setting, raw fear can get masked by bravado crossing the line into hate.

I half expect him to tell his readers that they need to help these poor befuddled haters, that they need to Take Up The... er, White Man's Burden, as it were.

The Normie Take

If you don't own a red MAGA baseball cap or a "Let's Go Brandon" bumper sticker, but also aren't some raving Bernie Sanders voter who brings your tofu sandwich lunch to work in an NPR tote bag, Ben Dreyfuss's take here is pretty much how things look:

I live in a small town. I drive by the same five police cars every day. If I constantly played “Fuck The Police” as loud as possible and flipped them off as I drove by, if I were ever pulled over for speeding, I would not expect them to let me off with a warning.

Trump, more than any politician in my lifetime, chose a political strategy that involved him antagonizing half this country. From day one, he “owned the libs.” He made himself the main character in our culture. And he won a personality cult on the right that loves him. But, he earned the intense disdain of the other half of the country.

There are lots of reasons why I think that was bad for this country and the world, but one reason you shouldn’t do it out of self-interest is that a lot of people are going to be rooting for your downfall. And they are going to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And if you are a criminal who has broken/does break the law, your chances of getting away with it are going to drop precipitously.

If you have a person bound and gagged in your trunk, you probably shouldn’t speed.

So many people in Trump’s orbit were convicted of various low-rent crimes over the last decade, and none of that would have happened if Trump hadn’t won in 2016. They would have gotten away with all of their fraud and bribery schemes. They had gotten away with them. Then they decided to loudly associate themselves with a hugely divisive person who antagonized so many people that the world gave them a closer look.

That’s what happens in life! It’s just a fact of human nature. It’s how attention works. Of course, that now applies to Trump. And it applies to his enemies, too.

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Al-Qaeda HR Dept.: "Knock it off with the EEOC compliance!"

"To prevent future acts of jihad from being misinterpreted as hate crimes, all affiliates, associates, and franchisees of The Base are asked to focus their mass casualty attacks and other acts of jihad on majority Anglo Saxon targets, preferably heterosexual ones."

So, I guess stay alert at the State Fair this year? Probably want to keep on your toes at any NPR-sponsored events, too.

That's got to be frustrating for Johnny Jihad: You tell everybody why you're doing something and they just condescendingly pat you on your little brown head and patronizingly inform you why you're really doing it. I thought Progressives were opposed to silencing the narratives of oppressed minorities and all about the self-identification? I guess it's okay to self-identify as anything but an Islamic terrorist.
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We aren't the world.

Let's get a couple of things straight, here:

1) I don't currently have a single dream that the entire nation of Ghana could crush, even if they all tried at once.

2) I have never had a dream related in any way to soccer.

There have always been Americans that loved them some soccer, and that's fine. It's still mostly a free country, and if you want to get all interested in curling or cricket or bocce ball or whatever, then get down with your bad self.

But as far back as the Carter years, when I was in elementary school, a certain political overtone crept into the whole soccer thing. Soccer gradually became more than a game; it became, in certain circles, a badge of something; a sign that one was trying to separate one's self from the dull proletarian American herd and show one's almost... almost... European sophistication by embracing this pastime.

Mariatheproblem comments in an excellent post:

The soccer scolds don’t understand that American football is something that grew up organically, out of a specific culture, at a specific time and place. That doesn’t make it either superior or inferior to soccer, it just makes it our game. Those hundred-year-old chants and ancient rivalries serve the same purpose as all other cultural traditions: they build valuable social capital.

Or maybe the soccer scolds do understand. Maybe it’s just one other aspect of the Kulturkampf attack on American exceptionalism. No wonder NPR has taken up the desparate cry that football must be replaced by soccer.

Personally, I'm not as much of a football fan as Maria; with me, it's baseball. But before the soccer scolds try to come for my baseball, they'd do well to be reminded that it's played with a handy ash wood club.


(H/T to Dustbury.)

Overheard on I-70 Eastbound...

Driving toward Dayton this afternoon, I gradually hove out of sight of the shoreline of Indianapolis's NPR broadcast island and hadn't gotten within reach of Dayton's. Rather than wade through the assortment of unknown classic rock, country, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows-type religious stations out in eastern Indiana, I tried to power up the Bluetooth speakers I have for listening to podcasts on my phone as an interim solution until I replace the Zed Drei's head unit.

Unfortunately, the battery in the speakers was flatter than the soybean fields I was droning past, and so I just turned the audio off to leave myself listening to the thoughts in my head and the wind noise in the convertible top...

...jerking my head upright from what was certainly only a blink's worth of sleep, my eyes flew open and I shouted "The SMERSH powder is all he had on him!"

I have no idea what it means, either, and it's amazing that I got enough dream detail to yell that in what was not even enough of an eyeblink for the car to wander in its lane.

Needless to say, I was wide awake for the rest of the way to my destination.
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Idiocracy.

So, during the DNC's multi-million dollar Martin Luther King-themed campaign extravaganza in DC last week, I was listening to NPR like a good SWPL so I could feel Better Than You.

During the proceedings, they cut to a commercial for a show where they would ask some of today's high schoolers, who should get off my lawn are the future of our nation, what the March on Washington meant to them and what it would take to get them to join a modern-day iteration. I nearly drove into a tree when the following emerged from my speakers:

“I would join march if it was about this – the judgement of people. Not even about their skin, but just judging them because of the content of their character.”

What? What?  (*screeech! crash!*)

That's... that makes no damned sense at all! Of course you judge people by the content of their character! It's easy to do because their character is made manifest in their actions. Watch, it's simple:

"That lady is rescuing a kitten; I judge her to be good. That man is trying to take my wallet; I judge him to be bad. Those kids over there are pushing little old ladies into traffic; I judge them to be really bad and maybe I should stop them."

There's a difference between not being unfairly judgmental and having a complete lack of judgment, honey, and clearly you are incapable of judging the difference between the two, having mistaken the latter for the former.

On a side note, the whole Democrat-party-utterly-partisan MLK extravaganza* was especially surreal to me in that the March on Washington is exactly as far in the past today as the Armistice was from the year I was born, but you didn't see Nixon campaigning in '68 under the slogan "Vote GOP! We Beat The Kaiser!" because maybe they still taught history in schools back then.


*The nation's lone African-American senator was not invited to attend because he was from the wrong party, but a couple of cracker ex-governors of Georgia and Arkansas were, because they were from the right one. What's the difference between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter? Barry's never eaten in a segregated restaurant.

Overheard on 56th Street...

Chamber of Commerce weather today in Broad Ripple. Driving home from the grocery store with the top down...

NPR Announcer: "...and for everybody who lived through the financial crisis..."

Me: (yelling at car radio) "By which you mean all your listeners over age six!"

(Not that I think the "financial crisis" is at all over. To riff off Churchill, we've seen the end of the beginning, but we're nowhere near the beginning of the end yet. There's just been a fevered bout of kicking the can further down the road.)
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Masochism.

New Jovian Thunderbolt pressure-tests his cerebral arteries by listening to NPR on purpose.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "I was doing an image search for 'panzer acropolis'..." RX: "Panzer Acropolis... Great name for a group!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 14, 2015

Somebody or another on NPR recently casually used a throwaway line about how the Greek bailout deal negotiations were putting... I believe the phrase was "unprecedented strains" or something close ...on relations between the countries. I nearly drove into a ditch at the mind-boggling ahistoricity of such a statement.  

"Ve are chust here to see ze tourist sights, ja."

You... you... patriot, you!

So, as background emerges on Mickey and Mallory Knox, New Vegas Edition, the crowd at HuffPo has practically popped a chubby over their wookie-suiter roots. To read commentary around the net, these mopes may have held the guns, but Wayne LaPierre lined up the sights and Rand Paul pulled the trigger.

Of course this miserably fails the ideological Turing test, which is much easier for me to pass than it is for my opponents on gun issues or even general politics. They may actually skim the occasional article in American Rifleman or on PJ Media to bone up for a hit piece, but I can't help but swim in their stuff; it's so ubiquitous that you have to deliberately avoid it if you don't want to get it all over you.

I know their side of the story because I hear it all the time on NPR and NBC, in the editorial commentary disguised as neutral journalism. They, on the other hand, only know that "Those Gun People" come from "The Right", which is some kind of amorphous blob, an undifferentiated mix of Nazis and National Review, Ron Paul and Ronald Reagan, Jonah Goldberg and compound-dwelling Jew-haters, the Klan and Palin and Vanderboegh.

If you want to really get your civil war on, you gotta Other the opposition, and Team Open-Minded Non-Judgmental seems to be keepin' up with the Bob Joneses here.
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