The Triumph of Derrièrism

Last year I identified an important new school of film criticism, which I called “derrièrism,” since all schools of film criticism are supposed to have French names. Derrièrists are inspired by Jack Warner (though some say it was Harry Cohn), who once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them. Like Warner (or Cohn), a derrièrist film critic judges movies by his ass. As I wrote last year: "Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult." At the time Variety magazine hailed derrièrism as “provocative” theory and said my piece “represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films,” whose virtues I extolled in my piece. While derrièrism was once an esoteric school of film criticism championed by a few forward-thinking critics, this year it has triumphed. Not only has Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Hollywood critic behind Breitbart.com, announced that he will start a new website, Big Hollywood, which promises to be a hotbed of derrièrist film criticism, such respected film critics as Roger Ebert and the critics at Cahiers du Cinema have jumped on the derrièrist bandwagon.

Breitbart’s site will feature film reviews and criticism from some of this country’s leading derrièrist film critics, people like House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, Reps. Thaddeus McCotter, Mary Bono Mack and Connie Mack, former presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and conservative commentators Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others. According to The Hill, “If Boehner, for instance, sees a movie, ‘I’d like for him … to do a movie review,’ Breitbart says. ‘Not everything is going to be a political dissertation,’ he says. In that vein, Cantor spokesman Rob Collins says he could see his boss writing a post on the television shows his three teenage children watch and how those programs affect them.” Breitbart wants to bring back the kind of crowd-pleasing movies Hollywood used to make, which encouraged people to pay their credit card bills on time. “The movies used to reinforce good behavior — that you should pay back your loans,” he says, apparently thinking of such films as The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life and Salt of the Earth. Because Breitbart's site will not pay its writers that should encourage good behavior like thrift.

Breitbart also wants Big Hollywood to change the image of conservatives in Hollywood, where they are cruelly oppressed. “We’re not bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist monsters,” says the new blog’s editor-in-chief, John Nolte, the proprietor of Dirty Harry's Place. Nolte, who says that gay marriage “has nothing to with ‘rights’ and everything to do with hate, the tearing down of tradition, and seeking yet another excuse to attack conservatives and religion,” and who wrote after J.K. Rowling outted Dumbledore, “English and Gay is like Japan and China: you can’t really tell the difference,” is known for his trenchant film criticism. Although he has never seen such minor, really old movies as City Lights and The Passion of Joan of Arc, that hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on such important questions of film scholarship as whether Deuce Bigelow or The Searchers is the best film ever made.

While Big Hollywood should be a welcome relief from critics who think they know a lot about movies just because they have seen a lot of them, even some of the most respected film critics in the world have succumbed to derrièrism and are pulling film criticism out of their asses. Roger Ebert has seen his influence wane since he left At the Movies and was replaced by hipper, younger derrièrist critic Ben Lyons, who called I Am Legend “one of the greatest movies ever made” and named Superbad, which he just happened to have an acting role in, one of the ten best movies of last year. Then in October of this year Ebert joined the ranks of derrièrist critics with a big splash. He wrote a savage one-star review of the gay film Tru Loved after sitting through only eight minutes of it. It was only at the end of the review that he revealed he hadn’t watched the whole thing or even very much of it, so if readers got bored and decided they didn’t want to sit through Ebert’s entire review, they wouldn’t know how much of the movie he hadn't seen. Although Ebert’s editor wanted him to disclose this fact at the beginning of the review, Ebert argued that it would ruin his carefully constructed artistic prose if he did that. “I thought that would have made the review anticlimactic,” he said.

Ebert was slammed by some critics such as Margaret Nowak, who gave a derrièrist critique of Ebert’s derrièrist review: “After learning that Roger Ebert defends writing a full-column review based on an 8-minute scrap of film, I don't feel so bad about not reading movie reviews. I give a cursory glance to the score rating the movie received, and move on.” Ebert, however, was not amused: “I find it charming that Margaret Nowak was able to arrive at her scorched-earth opinion of me without reading either the review in question OR my linked blog entry that was posted simultaneously with the review on the same page.” He called her review of his review a “cheap shot.” If Nowak had just spent eight minutes reading the beginning of Ebert's review, she might have seen the error of her ways.

Unfortunately, under pressure from anti-derrièrists, Ebert eventually apologized for the review, watched the movie and wrote a new review. Derrièrist Ann Althouse was disappointed by Ebert’s capitulation to the anti-derrièrist mob, writing, “Walking out is an important form of judgment.” Althouse is one of the leading proponents of the idea that you don’t have to see or read something or really know much about it at all to criticize it, which has given hope to other aspiring critics who, like her, have the attention span of a two-year-old.

Unlike Ebert, Cahiers du Cinema had the courage of its convictions and defended its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Abandoning its support of the tired old theory of auteurism, the critics at Cahiers put together a list steeped in derrièrism, which included not a single boring Tarkovsky film or any British movies at all, relegating such tedious efforts as Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and The Red Shoes to Le ashbin de l'histoire.

But it wasn’t just snooty French critics who embraced derrièrism. Entertainment Weekly published a list of 100 “classics” of the last 25 years that included only six excrutiatingly dull foreign movies. By redefining the word classic, EW was telling us that we don’t have to bother watching dreary old movies when we can watch such new and improved “classics” as The Breakfast Club, Naked Gun, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Ghostbusters instead. Meanwhile, Premiere.com, which started out as the website for a print magazine whose articles no one ever finished, this year introduced a new and improved template for film reviews made up of what bitter former Premiere writer Glenn Kenny calls “thematic modules.” But even Kenny could not resist the derrièrist onslaught and gave this ground-breaking approach to reviewing a shot, applying it to one of the most boring films ever made, Au Hasard Balthazar:

"The Pitch: A donkey in provincial France gets passed from owner to owner until it, like, dies.
What It Really Is: Apparently, a "meditation" on life, suffering, and grace, and that kind of stuff….
Can We Be Serious For A Moment?: Seriously? What this movie really needed was for Andy Samberg as Mark Wahlberg to show up and have a nice little chat with Balthazar."

Kenny has a long way to go before he reaches the scholarly heights of one of the deans of derrièrist film critics, John Podhoretz. Podhoretz didn’t bother to see Stop-Loss, yet another anti-war-in-Iraq movie, before he reviewed it because what would be the point? “It is high time to cease the armchair analysis of those who refuse to attend war-in-Iraq movies and ask them directly to explain their behavior,” writes Podhoretz, who then moves from the armchair to the divan to begin his analysis by interviewing himself. “I'm about to turn 47. I have seen thousands of movies in my time. Life is too short to spend even two hours in a theater watching Stop-Loss. Its virtues are, I expect, that it is very well made, with vivid scenes of terrifying battles in the streets of Karbala or Falluja--and touching moments of reconciliation. There's probably a well-done scene in or just outside a Wal-Mart. Its failings are that it tells a schematic story that stacks the deck.” Podhoretz was able to figure all this out from “three trailers and a few minutes watching Showbiz Tonight.” Podhoretz also wrote an entire column extolling the virtues of watching movies on an iPod: “Say you're watching a bad or boring movie on a subway train, a movie you nonetheless want to get to the end of. A distraction or two is not a bad thing; the movie turns into a radio show for a moment as you survey the other passengers. And if a homeless guy comes through asking you to help him in the name of Jesus, you can turn right back to the iPod, confident he will pass you by.” Isn’t that what movies are for anyway, to distract you from homeless people?

Sadly, one of the great proponents of derrièrism, Libertas, went defunct this year, but not before its founder Jason Apuzzo denounced the film WALL-E, which attacked everything derrièrism stands for. “Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film,” wrote Apuzzo before he had actually seen it. In the film humanity is depicted as a bunch of dim-witted, materialistic couch potatoes, which derrièrist film critics saw as a personal attack on their lifestyles.

Patrick Goldstein said the film slandered “the American way of life.” “If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?” wrote Bill Wyman, who is no film theorist. “I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.” Shannen Coffin lamented, “From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.” And a reader of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog helpfully pointed out the film’s fascistic elements, such as the use of the color red, which was one of the colors on the Nazi flag and should never be used in a film unless accompanied by the colors white and blue.

Next year promises to be even better for derrièrism as many critics realize, like John Miller, that you don’t actually have to sit through all four hours of Ché to attack it. And who really wants to see crazy left-wing actor Sean Penn kiss a guy in Milk no matter how good his performance is supposed to be? I’m sure most critics would rather watch over and over again the oiled-up, musclebound actors of 2006's 300, a “classic” that brought back the “lost art of cinematic masculinity,” according to John Nolte, and wasn’t the least bit homoerotic no matter what left-wingers say. Why doesn’t Hollywood make classic movies like 300 anymore?

Crossposted at Newcritics

Update: The left-wing New York Times weighs in. And Roger Ebert replies: "The acid test of the ancient distributor's definition of a great picture--'a tukkus on every seat.'" Meanwhile, Josh Taylor writes "Note To Awards Givers: Ignore The Dark Knight At Your Own Peril," which may come to be known as one of the great manifestos of derrièrism: "Film critics can no longer afford to champion pet films which no one has ever seen, at the expense of what even they have to know is probably the better film. Here’s why: They’re all about to be out of a job....For print critics, a vote against The Dark Knight is a vote for your own irrelevancy. It’s a vote for the unemployment line."

Carnivals: Movie Monday Carnival, Pajama Party Flick Picks

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Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging

No matter what happens in this year’s election, the conservative blogosphere deserves to win a collective Pulitzer Prize for its election-year coverage. While the mainstream media has given Americans a very distorted picture of Barack Obama, portraying him as a thoughtful, intelligent, unflappable, decent family man who has the temperament and judgment to be President, the conservative blogosphere has been the only place where you can get the real story. Hampered by quaint, old-fashioned rules of journalism that require citing evidence and reputable sources, the mainstream media has failed to report a number of important stories about Obama and the conservative blogosphere has had to step up and do the media’s job for them. As a public service I have collected some of the most important of these stories in one place. Pulitzer Prize judges, take note!

Some of the stories below are shocking and even hard to believe, but they weren’t published on crazy, fringe websites. They appeared on some of the most distinguished and well-respected sites on the Internet. The bloggers and online journalists who published them have staked their reputations and their sacred honor on the veracity of these reports. To doubt the truth of their findings, you would have to believe that an entire segment of the blogosphere has suddenly been gripped by hysteria and gone collectively insane, which is a pretty unlikely scenario.

During Obama’s dark, mysterious years at Columbia, he was involved in domestic terrorist bombings

Although some mainstream media sources have alluded to Obama’s mysterious years at Columbia, only one intrepid reporter, Tom Maguire of Just One Minute has made the cognitive leap required to connect all of the dots. Noting that Obama admitted in his book Dreams of My Father that he was “interested in South Africa divestment,” Maguire does some digging and discovers that some protests against the 1981 tour by the South African Springboks rugby team resulted in violence and even some bombings. Guess who “was involved in some fashion” in these bombings? The Weather Underground! “These are just dots and it may be impossible to connect them,” says Maguire, modestly, “but we have Barack Obama at Columbia working on South African divestment (as were many peaceful protestors) while other radical elements with a Weather Underground flavor are setting bombs, killing cops, and working on South African divestment. As a bonus, Bill Ayers is studying at Bank Street College a quarter mile from Columbia.” Wow! How can the mainstream media possibly ignore the fact that Obama must have been “involved in some fashion” in domestic terrorism because he was “interested in South African divestment.” “Tom Maguire steps pretty far out on a limb with this bit of speculation,” says CPAC Blogger of the Year Ace of Spades, who links to the story. “But it would explain why Barack Obama's ‘lost years’ at Columbia have remained so very very secret.” It makes me wonder how my friend Tom Watson, who was at Columbia at the same time as Obama and was also “interested in South African divestment,” was connected to the Weather Underground, not to mention hundreds of other former Columbia students who today freely walk the streets despite their terrorist connections. I wonder if Tom has mentioned his radical connections in his upcoming book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, or if like Obama, he mysteriously left it out.

Obama didn’t actually write Dreams of My Father. In fact, it was ghost-written by none other than Bill Ayers!

Jack Cashill at the aptly named American Thinker found it difficult to believe that Barack Obama, who is not one of the most articulate politicians around, could possibly have written a whole book all by himself. He must have had help. Probably from someone evil. So on a hunch Cashill decided to compare Obama’s book with a book written by Bill Ayers and lo and behold, he discovered some shocking similarities, including the use of nautical imagery and the fact that a very scientific test to determine the grade level of the prose was a match. This wasn’t the first story Cashill broke. Cashill also proved that Arab terrorists and not Eric Rudolph were responsible for the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta and that the Clintons covered up the real cause of the death of Ron Brown and the downing of TWA Flight 800. Unfortunately, Cashill’s overwhelming evidence wasn’t enough to convince the mainstream media to report on his theories, but Ann Althouse, who is a tenured professor at the 36th most prestigious law school in the country according to U.S. News & World Report, took them very seriously. “Mere confirmation bias? Or is Cashill onto something?” wrote the respected professor ominously after presenting her exhaustive analysis. Former U.S. prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, who now writes for the National Review’s The Corner, wrote that while he didn’t “want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia,” after reading Cashill’s analysis he found it “thorough, thoughtful, and alarming.” Scott Johnson at Powerline called Cashill's work "interesting" and said that while "Cashill could also make the case that John Hinderaker and I qualify for recognition as Obama's secret collaborator" they didn't live in Obama's neighborhood, as Ayers did, which is in itself pretty damning. “Nautical metaphors may sink Obama,” Ace of Spades wrote hopefully. Flopping Aces saw Ayers’ ghost-writing of Obama’s book as just one part of a vast conspiracy to get a socialist elected President. “Eventually, if successful, their dreams of a Communist nation can be realized,” wrote Flopping Aces. “Sounds crazy….I know.” By the way, before Cashill hit on his theory, I noted some eerie similarities between Dreams of My Father and the Horatio Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester, which also contain nautical references and are written on a high school level, but I gave up my investigation when I realized that Forester died in 1966 and probably could not have written Obama’s book. Why didn't I think of comparing Obama’s book to Ayers’ book instead? I guess that's why I'm not one of the A-list bloggers.

Michelle Obama attacks “American white racists” in an interview with obscure online news site

I bet you probably didn’t know that Michelle Obama gave an exclusive interview to the obscure online journalism site African Press International in which she said that “American white racists” are trying to derail her husband's candidacy by claiming that Obama was adopted by his Indonesian stepfather, which would make him ineligible to be President under one of the secret, little-known provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Mrs. Obama was apparently so disturbed by these charges that she decided to call this press agency, which most people have never heard of, and vent Martha Mitchell-like, even though her words might scuttle her husband’s chances of becoming President. Although the mainstream media hasn’t yet picked up the story, and the Obama campaign denies the interview took place, Gateway Pundit, Protein Wisdom, Right Pundits, Stop the ACLU, Maggies Notebook, Death by 1000 Paperecuts, Strata-Sphere, Gina Cobb, Macsmind, News Busters, World Net Daily, Jim Treacher, Townhall and a number of other conservative blogs and news sites ran with it. Although some cynical bloggers were skeptical of the story for some reason and demanded more proof, API assured them that it had tapes of the conversations and was just waiting for the right moment to release them. Although API still hasn’t managed to work out the logistics yet, and several deadlines have already come and gone, conservative bloggers are very patient and understanding and just hope that API can work everything out before the election. “We will know soon enough,” writes Gateway Pundit. “It is amazing how the media will believe a hoax that some Republican yelled ‘kill him’ at a Palin rally with no evidence but will disregard a harsh story on Michelle Obama from the start. It's interesting how that works.” It is funny how that works, Gateway Pundit.

Obama had a girlfriend that his wife found out about and forced her to move to the Caribbean.

What would an election be without a sex scandal? If you only read the American mainstream media, you might not know that the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that Obama was “the target of a shadowy smear campaign designed to derail his bid for the US Presidency by falsely claiming he had a close friendship with an attractive African-American female employee…. The woman, now 33, vigorously denies the vicious and unsubstantiated gossip.” Unfortunately, the American mainstream media apparently has some kind of silly rules about publishing stories about unsubstantiated rumors as a way of writing about those rumors, but conservative bloggers have been all over the story like white bloggers on rice. Once again the conservative blogosphere’s most respected blogger Ace of Spades led the way. “Having now spoken to someone tracking the story, I can say: 1) It's not just a silly little rumor. 2) It will break in some form shortly,” he wrote. Ace even noticed that Obama had vacationed in the Caribbean, noting his source “hadn't even made that connection.” That’s just how Ace’s mind works, making connections that don’t even occur to peddlers of sleazy gossip.

Unfortunately, the story hasn’t broken yet in some form, except on a number of prominent conservative blogs. Jammie Wearing Fool presented a very credible case for why the story might be true, writing, “If you're Obama and you're married to the modern-day incarnation of Aunt Esther, you've got to figure the temptation to get your thang on must be pretty strong.” Say Anything advised Obama to “disclose this woman’s pay records, her travel records and her job history as it relates to working for his Senate staff and/or campaign.” Stop the ACLU cautioned, “Just remember…this is only a rumor until the media get off their behinds and actually investigate this,” but that didn’t stop Right Voices, Protein Wisdom, Hill Buzz, Confederate Yankee, Jammie Wearing Fool, Silent Running or Black Five from discussing it. Unfortunately, these bloggers have been unable to offer any evidence that the story is true, but just because there is no evidence that something is true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

There is a tape of Michelle Obama with Louis Farrakhan talking about “whitey”

Larry Johnson of No Quarter used to be a liberal until the Democrats decided to nominate an unqualified African-American for President. In a last-ditch attempt to get Democrats to come to their senses, he revealed the existence of a secret videotape featuring Michelle Obama speaking to a group that included the wife of Louis Farrakhan and maybe even Farrakhan himself in which she confirms the most feverish nightmares of some white Americans by ranting about “whitey.” Johnson claimed that Republicans had a copy of this tape, which they were holding onto until October, when it would do the most damage. Although he didn’t actually see the tape himself, he had many friends and friends of friends who did see it. Stop the ACLU wrote, "This is all a rumor, but if you read Michelle’s college thesis on race you will find it is most likely true." Macranger reported, "Too many insiders are talking about it to outright dismiss it." Jim Geraghty of National Review's The Corner initially believed the tape existed but later grew skeptical, writing, "I note that despite my readers' hopes, this fits the pattern for rumors like this — they're always simultaneously vague but hyped to be huge, and they're always coming just around the corner." Killjoy. If Johnson is right, and there is no reason to doubt him, we should be seeing that tape any day now. But you might want to send him a note and remind him that there are only two more weeks left in October so they better release that tape quick.

Obama was not born in the United States and his birth certificate has been forged.

What would happen if we elected a President who was not born in this country and is not eligible to be President? Some of the best minds in the conservative blogosphere are doing everything they can to stop this horrifying scenario from happening before it is too late. “This is serious: Barack Obama's campaign has endorsed the accuracy of what is almost certainly a forged birth certificate for Obama,” writes Right Wing News. According to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, Doug Ross of Director Blue and Israel Insider, the birth certificate the Obama campaign released is without a doubt a forgery, which they have proven using all kinds of scientific analysis that involves anti-aliasing and kerning, which makes my head spin but looks really convincing. Tiger Hawk was really concerned about this: “I do not think that it would be good for anybody, including Republicans, if it turned out that Barack Obama was not 'natural born' under the law. What a mess that would be for the whole country.” And Andrew McCarthy of the National Review’s The Corner also wanted answers, adding, in case anyone had any doubt, “I am not a conspiracy theorist.” (Update: What is the real reason for Obama's trip to Hawaii?)

So if Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, where was he born? Prestigious conservative news organization World Net Daily reports, “Pennsylvania Democrat Philip J. Berg, who filed a lawsuit demanding Sen. Barack Obama present proof of his American citizenship, now says that by failing to respond Obama has legally ‘admitted’ to the lawsuit's accusations, including the charge that the Democratic candidate was born in Mombosa [sic], Kenya.” Berg claims he spoke to Obama’s grandmother and she said she was in the delivery room when he was born in a hospital in Mombassa. Although Philip Berg once filed a RICO lawsuit against Bush and others blaming them for the events of 9/11, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong now. (Update: Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs has determined that not only was Obama not born in Hawaii, his father is actually Malcolm X!)

As if being Kenyan weren’t bad enough, John Ray at Stop the ACLU reports that Obama is also Indonesian according to another birth certificate and that he traveled to Pakistan in 1981 on an Indonesian passport where he no doubt met with members of Al Qaeda. “I suspect that Obama may have dumped his Indonesian citizenship at some point along the way, to advance his political career,” writes Ray of the wily, ambitious politician. “But I would not be shocked if he still holds it. This question, however, should not overshadow the serious problem of hiding his Indonesian identity from the electorate….. What else is he hiding?” Despite so much evidence that Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, some conservative bloggers have been as dismissive of this story as the mainstream media. “Let’s stop chasing absurd conspiracy theories that make it more difficult to win the real arguments in this election,” Ed Morrissey of Hot Air wrote, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who is the Father of Konservative Kerning Analysis has banned mention of the birth certificate story on his site and AJ Strata of Strata-Sphere did his own scientific analysis to disprove it. Who got to them, I wonder?

Barack Obama had an underage, gay “affair” with a pedophile.

When the National Enquirer reported that one of Obama’s childhood mentors wrote a semi-autobiographical book that includes passages about sex with an underage girl, the conservative blogosphere collectively made the next logical leap that even the Enquirer was too skittish to make: Obama must have had sex with this man when he was nine years old. “The National Enquirer now suggests Barack Obama had an underage, gay affair with a pedophile,” wrote Erick Erickson of Red State. “Yup. That Frank Marshall Davis guy Barry says was his good friend? Turns out he was a perv of the first order and liked young boys." In case anyone should make unfair accusations against him, Erickson added, "This post is not intended to spread that rumor.” Indeed, that post was only intended as a public service to pass on information that was right there between the lines of the Enquirer story for all to see. “That may be worse than his having been counseled by Jeremiah Wright,” wrote Dan Riehl. “No wonder he says "Pakit-stan" in that funny way of his! heh!” Confederate Yankee wondered why this very important story was being buried by the mainstream media, explaining, “Barack Obama's list of known mentors now includes child rapists ('Uncle Frank' Marshall), racists (Rev. Jeremiah Wright) and terrorists (Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn). When is someone going to question how these associations must have warped Obama's views and render him unstable, and unsuitable for the Presidency?” Jules Crittenden, who called the story an “October Surprise,” dismissed Obama’s being “mentored by a suspected commie pervert in underage late-night drinking/dirty limerick slams” as a “youthful indiscretion,” but added, “with the subsequent adult pattern … 20 years in the pews of a frothing America-bashing bigot and the professional palling around with an unrepentant ex-terrorist … you begin to see what they mean when with that ‘doesn’t look like us’ line. Turns out it’s not a racial cue at all.” Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom also reported on the story, but as usual, I have no idea what he was trying to say. “No doubt Obama will claim this as a desperate smear by the forces of evil who are afraid of change,” said Jammie Wearing Fool, with that delightful sarcasm he uses when not smearing people.

You might think that the fact that Obama was palling around with pedophiles when he was nine years old, which is the exact same time that William Ayers was blowing up the Pentagon, would be an important story, but once again the mainstream media ignored it. Conservative blogger Don Surber also demurred, writing, “Some bloggers are calling this an October surprise. I call it stupidity” and predictably liberal bloggers proceeded to shoot the messengers. “When people discuss (possible) sexual contact between ten-year-old boys who are not their political enemies and grown men, they usually refer to the 'underage gay affairs' as sexual abuse,” wrote Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings. “They also recognize that adults who have been abused may or may not wish to tell the whole world the details, and they respect it. Admittedly, most people are not members of the NAMBLA wing of the Republican Party, or, failing that, curdled into pure meanness. Maybe Erickson just holds with the more sweeping theories about the cultural construction of the age of consent. Whatever the reason, he’s sure that that little vixen, ten-year-old Barry Obama, was asking for it man.”

Obama had cocaine-fueled gay sex in the back of a limousine with a not-very-attractive disabled man with a criminal background

While the mainstream media requires their sources practically to be saints before they will even think of publishing sensational allegations, the prestigious World Net Daily is under no such constraints. It reported on Larry Sinclair’s allegations that he did cocaine and had sex with Barack Obama in the back of a limousine without making him jump through all the hoops a mainstream media organization or even the National Enquirer would have required. Although some people didn't find Larry Sinclair's story credible considering his criminal record and the fact that he failed a lie detector test, WND decided to publish the allegations and let the people decide. Although many in the conservative blogoshpere also doubted Sinclair’s veracity, some, like Rusty Shackleford at Jawa Report, decided the gloves were off after the National Enquirer ran a salacious report on Sarah Palin, and reluctantly decided to link to the story anyway, because, as he explains, “this kind of slime is now in play.” Mick Stockinger at Uncorrelated agreed that “it’s only fair” to bring it up and Rude News called it “tit for tat.” That oughta teach the National Enquirer.

Obama was getting answers in the first debate through a clear plastic hearing aid in his ear

Ann Althouse has a unique ability to see things that no one else sees, not unlike my Aunt Agatha, until she was sent away to a rest home and forced to take medication that took away her abilities. During the primaries, Althouse discovered that a Hillary Clinton ad included the subliminal message “Nig” written on a child's pajamas. Then during the debates, Althouse noticed on her high definition television that Obama was wearing a clear plastic hearing aid in his ear and noted that he spoke haltingly as if someone was giving him the answers in the debate. “It's clearly there, a crescent of clear plastic,” she said in response to some skeptical comments (note her use of the word "crescent," a clever reference to Obama's secret Muslim heritage). Although Althouse later backed away from the story, which Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit linked to, she didn’t repudiate it entirely, concluding in the comments, "You know, just because the thing I saw wasn't there doesn't mean there wasn't something there that I didn't see." I don’t know if this is an acceptable standard of evidence in courts of law since I am not a law professor like Ms. Althouse, but it has come to be the standard of evidence in the conservative blogosphere, and I don’t see why the fuddy-duddy mainstream media can’t adopt this way of thinking, too.

Ace of Spades’ Super-Secret Unified Field Story That Connects All the Dots

For weeks Ace of Spades has been working on a super-secret story about Obama, which "called Obama a straight-up liar on his supposed 'flimsy' relationship with The Terrorist William Ayers" and finally connected all the dots, linking Obama and Bill Ayers, Acorn, Tony Reszko, Charles Manson, the Chicago mob, the Illuminati, Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, Nazis living in South America, Fidel Castro, the KGB, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, Area 51, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Bermuda Triangle, Mrs. Calabash and Mr. Gorsky. Apparently, Ben Smith at Politico, had the story, too, according to Ace and Hill Buzz, and he was just sitting on it (though Smith denied it). Then just as Ace was on the verge of breaking the story, he made this heart-breaking announcement: “The source was considering dropping his demand for anonymity. Thus likely moving the story forward. (He wasn't considering going forward with the Politico, by the way: but with the other, more important organization.) And now, today? After witnessing Politico, among others, savage Joe Wurtzelbacher? Cold feet.” Curse you, mainstream media and your accursed fact-checking! Will your cover-up of the truth about Barack Obama never end!

Update: Ms. Althouse is not happy about New Yorker writer George Packer's post about this modest post and calls me terrible names in her comments. See more about her disappointing reaction here.

Update 2: Ms. Althouse now cites her hearing aid exclusive as her worst post of 2008.

Carnivals: Bobo Carnival of Politics, Carnival of the Insanities, Fuelmyblog Carnival, Carnival of Aloha, Carnival of Conservatism, Scribes Carnival

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In Defense of Angry Mobs

This week pundits were all in a tizzy about the angry mobs showing up at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies. “Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November,” fretted former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for a man who may well be the next president of the United States, incidentally the first African-American president?” David Gergen warned, “There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence.” Andrew Sullivan intoned ominously, “This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire.” And there are signs that John McCain is now looking on the passion he has stirred up the way Frankenstein looked on his monster. But I’d like to know, What’s so bad about angry mobs? After all, angry mobs made our country -- and the Republican Party -- what it is today.

This country wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an angry mob that decided it wanted a tax cut and threw English tea into Boston Harbor. Angry mobs once enforced local justice without interference from the meddlesome federal government in the Old West and in the south after Reconstruction, just as our Founding Fathers had envisioned in The Federalist Papers. And we would probably all be Muslims now if an angry mob hadn’t chosen Barabbas over Jesus 2,000 years ago.

The Republican Party certainly owes a lot to angry mobs. Angry mobs in Little Rock and Selma deeply concerned about the issue of state’s rights, angry mobs of parents in Boston who didn’t want their kids bussed across town and angry mobs of Chicago homeowners who didn’t want their property values to go down all helped give birth to the modern conservative movement. The Democrats had angry mobs of their own rioting in the cities and burning flags at antiwar protests and conservatives realized that the only way we would win is if we had better, angrier mobs. What was Nixon’s Silent Majority but a very quiet, very angry mob?

But some conservative “intellectuals” like David Brooks subscribe to the canard that the conservative movement was defined by pointy-headed eastern elites like William Buckley, whose “entire life,” Brooks recently wrote, “was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect. Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines, they disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.” Now Brooks laments, “What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.” Brooks even goes so far as to claim that conservatives once valued “constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking.” We did? Since when? Does he honestly believe that the conservative movement was based on people who read books? Reagan wasn’t elected by the Harvard faculty. It was an angry mob tired of welfare queens and pinko fellow travelers selling us out to the Soviet Union that put him in office. And when Al Gore tried to steal the election in Florida in 2000 it took an angry mob of bussed in Young Republicans to remind Americans that you don’t get to be President just because you have the most votes. That’s not how democracies work.

So when people like David Brooks and David Gergen act like scared little rabbits over a good old American red-blooded angry mob, I wonder, where have you been all these years? How do you think Nixon, Reagan and Bush got elected?

Some conservative “thinkers” now act shocked when angry conservative mobs don’t bow down to their precious ivory tower thoughts. When Kathleen Parker treasonously wrote that Sarah Palin should quit the ticket, they responded with justifiable outrage, sending her 12,000 emails calling her a traitor and an idiot and saying she should have been aborted. But suddenly Parker no longer wants to have a frank dialogue with her readers. “When we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk,” she writes self-righteously, acting as if the scales just fell from her eyes. Is this the same Kathleen Parker who excoriated Scott McLellan for being disloyal to President Bush just to sell his book? Is this the same Kathleen Parker who defended a man who pointed out that Barack Obama is not a “full-blooded American” by saying, “Some Americans do feel antipathy toward ‘people who aren't like them,’ but that antipathy isn't about racial or ethnic differences. It is not necessary to repair antipathy appropriately directed toward people who disregard the laws of the land and who dismiss the struggles that resulted in their creation. Full-blooded Americans get this.” I’m sorry, Kathleen Parker, but you are just not like us.

And whether Ms. Parker likes it or not, how else to characterize the endorsement of Barack Obama by William Buckley’s son Christopher Buckley as anything but a betrayal? Buckley was too much of a coward to make his endorsement in his father’s magazine. He made it on The Daily Beast because he said he didn’t want to receive “foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails” from National Review readers. Why is Buckley turning his back on those who have kept the magazine in business all these years? If National Review cut all of its foaming-at-the-mouth readers from its subscriber rolls who would be left to read the magazine? Now, suddenly, Buckley thinks foaming at the mouth is a bad thing?

Sure, angry mobs can get a little rambunctious and overenthusiastic at times. Some members of the angry mobs that have been attending McCain/Palin rallies (otherwise known as “the Republican base”) got a tad carried away when they reacted to hearing Obama’s name by screaming “Kill him” and “Off with his head.” But it’s easy to go overboard in the heat of the moment. Who wouldn’t be furious at the prospect of a terrorist who went to Pakistan on an Indonesian passport, where he probably had secret meetings with Osama Bin Laden, the Weather Underground and the Illuminati, getting elected President? Can you blame them?

At first it looked like John McCain and Sarah Palin were not only prepared to ride this angry mob to victory but were even willing to egg them on a little. But yesterday it seemed McCain suddenly got cold feet. On Friday he rebuffed a woman at one of his rallies who said that Obama was an “Arab,” telling her, “No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab].” He told another man that he didn’t have to be “scared” if Obama is elected President. Now you tell us. Don’t you want to win this election?

I don’t know why McCain now seems to be turning his back on his base, which never trusted him anyway. Maybe it was the memory of the angry Vietnamese mob that pulled McCain out of his plane when it went down in Hanoi and nearly beat him to death that gave him second thoughts. But now is not the time for McCain to suddenly find his moral scruples. Pandering to the eastern elites won’t get McCain elected. If McCain wants to win, he’s going to have to put aside whatever principles he is still clinging to and embrace the angry mob the way Ronald Reagan and George Bush did before him. Because if he loses there is no telling what this angry mob will do next. There could be rioting in the streets or worse. So let’s hope for all of our sakes that McCain has the stomach to win this election.

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