Things Fall Apart: Rob Ford's Continuing Crack-Up

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The University of Toronto's Department of Lifestyle Studies

A couple of weeks ago, in a review of Django Unchained, I said that " people who see politics in everything should probably be buried alive." Not only is that the truest thing I've ever written, it might be the truest thing written by anyone, ever!

You know what you should see politics in? Politics. Pretty much everything else should be apolitical. Modern politics is little more than an exercise in being deliberately dishonest or honestly idiotic. Watch cable news for an hour. Then watch an hour of cartoons. If you have a difficult time deciding which had more intellectual content, you aren't alone.

Look, I don't give a fuck about what Bono thinks about the issues, and I wish that he'd stop telling me. The only thing I want to know about him is whether or not he can put out another album as cool as Achtung Baby, and I'm pretty sure that he can't. Everybody knows what Ted Nugent thinks, but it's been at least thirty years since he's accomplished anything other than receive second-billing to a goddamned puppet show, so who gives a shit?

The very last thing that should be political is fucking, and there's no shortage of asexual political misfits on both sides insisting otherwise. An entire field of sexual politics has been defined by a group of people who nobody in their right mind would want to fuck in the first place. Ideally, politics involves great thought and deliberation, and the best sex usually happens when thinking ceases entirely. Whether they're on the left or the right, people who insist on combing sex and politics universally suck at both.

So it goes without saying that the Outrage Machine is going to go into overdrive about this story.

It’s being billed online as an epic student sex club adventure — and in other corners of the web, a student orgy.

The University of Toronto Sexual Education Centre (SEC) is kicking off its annual Sexual Awareness Week next Monday at Oasis Aqua Lounge, a downtown club that bills itself as a water-themed adult playground, where swingers are welcome and sex is allowed everywhere but the hot tub.

“U of T is holding an orgy, and you’re invited! You just need your student ID” one Reddit user posted in a University of Waterloo forum.

But not so fast!

“Our executive director made it very clear that this is not an orgy, we’re not funding an orgy,” says external education and outreach co-ordinator Dylan Tower, 22, as he sits inside the sixth-floor office of SEC. “People are allowed to have sex on premise … there is not any type of ‘You should be having sex when you’re here.’ It’s very much, come and enjoy the space, there’s no prodding or pushing in that direction.”

There are names for people who show up at orgies and don't fuck. "Perverts." And do you have any idea what it takes to be labelled a pervert at an orgy? You really, really don't want to know, but the process of finding out can be even more fun than you'd suspect.

 SEC has rented a downtown Toronto fuck club (because such things are legal in Canada), Oasis Aqualongue, out for the event.

Of course, if you're overly political, this is going to twist your titty in big, bad way. Shithead social conservatives are going to look for some idiotic "culture war" angle, and victimhood junkie liberals are going be in a desperate search for victims, if only because they need something to do between SlutWalks.

As you might expect, I have other concerns.

The group’s mission is to foster a sex-positive attitude in the greater U of T area, by offering information, programming, safer-sex supplies, and peer counselling in a welcoming environment. Their sexual awareness week includes a discussion on sex positivity, an interactive sex toy demonstration and an afternoon of pornography. The first event is the party at Oasis: the organization rented the club and lowered the price to $5 a person. (Admission for couples is normally $80.)

Tower said it is a safe and cheaper way to introduce curious students to the sex club scene in Toronto. The group plans to provide a “myriad of safer-sex supplies” so “everyone can be as safe as possible” and volunteers will circulate to “make sure everyone is respectful and having the best experience Oasis has to offer,” he posted online, addressing concerns.

We're all probably a lot better off if we don't discuss how I know how fuck clubs work, but there's one thing I need to share with you. If you have larger than average genitals, do not under any circumstances rely on their condoms. They only supply them in the "regular" (or as I like to call them, "pre-teen" size.) As you might might imagine, no good can come of that.

Actually, maybe not. If you really want to impress a group of potential paramours, try on one of the establishment's scumbags and watch the ladies' eyes widen in amazement when you snap it in half. Don't ask me how I know that'll happen, just know that I do. Your WonderWang will immediately become quite the conversation piece. There are few things as flattering as having your heroic girth becoming the talk of the town.

I'm also wary of any public sexual event that allows college -aged men to participate. I've discussed this with dozens and dozens of women over the years, and they are of the universal opinion that guys under 30 just don't know how to fuck. Not only do most of these whippersnappers need training wheels under their balls, adequate cunnilingus is well beyond their skill set. I'm shocked that more sexually mature girls don't scream at them to "get off of my lawn," so to speak.

Of course, younger women are no great help because they're singular failures in telling their partners what they want and how they want it done. Oh, they'll tell all of their friends how inadequate you are, and they'll eventually tell me. They just won't help you out when you need it most.

Higher education is supposed to be about exactly that: education. And there's just no way that a 20 year old with a football scholarship and a minor in date rape can be expected to know the intricacies of a Vietnamese spin-fuck chair. No 19 year former cheerleader knows what miracles occur when she tickles a man's perineum with the tip of her tongue.



These are things that take years of experience and experimentation. I'm all for "fostering a sex positive attitude," I just think it should be done properly. And that necessarily requires the presence of mature mentors. Just as you don't let first-year chemistry students dick around with the beakers without adult supervision, the same should be doubly true of their goodies.

Folks in their late teens and early twenties think sex is pretty awesome, but they don't have a fucking clue. Just as Dan Savage teaches us, albeit in a very different context, "It gets better." And, oh, it gets so much better.

Be that as it may, the endeavour is getting kudos from the academic community, as well it should.

Jocelyn Wentland, PhD student in the Human Sexuality Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, said the centre should be commended for “not hosting another ‘happy hour’ at the campus bar and doing something unique.”

“Young people often experiment with their sexuality, and we know that many young adults’ conceptualizations of what constitutes a ‘relationship’ has changed over the years. Recognizing those changes and offering mechanisms and events for young adults to self-express their sexual attitudes in a safe environment should be encouraged,” she wrote in an email. “It’s time that we recognize that not everyone is in heterosexual, monogamous, committed long-term relationships and nor does everyone wish to be.”

There comes a point in everyone's life when they realize that monogamous relationships are the very worst kind. No matter how wonderful your monogamous partner might be, it's virtual certainty that he or she doesn't have two tongues with which to lick your favourite no-no places in tandem. If they do, there's a very high probability that they're fucking radioactive.

As a blogger of international renown, I know a great deal about self-expression, and I'm here to tell you that it's never as satisfying as when you're blasting it all over the face and chest of someone you just met. Some of my greatest interpersonal relationships started exactly that way and I'm sure that many more will.

Tower says sex positivity is all about coexisting, and not having disagreements about what is morally right or appropriate.

“We just make sure that everyone, no matter what they’re into, can communicate about it, and have a great experience socially, without people being like, “You can't do that, that’s gross.”

Well, except for watersports. And poo-parties. Anything German is gross and I think we can all agree about that. But I'm getting beyond the point, aren't I?

Look, if U of T itself were paying for this, I might feel differently. But they aren't, so I don't give a shit. Besides, if more and younger women get involved in the lifestyle at an earlier age, the better the chances are that I'll run into them one good eve. And no one is more about helping young adults self-express their sexual attitudes more than I am. I'm pretty Christ-like that way.

And that should be enough reason for my friends on the left and the right to keep their busy yaps shut about this. But I can almost guarantee you that they won't. I'd put good money on the Canadian blogosphere going apeshit about this story by noon, mostly because the Canadian blogosphere is out to ruin my good time, the assholes.

If the University of Toronto wanted to accomplish something even more productive, they'd offer a course in How to Live Like a Real Man.

Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee: How Irony Escaped Aaron Walker

But for one post, I've stayed away from the strange and stupid saga of Aaron Walker (aka Worthing) because not only was it a dumb battle without any "good guys" in it, it also got powerfully tedious. Any self-respecting person can only listen to so many people engage in so much self-pity and retarded bravado before you throw up your hands and hope that everyone involved gets stomach cancer. I reached that point about 15 minutes after the whole dumb spectacle went viral.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to support Walker, but I developed a powerful allergy to anyone who wants to take their blog pissing matches to the courts years ago. I don't care if they're on the left or the right. It's a giant waste of time and resources that can be better spent on other, more pressing matters.

For those of you who blessedly missed the story, here's a brief recap.

Once upon a time there was an adjudicated bomber who ran a couple of non-profit political groups* named Brett Kimberlin. A guy named Seth Allen wrote a bunch of posts that nobody read regarding Kimberlin's activities, so Kimberlin sued him for libel.

Mr. Walker, a self-described Virginia lawyer, acting under an alias and despite not being a member of the Maryland bar, started offering Allen legal advice. Walker maintains that he wasn't Allen's lawyer, although the former's e-mails to the latter reference "privilege" at least once, and maybe more often.

Anyhow, Kimberlin grew mighty interested in who this "Aaron Worthing" was. When he learned Walker's identity, he also connected it to the Everybody Draw Muhammad blog (which has since been scrubbed and made private.) That blog is key here, as you will see shortly.

On Everybody Draw Muhammad, Walker repeatedly asserted that certain segments of the Muslim population are violent psychopaths, which even most Muslims would agree with. Walker went further than that. From what he thought was the safety of an assumed name, he invited that violence to visit him personally and implored others to do the same under their real names. Of course, he didn't bother telling his readers and contributors that he was using a pseudonym because, to hear him tell it, he's more afraid of wife than he is of violently psychotic Muslims.

When Kimberlin found out who Walker was, Walker went to his employers and explained everything, including Everybody Draw Muhammad. Unsurprisingly, Professional Healthcare Resources, Inc. took a dim view of Worthing's online activities and shitcanned him, although they officially told him that he was being booted for (literally) sloppy lawyering.

But it would take almost a year for anyone to find that out. In the interim, Walker launched a legal and public relations jihad, insisting that Kimberlin cost him his job, although no evidence of that exists. In their e-mail terminating his employment (and, unfortunately, that of his wife) PHRI doesn't mention Kimberlin contacting them. They do, however, go on at some length about the security issues created by Everybody Draw Muhammad and his invitation to violence therein.

Walker's suits against Kimberlin (and Neal Rauhauser, Ron Byneart and at least one John Doe) have been thrown out by two courts of competent jurisdiction in the last five weeks.

The (almost certainly illegal or unethical) discovery leak that revealed the true reasons behind Aaron Walker's dismissal should have been enough for any honest conservative to withdraw their support from him. He was deliberately misleading in his public presentation of the facts and he continues to raise money from same. You can assume whatever you will about the motives of those who continue to stand behind him.

But it is that clear from the very first days of Everybody Draw Muhammad that he has a history of actively lying to his readers and not admitting it until he has no other choice. If you want to be a willing dupe for that, feel free. If you want to finance it, you're probably better off without the money, anyways.

Even before his lawsuits were dismissed as political nonsense and vindictive bullshit from someone that could only be charitably be described as a half-wit with honesty issues, Walker had the temerity to accuse PHRI's attorney of lying about his dismissal, which I'm sure will come back to haunt him, both civilly and before the Virginia Bar. If any one thing in the last year has made Aaron Walker unemployable in the legal profession, it's that. Lawyers blatantly calling other lawyers liars in public simply isn't done. That tweet was the final nail in his professional coffin.

All things being equal, I wouldn't care all that much if it ended there. Blowhards destroy themselves on the Internet with some regularity, and the people who ally themselves with Breitbart.com tend to do it more regularly than most. This is a story where everyone involved is someone that I wouldn't be proud to know.  It's one of those rare stories, like Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, where everyone's a Bad Guy.

I would have been thrilled to forget that I ever wasted seven months of my time following such a stupid story. Really, I would have.

But then Walker had to post this just as quickly as he could.

That's right. A guy who just wasted a year of everybody's time, energy and money fighting for his right not to be fired for his online activities ..... is calling for someone to be fired for his online activities.

Firstly, Walker proves that he's either an idiot or a dishonest hack by saying of Professor Loomis' "head on a stick" comment;

By the way, we are told that this bit about “head on a stick” could not possibly be an actionable threat, because it is a metaphor. Right, because you can never threaten a person in figurative language. If a Mafioso says “pay your protection money or you will sleep with the fishes,” these legal geniuses assure us, that is not a threat.

Which is my sarcastic way of pointing out that you can indeed threaten a person with a metaphor.

No, the when the Mafia said "Tonight, you sleep with the fishes," they meant exactly that. It's also where the phrase "concrete shoes" comes from. They would actually encase your feet in concrete and dump you in the water, thereby ensuring that you slept with the fishes. If you know anything at all about Mafia history or pop culture, which Walker apparently doesn't, you know it isn't a metaphor.

So far as I know, no one in western civilization has had their head  put on their stick as political statement since the nineteenth century. While it's a common figure of speech, it decidedly doesn't happen very often in modern America.

Of course, I'm being charitable in assuming that Aaron doesn't know that. I could just as easily say that he's a dishonest hack.

The real and clear reason, by the way, that this is not an actionable threat is because it was not plainly communicated to Mr. LaPierre nor was it plainly directed at being communicated to him. What this is, then, at worst, is ruminating about murdering a person, which can be rightfully a concern for law enforcement but it is not a threat.

(Ken at Popehat is also correct to say that it is not a threat if it is not meant seriously, but how does he know that he isn’t serious? I am sure he doesn’t literally want to put LaPierre’s head on a stick, but I don’t and I won’t speculate about whether Loomis actually wants to kill him.)

Wow. It does seem unreasonable to me to think that Walker's first remedy to questionable speech is to refer it the police, if not the speaker's employers, rather than the speaker himself. That kind of puts his silly fucking lawsuit in a new light, doesn't it?

And it gets better. Oh, it gets so much better.

Since Loomis said these things, there are some people who have argued that he should be fired from his university job and there are good people such as Ken in the piece I have cited, Adler over at Volokh, and eight professors posting collectively at Crooked Timber.

Now certainly if Loomis had merely said, “I hate the NRA.” Or even “the NRA’s policies are dangerous and contributed to Friday’s massacre,” I would agree with my distinguished colleagues and say he should face no retaliation at his job. I mean, I of all people don’t believe that as a rule people should be fired from their jobs for what they say on their off time. But they are missing (or in Ken’s case failing to grasp the importance of) the real problem in Loomis’ commentary:

Yes, respected lawyers who weren't fired from their jobs because of their dishonest and sloppy blogs tend not to support the firing of Erik Loomis. Whatever could these professionally respected and employed lawyers and scholars be missing that Aaron isn't?

The Problem is Fascism.

Oh. Who knew?

You see the real reason why Loomis should be fired—or at the very least investigated for what he said—is that his comments are fascist. Bear in mind, I define fascism as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy itself.*

Walker published a footnote giving his preferred definition of fascism, which is hilarious**. I'm not going to reprint it, but if you're amused by the abuse of the English language to advance political bullshit, I couldn't encourage you to read it enough.

People like Aaron (and many others on the modern right) use the word fascism interchangeably with communism and socialism. They're either wrong or lying. Fascism was primarily an economic system that married government with private business, ensuring the success of both. Fascism was actually quite popular with the American right in the 1930s precisely because it was seen as an antidote to communism.

It takes a special kind of dickhead to equate fascism  "as nothing more than a lack of belief in democracy itself." There are all kinds of non-fascist systems of government that do that.

Consider for instance this comment by Loomis:

You are goddamn right we should politicize this tragedy. F__k the NRA. Wayne LaPierre should be in prison. [Cursing censored by me.]

So he believes that LaPierre should be imprisoned for what exactly? To the best of my knowledge, LaPierre has broken no laws. All he has done is advocate for a policy—reduced restrictions on gun ownership—that Loomis disagrees with. Advocacy of the criminalization of opinions you don’t agree with is the very essence of fascism. He repeats that thought several times:

Wayne LaPierre is a criminal and should be in prison for complicity with murder. 27 counts.—

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don't want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life. #nraterrorism

Further he advocates that the NRA and its leaders be treated as terrorists, again for expressing an opinion he doesn’t agree with.

Can we define NRA membership dues as contributing to a terrorist organization?

Larry Pratt and the group Gun Owners of America are terrorists and should be dealt with as such.

The right-wing intimidation campaign against me for saying the NRA was a terrorist organization continues. Will not succeed.

I bet terrorist NRA head Wayne LaPierre will sleep well tonight.— [on the night of the Newtown massacre.]

 

Um, yikes! There are any number of things that the modern right wants harsh criminal penalties for that didn't used to be crimes. Material support for terrorism is just one of them. Republican congressman Peter King remains a proud supporter of what the Irish Republican Army used to do, and there's no shortage of Republican assholes who successfully lobbied to de-list the MEK as terrorists because they happen to be  terrorists they see them as our terrorists, so we call them "freedom fighters" instead.

Now this is not to say that this is incitement within the meaning of the Brandenburg standard (of which I am safely considered an expert) and thus can be criminalized or otherwise prohibited. But as a history professor wrote, “such language can embolden the crazy[.]” And who wrote that? Erik Loomis, when arguing that somehow targets on a map caused the Giffords shooting. What Loomis has been doing is a tad worse than that. So, add the charge of hypocrisy to the bill of particulars against this professor.

And even then, ordinarily, this doesn’t justify a person being fired from their job. Whether a person is a fascist or not, a brownshirt in waiting, is of no rightful concern to his employer if he was a bagger at a grocery store, a garbage man, a lawyer, a businessman, etc.

But he is a professor in a University. Further, it is a state university. And that is a problem.

That's top to bottom nonsense. Walker successfully argued Brandenburg against a peace order (which doesn't require a lawyer) and he did so after losing at his initial hearing. That does not an "expert" make, any more than having a speeding ticket overturned makes you an expert in traffic law.

What Walker is suggesting is that some people have greater free speech rights in their private lives based solely on who their employer is. If you teach at a state school, according to Walker, you had better watch what you say!

Academic Freedom Applies to Students, too.

His students have as much of a right to express differing views, to enjoy freedom of inquiry, and so on, as he does. I mean a professor can say to a student, “I am teaching right now, so kindly shut up.” That is okay. Time, place and manner restrictions on student expression are fully justified or else teachers wouldn’t be able to teach.

But, a student should not face discrimination because his views—when expressed at appropriate times—differ from his professor. This is the ideal in the setting of a private university, but it is mandatory in a public one. After all, this professor’s actions are the actions of the state and thus academic freedom is not merely some ideal, but a constitutional command under the First Amendment (as incorporated by the Fourteenth).

And bear in mind I am not saying that Loomis is not entitled to believe what he believes, even passionately so. If he merely came on twitter and said he thought assault weapons should be banned, I wouldn’t be talking about either firing or seriously investigating him due to his words.

But he has gone further than that. He has advocated prison for those he disagreed with. He advocated designating political opponents as terrorists, which could bring consequences ranging from the freezing of funds to being killed summarily. And he has stirred up private violence against those who disagrees with him.

Do you think he can treat his students who disagree with him fairly?

Simply put, that's retarded, and I'm sure that Walker would agree if that standard were applied to him.

As a member of the Virginia Bar and an Officer of the Court,  it could be suggested that Aaron Walker's public positions should disqualify him from any number of legal issues. And I'm not arguing that, he is.

Bar associations have a monopoly granted under state power. If Erik Loomis is to be judged by a special standard because he teaches for the state, shouldn't Aaron Walker, as well? Given his publicly stated positions on any number issues, would it be reasonable to question Walker's ability to represent clients using Walker's own test?

Again, this is a guy, Professor Loomis, who said gun supporters should be imprisoned, treated as terrorists (which might be interpreted as endorsing their summary execution) and has whipped up violence against those who are pro-gun-choice. Even if you call that hyperbole, it doesn’t bode well for the possibility of an open and respectful discussion of gun rights in his class. If a student expresses a pro-gun-choice view on an exam will that student’s grade be affected by this professor’s unhinged hatred of this position?

Actually, that's not true. Loomis didn't say that "gun supporters should be imprisoned." He said that Wayne LaPierre should be. I disagree with that, but I'm not going to dishonestly manipulate what Loomis actually said, or cost him his job. And it was Walker himself who endorsed summary execution of terrorists and then imparted that motive on Loomis in regards to gun rights supporters, which goes further to Walker's record of honesty.

Walker also provides no proof that Loomis would treat anti-gun students unfairly. He cites no complaints or university censures. He just assumes that Loomis will be unfair, given his public record.

Who can say that Walker, as a lawyer, won't do exactly the same thing, absent any evidence that he won't? And I don't think that it's a huge stretch to suggest that the function of an attorney is as important, or more so, than that of a university professor. A lawyer's clients are at least as pliable, if not more so, than college kids.

I don't endorse applying that test, he does. And it takes a special kind of stupid for someone who lost his job due entirely to his online activities to do that.

Not three weeks after Aaron Walker's "free speech crusade" was throw out of court, he's parading around online demanding that other people suffer the same fate that he did. Hopefully, they have better repesentation than he did at trial.

If you want to continue financially supporting Aaron Walker, feel free. There have been things said about fools and their money, after all.

But please don't pretend that you're supporting free speech. You'll just look ridiculous.


As I said in my last post on this subject, if Mr. Walker wants to respond to anything that I've written here, I will give him all the space that he desires to do so, unedited and without unnecessary commentary on my part. Any counter-commentary (other than I deem necessary to protect my own legal interests) will be limited to the comments.

Should Mr. Walker feel that I have in way breached that commitment, he will of course be free to call me out for it on his presumably more widely-read blog.

If I have made errors of fact that are not supported by the available evidence, I will be more than happy to correct them. Having said that, "Because I said so" does not meet my standard of available evidence, particularly given the joint court dismissals.

Would Mr. Walker extend that courtesy to anyone else? There's no evidence that he would. But I am. If I'm going to make an error in this case, it'll be by being overly air to everyone. Except in the most egregious circumstances, I don't edit or delete comments. I think I've done it five times in almost ten years.

He can contact me at skippystalinATgmail.COM. 




*As I've said in my previous post, I don't think that anyone convicted of a crime should be allowed under the tax code to run a non-profit. If felons can lose their voting and gun rights, surely they can be stopped from playing politics at the taxpayers expense, too.

By the same token, that standard shouldn't apply to Kimberlin if it doesn't apply to Ali Akbar, whose crimes involve the theft of actual money. You can't deny a violent  psychopath his rights while granting them to an convicted thief without looking like a goddamned shill.

** Walker cites as a source Jonah Goldberg, who sees fascism completely as a creation of the left, despite an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary. The left already had their their totalitarian movement in communism. Fascism was a reaction on the right to that. As shocking as it may seem to those who buy into "left-wing fascist" blogosphere propaganda, the original fascist powers; Spain, Italy and Germany were vehemently anti-communist.

The United States itself allied itself with arguably fascist regimes in Central and South America, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War in the name of anti-Communism. They were just careful about not calling them that. Historical context is sort of important when throwing about phrases like "fascist."

Liberals can be extraordinarily totalitarian when they put their minds to it, but they aren't fascist by definition. When you hear conservatives describe then that way, that should be a giant red flag that they're dishonest, stupid, or working for Breitbart.com.

Ben Affleck Was Hated, Feels Much Better Now

I saw Argo a few weeks ago, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I usually go to historical flicks because I like being angry. Christ, you should've heard me holler like a maniac at the inaccuracies in Olver Stone's Nixon when I saw that in a crowded theatre.

But Argo was not just pretty awesome, it was more of less true to the history. Sure, a bunch of Canadians got pissy about how the movie underplayed the contribution of our ambassador, but Canadians don't have much of an idea about Hollywood works, which is weird when you consider how Canadians actually dominate Hollywood. The fact is that there isn't going to be a long line of investors saying "You only want $30 million to make a movie about a Canadian diplomat? But we wanted to give you $60 million!"

I'd recommend it heartily to you, in large part because I wasn't really aware that Ben Affleck could actually do something before. That, in and of itself, was pretty compelling. Sure, I'd seen him in a bunch of Kevin Smith vehicles, but I thought that I only like him because I dig Smith so much.

Turns out that I was wrong. He can act and direct and all kinds of neat shit. And now Young Ben has returned to being the Toast of Tinseltown! Lookie, he's even one of GQ's Men of the Year!

This is ideal for Mr. Affleck, in so far as it allows him to publicly ruminate about the years - and, as I remember it, there were a lot of them - when shitting on Ben Affleck was the national past time. I think it may have been bigger than baseball, but there could have been a baseball strike during that era. Not being gay, I don't follow baseball.

I remember the years that everyone hated Ben Affleck as something of a personal Golden Age. If, I reckoned, you can't look down upon someone who's handsome, rich and successful - being paid beyond the limits of human imagination for projects that go right in the toilet - exactly who are you supposed to look down on? That's an especially important question when, like me, you've generally failed at life and look forward only to the auto-erotic asphyxiation mishap that finally puts you out of your endless misery.

What happens when looking down on Ben Affleck is all you've got?

Well, for one thing, it brings you the closest thing to joy that you're likely ever going to find. So that's something.

But F.Scott Fitzgerald proved what a drunkard and an all around fool he was when he said that "There are no second acts in American lives." Richard Nixon died a respected statesman and Affleck just made a movie that could very well win an Oscar. America is all about second acts and always has been, which leads me to believe that Fitzgerald was a pickled foreigner, likely smuggled in directly from Ireland and never given the opportunity to sober the fuck up.

Verily, this is the Age of Affleck. And Affleck wants to use his time to bitch about my Golden Age, when everybody properly hated him.

I read two particularly blunt examples out loud to Affleck. One is: At the risk of generalizing, there may not be a person on the planet who is more socially acceptable to hate. The other: It is fashionable at the moment to loathe Ben Affleck. To be honest, the guy makes it easy.
 

"It's as mean-spirited a thing as it is kind of permissible to say in an editorial capacity," Affleck says in response to the second. That one comes from The Boston Globe. "My hometown paper."

Looking back, whatever Affleck's real or perceived shortcomings, the viciousness of what was said about him now looks like a kind of collective lunacy. "At the time, I knew on some level, 'This is insane,' " he says. No one on the planet was more socially acceptable to hate? Really? "What was that guy's name who killed his wife and dumped her off the side of a boat?" He supplies the answer himself. "Peterson. I remember thinking he actually gets slightly better treatment than I do in the press. At least they had to say 'alleged killer.' Unfortunately there's an aspect of that that's like one of those fights you see on YouTube where one of them falls down and then a bunch of people who were standing around come over and kick the person. They don't know them, they have no involvement in the fight, but they recognize a moment that they can get a free shot in, and for some people it's just too much to resist. And that was definitely me at that point. I was the guy. I was the designated person to loathe."

I don't want to piss on guy's perfectly well-deserved parade - and Argo really is a fantastic movie - but there are a few things I'd like to point out regarding Affleck's comparison of himself to Scott Peterson.

1. The Constitution demanded that Scott Perterson be given the presumption of innocence for his crimes. That's not true of whether Ben Affleck made nearly a dozen shitty movies in a row.
2. Peterson's crimes and subsequent trial didn't waste as much time, money and public attention as Affleck's career did at that point.
3. Peterson's murder of his wife and unborn child were horrific, but still sexier than Gigli.
4. Everybody knew Peterson did it, but even that was more suspenseful than Daredevil.
5. Peterson's TV trial was a single static shot, yet still provided more compelling visuals that Pearl Harbor.
6. If nothing else, Scott Peterson is still paying for his crimes.

"Our Long National Chick-fil-A Nightmare is Over."

In late July and early August, I wrote a couple of posts about American coronary factory Chick-fil-A's marketing fiasco regarding their corporate stand on gays. You can read them here and here.

One thing that should be made perfectly clear is that this wasn't about Dan Cathy's personal stands because the donations in question were made by Chick-fil-A as a business. Indeed, if the company was publicly traded, its stockholders would very probably have shown the Cathy family the door, if not actually had them executed.

You see, for businesses to involve themselves in public controversies that don't direct affect them is just bad business. No matter what you say, you're almost guaranteed to alienate half of your market. Who in the fuck needs that?

Of course, liberals just had to be liberals and refused to let the market take care of itself. A few mouthy mayors just had to threaten to complicate Chick-fil-A's future expansion, which immediately made this a First Amendment issue instead of whether or not Chick-fil-A were mouthbreathing tools. Even I took Chick-fil-A's side on that.

The reason that liberals are singularly incapable of bringing half the population to their point of view is that they have to make things far more complicated than they are and insist on a bureaucratic solution for everything, whereas normal human beings would much rather brawl it out in the marketplace of ideas. Not only is government not always the solution, it only very rarely ever is.

I remain convinced that, barring the fuckheaded interference of liberals, the market would have taken care of the story in less than a week. Yes, you might have had some semi-mongoloids who actually like looking like bigoted assholes marching in support of the company, but you would not have had Fox News, the fucking Tea Party and every glory-hound dickhead blogger on earth determined to make them a zillion dollars in a day.

Reasonable people would have thought about it and very quietly said to themselves, "I have close friends, co-workers and family members who are gay. I can't see a single plausible reason that some fucking fast-food restaurant would go out of their way to fuck with them, so I don't think I want to give them my money. If they want to make a public issue out of their superstitious stupidity, we'll see how well that works out for them."

That's how this story should have played out. And that's why everybody hates liberals.

Instead, we wound up with Fox News broadcasting a 24-hour marathon of people lining up for hours to throw money at Don Cathy. Even has-beens like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin managed to wring their lusted-after sixteenth minute of fame out of it.

And those people weren't wrong in doing so. It no longer was an issue of whether or not Chick-fil-A was evil, the question had become one of the power and reach of ward-heeling assholes in Boston, New York and Chicago. And that was a question people who wanted to call Chick-fil-A out weren't ever going to win. Ever.

After the hugely profitable "Chick-Fil-A Anti-Gay Day," the story gleefully disappeared. Even I dropped it, mostly because that's when I thought that things were going to get interesting.

And guess what?

Chick-fil-A has pledged to stop giving money to anti-gay groups and to back off political and social debates after an executive’s comments this summer landed the fast-food chain smack in the middle of the gay marriage debate.

The Civil Rights Agenda, which dubs itself the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group in Illinois, said Chick-fil-A agreed in meetings to stop donating to groups such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage. Such groups oppose same-sex marriage.

The LGBT collective said the Atlanta-based restaurant chain also sent a letter, signed by its senior director of real estate, to Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno.

Chick-fil-A said in the missive that its nonprofit arm, the WinShape Foundation, “is now taking a much closer look at the organizations it considers helping, and in that process will remain true to its stated philosophy of not supporting organizations with political agendas,” according to TCRA.

That still hasn't work out the way I would have liked because of the involvement of Moreno, one of the ward-heelers that threatened zoning prohibitions on Chick-fil-A. The yokels are still going to be able to say that they made a business decision solely because of government pressure. And by copying Moreno on the letter, Chick-fil-A furthers that narrative.

If private advocacy groups like The Civil Rights Agenda figure that they have the market juice to put a gun to Chick-fil-A's head, fine. After all, that's the kind of shit that the Family Research Council and the fucking awful Catholic League try to pull all the time.

But it's never going to be a clean victory for those of us who thought that Chick-fil-A were being mouth-breathers precisely because of the weight that the fucking government threw into the fight. Those of us who thought that the company was engaging in half-witted religious grandstanding are never going to be able to say that the marketplace actually won because we'll never be able to prove it.

Did I mention that this is why everybody hates liberals?

Jason Kenney's Unintended Consequences

One of the most beautiful things you'll ever see is idiots demonstrating what good people they are. It's usually a source of constant amusement for me. Then they get elected to something and it's no longer quite as funny.

For the longest time, this was the domain of liberals. But conservatives increasingly have decided that they can be just as empty-headed, largely because they've seen how effectively liberals have been at ward-heeling like that.

Politicking this way is effective because voters are simpletons and singularly incapable of independent thinking. As everything goes to shit in the world, I can't really blame the politicians all that much. After all, in a democracy, we're supposed to be calling the shots and we couldn't be more obstinate in our refusal to use our fucking heads once in awhile.

A good example of this is the issue of "sex trafficking." As properly defined - the employment of women as prostitutes by force or coercion - is something that all right-thinking people are against. The law, the conventional thinking goes, should absolutely do more to stop it.

It's only when you start thinking about it that a very different picture starts to emerge. Here's how.

Ask yourself what the most common elements of sex trafficking are. You'll answer that they are assault, kidnapping, forcible confinement, uttering death threats, rape, sometimes blackmail and extortion and, because more than one person is usually involved, conspiracy. You'll also notice something else. Those things are all already against the law. As a matter of fact, they're among the most serious charges a defendant can face. And they get more serious still when the victim is a minor.

The laws that have been on the books for well over a century are more than adequate to combat sex trafficking. But cops are lazy, politicians want to be seen as "doing something," and the public is too fucking dumb to know the difference. The friggin' media is certainly no help because all too often their determination to be a populist "voice of the underdog" serves to actually enable and reinforce the stupidity of its audience.

This is true of both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants you to know that they "care" and the right wants to demonstrate that they're "tough on crime." The police, off on the sidelines, always want new and ever more intrusive powers. So despite the fact that every single element of sex trafficking is already addressed by multiple criminal statutes, we wind up with new laws.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his slack-jawed ward-heeler of an immigration minister, Jason Kenney, decided that they were going to use Canada's immigration laws to pretend that they're attacking the problem. They did this by refusing to renew the visas of foreign strippers in Canada.

Despite the fact that stripping is not only legal in Canada, but a constitutionally protected form of speech, and despite the fact that there's no evidence that legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, Harper and Kenney are doing something, by God!

Of course, I have a theory why the Tories are doing this. On top of their moronic "tough on crime" image, they're playing to their retard base. The Harper Conservatives are altogether too smart to go after abortion and same-sex marriage, which their social conservative base is enormously pissed at them about. So they'll give them the next best thing, an assault on the legal "sex trade."

There's no evidence that the legally admitted foreign strippers are being trafficked, and even if they were, that a violation of existing immigration law and the other sections of the Criminal Code that I cited earlier. And let's say that they are being trafficked. How is deporting the victims the answer?

What the bill does do is create a giant hole in the perfectly legal adult entertainment industry, which that industry is going to fill one way or another. And this is where the Law of Unintended Consequences takes over in a breathtakingly hilarious way.

Recruiters of teenage strippers may soon be scouring Toronto high schools in search of female students who can be groomed into disrobing part-time as exotic dancers to earn college tuition.

A flyer praising the benefits of the burlesque trade has been put together to target students in high schools, colleges and universities in the Toronto-area, says a group representing dancers and club owners.

The brochure claims working as a dancer pays well, offers flexible hours and makes a “great part-time job to raise college tuition.”

A scramble is underway by the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada to fill a demand for dancers after Ottawa this month stopped issuing visas or extensions for foreign strippers to work here. There are up to 800 foreign strippers in Canada and most vow to go underground and work in the sex trade if they can’t dance legally.

Of course, like almost everything you'll ever see in Sun Media, this is written in a highly misleading way.

Strip joints are holders of Ontario liquor licenses and the drinking age here is 19. The law pretty clearly says that no one under the age of 18 can work in an establishment whose primary product is booze. The Sun makes it sound like you're going to wind up with ninth and tenth graders getting twenties shoved in their cooters, and that just ain't the case.

But nobody does shithead outrage quite like Sun Media. If you've never read their newspapers or watched their version of the Fox News Channel, you really should. Don't get me wrong, you won't learn anything, but I can guarantee that you'll get mad at something. If you're halfway smart, you'll get mad at yourself.

The Tories managed to pass an ineffective law that does nothing to address a serious issue (if you assume that new laws are even needed, which I don't) to what end? Well, younger and younger Canadian girls are going to be drawn into stripping and there isn't a goddamned thing the government can do about it. And this is going to get Harper's social conservative based even more pissed at him if that base chooses to be even halfway honest. Remember, none of this would have happened were it not for Kenney's genius decision not to renew the visas.

This might be the most perfect storm of stupidity out of this government yet. This is fucking brilliant!

Although I've only been to a peeler joint twice in the last ten years, I have very fond memories of foreign strippers. And not just the obvious ones. They do tend to be much nicer people than their native born co-workers, who can be a spectacular pain in the ass. Canadian girls in the business often think that they're above what they're doing for a living, but the immigrants seem to be genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be here.

So what happens to them?

Caroline, 28, and Nicola, 25, have been dancing in a downtown Toronto club for more than a year and have tasted the good life and now don’t want to return to their native Hungary.

“We are not happy that visas are no longer being issued to us,” Caroline said. “I am very disappointed and afraid of what may happen to me in the future.”

The women say they work long hours and send most of their earnings back home to their families.

“We did not do anything wrong in Canada,” she said. “They should not be sending us back home.”

Nicola said she’s stressed out and hasn’t been able to eat since hearing news of the visa revocation.

“My visa is almost expired and I am very scared,” she said. “I am very shattered that I may no longer be able to work and help my family back home.”

(...)

Foreign dancers say they’re willing to get married to a Canadian citizen or file refugee claims to stay here.

Plans are in place to seek Canadian men to marry some of the strippers whose visas are on the verge of expiry, which will force them to go underground and into the hands of organized crime to work in the sex trade.

Did I mention the unintended consequences? Some of them aren't so funny.  Jason Kenney, in his peculiarly Jason Kenney way, may have managed to create a new wave of sex trafficking victims because he's such a magnificent shithead.

Fortunately, the government knows enough about irony to keep Vic Towes as far away from this issue as they can possibly can.

But you know what? I'm a helpful cat and I love nothing more than beautiful girls with cute accents. Those just happen to be a couple of my favorite things.

Perhaps, like a more celebrated Foreigner, you want to know what love is. And maybe, just maybe, you want me to show you.

If you happen to be a foreign dancer in Toronto with an expiring visa, get in touch with me at skippystalinATgmail.com. There's a better than even chance that I'll immediately fall in love with you and propose. I'm really romantic and tend to propose marriage 36 times a day, as my long-time readers will confirm. All you have to do is say yes!

I'm so in love with love that it's actually infectious! You won't be able to help yourself from wanting to join me in holy matrimony. People like Minister Kenney might be skeptical about love at first sight, but I think we can prove them wrong.

The lonesome death of Joe Paterno and the fall of college football

If you want to get Americans really pissed off at you, you needn't challenge their foreign policies or even the fact that they're individually getting bigger than their own houses. They expect that from filthy foreigners, so they ignore it. But if you criticize college sports, and especially football, you better be ready to go to war, son. Those people don't fuck around about that.

I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan about eight years ago and I was shocked (and more than a little horrified) to see the University of Michigan's football stadium. It was easily the size of a major market professional stadium, and Ann Arbor isn't what any sane person would call a major market. That stadium is the kind of kind of thing you see in Nuremberg, which has a population roughly five times that of Ann Arbor. The only difference is that the monstrosity in Nuremberg celebrates eagles instead of wolverines.

Sure, I had heard about it, but I had never actually seen it. When I did, I looked at the local woman I was fucking at the time and said that it was "the largest publicly financed monument to drunkenness, stupidity and date rape since the Fall of Rome."

In light of recent events at Pennsylvania State University, my Roman reference was actually prophetic. We now know that Penn State tacitly permitted child-rape to occur on the premises. A sixty-eight year old assistant coach named Jerry Sandusky was plowing his way through every male child in sight, and not only was there no shortage of people who knew about it, they allowed it to continue.

The one constant theme in Thursday's Freeh Report is the self-justification of Sandusky's co-conspirators (and they are exactly that, in everything but the legal sense) to "protect the institution of Penn State." You see that over and over in their communications with each other.

Horseshit. They weren't protecting Penn State. How do I know that? Because I know that if a philosophy professor slipped and found himself firmly embedded inside a comely, legally-aged co-ed, that professor would be very publicly bounced out on his ass and find himself unemployable.

Let's be clear about thing: Sandusky's crimes aren't a case of "I think he touched it" molestation. This is hard-core, push-him-against-the-shower-wall-and-fuck-him-in-the-ass rape. This was the kind of shit that you hear about happening in prison, and it was visited upon boys as young as ten. And we now know that the Powers That Be sanctioned it for at least a full decade to "protect the institution of Penn State."

No, these people were protecting Penn State's football program. Period. Because nobody who knew about Sandusky's child-rape marathon presumed to stop him, they explicitly enabled him to continue. Not only did he continue buggering boys; he did so on campus, even after he retired. And he was allowed to do in the name of football. Again, do you think that the school would circle their wagons around the fucking physics department that way? I don't.

If anything, this is worse than the way that the Catholic Church used to deal with their kid-fuckers. At least the One True Church would move their pedophiles around to maintain at least the appearance of propriety. Penn State kept Sandusky right where he was, again, even after he retired. On the other hand, the Catholic Church analogy falls apart because football has always been more of a Protestant sport.

Here's another chilling fact. Law enforcement and academic statistics say that for every sex abuse victim that reports their violation, there are ten that don't. But those statistics are almost exclusively devoted to female victims. I would wager that the margin is far wider for abused men and boys. There are very likely hundreds of Sandusky's victims out there still. Given his age when he was finally stopped, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there turned out to be more than a thousand.

As is true of most men, you would think that the sex drive of pedophiles slows down as they hit later-middle age. Sandusky, on the other hand, was still going strong as he approached seventy. Since I'm not aware of a single instance of a carnal attraction to children manifesting itself during an offender's fifties (when the fables of Sandusky's conduct started to circulate through the Penn State administration,) I'm horrified to think of what this monster may have done during his sexual prime. And all but two of the years of Sandusky's adult life - 1967 and '68 - were spent at Penn State.

I inherently distrust anyone that has statues made of them during their lifetimes. The Bible actually has a few things to say about it, too. The second that statue of you is erected, you become somehow more than human and less than accountable, After all, you have a statue, right?

That's certainly what happened with Joe Paterno. When it became clear that Paterno was at least complicit in Sandusky's savage kid-fucking spree, the university found itself with no other choice to fire his ass. And the townsfolk of University Park responded by rioting. After all, Paterno coached football. And he had a statue.

Americans have a strange tendency to create personality cults that do monstrous evil. I never have heard of a group of, say, Finns, cutting off their own genitals and poisoning themselves in a rented mansion, have you? Combine that with something as populist as football and a shit-ton of money, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Look, this isn't a situation where we can find out "what the market would do" to punish this kind of evil. Having said that, I think that if the Pittsburgh Steelers had a similar scandal, everyone would forget about it almost immediately, too. Within three seasons, they'd be just as popular as they are now.

Penn State is exactly what it's name implies, an arm of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As such, it isn't subject to the whimsy of the market, but it is liable for torts committed by it. Try as I might, I can't imagine any jury that reads the Freeh Report declining to award civil plaintiffs against Penn State untold fortunes in damages.

Those damages won't be paid off by the football program, or even Penn State itself. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania will be on the hook for every nickle. Sandusky is likely broke from his trial, Paterno's dead, and pretty much everyone else named in the Freeh Report is under indictment, so who else do you sue? The agencies of the state that enabled the almost satanic mess in the first place.

As I said earlier, Jerry Sandusky wouldn't have survived fifteen seconds if he was a physics professor, mostly because there isn't a national cult built around college physics in America and it doesn't print money the way football does. It was only because of cultish devotion and money that Sandusky's evil became the contagion that it did. Absent the football program, you might have one or two incidents. With it, you get at least fifteen years worth of them, and probably many more.

Were I one of Sandusky's victims, I would spend the rest of my life full of a righteous indignation and possessed of a wholly justifiable determination to financially ruin the institutions that knowingly allowed me to be violated that way. I sincerely hope that his victims literally rain holy vengeance down upon Penn State for the insidious ways that they were wronged and sexually tortured. It was deliberate, systematic, and at least tacitly sanctioned by agents of the State.

If you want to argue that Penn State is an isolated incident, I would suggest that you're probably kidding yourself. The cultish devotion to football and the enormous amounts of money it generates is hardly specific to Penn State. That creates a natural atmosphere where people like Jerry Sandusky can't help but worm themselves into. This might be one of the very few instances where the worst case is uncovered first, but there's no reason to believe that it's going to be the only instance.

I don't think this is over. Not by a long shot. And if the states don't get their shit together soon, college football won't exist at all. State budgets are being crushed and, sooner or later, taxpayers are going to tire of paying out tens of millions in judgements because of the criminal sexual habits of some guy that tells teenagers  how to throw a leather ball up and down a flat field.

If you think I'm pessimistic about the future, you're right and I'll tell you why. We knew everything we needed to know about Joe Paterno before Christmas. But he still died peacefully, surrounded by a loving family, and with no shortage of devoted defenders.

And most of all, that fucking statue is still proudly standing at Penn State.

And I love how sensitive all the Penn State sycophants got about Joe Paterno criticism. People wanted to lynch me when I went on Twitter and mocked him after he died. There's still a giant statue of him at Penn State, so I wrote, "From now on, anyone raped at Penn State should just tell Joe Paterno's statue. It couldn't help you any less than the real Joe would have." Which I thought was a pretty salient point. Penn State fans, however, thought I was making a point just as an excuse to wrap a cheap joke around it. I guess we were both right."
-Jim Norton

Treyvon Martin, Politics, the Media and History

I've very consciously tried to avoid opining on the sad and savage saga of Treyvon Martin for the simple reason that I don't know enough about it. I suspect that what I do know isn't going to play out well for his killer, but that's highly speculative. Besides, I'm loath to be on the side of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton about anything. I’d include Spike Lee in that denunciation, but I can’t remember the last time anybody paid attention to him.

On the other hand, I have written about the kind of circumstances that led up to Martin's death repeatedly, and most of you aren't really fond of my views. I took all manner of shit from my American readers when I suggested that the Castle Law didn't give Joe Horn the right to blow away two people leaving someone else's castle, back in 2007. More recently, my Canadian peeps went nuts what I said that someone who needed an interpretor for his trial, as David Chen did, probably shouldn't be in the business of arresting folks. I got into fights for weeks over that.

Look, these Castle and "Stand Your Ground" laws in the United States, as well as the proposed revision to Canadian  laws regarding citizen's arrest, are based on a number of faulty premises.

First, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as willing and able to kill or maim as criminals are. If that's true, society is fucked.

Secondly, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as practised with weaponry as criminals are. If one is smart, one never assumes that one is more dangerous that someone already demonstrably willing to commit a crime is. It'll almost never end in your favour.

These laws are written in such a way that might have the unintended consequence of encouraging criminals to kill you first. It stands to reason that if you know that the law allows you to kill an intruder that the intruder knows it, too. It doesn't take boundless leaps of the imagination to figure how that can work out.

Third, they suggest that average citizens should have police powers, without the training or experience of the police. And the police fuck up more than their share! It strikes me as odd that the same people who decry things like Waco, Ruby Ridge and the more recent G20 Battle of Toronto want everybody to have the legal authority to kill, even when a safer alternative may exist. Worse, they want lethal force as a first option enshrined in the law. And it's incredibly difficult to see anything conservative in that, at least if you're sane.

I'm all for the right of self-defence. However, with that should come a great deal of responsibility. If you're going to take it upon yourself to act like a cop, you should be held to at least as high a standard when you smoke someone. The police usually only go out with guns blazing in the movies, but some people think that those not in the constabulary can shoot first and ask questions later and do so without consequence. 

As far as the Martin-Zimmerman controversy goes, it doesn't logically follow that following someone around,  confronting them, and then shooting them in the chest when they decide to kick your ass - assuming that this is even what happened, itself a leap of faith - constitutes "standing your ground", particularly when you're armed and you're not good and goddamned sure the other guy is, too.

If you think I'm talking crazy talk here, know that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who signed the bill, and the chief Republican sponsor of Stand Your Ground agree with me. 

On that point, I'd be awfully surprised if Mr. Zimmerman thought that Treyvon Martin was armed and decided to follow him around anyway, especially when a 911 operator specifically instructed him not to. It makes eminent sense to assume that Zimmerman believed that Martin was unarmed, or at least that he was better armed and more willing to fire first. To suggest anything else is suggest that either George Zimmerman was stupid, suicidal, or that the neighbourhood watch program has become a  kamikaze  mission without anyone telling me.

Which brings me to the media coverage of the story, which is sixteen kinds of stupid. While it's beyond tragic, it's hard to see how this has become a national story but for America's obsession with race and the continuing Republican descent into eternal victimhood. 

Ann Coulter hasn't always been batshit crazy, you know. I read her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors when it first came out and it wasn't actually retarded. Of course, smart doesn't sell these days, so Coulter made sure that everything she's subsequently written is either laughable or actually demented. Anyone who spends as much time as Coulter does defending the memory of Joseph McCarthy - whose years of investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single communist - shouldn't be taken seriously. 

But, as it happens, saying crazy shit is a great way to get on cable news, and being on cable news is a superior way of selling books to people who don't know how to read. Did you know that both Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly have had multiple bestsellers? Did you know that cable news and talk radio hosts are the only people alive who are worse writers and thinkers than bloggers, who give away their nonsense for free?

It was only a matter of time before Coulter weighed in the Martin-Zimmerman saga, if only because modesty isn't her strong suit.

“I mean it is a lynch mob. This isn’t how we try cases in this country. And you know, the last time you saw this sort of thing on a regular basis was of course again from the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party’s outgrowth, the KKK. So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we get this from the Democrats. They have never bought into the criminal justice system where you have, you know, grand jurors and a procedure where evidence is vetted, and police look at it and prosecutors and grand jurors.”

Just for the record, the last time I was aware of a “lynch mob” going after someone named Zimmerman, Dylan had just gone electric. It’s not a phenomenon you hear a lot about in the news.

Historically, the phrase is very specific to the black experience in the Deep South of yore. It has very real connotations to people who are still alive today. Of course liberal activists shouldn’t have compared the Martin case to Emmett Till, but it should be remembered that Emmett Till would only just be approaching retirement age if he were alive today.

This isn’t unlike Sarah Palin’s appropriation of the conservative “blood libel” in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Because having MSNBC saying nasty things about you is just like the European pogroms against the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Seriously, if you blindfolded me, I wouldn’t know the difference. Actually, that’s not true. Coco Chanel does smell different from incinerated human flesh, if only slightly.

Lookee, I’ve been writing in public just shy of nine years now. And if you went through everything I’ve put out on Al Gore’s fabled Interwebs, you would be very hard pressed to find an instance of me calling anyone a racist. Mostly because it’s nasty, unnecessary, rarely true, and doing so proves that you don’t have a further argument.

Moreover, it’s a tactic pioneered by the Left, who still uses it to great effect on a daily basis. It seems to me that the Right can’t decry the tactic and appropriate it at the same time, at least not while remaining credible. It’s an intellectual twist to stand for rugged individualism while positioning yourself as a persecuted class, which rich, white cunts like Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Coulter herself  like to pretend that they are. These people say - often in the same fucking paragraph - that you should pull up by your bootstaps and that you can't because the government and media are discriminating against you because, of all things, you want a tax cut. 

You know what? I’ll renounce everything I’ve said in the preceding five or six paragraphs if you can give me just one example of Ronald Reagan publicly comparing himself to the target of a lynch mob or a Holocaust victim because of his political opinions. Nor are you likely to find him equating Democrats with the KKK, mostly because he actually was a Democrat during the period in question.

Ms. Coulter, in her comments, likes to point out that that the Ku Klux Klan originated and flourished in what were then Democratic states. What she doesn’t point out is that those states are all Republican now, or why.

I’ve written about the history of Southern politics before, but it could use a re-telling.

Between the end of Reconstruction during the Grant administration and the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party was considered a foreign entity in the former Confederacy. Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education accomplished exactly nothing (because school desegregation only happened under Richard Nixon, nearly two decades later), Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, supported largely by the GOP.

Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act as a matter of principle. He was the furthest thing from a racist – and was one of the first mainstream voices to support gay rights in the 1990s – but he felt that the federal government shouldn’t be in the business of interfering with property rights.  It should be remembered that Goldwater was more of a libertarian than he was a Republican.

But it isn’t a coincidence that Goldwater became the first Republican to win the Deep South in a century. Five of the six states that he carried were there, constituting almost a majority of the former Confederacy. LBJ swept Goldwater way in the Western and Mountain states, which were far more inclined to his libertarianism than was the South. Guessing why is hardly a stretch, particularly since the South benefitted more handsomely than anywhere else in America from New Deal liberalism.

I should also point out that Democrat Harry Truman lost a great deal of the South to the Dixiecrat segregationist (and later Republican) Strom Thurmond in 1948. Thurmond, who became a Republican as a result of its passage, also voted against the Civil Rights Act. As a Democrat, Thurmond carried out longest filibuster in the history of the Senate, 24 hours and 18 minutes, against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.  As a Republican, Thurmond voted against the much-less (seemingly) constitutionally offensive Voting Rights Act of 1965.Strom Thurmond never publicly renounced his racial views, but remains a revered figure in the GOP. 

The Republican advance in the South was blunted by Alabama’s segregationist (then) former Alabama governor George Wallace’s presence on the ticket as an independent in 1968. Barring a southern Democrat, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton – who had ambivalent racial records, if you don’t count their liking rhythm and blues – Republicans have owned that part of the country between 1972 and 2008, when Obama surprisingly carried Virginia and North Carolina, and came within eight points of winning even Georgia.

Ann Coulter might like to pretend that America’s few dozen living Klansmen, who have constituency somewhat larger than that of the New Black Panther Party (all three of them), are rabid Obama supporters, but even the most curious sense of history tells you that this probably isn’t so. History would seem to suggest that most of them have Rick Perry bumper-stickers on their Datsuns.

She also ignores the de facto segregation of the North, where Republicans dominated for most of the century in question. Nor was the Klan completely alien there. Indeed, most of today’s most notably racist Christian Identity groups are securely entrenched in the Red States. Am I the only one who noticed that the only black folks killed at Waco or Ruby Ridge were probably government agents?

Yes, the Left – and the Democratic party activists, in particular – are deeply, deeply wrong in ascribing some nefarious racial motive to everything that happens everywhere, particularly given their political history. They didn’t love blacks, as much as understood that they couldn’t form a governing coalition without them in a post- Civil Rights Act era. Life was demonstrably much easier for the Left prior to 1964, as the New Deal proved. Without the “Solid South,” none of it would have been sustained for more than a few years, if it happened at all.  

But Republicans shouldn’t pretend that their hands are clean, either. The Party of Lincoln saw the accidental success of Barry Goldwater’s constitutional stand and attempted to build on it thereafter, and did so cynically.  

In all honesty, I don’t think that America’s obsession with race is necessary a badthing. The United States is almost alone among great countries that have honestly tried to face the truly horrid things that it did to its own citizens, and that’s something that should be commended. It would be a better world if more of us did it. 

But there comes a point where that obsession colors (pardon the pun) everything and accomplishes nothing. Past that point, it divides for the sake of division, rather than unifies. And if you believe that politicians are interested in realunity, you’re kidding yourselves. Division for the sake of division is what decides elections, whether on the Left or the Right.

In a perfect world, the shooting of Treyvon Martin would be a matter for Florida law enforcement and media to decide. It’s only in the hyper-partisan atmosphere, driven largely by cable, talk radio and almost magnificent ignorance that has made it a national racial time bomb at all.

No matter where you stand, do you think that Martin or the Zimmerman families want that?