I am sorry I haven’t posted or approved — or read — comments for a few days. I had to dig out of about six inches of snow on Wednesday and take my father for a routine medical appointment and do errands. Then I stayed up most of the night watching over him because there was a chance he would need my assistance. And then I spent Thursday and Friday preparing for the blizzard that is blanketing the mid-Atlantic region in snow.

Also, I wanted to be less enraged with Gay Patriot West, aka Daniel Blatt, and have several hours clear in order to write the sequence of posts I need to write in order to explain my position and then approve and answer comments. I may not have that block of time for a few more days due to the blizzard. The snow looks like it is going to break the record at Thurgood Marshall-BWI airport of 28.2 inches that was set in 2003.

I’m going to be spending the rest of the daylight hours clearing the snow on our walkway and driveway. It looks like it’s at least 30 inches in spots and it’s wet at the bottom. The night temperatures for the next several days will be in the teens, so that slush will turn to ice if I don’t get it cleared. And I just got a robo-call from the county saying we could get up to eight inches more snow before the storm ends. If you want to pray for us, I welcome that. Please God let the electricity stay on — we both sleep with respirators for obstructive sleep apnea — and let the roof hold.

I did see a comment in my comment queue from Daniel calling me passive-aggressive for declaring war on him publicly without trying to persuade him behind-the-scenes to change his ways. No, no, no! I am 100 percent aggressive! I’ve already punksmacked him a few times over the course of the last year and seen no sign of improvement. Daniel has made Gay Patriot the safest place on the Internet to get your gay-hate on, and he regularly pronounces his benedictions over hatred toward gays. No one in the conservative blogosphere has to denounce homosexuals — all they have to do is wait a few minutes for Daniel’s post or column and then link it. The way I see it, Daniel is doing more than practically anyone else to destroy any chance homosexuals have of equality in America — and I consider that a form of genocide, even if it is a very slow-motion one and if it’s not affecting you then you will find that word much too extreme. I saw no reason to believe that back-channel communications with Daniel would alter his attitude or behavior. So I decided to make an example of him.

As I recall, the last time I punksmacked Daniel Blatt, aka Gay Patriot West, over his ambivalence about gay marriage, — “You no playa da game, you no maka da rules,”I found out he has never been in a longterm committed relationship. (I will publish any correction of this statement he sends me.) I was, for over 20  years, caring for my late life partner until her death on Dec. 7, 2004.

That is why I am OUTRAGED that Daniel never misses an opportunity in the conservative blogosphere to damage the cause of same-sex marriage equality. His latest assault on gays and lesbians who are seeking equality in every aspect of their lives, especially marriage equality, is founded on siding with Joy Behar, of “The View,” who recently opined that homosexuals do not deserve marriage equality because she says we are not monogamous. Or somehow, straight people who marry are monogamous, but gay people, who cannot marry, are not monogamous and therefore never deserve to have marriage equality.

Actually, considering the divorce rate, it looks to me like the straight community should be VERY humble and filled with compassion on the issue of monogamy in marriage.

Also, I want to point out to my fellow gays and lesbians on the Left that THIS is an example of the Left’s betrayal of its promise of support for homosexual equality. They don’t deliver because they do not want to deliver. Who on the Left condemned Behar for extrapolating her attack on the capacity of gays to be faithful into an attack on our quest for equality?

But more importantly, it is time for me to put Daniel on notice that I am going to start matching any further denunciations of the quest of gays and lesbians for equality, especially with regard to marriage, by ridiculing him as a man who has never been able to maintain a long-term, committed relationship. Therefore, I suspect Daniel’s rejection of marriage for ALL homosexuals really has to do with his personal inadequacy. But, if I am wrong, and Daniel has found someone, then I think truth and justice will still be better served if Daniel STOPS writing about gay marriage altogether until he has had one for at least five years.

This is all-out war, Daniel. You do NOT deserve to kill the hopes and dreams and aspirations of worthier people who NEED equality to have the same advantages and supports straight people do to build their lives together and support one another through prosperity and adversity until death parts them.Until YOU’VE been married to the man who is the love of your life for at least FIVE years, you do NOT know enough to write about same-sex marriage equality.

P.S.

And while I’ve got the strop out, I think you are crazy to let American Elephant dominate your blog. He poisons every comment thread he’s in and is acting like he’s your co-blogger, when he’s really the worst kind of concern troll.

I regard with horror the naivete and foolishness of feminists and lesbians and gays regarding the menace of Islam because they are the first ones who will lose their liberty and/or lives when Muslims move into a neighborhood. This is not prejudice toward Muslims — they are commanded to kill unbelievers. Women and gays are low-hanging fruit, as it were.

Naomi Wolf is one of this breed of feminist fools. She recently toured Morocco, Jordan and Egypt — where over 95 percent of women have had some sort of genital mutilation — and then published some claptrap about how sexually liberating the chador is and how she can really relate because she went shopping wearing a shalwar kameez, aka Punjabi suit.

Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish woman, who, in her foolish youth, married a Muslim man, moved to his country, was effectively imprisoned by him and managed to escape, has a much more authoritative view of Islam, Muslim sexuality, the burqa, the chador and the hijab. She punksmacks Naomi Wolf here.

However, if you are not familiar with the differences between the shalwar kameez, the chador and the burqa, let me supply some illustrations for Dr. Chesler’s lecture.

The shalwar kameez, or Punjabi suit, is comfortable and flattering to all ages and figures, and available in an array of designs, all sorts of fabrics and price ranges, and a rainbow of colors:

Shalwar kameez or Punjabi suit

Now a chador:

Chador -- from an online supplier (veil not included, one size fits most).

Now a burqa:

Person, probably a woman, wearing a burqa.

Two of these things are not like the other, Naomi. Two of these things are not like the other. Not even a little.

Update, 9/2/09: Dear Little Miss Attila has linked this post and provides her own thoughtful discussion on dressing modestly here.

Update, 9/2/09: Dr. Chesler has a follow-up piece at Pajamas Media today, “Wolf Demands an Apology, Chesler Won’t Back Down” because — what’s a nice way of saying this? — Ms. Wolf can’t use a Web browser well enough to know that when Dr. Chesler linked her piece, it was Wolf herself who persuaded Dr. Chesler’s readers who CAN use Web browsers and DID read it in its entirety that she is a fool AND that she has no practical grasp of what women’s rights are, and no appreciation for the concepts of liberty and freedom, either.

So Ms. Wolf, the place to stand to demand your apology is right in front of a mirror.

And Dr. Chesler — please count this newly conservative lesbian as someone who has your back when you are fighting for equality for women everywhere and sounding the alarm about the menace of Islam.

Update, 9/3/09: Little Miss Attila kindly linked this post here on Sept. 1 and today the unmitigated, clueless GALL of Naomi Wolf’s demand that Dr. Chesler apologize to her has inspired her to provide Wolf with another punksmacking. Kids, these days.

Update, 9/3/09: The following is my favorite comment from the comments following Dr. Chesler’s posts at Pajamas Media schooling Naomi Wolf on the atrocities Muslim women suffer under Islam:

(Author: RSE; I corrected one typo.)

Honestly, the single sentence in Wolf’s original story, “I do not mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women,” is the only place her piece even obliquely states, in Wolf’s words, that “Muslim women face terrible oppressions.”

I was fascinated by another sentence in in Wolf’s piece. In her paragraph beginning, “Ideological battles are often waged with women’s bodies as their emblems, and Western Islamophobia is no exception,” Wolf writes, “When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for female genital mutilation, forced wearing of the burka, refusal to educate women and girls, forced arranged child marriage, daughter- and wife-beating, and honor killings.” Ooops, sorry, that’s not what she wrote. Wolf wrote, “When Americans were being prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women.” If ever there were an epitaph for Western academic feminism, that is it.

One of my commenters from Australia quoted Helen Reddy’s song, “I am woman,” and it occurred to me that most younger readers here might not recognize the allusion, so I went hunting on YouTube for it. I just watched it and I’m sitting here with tears running down my cheeks. It deserves its own post.

The extremely youthful would-be comedian and unfunny hack, Steven Crowder, who has no discernible sense of humor and ethics that primarily are directed at the behavior of people other than himself, is on his high horse at Big Hollywood about freedom of speech — oh, and calling for Republicans to “grow a sense of humor” about entertainers who fantasize on TV about the daughters of people they hate being raped.

OK, Steven, if you are so brave, and humor and freedom of speech mean so much to you, then do a video of yourself performing Letterman’s EXACT SAME JOKES about Gov. Sarah Palin and her daughters from June 8, 9 and 10, including the entire flight attendant rant quoted here by Michelle Malkin, only substitute the names of Michelle Obama and Malia and Sasha. Then post your video on YouTube, see if PJTV will carry it, and announce it to the world via Big Hollywood and Twitter.

But, I have some advice for you before you do: (1) make your will; (2) pre-arrange your funeral and pay for it; (3) give someone durable general power-of-attorney over your affairs and tell them where all your financial records and important papers are; and (4), give someone durable medical power-of-attorney and tell them your wishes about feeding tubes and being kept alive if you are in a persistent vegetative state due to, say, a brain injury — just in case, oh, I don’t know, your routine pisses off people who decide to “stone you old-school.”

I’m waiting, funny boy.

Update: Little Miss Attila: “One, and It’s Not Funny!,” also about Crowder’s piece telling Republicans to “grow a sense of humor,” and “Pride and Truth,” her comment on her struggle with her memories of being raped at age 14 — the same age as Willow Palin, who was targeted in Letterman’s joke about attending a Yankees game with her mother, Gov. Sarah Palin.

Lent’s over and Stacy — The Other McCain — is released from his vow of giving up the pleasure of punk-smacking Ross Douthat. I picked up the slack a couple of times during Lent — here and here — just so Douthat would stay in punching-bag shape, and I thought I could let Stacy resume and walk away.

But I just saw Stacy’s quote of Douthat’s dismissing the Tea Parties:

[The Tea Parties] have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they’ve brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

Really, Douthat should get it over with and come out already so he can celebrate in the marches and festivals for Gay Pride Day in June, which will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in New York that began the gay rights movement in June 1969. Those marches and gatherings are FOR something, and in one form or another, I’ve participated in them since the early 1970′s — including the major marches on Washington in the 1980′s and 1990′s — and BEING IN GATHERINGS LIKE THAT CHANGES YOU. That’s the real reason we did them. They changed people who felt isolated and hopeless into people who felt unified and optimistic and motivated to create change, starting with their own lives.

Although I missed my local Tea Party to be with my dying cat, when I arrived late I did meet a small group who had attended and I could tell they, too, had been changed IN JUST THAT WAY by their participation in the Tea Party. They said 600 people had gathered on our small town’s Main Street and they were thrilled, energized and determined to take their momentum and get things done.

That excitement has galvanized everyone who doesn’t like what Congress and Obama are doing to the U.S. out of a state of inertia. We’re moving, now, baby! And while it may take a little more discussion to sharpen our focus on what to do about the excesses and destructiveness of the spendthrift Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike — and a foolish, incompetent president whose only salient skills are to read from a Teleprompter and to get other people to do his homework for him — we’re a grassroots movement that has stopped waiting for a leader, organized itself and started marching. It is not comparable to the anti-war movement because it is not an anti movement — it is a movement FOR smaller government, FOR conditions that create opportunities for individuals and small businesses, FOR a strong military, FOR victory over our enemies and FOR secure borders.

Douthat can sneer as much as he likes from the porn wing of his — what does he live in? townhouse? condo? mansion? The first wave of Tea Parties has created a strong group consciousness and thanks to the distributed leadership of bloggers and the media of the Internet — online TV, podcasts, online radio, social networking sites and Twitter — we can’t be suppressed any more by the mainstream media and we don’t have to wait for a Dear Leader to tell us what to think and do. The efforts of the current Congress and president to bankrupt the United States and make government so big that individual liberty and opportunity will be destroyed are not going to be allowed to stand.

At least Douthat was smart enough to close his piece with the bar graph chart showing both the Congressional Budget Office and White House estimates of the deficit — which I happen to think is going to focus people’s attention like the prospect of being hanged. (Gateway Pundit has the chart and current explanatory info here.)

So — Douthat — because you took an unworthy shot at Ann Arbor — and I was there for the opposition to the Viet Nam war — this Wolverine just has to set you — gee, straight’s not the right word, you’re still looking for the magic porn that will solve THAT little problem — this Wolverine just has to educate you on what is really going on in the Tea Party movement. See you at Pride Day!

And — Wolverines!

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Faux conservative/twerp vérité Ross Douthat, whose collection of contemporary porn from the last 60 years is one of his own favorite column topics, is the subject of a lengthy profile today by Michael Calderone at Politico in celebration of Douthat’s replacing Bill Kristol as the token conservative on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

The main credential recommending Douthat appears to be his unremitting fault-finding and attacks on conservatives and Republicans while stoutly insisting that he is not either a liberal, not no how, not no way. 

As they say in Yorkshire: I’ll believe him. Thousands wouldn’t.

Anyhoo, here’s how Calderone concluded his Douthat hagiography:

“I think they’ll [the New York Times] benefit from having another conservative — a social conservative,” said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, the conservative magazine where Douthat once interned and which still publishes his movie reviews. 

Lowry said he considers The Washington Post’s op-ed page to be more diverse politically than that of the Times, and he deemed it “strange, to say the least,” that there wasn’t already a writer with Douthat’s perspective “represented in the country’s most important newspaper.” 

“For me,” Lowry continued, “it will fill an important hole.”

Is it just me, or is that TMI?

P.S. Robert Stacy McCain — who is keeping his Lenten vow — you’re welcome.

Monique Stuart at HotMES is on about de-criminalizing recreational drugs today, as a follow-up to Obama’s town hall meeting, which I would leave alone although I disagree. But because she based her argument on conflating pharmaceutical drugs, aka medicines, defined as “any substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease,” with recreational chemicals that frequently have addiction as a side effect, I must administer unto her the first fisking and punk smacking of my blog.

The indented material is Monique’s.

I’m sorry that Mexico is having experiencing problems related to drugs. And, I’m sorry America has its own drug-related problems to deal with. But, drugs aren’t the problem; they are a symptom of the problem.

1. The drugs are a symptom? Could this symptom be cured by, say, penicillin?

We pretend to be a culture that is against drugs, yet we are not. We have a “War on Drugs,” as new drugs are advertised every day. At some point, our government made the decision that some drugs were acceptable and others were not. This is where the problem lies.

2. We do not as a culture have contradictory attitudes towards drugs because, as a culture, most of us are able to tell the difference between drugs that have the purpose of curing a disease, slowing its progress or alleviating a symptom. Legal drugs do one or all of those three things. That is why we, through our government, aka our elected representatives, have decided that these drugs, aka medicines, are acceptable.

Illegal drugs are taken recreationally. They are not necessary. The ones that are highly addictive are extremely dangerous and change the behavior of the people taking them for the worse. That is why we have decided they are unacceptable.

It’s one big contradiction. Either we’re against drugs, or were for them. Make up your mind. Heroin isn’t acceptable, but clinics hand out methadone, while doctors prescribe Oxycontin (which makes you feel like you’re on heroin from what I’ve been told).

3. Do read up on logic and “false choice” and the “straw man,” which are the names of the devices that you use above.

We do not have to be either for drugs, or against them. It is totally legitimate to pick and choose.

So we are not being at all capricious or contradictory at all when we legalize antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, hormone replacement therapies, chemotherapies, pain medications and a host of other pharmaceuticals that have targeted and legitimate purposes.

Neither is it capricious or contradictory to ban drugs that are recreational and highly addictive. An addiction may be triggered in some people with one dose. The addiction dramatically changes the behavior of that person for the worse. It is worthwhile for society to make and enforce laws to guard against this.

The reason it’s a contradiction is because drugs aren’t inherently bad, just as guns aren’t inherently bad. It’s how people choose to use them. To be quite honest, I don’t see the difference between someone who smokes a joint at the end of the day versus the person who is having a couple martini’s. In fact, one could argue, the former is preferable to the latter.

4. Beg to differ. Crack is inherently bad because it is addictive. Ditto for heroin. The addiction by definition removes the ability of people to choose whether or how to use them.

Why aren’t all drugs, legal, though? Whether prescribed or proscribed, all drugs are the same: most offer some benefit when taken in moderation. As of the year 2000, the “War on Drugs” was estimated to cost over $40 billion, annually. I’m sure it’s costing much more, now.

Legalizing drugs would put the Mexican drug gangs out of business a lot quicker and a lot more effectively than anything our two governments can come up with. Put that at the top of you checklist and you should be done.

5. No, it would legitimize the fortunes of the drug lords, so they would stop doing their legitimate money-laundering businesses like the New York Times — a big chunk of which is now owned by a Mexican “real estate developer” — although I bet now that it’s his PR puppet it is not technically money-laundering but a legitimate business expense, so bad example — and they still would not be willing to pay taxes to support water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, electricity, schools, roads and hospitals for all citizens of Mexico.

(It also is worth noting that Mexico is an oil-rich country that certainly could afford to do these things for its people if its people ever really wanted these things to happen.)

Obama mocked his online audience in his “town hall meeting” yesterday—to the laughter of the elitist DC crowd that surrounded him in the room—for asking about legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana.

You’re right, Mr. President, it may not remedy our economic woes, but why can’t this be taken into consideration? I believe it’s a serious question, with serious implications, and should be seriously addressed. You are not a comedian, Mr. President. Stop trying to be funny!

I don’t smoke pot or do any other illegal drugs. I don’t take many legal drugs, either. Maybe some Tylenol, here and there. Lately, I have been hitting up the Sudafed (I have some cold that I have named The Illness that won’t seem to go away). But, what’s the difference between the person who pops some Xanax for their anxiety and the person who takes a hit from the bong?

All legal drugs are achieving some goal that could be achieved by an illegal drug, they’re just doing it synthetically instead of naturally. Where do you think the drug companies came up with the idea in the first place? Mexico wouldn’t be having the issues it is, and neither would America, if drugs became legal. People are going to use drugs and some of those people will abuse drugs. The legality of the drugs doesn’t matter.

6.First, Obama mocks people because he is a narcissist and that is what they do to people who have shamed them. Obama does not have a sense of humor.

Second, WTF??? Aspirin might come from willow bark and digoxin from foxglove and penicillin and the -mycin antibiotics from fungi, but I’d love to have your source for where baclofen, carbamazepine, phenytoin, Avonex, and metoprolol — just for starters — came from in the wild.

Or do you think that ALL drugs are really some form of opioid?

Could you REALLY not have have bothered to read up on countries that HAVE decriminalized recreational drugs? Try reading this, as a sample. Decriminalizing recreational drugs has multiplied problems, not mitigated them.

Addendum: This issue has a face for me — my brother’s best friend, who died this time last year of liver failure due to 30-plus years of taking methadone, the treatment for his heroin addiction. He was so big and strong in his youth I thought nothing could ever beat him. We all miss him so.

I have just belatedly learned that our dear Stacy McCain has given up Ross Douthat-bashing for Lent! I gather the problem is that he is relinquishing something that gives him pleasure — I’ll have to ask the Anchoress — while Douthat annoys me like a big, slow-moving fly when I already have a rolled-up newspaper in my hand. I just have to smite him.

Stacy technically did not bash Douthat by quoting him today, so he’s keeping his vow, but I couldn’t tell from the quote whether Douthat was for or against porn and it included a swipe at gays,  so I had to wade through his (Douthat’s) turgid prose to see whether he would continue tying us to the decline of modern civilization. It turned out he was after bigger fish.

Frankly, from reading Douthat’s essay here when he must have been a sophomore or junior at Harvard in October 2000, to an even more tedious, fuzzy-minded, yet obviously meticulously and extensively researched essay for the Atlantic published in October 2008 allegedly pondering the question of whether pornography is adultery — my one takeaway was that this kid LOVES his porn, and periodically poses as a serious-minded journalist on the subject to justify indulging his passion AND MAKE IT TAX DEDUCTIBLE!

(Douthat’s porn stash must be HUGE! I mean, seriously, he invokes images that I know about from my brother’s Playboys from the 1960′s when they were originally published, twenty-some years before Douthat was born — he’s a freakin’ porn historian.)

Oh, and before you read the following quote from Douthat, I want to point out something about it that straight people would never notice without my drawing this to their attention — namely, it shows how much straight people take marriage for granted and chafe and rail against it. You guys unthinkingly denounce and besmirch marriage so cavalierly, and then somehow gays and lesbians wanting to get married makes US what’s threatening the institution of marriage these days? How, exactly? By shaming you guys by VALUING it, is how it looks to me.

I added the boldfacing below to Douthat’s wishy-washy and decidedly tepid denunciation of porn in the Atlantic (linked above):

Go back to Philip Weiss’s pal and listen to him talk: Porn captures these women before they get smart … It’s painful to say, but that’s your boys’ night out. This is the language of a man who has accepted, not as a temporary lapse but as a permanent and necessary aspect of his married life, a paid sexual relationship with women other than his wife. And it’s the language of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse.

Calling porn a form of adultery isn’t about pretending that we can make it disappear. The temptation will always be there, and of course people will give in to it. I’ve looked at porn; if you’re male and breathing, chances are so have you. Rather, it’s about what sort of people we aspire to be: how we define our ideals, how we draw the lines in our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves if we cross them. And it’s about providing a way for everyone involved, men and women alike-whether they’re using porn or merely tolerating it-to think about what, precisely, they’re involving themselves in, and whether they should reconsider.

The extremes of anti-porn hysteria are unhelpful in this debate. If the turn toward an “everybody does it” approach to pornography and marriage is wrong, it’s because that approach is wrong in and of itself, not because porn is going to wreck society, destroy the institution of marriage, and turn thousands of rapists loose to prey on unsuspecting women. Smut isn’t going to bring down Western Civilization any more than Nero’s orgies actually led to the fall of Rome, and a society that expects near-universal online infidelity may run just as smoothly as a society that doesn’t.

Which is precisely why it’s so easy to say that the spread of pornography means that we’re just taking a turn, where sex and fidelity are concerned, toward realism, toward adulthood, toward sophistication. All we have to give up to get there is our sense of decency.

You know, if what’s standing between us and the onslaught of porn is our sense of decency, don’t you think that is the idea that should have been developed throughout the article instead of being a throwaway line as Douthat is pulling his hand out of his pants after the contemporary history of porn montage that comprised the rest of the article reached its climax?

By the way, Douthat made some remarks about women’s use of porn and that  it is less than men’s, blah-blah-blah. This is a point I think most people in the field get wrong. Men’s and women’s porn are COMPLETELY different.

Women are high consumers of porn — it’s just that OUR porn — by which I mean pictures that make (straight) women excited — can be sold at grocery stores and children can look at them without experiencing any loss of decency whatsoever. This is because women’s porn is photos of chocolate cakes, followed by pretty much any other baked dessert, followed by attractive women in stylish clothes. Naked men, as a corollary to the naked women of men’s porn, are really not on the radar. Which is just as well, guys, because women resenting how  judgmental men are about their endowments is nothing compared to how you would feel listening in on their judgments about, um, yours. To say nothing of how you would feel about the pointing and laughing, or worse, the pointing and sighing.

Update: Welcome, Anchoress readers, and I send my thanks to her for accepting my link’s pingback. I enjoy her posts whether or not I agree with them because, like her, I believe in the value of leading a life devoted to spiritual development. I expect we may have a conversation or two in the future — blogversation? — about the separation of religion and science, since that is at the heart of my father’s work on the origin of life.

Update: Welcome, Protein Wisdom readers — Dan was kind enough to give me a head’s up that you might be dropping by. If you are disappointed at not finding any sample porn, may I direct you to my “humor” category, so I have a shot at getting you to laugh before you go? Also, please peek at the category for “Barack Obama.” I explain why his sociopathy — his lack of a conscience — explains all his contradictions, seductions and coercions. I really want to educate as many people as I can about that. Also, it will help immunize you against his manipulations.

Update: Welcome, The Other McCain readers, sent by my dear Stacy from here and here. My favorite line today of Stacy’s immortal prose is, “Sister Cynthia is numbered among the ‘Lanche-worthy, and with porn-worthy rackage dealeth she the mighty blog-fu: WOLVERINES!” I dealteth some amusing karma, too — be sure to scroll down.

Update: Andrew Sullivan helpfully chronicled other smitings of Ross Douthat here, “A Douthat Backlash.” It was just not Ross’s day today.

Update: I just read the post at Brad DeLong’s blog, which is linked in Andrew’s post and now I see why Stacy had it, too. Oh. My. God. If you have been wondering how to say Douthat’s name, it is pronounced, “douchebag.” I hereby officially amend my theory that Douthat writes about porn to make his collection tax-deductible to stipulate that it appears his primary drive in amassing his huge collection is to find the Magic Porn that will make him straight.

Update: Cuban Diva BFF advises me this morning that I should tell my gentle readers what I told her about why the Douthat quote linked above made me conclude he is very likely a gay man trying to make himself straight. In short, it takes one to know one.

First, when I was in college and in comparable intimate situations with men, I felt the same way Douthat says he did with a willing and scantily clad woman: clueless, disgusted and bored. HOWEVER, I don’t think anyone in the history of the Earth has EVER been as turned on as I was the first time I was intimate with a woman at the age of 18 and you know what? My hormones told me EXACTLY what to do and I was WILDLY ENTHUSIASTIC about the whole endeavor.

So I am outing Ross Douthat. If he is NOT a gay man, and the very worst kind of closeted Congressman-Robert-Bauman-I-denounce-gays-to-prove-I’m-not-gay gay man, I will eat my hat. It is a chocolate hat, but very large, and therefore likely to upset my tummy, so this remains A REALLY SERIOUS VOW!

Coincidence: When I was a reporter for the Harford Democrat, I wrote the Election Night story when Roy Dyson defeated Bob Bauman after Bauman was caught soliciting sex from a teenage boy in downtown D.C. during the campaign. The next summer I was covering some Democratic crab feast that Gov. Harry Hughes attended in Havre de Grace, Maryland, and Bauman was there and flirted with me. Ick. He is about 5’2″ and has the most startling aqua-blue eyes.

Update: Michelle Malkin was really the first one out of the blocks when the New York Times announced that Douthat would replace Bill Kristol as its token conservative op-ed columnist. Michelle lists their criteria here. (Snort!) I have the utmost respect for her and pine for the day when she will accept my trackbacks.