NEWT GINGRICH IS ROOTING FOR EUROSOCIALIST COUNTRIES AND THE U.N.

A tweet from Newt:

European push could mean that driverless cars will hit the road sooner than expected. http://t.co/aDT3oFRqYz

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 19, 2014

If you've followed Gingrich's career, you know he looks upon this development with eager anticipation, not alarm -- under that helmet of white hair lies the mind of a technophile 11-year-old.

But wait -- Gingrich is praising European countries? Those socialist warhorses?

Yup -- and not just European countries, but European countries working in conjunction with the United Nations:

Cars could be driving themselves down the world's streets far sooner than expected, thanks to a change in a global treaty backed by European countries.

A little-noticed amendment to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic agreed last month would let drivers take their hands off the wheel of self-driving cars. It was pushed by Germany, Italy and France, whose high-end carmakers believe they are ready to zoom past American tech pioneers and bring the first "autonomous vehicles" to market.

... as the technology becomes more affordable, Europe's luxury automakers say they are well placed to take advantage of it because of their deeper experience in engineering, manufacturing, marketing and sales. There is no point in waiting while California upstarts catch up.

... moving from test drives to marketable products was held back by Article 8 of the 1968 Convention on Road Traffic, which stipulates: "Every driver shall at all times be able to control his vehicle or to guide his animals."

The amendment agreed last month by the U.N. Working Party on Road Traffic Safety would allow a car to drive itself, as long as the system "can be overridden or switched off by the driver"....

Germany! Italy! France! How is this possible when everyone knows that socialism crushes the will to innovate, as well as all other aspects of the human spirit?

Back in 2012, when he was running for president, Gingrich sneered at Europe for its, um, driving choices:

Gingrich ... lampooned the fuel-efficient Chevy Volt, and the prospect of generating energy from algae -- calling Obama "President Algae" and "President Food Stamps" -- and claimed that the 44th president is seeking "total power" to shape Americans' consumption habits.

"The President would like to force all of us into small vehicles," Gingrich alleged. "The President would like to force all of to do what he wants. He's president of the wrong country. ... He needs to move to Europe."

Apparently the driving in Europe is going to be more to Newt's taste soon.

RIGHT-WINGERS STILL THINK GODWIN'S LAW MEANS NAZI COMPARISONS ARE MANDATORY

* Ken Langone:

It turns out Ken Langone is not actually that sorry for comparing the fight against income inequality to the tactics employed by Nazis in the 1930s.

The billionaire founder of Home Depot had apologized shortly after making the comparison in March. But in an interview published Monday, Langone instead tried his best to defend those remarks.

“I pointed to the election in Germany in 1933 that brought Hitler to power," Langone told Capital New York. "He came to power through a totally democratic process. So I simply said that just because we’re a democracy that doesn’t mean we can't do bad things!" ...

* AFDI, a group run by Pam Geller and Robert Spencer:

A controversial anti-Islamic ad campaign will appear on the side of buses in Washington D.C. featuring the face of Adolf Hitler.

The advert will be on 20 metro buses and depict a meeting between the leader of Nazi Germany and anti-Jewish Islamic leader Haj Amin al -Husseini during World War II....

* Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH: Reuters also has a story here: "Top Aide Says Obama 'Madder Than Hell' About Veterans Allegations," and it's a story quoting what you just heard -- the chief of staff, Denis McDonough -- on Slay the Nation yesterday. (paraphrased) "We're gonna get to the bottom of this! We're gonna get to the bottom of this and we're gonna fix it, and we're gonna ensure that it doesn't happen again!"

Now, this is classic. This is exactly how stuff like this gets spun ("spinned," for those of you in Rio Linda) in dictatorships and in totalitarian states since time immemorial. For example, "Gosh, if Lenin only knew all these people are dying in Ukraine! God, if Lenin only knew, he'd be so mad that he wouldn't let this happen! If Stalin only knew!"

He was the genocidal dictator.

"If Stalin only knew! If Hitler only knew what was being done on his watch? Oh, my! Oh, gee! What if he only knew? If Castro finds out, oh, no! Who's gonna have to tell Castro that this is not working? Oh, no!" And then when the problem becomes too big to ignore, we hear, "Boy, is Stalin mad now! Boy, is Castro really mad now!" (Transcript from RushLimbaugh.com)

This is defining totalitarianism down. Do right-wingers believe that everything they hate is the moral equivalent of Hitler, or is almost like Hitler, or has the potential to be like Hitler? Geller probably does; the rest, in all likelihood, not.

They don't care. It gets the rubes riled up, and it gets up our noses. And the gatekeepers in the mainstream press would rather wring their hands over a few canceled commencement speeches than over routine group slander directed leftward.

SHOCK POLL: VOTERS IN MOSTLY REPUBLICAN STATES AND DISTRICTS LEAN REPUBLICAN

This is being reported as horrible news for Democrats:

... Republicans have captured a lead in the areas home to the year’s most competitive races, according to a new POLITICO poll.

In the congressional districts and states where the 2014 elections will actually be decided, likely voters said they would prefer to vote for a Republican over a Democrat by 7 points, 41 percent to 34 percent. A quarter of voters said they were unsure of their preference....

While this isn't good news for Democrats, I question how dire it is. Go to the fine print of the poll data and you learn that 68 House districts were surveyed. Of those, a majority -- 36 -- are already represented by Republicans.





So in a sample of districts that's 6% more Republican than Democratic -- 53% Republican, 47% Democrat -- Republicans have, um, a 7-point lead. Forgive me if I'm not horrified.

The Senate battleground states are a lot more problematic for Democrats -- in 14 of the 16 races, the current senator is a Democrat.





But it's long been known that this would be a challenging year in the Senate, because Democrats are defending seats in red states (Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia) and a couple of purple states (North Carolina, Virginia). You'd have to be really naive to think that Democrats won't lose seats. They just have to avoid losing six or more to hold the Senate.

But why ask a generic ballot question about a Senate race anyway? Despite party sentiment, a lot of Democrats are surprisingly competitive in red states -- Mark Begich in Alaska, Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Michelle Nunn in Georgia, Alison Grimes in Kentucky, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Don't voters already know the candidates in these races? If so, why ask about unnamed Democrat vs. unnamed Republican?

So the poll is bad. But it's not as awful as it appears on the surface.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION -- AND IF IT'S NOT CONSPICUOUS ENOUGH, THEY'LL RUB YOUR FACE IN IT

In New York City, developers who want to put up luxury apartment buildings sometimes reserve a certain number of units for middle-income tenants paying lower, stabilized rents, which can rise only a set amount each year. The developers do this not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it entitles them to a sweet tax break.

And then, as The New York Times notes, this often happens:

When a playroom opened in Michael Reilly's Upper West Side building two years ago, he asked the concierge for a key to the space so his toddler could play there. The concierge's answer stunned him: It was out of bounds to him and his child.

Mr. Reilly's building, the Windermere West End, a luxury rental, is one of several in the city that prohibit rent-regulated tenants from using new services like gyms, playrooms and rooftop gardens. Some co-op and condo buildings have similar restrictions.

Developers say amenities are a marketing tool to lure high-paying tenants....

In recent years, developers who have earned tax credits by promising to provide affordable housing have built luxury condos with separate entrances and lobbies for the affordable rental units. The so-called "poor door" makes it easier to restrict who gets access to amenities....

At the Windermere, tenants living in the nearly 140 rent-regulated apartments have been barred from using the new spa with a pool, yoga studio and gym. As part of a $10 million renovation, Stellar Management is also adding a sky lounge, a bar and planters to the roof. Rent-regulated tenants, who pay about $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom, had socialized on the roof for years, but will no longer be allowed to use it when construction is complete....

I don't know where this falls on your injustice scale. The separate-entrances thing strikes me as the creepiest -- it's not quite Jim Crow, but it's as if these developers want it to be.

Over at The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson notices something similar going on in air travel. At one end of the income spectrum, you've got this:

According to a New York Times story on business travel that ran earlier this month, "the average seat pitch -- the industry standard for the space between two seats, currently about 31 inches -- has been reduced by about 10 percent over the last decade. Airlines are also using slimmer economy seats that allow them to add more rows and passengers on their planes."

... Spirit [Air] charges its benumbed passengers a fee for their carry-on bags, $3 for water and $10 for printing out boarding passes, and has seats that, by design, don't recline.... And yet Spirit thrives as the 99-cent store of air travel, because it's an airline that the downsized working class can afford.

And at the other end, there's this:

A first-class ticket on Emirates Air from Los Angeles to Dubai entitles you to a private compartment -- complete with a sliding door, a lie-flat seat and mattress, a vanity, a minibar, a flat-screen TV and luxury bathroom with shower -- for a tidy $32,840. Korean Air has installed what the New York Times describes as a "spacious lounge" with fully equipped bar in the first-class sections of its planes. Delta will provide flat-beds for their first-class and business passengers on all their New York to L.A. flights starting this summer. Virgin Atlantic provides private limousine service to and fro airports for their first-class passengers. Not to be outdone, Lufthansa has built an entire separate terminal for its first-classers at the Frankfurt airport, from which they are carried by limousine across the tarmac to their planes. Delta and United whisk their first-class passengers to connecting flights in Porsches and Mercedes, respectively.

Even the air within the plane is apportioned by class. In its first-class cabins, Lufthansa has installed humidifiers that increase the humidity to 25 percent, while in coach, it ranges from 5 to 10 percent.

Are these First World problems? Sure. But still, they're a sign that business is abandoning any expectation of making money in the future from a broad middle class. And clearly no one in the upper brackets cares any more about the conspicuousness of their own consumption. The middle class is expected to feel deprived. That seems to be the point.

TRIGGER WARNING: AMBIVALENCE ON TRIGGER WARNINGS

Trigger Warning: all human experience.

— Darinstrauss (@Darinstrauss) May 18, 2014

The New York Times has a story today about campus activists who are pressing colleges for trigger warnings:

Should students about to read "The Great Gatsby" be forewarned about "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence," as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism -- like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" or "Things Fall Apart" -- have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as "trigger warnings," explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them. But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other schools....

This issue splits the left: on Twitter there's a lot of liberal scorn, as well as equal scorn for the scornful (the pro-warning argument is that the notifications are small and easily ignored by people who don't need them).

My gut reaction to trigger warnings is negative -- and yet I see the appropriateness of being sensitive to survivors of war, sexual violence, childhood abuse, and so on.

I think I'm resistant because of the way trigger warnings are often done. Online, a trigger warning tends to precede content in a way that stops the presentation of that content dead in its tracks for a moment. It's a HERE BE MONSTERS sign everyone has to pass under before getting to the content.

And where trigger warnings are in place, there often seems to be a sort of mission creep. After a while, the warnings aren't just about the sort of material that might recall violent trauma a reader might have experienced; they're about, well, everything bad in the world.

This is why I avoid Melissa McEwan's Shakesville, which I used to read regularly. Go there and you'll see trigger warnings like this:





Seriously? For a post titled "Brown v. Board of Ed" you need a warning that it's going to discuss racism and segregation? And are these, and class warfare, actual psychological triggers likely to induce post-traumatic stress? Graphic depictions or descriptions of civil-rights-era violence, sure -- those might benefit from a warning. But there's nothing of the sort in the linked post. Why is a warning appropriate?

Ultimately, I think the prominent display of this sort of thing runs the risk of turning traumatization into the new gluten sensitivity. Yes, some people actually suffer post-traumatic reactions to certain content, just as some people actually have celiac disease and need to avoid gluten to safeguard their physical health. But gluten avoidance has become a food fad -- and putting a HERE BE MONSTERS frame around writing and art may become an academic fad, as more and more people express sensitivities they don't really have, or assume sensitivities in people who haven't actually expressed them.

My solution: generate the warnings and make them available on request and online. Make them easy to find for anyone who needs them -- but underplay them. I think it's good that people with nut allergies can find allergan notices by reading side-panel labels on packaged foods. I think it's also good when the rest of us find them easy to ignore. That's the right balance.

YES, FOX IS STILL FLOGGING PRESCRIPTION GLASSES-GATE

No, Fox isn't dropping this -- you didn't think anyone there was capable of shame, did you?





It's at Fox Nation, too, of course.

From the story:

A New York ophthalmologist told FoxNews.com that special glasses former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was seen wearing last year are used to treat double vision, which is sometimes caused by severe head trauma.

Dr. Marc Werner explained the purpose of the Fresnel prism eyeglasses, like the ones Clinton wore, amid questions about the potential presidential candidate's health....

"Any issue which raises intracranial pressure can damage one of the nerves which moves the eye around, and if it damages one of the nerves, your eyes will be misaligned -- maybe temporarily, maybe more permanently," Werner said....

When asked what he might look for given the chance to see Clinton's medical records, Dr. Werner said he would want to examine imaging studies.

"I would like to know what the results of any imaging studies were and the cause of why someone needed Fresnel," Werner said. "There are lots of different causes, anything from Myasthenia to Multiple Sclerosis to maybe a blood clot, these are all possible causes, but all we know is that she was using a Fresnel prism and therefore had double vision."

Jesus -- multiple sclerosis. Hope you got a sweet paycheck for that bit of insinuation, Doc. "Maybe more permanently" was choice, too.

(Well, it beats the American Thinker, which is asking whether Hillary suffered a stroke.)

Steven Galetta, a neuro-ophthalmologist interviewed by The Washington Post this past week, said concussion victims generally recover quickly, though some show symptoms even after a year.

But, um, Hillary isn't wearing the glasses anymore in public appearances. However, the people who won't let go of Benghazi sure as hell aren't going to let go of this, even if they propaganda goes over equally poorly with non-wingnuts.

THIS IS WHAT THE TEA PARTY WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE WITHOUT FOX AND THE KOCH BROTHERS (PART II)

The utter failure of Operation American Spring -- which drew a tiny crowd in D.C. yesterday instead of the 10 million or 30 million or however-the-hell-many million its organizers hoped to draw for a demonstration intended to purge the U.S. government of all its insufficiently wingnutty leaders (McConnell and Boehner as well as Obama, Pelosi, Holder, et al.) -- can be explained a lot of ways, but I think danps at Corrente is right about this:

... it looks like the only way the Tea Party gets real numbers in DC is if the Koch brothers charter buses for the event. Not very grassrootsy!)

That's a point I made in one of the most-read posts ever on this blog -- or, to be accurate, most hate-read. The post, from last August, was titled "This Is What the Tea Party Would Have Been Like Without Fox and the Koch Brothers"; it discussed, um, a sparsely attended demonstration at which many embarrassing arguments and assertions were made. Why weren't the crowds at that demonstration bigger? Why were the messages so embarrassing? (Then it was racism; at OAS it was chemtrails and rumored FEMA roundups.) I said that it was because deep-pocketed pros weren't helping out with message guidance or money or publicity; in the absence of that, the fearsomely large, allegedly grassroots tea party was just an absurdly small collection of haters and cranks.

This didn't go over well with the 'baggers, as you'll see if you scroll through the 619 comments at that post, or the 171 comments at a follow-up post. (I'm not sure how they found what I'd written, but I was the hottest thing on wingnut Facebook for a while.)

The demonstration I was writing about was sponsored by a group then known as Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, and now known as Overpasses for America. To state the obvious, the group focuses on hanging signs over overpasses demanding the president's removal from office. And, well, what do you know: Overpasses and Operation American Spring are allies:

Overpasses for America is teaming up with Operation American Spring to deliver "Articles of Impeachment" to the House and Senate on April 22, before a planned rally in Washington D.C. on May 16, Overpasses for America founder James Neighbors told the Examiner....

Failure loves company, I guess.

Here's the horrible, Journey-esque music video posted at the Overpasses site in honor of Operation American Spring. (UPDATE: Sorry, folks -- as the only person on the planet who hasn't yet embraced the nerd/sci-fi/ComicCon culture onslaught of the past few decades, I didn't realize that this is the theme to Star Trek: Enterprise. It's still horrible and Journey-esque.)

RACIST NEW HAMPSHIRE POLICE COMMISSIONER -- MITT ROMNEY, YOUR THOUGHTS?
(updated with Romney's response)

I'm still waiting for Mitt Romney to get asked about this:

WOLFEBORO, N.H. -- A police commissioner in a predominantly white New Hampshire town said he won't apologize for calling President Barack Obama the N-word, and he sat with his arms crossed while angry residents at a meeting called for his resignation on Thursday....

Wolfeboro Police Commissioner Robert Copeland, who's 82 and white, has acknowledged in an email to his fellow police commissioners he used the racial slur in describing Obama.

Town resident Jane O'Toole, who moved to Wolfeboro four months ago, said she overheard Copeland say the slur at a restaurant in March and wrote to the town manager about it. Copeland, in an email to her, acknowledged using the slur in referring to the president and said he will not apologize....

Mitt Romney's been going to Wolfeboro since his father brought him there when he was a child. Mitt and his wife have owned a summer home there since 1997.

Now, you know that if anything happens anywhere in America that involves black people, Barack Obama gets asked about it. He was asked about Donald Sterling in Malaysia, where he was meeting with the prime minister. So why can't somebody get a comment out of Romney about this situation, given the fact that it's happening in a town where Romney actually pays property taxes?

(I assume Romney pays property taxes there. Who knows? Quite possibly he's found a clever way to avoid doing that.)

It's not as if Romney has gone reclusive on us since 2012 -- he can certainly find his way to a microphone or a camera when he wants to flog his documentary (here he is making a surprise appearance at Sundance), or when he wants to troll President Obama regarding Russia policy, or when he decides to needle Harry Reid childishly by pretending he had to stand in line at the post office in order to pay his taxes. So why can't the news media get a comment from him about this?

If you care, here's Romney chatting with Jimmy Fallon this past January about the swell time they're going to have eating burgers together in Wolfeboro this summer. This was during the publicity tour for the documentary. (Fallon also spends time in Wolfeboro -- hey, Jimmy, what are your thoughts?)





****

UPDATE: OK, good for Mitt:

The Wolfeboro, N.H., police commissioner who has stood by his comment calling President Obama a racial slur is facing a growing cascade of calls to step down, including from the tiny lakeside town’s most famous summer resident — one-time Obama opponent Mitt Romney.

"The vile epithet used and confirmed by the commissioner has no place in our community," the former Bay State governor, who owns a home in the popular Granite State vacation spot, said in a statement to the Herald. "He should apologize and resign."

HEY, KIDS, LET'S WATERBOARD TIMOTHY EGAN

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan certainly shouldn't object too harshly to being waterboarded because, in his zeal to defend Condoleezza Rice's inalienable right to earn $35,000 for a commencement speech over any and all objections from the graduating class being addressed, he writes this:

The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush -- two wars on the credit card, making torture a word associated with the United States -- was clearly a debacle. Contemporary assessments were not kind, and history will be brutal.

But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts. You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.

So go ahead and waterboard Egan, because he thinks it would be less painful than sitting in the California sun listening to a dull speech.

This appears in Egan's column -- titled "The Commencement Bigots" -- a few paragraphs after the following masterpiece of false equivalence:

Near as I can tell, the forces of intolerance objected to [Rice's] role in the Iraq war. O.K. And by shutting her down, the point is ... what? That extremism, whether in the climate-denial echo chamber of Republican Party elites or in the fragile zone of college faculty lounges, is the worst enemy of free speech.

Right -- objectors who prevented Rice from delivering one speech are analogous to Republicans who, on an ongoing basis, are blocking virtually all federal efforts to address a world-historic climate crisis. Yup, that makes sense.

Egan's remedy for all this commencement fascism?

Give me a brisk, strong, witty defense of something I disagree with over a tired replay of platitudes. It matters little if the speaker is a convict or a seminarian, a statesman or a comedian.

Yeah, there you go. Enough of this intellectual pabulum -- let's mix it up! Let's get some commencement speakers who'll really challenge these overprivileged snotnoses! Send Ted Nugent to Virginia Tech! Dispatch Donald Sterling to Howard University, or maybe George Zimmerman! And at Brandeis, in place of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, why not see if we can bail out Frazier Glenn Miller? It would be better than (ick! ptui!) political correctness, right?

SHOCKINGLY, KIRSTEN POWERS OMITS A FEW FACTS

It's a day ending in "-day," so pseudo-Democrat and professional concern troll Kirsten Powers is denouncing liberals for intolerance again, this time in USA Today:

Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can't have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the "right" things in their life off the set?

First of all, I love the reference to "old remarks," as if these were comments from the distant past that no longer reflect the brothers' beliefs. The remarks were from ... 2012. And when they were brought to light, the brothers -- or at least David Benham, who is the real ideological combatant of the two -- went on a right-wing media tour and said that, hell yes, he stands by those "old remarks."

Oh, and David Benham's "Christian beliefs on homosexuality" include the belief that homosexuality is analogous to Nazism. He's not very fond of Muslims, either, or particularly tolerant himself, if you're pro-choice.
Right Wing Watch quoted this 2012 blog post by David Benham:

... if evil is being accepted and appreciated at the national level, aggressive Christian men must lead the charge against it. In the late 1940's England realized this truth with Neville Chamberlain's Policy of Appeasement and the Nazi regime. Chamberlain thought he could somehow "appease" the fuehrer, yet Winston Churchill aggressively stood against this policy and proclaimed that they must kill Hitler and destroy the regime in its entirety. It wasn't long before Chamberlain's "politically correct" policy fell flat on its face, and Churchill -- the more aggressive man -- took the reins and joined America in defeating the beast called, Naziism [sic].

Also:

David also leads protests outside of abortion clinics where he praises demonstrators for taking a stand at "the gates of hell" and confronting the "altars of Moloch."

And Right Watch Watch refers us to this report by the ADL (yes, the ADL is part of the "liberal mob"):

David Benham, Flip Benham's son and an OSA spokesman, called the [proposed Park51] Islamic center [in lower Manhattan] a "den of iniquity," and referred to Muslims as "the enemy attacking" America. Benham, portraying the United States as a Christian nation, also drew this distinction: "The difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam takes life and enslaves it. Christianity lays its life down and sets you free." The day prior to the demonstration, OSA released a statement asserting that seeks to convert Muslims who are "enslaved in the tyrannical bondage of Islam" to Christianity.

Benham has defended his remarks in the right-wing media since they were revealed, asserting that his anti-gay sentiments are merely his attempt to fight "the evil that's enslaving people," which, as the brothers assert, is the work of Satan.

But liberals who have a problem with all this are the intolerant ones.

*****

Powers goes on to offer a rather selective reading of the worldview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose honorary degree from Brandeis has been withdrawn:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic ... sadomasochistic ... malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

Well, of course, there are quite a few folks out there who've called for a boycott of Bill Maher -- but they're not liberals, so, to Powers, they can't be intolerant.

But let's go back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Were progressives at Brandeis upset because she "attack[s] the prophet Mohammed"? No. They're upset because she calls for a war with Islam -- all of it:

David Cohen quotes Ms. Hirsi Ali as saying: "Violence is inherent in Islam -- it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder. The police may foil plots and freeze bank accounts in the short term, but the battle against terrorism will ultimately be lost unless we realise that it's not just with extremist elements within Islam, but the ideology of Islam itself....Islam is the new fascism" (London Evening Standard, 2-7-07).... Van Bakel notes religions' ability to bring about change for good: "Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?" Ms. Hirsi Ali responds, "Only if Islam is defeated." Van Bakel asks, "Don't you mean defeating radical Islam?" To that she responds, "No. Islam, period." (Reason, 11-07)

Every Muslim on earth is the enemy -- but to Powers, if you have a problem with that viewpoint, you're intolerant.

*****

One final Powers quote:

In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job.

Odd that Powers would somehow neglect to mention that the "anti-abortion sign" in question was a large, graphic photograph of an aborted fetus, clearly designed to provoke. That doesn't justify Professor Miller-Young's decision to walk off with the poster -- but she is up on charges. Is everyone who responds in a similar way to graphic aborted-fetus pictures a thuggish fascist? Facebook banned ex-Saturday Night Live star Victoria Jackson for posting a similar picture. TV stations are required to air political ads featuring aborted fetuses if they're from legitimate candidates for office, but if not, the ads can be blocked. Is that intolerance, too?

Y'know, if I didn't know better, I'd think Kirsten Powers was deliberately omitting this information in order to make the moral balance seem one-sided. Oh, but she wouldn't really do that, would she?

IN WHICH I DISAGREE WITH A WHEELCHAIR-BOUND GUN CONTROL ADVOCATE WHO'S REGULARLY HARASSED BY GUN EXTREMISTS

Mark Follman of Mother Jones has written a post about advocates of loose gun laws who harass female gun control advocates. They stalk. They make death threats. They threaten rape.

Here's what Follman tells us about one victim of these men:

AS JENNIFER LONGDON STEERED her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she'd participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.

As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face....

Longdon is no stranger to such attacks. Last May in her hometown of Phoenix, she helped coordinate a gun buyback program with local police over three weekends. On the first Saturday, a group of men assembled across the street from the church parking lot where Longdon was set up....

Some of them approached Longdon. "You know what was wrong with your shooting?" one said. "They didn't aim better." Another man came up, looked Longdon up and down and said, "I know who you are." Then he recited her home address....

After a fundraiser one night during the program, Longdon returned home around 10 p.m., parked her ramp-equipped van and began unloading herself. As she wheeled up to her house, a man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in black and had a rifle, "like something out of a commando movie," Longdon told me. He took aim at her and pulled the trigger. Longdon was hit with a stream of water. "Don't you wish you had a gun now, bitch?" he scoffed before taking off.

"It was like a mock execution," Longdon says....

The fact that Longdon soldiers on after abuse like this puts me in awe of her bravery.

But I have a disagreement with her.

The majority of gun owners in America are good people, she adds. "I wish that more responsible gun owners would step into this conversation and say 'Look, those guys don't speak for us.'"

No, she's wrong. The majority of gun owners in America are not good people, and she just told us why. They don't speak out about this. They don't distance themselves from people like this.

Now, I understand that a lot of ordinary gun owners don't know that this kind of intimidation is taking place. But there's been plenty of publicity lately for acts of garden-variety intimidation -- the guy who defiantly waved a gun near a Little League field, or people having a brandish-in at a Starbucks in Newtown, Connecticut. When are supposedly decent, well-meaning gun owners going to put some distance between themselves and people who do things like that?

Follman's article quotes a couple of gun advocates who seem to have a problem with all this, but the problem they have is that they don't think it's good for them strategically:

Some staunch advocates of expansive gun rights recognize that this kind of bullying is bad for the movement. In March, a talk radio host and self-described gun enthusiast in Wisconsin called the "in your face open-carry playbook" tactics "perfectly legal, and perfectly stupid." After the Arlington restaurant incident, the editor of BearingArms.com wrote that Open Carry Texas had achieved "a public relations disaster."

The latter is a reference to an incident in which forty members of Open Carry Texas "armed with assault rifles showed up outside an Arlington, Texas, restaurant where four women from Moms Demand Action were having lunch." That's not a "public relations disaster" -- that's thuggery. If members of the gun community won't say so -- if they continue to look the other way -- then, no, they're not good people.

THE VA'S PROBLEMS REALLY ARE A SCANDAL. WHY HASN'T THE GOP MADE THE VA THE NEW BENGHAZI/IRS/OBAMACARE?

The right-wing noise machine has spent the Obama years flooding the zone with angry talk about so-called scandals. Three have gotten the most attention by far: Obamacare and its real or imagined shortcomings, the IRS and its real or imagined persecution of right-wiong groups, and, of course, Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!

Meanwhile, the Veterans Administration really has been falling down on the job -- yet the VA's problems have never become the obsession of the right the way Obamacare, the IRS, and Benghazi have.

Why? Why aren't Republican candidates in the midterms making huge ad buys to run commercials about the VA's failings? Why aren't there multiple House committees staging endless investigations of the VA's problems, with documents gleefully leaked to friendly news operations every time there's a lull in the news cycle? Why isn't Fox running several segments on the VA every night? Why hasn't Eric Shinseki become Public Enemy No. 1, like Lois Lerner or Kathleen Sebelius?

Is it because the problems didn't originate with the Obama administration? Well, the economic collapse of 2008 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and Republicans have gotten very good at arguing that Obama is a whiner who blames Bush for everything.

Is it because it's a reminder that many of the servicemembers in need got to where they are because of unpopular Bush wars? But Benghazi is an indirect reminder that America's relations with the Arab-Muslim world worsened as a result of Bush's bungled wars -- and of the fact that Bush failed to focus on Al Qaeda after 9/11.

I think Cui bono? applies here.

Who would benefit if the right-wing "wins" the IRS scandal? Obviously, the victors would be billionaire political movers and shakers, who would be even freer than they are now to manipulate elections. Most of these billionaires would be Republican, of course.

Who benefits if the right triumphs on Obamacare? Either we go back to the status quo ante -- no guaranteed coverage for those with expensive preexisting conditions and so on -- or we shift to the GOP's wish list: tort reform that effectively makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to file medical lawsuits; insurance sold across state lines (which will all be sold out of one or two states that pass extremely industry-friendly laws); medical savings accounts and voucherized Medicare (which will shift more of the health care burden to individuals, who'll be told it's their fault if they can't cover their expenses). In other words, a big win for Big Medicine.

Who would benefit from a GOP triumph on Benghazi? The message would be that Obama is weak and Republicans stand up for America when it's threatened by evil brown people. That's music to the ears of neocons and defense contractors.

Now: who'd be the beneficiaries if Republicans went wall-to-wall on the VA's failings and the resulting scandal actually led to improvements in how the VA does business?

Well, veterans, obviously -- and you'd think right-wingers would want to play to veterans, and to others who are pro-military. But fixing the VA would cost money -- and while it might be argued that the VA's problems can't be solved just by throwing money at them, they certainly can't be solved without money. Lots of it.

And that would be social spending -- social spending on veterans, to be sure, but social spending nonetheless. The billionaires who fund the GOP don't want that. The chickenhawk neocons who dominate Republican foreign policy thinking want to fight wars, but they don't give a crap about the people who actually do that fighting.

And, ultimately, the right isn't going to go Full Metal VA because right-wingers don't really want any government social-service agency to function properly. Heaven forbid that Americans start believing in the ability of government to solve problems, not just create them.

So here's a scandal handed to the right on a silver platter. And the right doesn't really care. Yes, Shinseki is on the hot seat today. But wake me when every D.C. news story is described by the right as an attempt to distract us from the VA scandal.

IT'S ALWAYS OUR FAULT

I don't really have a fresh take on this New York Times/Jill Abramson story. The claim by Ken Auletta of The New Yorker that she got rosswise with top management in part because she was perceived as "pushy," and especially because she complained the discrepancy between her pay and that of her male predecessor, seems significant, especially when statements from a Times spokesperson's account of those discrepancies kept changing (we were told that Abramson's compensation "was not less" than Bill Keller's, then that it "was not meaningfully less," then that it was "directly comparable," whatever the hell that means. The Times itslf says she was trying to hire a co-managing editor to work alongside Dean Baquet, the subordinate who'll now succeed her, and didn't Baquet. Is consultthat "pushy"? Yeah -- the way a lot of male bosses are.

I've seen nothing but scorn for the Times from online liberals. But I think Adam Serwer nailed it:

Preview of the next week of writing on this: Liberals say sexism is real, conservatives say liberals are the real sexists.

— AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) May 14, 2014

Yup -- looky here, it's Allahpundit at Hot Air:

... if you've been wondering what that mysterious smell is this afternoon, there's your answer: It's a Category Five sh*tstorm on the horizon, moving at ferocious speed towards America's most famous liberal newspaper.

No need to pop the popcorn. I've made plenty. Behold the war on women....

In the interest of making this as miserable as possible for the Times, I'm calling it sexism. Straight up.

... deliciously schadenfreudean....

Right -- the Times falling short on liberal ideals is so disillusioning to us because we've never, ever had reason to criticize the paper until now. Oh, and the fact that an institution we find more or less compatible with our principles could be run by suits who violate those principles? It never occurred to us before!

Fortunately, the right won't spend much time on this -- there are new IRS and Benghazi non-stories to flog! So this moment will pass.

DEAR COLLEGE STUDENTS: BE AS INTOLERANT OF FAMOUS, POWERFUL PEOPLE AS YOU WANT TO BE

The Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi thinks "the oh-so-fragile class of 2014 needs to STFU":

... Today marks the second time in a month that a powerful female figure has pulled out of delivering a commencement speech because of opposition from a seriously uptight and holier-than-thou student body.

Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, has decided not to serve as commencement speaker for Smith College's May 18, 2014 graduation, after students started a petition protesting her selection.

... God forbid these delicate students should be exposed to an idea or an organization with which they disagree -- at college.

... Earlier this month, former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, pulled out of delivering a commencement speech for Rutgers University in New Jersey (for which she would have received $35,000 and an honorary degree), following protests from students and faculty....

Rice occupied one of the most important offices in the whole country. But you’re right, kids, she probably has nothing interesting to say or any good advice because she was involved in a senseless war....

Millennials have grown up in a world where you are never forced to see, hear or read anything that you haven’t personally selected. 7,000 TV channels, a DVR to skip commercials, millions of websites -- we have been able to curate our own little worlds using technology, wherein nothing unpleasant or offensive can creep in. So when we're forced to sit through a commercial or, heaven forbid, listen to someone talk who isn't Mary-freakin'-Poppins, we can't handle it....

Yeah, maybe that's the problem -- although my generation, which programmed in FORTRAN, was similarly intolerant of ex-government officials we regarded as war criminals.

And so what? Nuzzi thinks millennials are spoiled by their ability to shut out certain messages -- but the fact is that millennials can't silence people with whom they disagree. You may choose not to listen to warmongers in the federal government or policymakers at the IMF, but, even if you're a millennial, you'll have to live in the world they make. If you disapprove of them from the left, it's overwhelmingly likely that you'll never be able to influence what they do. You may become a Pulitzer-winning journalist or a prominent left-leaning policy wonk or even a high official in a nominally liberal presidential administration, but chances are you'll never be able to exert leftward influence on the institutions of which you disapprove, because of the entrenched power of conservatism, and because of how much selling out and compromising you and your superiors will already have done just to get into a position of apparent influence.

So if you're still in school and one of these people wants to speak on your campus, you have what's probably the last opportunity you'll ever have to rebuff someone with this much power and actually make it stick. So what the hell -- be intolerant. These people run everything off campus -- when they decide to set foot on campus, you may as well tell them to bugger off.

EVERYONE IN D.C. IS EITHER SOCIOPATHIC OR IN DENIAL

Today's New York Times has a softball front-page story on Mitch McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao. I learned from this story that McConnell and Chao were introduced by the kind of guy who'd probably be considered a suspect subversive if he'd introduced Bill to Hillary or Barack to Michelle:

Mr. McConnell had come to Washington in the 1960s as an intern, and later was an aide in the Senate. He befriended Stuart Bloch, a public interest lobbyist against the Vietnam War who wore a cape and Borsalino hat. ("You have to distinguish yourself," he explained in a phone interview.) The conservative and liberal young men hit it off, sharing dinners and celebrating each other's birthday.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Bloch, who was married to Julia Chang Bloch, herself a Chinese immigrant and a future ambassador to Nepal, decided to fix up Mr. McConnell, a bachelor at the time.

Mr. Bloch, now a peace-sign flashing Washington lawyer partial to American flag cummerbunds, oversized sunglasses and the nickname "the Blochbuster," invited the senator to a candlelight dinner with Ms. Chao, a protegee of his wife's.

It's true -- the former antiwar lobbyist who became McConnell's close friend and introduced him to his wife really does like to flash the peace sign:



And Chao is also surprisingly chummy with The Enemy:

But Ms. Chao is less partisan in her socializing. This year, she was a host of a dinner to welcome Penny Pritzker, Mr. Obama's top donor, to the administration as commerce secretary. She spent the evening next to Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser. "I remember looking across the table and seeing the two of them just laughing," said Catherine Reynolds, a philanthropist and event co-host.

And did I mention that McConnell's previous wife, Sherrill Redmon, "went on to become a feminist scholar and collaborate with Gloria Steinem at Smith College"?

On a personal level, McConnell and Chao treat non-conservatives as human beings. But in his day job, McConnell takes a scorched-earth approach to Democrats, liberals, even moderates. The Obama agenda must be crushed. Every bill must be passed with a 60-vote supermajority -- a filibuster is imposed or implied in all cases.

Apart from that blocking-everything-they-want thing, McConnell and Chao are just fine with people who aren't right-wing.

I bring this up because Ana Maria Cox wrote an angry column yesterday in response to the news that Karl Rove had insinuated that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. Rove dropped this stinkbomb in a joint appearance with former Obama advisor Robert Gibbs. Rove and Gibbs have made several such joint appearances (for a $100,000 shared fee); they're like a left/right vaudeville team.

What offends Cox is the chumminess of it all:

I'm not sure which is worse: the idea that Rove and Gibbs might be imparting valuable insider information to these paying audiences at largely closed-door events; or that they've willingly emptied out whatever convictions they have about politics and agreed to play-act as partisans for sheer entertainment value.

It's not a news flash that political debate has morphed into entertainment, but there's something unseemly about the format being commercialized so blatantly. Their glad-handing we're-all-really-friends"appearances – and Gibbs and Roves are far from the only culprits – cheapens any debate about issues or real ideological differences, and gives Americans yet more evidence that party divides are largely for show (and that the real divide in American politics is between the powerful and the powerless). It's not so much that they're friendly with each other -- I'm for being friends! -- it's that they've chosen to link arms and walk on a treadmill of pointless conflict.

What's more, however skillfully Gibbs might argue his ideology and policy with Rove, his convictions are undermined by continued presence on the stage -- especially in this instance, given Rove's outrageous "brain damage" hypothesis. Gibbs refused to comment on the quote, which seems to confirm that Rove did make the accusation, and absolutely makes Gibbs ... complicit in legitimizing it.

But, see, the two parties are looking at this differently. Republicans are sociopathic enough to engage in total war with Democrats while maintaining a facade of civility. It's as if Republicans seem to regard it all as pro wrestling, yet they're still trying to send their opponents to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Democrats are in denial of a fact that's hiding in plain sight: because Rove, McConnell, et al., appear to be friendly combatants, Democrats ignore the fact that they're treating politics as a blood sport.

The denial extends to the media -- as I noted yesterday, the press just can't seem to grasp the climate-change nihilism of the GOP, presumably because nice, mainstream-seeming people obviously wouldn't all believe in superstitious nonsense that could permanently harm the planet, would they?

A facade of decency, rationality, and conviviality shouldn't blind the rest of D.C. to the fact that Republicans are nonsense-spewing take-no-prisoners extremists. But it does.

UM, YOU FOLKS KNOW THAT ALL THE 2016 GOP CONTENDERS BASICALLY AGREE WITH RUBIO ON CLIMATE, RIGHT?

Juliet Lapidos of The New York Times has had enough of one Republican presidential contender:

Marco Rubio Disqualifies Himself

If American presidents need to prove a basic ability to accept facts, then Senator Marco Rubio of Florida -- who's publicly mulling a run -- just disqualified himself from competition.

In an interview with ABC on Sunday, days after the release of an alarming White House report on the present and future effects of climate change on the United States, Mr. Rubio said:

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it."

So, according to Lapidos, come 2016 there's one GOP candidate who's removed himself from serious consideration by thoughtful people. One down! Glad we've established that!

Except that there's nothing unique about Rubio on this. As Paul Waldman noted yesterday at The Washington Post, Rubio's take on climate change roughly matches that of every other serious contender for the nomination, with the exception of Chris Christie (who's probably no longer a factor in the race).

Ted Cruz? Hardcore denier. Rick Santorum? Hardcore denier. Jeb Bush? Rubio-esque lite denier:

"I think global warming may be real," he said in a 2011 interview. "It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately manmade. What I get a little tired of on the left is this idea that somehow science has decided all this so you can't have a view."

Scott Walker?

He signed a "no climate tax" pledge promising not to support any legislation that would raise taxes to combat climate change and has been a keynote speaker at the climate-denying Heartland Institute.

Mike Huckabee?

... these days, he gets on the radio with Sen. Jim Inhofe and jaws about what a hoax the whole thing is.

Paul Ryan?

... in 2009 he wrote an op-ed decrying efforts to reduce carbon emissions and claiming that climate scientists are using "statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change."

And elsewhere we learn that Rand Paul thinks the science of climate change is "not conclusive."

So why is a Times columnist writing as if Rubio is some sort of odd outlier in his party? Why isn't the story here that one entire party denies science? Why does the editorial board of The Washington Post -- the same paper that published Waldman's roundup of climate thoughts by 2016 GOP wannabes -- also writing about Rubio as if his position is surprising and an anomaly, rather than a reflection of GOP dogma?

SEN. MARCO Rubio (Fla.), whom many presume to be a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, said two things Sunday about climate change. Only one could fit into a presidential campaign worth taking seriously.

"Our climate is always changing," he said on ABC News's "This Week." "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," he went on to say, "and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy." ...

It is one thing to invite a debate about the best policy to address rising global temperatures, a problem no country can tackle on its own. It is another to dismiss the evidence that "these scientists" have compiled -- "a handful of decades of research," Mr. Rubio derisively called it — to show that humans are driving much of that warming.

... On Sunday, Mr. Rubio insisted that he is ready to be president. We hope he does not count sidling up to climate change denial as a qualification. It is quite the opposite.

Rubio's opinion can't be squared with "a presidential campaign worth taking seriously"? But the GOP's 2016 presidential nominee will have an opinion on climate change that's just like that whoever that nominee is. The Post should say now that the Republican Party is on the verge of nominating someone for president who shouldn't be taken seriously. And then the Post should simply not take that candidate seriously. It should treat the candidate the way David Duke was treated when he won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1991.

But that's not what's going to happen. The Republican Party is going to nominate a climate change denialist, and the Post and the Times are going to take that person seriously. That's just how it goes. The mainstream press can't bring itself to acknowledge that one of our major parties has been hijacked by bunko artists and purveyors of snake oil and superstition. The press won't say that Republicans simply shouldn't hold the highest office in the land. It'll just keep acting surprised when Republicans express opinions they've made abundantly clear that they hold.

Republican extremism is hiding in plain sight. The mainstream press just doesn't want to see it.

KARL ROVE: COMPULSIVE TROLL OR EVIL GENIUS?

At first, I thought this was just contemptible:

Republican strategist Karl Rove suggested last week that Hillary Clinton suffers from brain damage, according to a new report.

The New York Post's Page Six section reported Monday that Rove, appearing at a conference with former Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs and CBS correspondent Dan Raviv last Thursday, recently waded into the former secretary of state’s health issues. In 2012, Clinton — a top possible 2016 Democratic contender — suffered from a blood clot that temporarily prevented her from testifying about the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. According to the report, Rove said the Benghazi issue should continue to be pushed.

"Thirty days in the hospital?" Rove said, according to the report. "And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that."

Then I thought: Isn't Rove just being a savvy partisan operative? Isn't he just planting a land mine? Assuming Hillary declares her candidacy for president shortly after her upcoming book tour, and assuming she wins the nomination, she's going to be in the spotlight for at least the next two and a half years. She's going to make a lot of public statements. Sooner or later there's going to be a gaffe -- almost certainly more than one. Maybe there'll be a couple in quick succession. Maybe there'll be a physical stumble. All perfectly normal for a candidate of any age -- but Rove is shrewdly laying the groundwork now for a discussion of this subject some time in the future.

But wait. The press is going to have that discussion anyway. There's already endless talk about whether Hillary is too old to run. Nobody needs Rove's input -- this will be discussed if Hillary shows any signs of frailty, or even if she doesn't, Rove notwithstanding. In the meantime, Rove -- who, by the way, is only three years younger than Hillary -- is indirectly insulting older people, something you'd think you wouldn't want to do as the mouthpiece of a party that relies on older voters.

This morning, Rove defended his remarks on Fox News -- which is run, of course, by Roger Ailes, who's seven years older than Hillary Clinton. The guy who signs Ailes's paychecks, Rupert Murdoch, is nine years older than Ailes.

Hillary, of course, is far less likely to trip over her words than the guy whose presidential campaigns Rove masterminded, who was a lot younger than Hillary is now. Oh, and Rove lied -- I don't think "misspoke" is the right word -- when he said, "Thirty days in the hospital?" (It was actually three days.)

Rove may have made us less likely to have a national conversation about Hillary's age in the next couple of years. Bring up that subject now and you sound like an oily, unsavory Republican political operative. You sound like Karl Rove.

So, no, I don't think this was Rove being an evil genius. He should have been smart enough to game out the likely impact of this hit on Hillary.

I think he really is that smart. But he was too much of a troll to hold back.

BLASPHEMY PUNCHING UP, BLASPHEMY PUNCHING DOWN

So I guess this happened, though not the way it was planned:

Although the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club dropped its sponsorship of a reenactment of a satanic "black mass" ritual earlier in the night, members of the New York-based Satanic Temple gathered for what appeared to be a black mass on the second floor of the Hong Kong restaurant and lounge [in Harvard Square] shortly after 10 p.m. Monday....

The ritual came after the cancellation of a black mass reenactment organized by the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club, which had the event scheduled for Monday evening in Cambridge Queen's Head Pub in Memorial Hall. Shortly before the planned starting time, the club said that it was moving to an off-campus site, citing in an email that "misinterpretations about the nature of the event were harming perceptions about Harvard and adversely impacting the student community."...

The denunciation of the event by the Catholic archdiocese of Boston was to be expected, as was right-wing harrumphing. It was disappointing, however, to read the response of Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, because it accepted right-wing framing of the event:

... But even as we permit expression of the widest range of ideas, we must also take responsibility for debating and challenging expression with which we profoundly disagree. The 'black mass' had its historical origins as a means of denigrating the Catholic Church; it mocks a deeply sacred event in Catholicism, and is highly offensive to many in the Church and beyond. The decision by a student club to sponsor an enactment of this ritual is abhorrent; it represents a fundamental affront to the values of inclusion, belonging and mutual respect that must define our community. It is deeply regrettable that the organizers of this event, well aware of the offense they are causing so many others, have chosen to proceed with a form of expression that is so flagrantly disrespectful and inflammatory....

I plan to attend a Eucharistic Holy Hour and Benediction at St. Paul's Church on our campus on Monday evening in order to join others in reaffirming our respect for the Catholic faith at Harvard and to demonstrate that the most powerful response to offensive speech is not censorship, but reasoned discourse and robust dissent.

I know what this is meant to convey: that a black mass is identical to the burning of a Koran by a right-wing preacher, that they're bigoted acts of the same sort.

Well, they aren't. If it were 1914 and a travestied Catholic religious service were being staged in order to inspire contempt for low-status Catholics among the dominant Protestant population, then I'd agree that we were talking about comparable acts of bigotry. But this is different.

As New York's Daily News reported Friday, this black mass was

based on the imaginings of French writer Joris-Karl Huysman in the novel "La-bas." Huysman wrote the novel during the French Occult Revival of the 1800s.

It's a reworked Catholic mass written by a resident of what was then a Catholic country. It was a questioning of the majority culture. And in America in 2014, Catholicism coexists comfortably with Protestantism as a part of Christianity, which is the politically powerful faith of the majority of Americans. So a black mass is meant to question the majority culture here, too.

When Terry Jones burns a Koran, he's attempting to rile up non-Muslim Americans against this country's Muslim minority. He's punching down. (He may think he's defending an embattled Christianity against the onrushing Sharia juggernaut, but that's because he's an idiot.) A black mass may be silly, but in a nation still run by Bible-evoking Christians, it's punching up.

Go here for an excerpt from the black mass in Huysman's novel. It denounces a God who fails to deliver on his promises to humanity and a church that doesn't practice what it preaches:

"... Jesus, Artisan of Hoaxes, Bandit of Homage, Robber of Affection, hear! Since the day when thou didst issue from the complaisant bowels of a Virgin, thou hast failed all thine engagements, belied all thy promises. Centuries have wept, awaiting thee, fugitive God, mute God! Thou wast to redeem man and thou hast not, thou wast to appear in thy glory, and thou sleepest. Go, lie, say to the wretch who appeals to thee, 'Hope, be patient, suffer; the hospital of souls will receive thee; the angels will assist thee; Heaven opens to thee.' Impostor! thou knowest well that the angels, disgusted at thine inertness, abandon thee! Thou wast to be the Interpreter of our plaints, the Chamberlain of our tears; thou wast to convey them to the Father and thou hast not done so, for this intercession would disturb thine eternal sleep of happy satiety.

"Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, enamoured vassal of Banks! Thou hast seen the weak crushed beneath the press of profit; thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid, paralyzed by famine, of women disembowelled for a bit of bread, and thou hast caused the Chancery of thy Simoniacs, thy commercial representatives, thy Popes, to answer by dilatory excuses and evasive promises, sacristy Shyster, huckster God! ..."

Punching up? Absolutely. And, yeah, the current pope utters a lot of nice words about poverty, but I don't see his church or any other Christian church right now doing much for "the weak crushed beneath the press of profit." Do you?