FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Sam Stein and Michael Calderone find that "If You Were An Iraq War Critic, You're Probably Not Being Asked To Go On TV," and boy ain't it the truth. But for the most part they're concerned with the dearth of televised People Who Were Sane From The Start who also belong to the officially-sanctioned class of pundits and pols. Really, I don't care if Russ Feingold pipes up or not; I'd like to see Digby or Atrios or Tbogg on the tube, asking a shocked and disdainful Dick Cheney how it came to be that they could see what a clusterfuck this was going in and he couldn't.  But that's obviously out of the question -- wingnut shouters like ham-faced Erick Erickson may get promoted to bigtime TV, but whenever the nets need a nominally-left blogger-type, they call up some golden-boy trimmer. Thus we get "YADDA YADDA JESUS CARVED MERICA OUTTA THE WILDERNESS WITH A BIBLE AN A GUN"  versus "Well you make some good points." Bah. Sometimes I think they keep things vanilla like that just so their credentialed conservatives don't get scared; get this, from Victor Davis Hanson's latest bullshit about how everybody makes mistakes that cost thousands of lives on the other side of the world:

A number of prominent columnists, right and left — from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam's forcible removal.

Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman! That Overton Window is somewhere over in the next fucking county.

•  Speaking of Ezra Klein, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's attacks on Vox don't bother me -- number one, who cares, and number two, so what -- but he uses Klein & Co.'s perceived biases as proof that liberals have the real epistemic closure problem. (Plus, "another symbol of growing epistemic closure on the left is The New Republic" which Gobry liked when it was "an idiosyncratic magazine critiquing liberalism," two Andrew Sullivan identity crises ago.) Gobry concedes conservatives had a little problem with E.C. for a couple of minutes, but not now...

A flurry of innovative young writers like Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Tim Carney, and Avik Roy put out fresh, 21st-century ideas on everything from tax reform to health care to social mobility to poverty to curtailing the power of Big Business. Many of these ideas are now compiled in a seminal new book... it's clear that the GOP is becoming the party of ideas again.

That "seminal new book" is Room to Grow, which I reviewed some weeks back, and which is a rat-bag of old-fashioned drop-the-minimum-wage, school voucher, and marriage promotion clunkers, with some sweet sauce poured over to make it look tastier. Also, how long are we going to keep calling Ross Douthat and his crew "innovative young writers"? It's getting to the point when I imagine even the kids at the Free Beacon are embarrassed when Salam drops some beats.

•  Fans of hot messes will be pleased to hear Rod Dreher is still the hot mess he's always been. In a post called "The Empire Takes Culture War To The World," he quotes a new report:

Seeking to mobilize a global front against anti-gay violence and discrimination, Vice President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that protecting gay rights is a defining mark of a civilized nation and must trump national cultures and social traditions.

Dreher comments on this:

The mark of a civilized nation. Well. Let it be noted that as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism.

Well, now that you mention it...

It’s been clear which way this country is going on religious freedom. I hadn’t expected that we would be getting there so quickly. Signs of the times, people, signs of the times.

Oh go take another Paris vacation ya big drama queen. Later:

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m completely on board with the anti-violence stuff. If that’s all this was, I would support it. But we all know it doesn’t stop there, because what Biden defines as “prejudice” is what many, many of us believe is truth.

And in another update Dreher produces proof that Emperor Obama's homo dystopia "goes far beyond opposing violence against LGBT folks. For example, USAID is providing funding for gay-owned start-up companies in other countries."

It's about time for Rod and his comrades to start writing songs of their oppression. Maybe for starters they can just add new lyrics to old ones -- here, to the tune of The Wearin' of the Green:

Oh I met with Maggie Gallagher a-cryin' o'er her books:
"They used to give us cash," she cried, "but now just dirty looks.
It's the most disgraceful pledge drive that NOM has had in years --
They're stiffin' us fine Christians for the Ragging on th' Queers."