FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Matthew Continetti was for years a reliable defender of the great and powerful Bush. Then he realized that gravy train wouldn't run forever, and so devoted himself to defending even greater Americans such as Sarah Palin, and to other variants of rightwing aargh-blaargh. Lately he's switched his specialty to  long hit pieces on Obama. In the latest installment, Obama goes to Italy and has dinner with local luminaries at the ambassador's residence. Continetti wants us to know this is an outrage, so he tells us the residence has an art collection that "includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts" -- whereas Bush's Ambassador to Italy lived in a youth hostel -- and Obama and his guests dined on "the finest foods and most delicate wines," whereas Bush ate hardtack and salt beef. "The dinner conversation, according to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein," Continetti went on, "touched on architecture, on art, on science, and on urban planning," whereas Bush... well, we hardly have to go on. The whole thing is full of easy layups like that, along with some more bizarre bits, like the backhanded slur on the Obamas' daughters ("'With his daughters around less,' Politico reports -- without saying exactly where Sasha and Malia, neither of whom is in college, have gone..."). Throughout you can almost see Continetti mincing around and flapping his hands; look at these foofy liberals with their wine and their architecture! But for me the key section is this:

I like to imagine the conversations at these parties...

God that Bibi is so unreasonable, who are your favorite authors, it’s time for a real conversation about race, is Homeland like real life, this is the sushi place to go to in Los Angeles, you are a real role model for young men not only in this country but all around the world...

And so on; eventually Continetti criticizes "the phoniness, the small talk, above all the endless putting on airs" of a conversation he just made up. It's like a transcript of teenage girls dishing on that stuck-up bitch in homeroom, but it's actually one of Conservatism's Great Minds writing what he probably thinks is social criticism, or at least a good way to pay the bills until he figures out who to suck up to next.

•  "This has to hurt: A plurality of respondents in a new Fox News poll 'believe the administration of former President George W. Bush was more competent [than] the Obama administration,' the Hill reports," says James Taranto. It would be more impressive if the sentence did not contain the words "Fox News poll," which people who can remember two years back know is a important qualifier. More interesting to me, though, is the brethren's weird relationship with Bush: Except for a brief outbreak of "Miss me yet?" signs, they've been acting like they don't know the guy for five years.  My first thought was that the recent wave of rightwing "reform" programs, which are suspiciously reminiscent of Bush's compassionate-conservative con, are part of the reason. But the Bergdahl bullshit figures too: As I pointed out earlier, these guys are feeling confident again that all they have to do is blow a bugle and America will again mistake them for Sgt. Rock -- just like back in Nineeleven days! They may bring the baseball and bullhorn back for 2016 -- in fact, if all goes well, they might even finally let W. attend their convention.

•  Speaking of Bergdahl, here's some ripe spew from Some Guy at RedState:

Other than the obscenity of a man who was introduced into politics by a brace of convicted domestic terrorists spouting words he seems to have learned while watching Blackhawk Down and rooting for the Mohamed Farrah Aidid clansmen --

You almost have to admire it -- it's like he managed to connect his bile duct to his fingers without  engaging his brain.

-- “we don’t leave anybody behind” — the statement isn’t even vaguely true.

In trading five senior Taliban field leaders for a US deserter, Barack Obama passed on an opportunity to retrieve four other Taliban captives, three of whom are American citizens... 

If Obama had really cared about “leave no one behind” he would have driven a harder bargain and brought three other Americans home with the feckless Bergdahl.

And that would have given us three more excuses to impeach him!

•  Sometime I wonder if Rod Dreher even knows what he's saying anymore. Andrew Sullivan got all huffy about that mass grave of infants recently discovered at a Catholic facility for unwed mothers, so Dreher, who was Catholic about eight religions back, raves about how important it is for his former Church to prosecute sexual sin. At one point:

Given that most religions and cultures have purity codes governing sexuality, it’s terribly unjust to single out Catholicism for special contempt. Why do purity codes exist? Leaving aside religious revelation, it doesn’t take a degree in cultural anthropology to understand why any society would have the need to regulate sexuality, for the survival of the group. In a resource-poor society, one without advanced medicine, strong rules governing sexual behavior may be harsh but necessary. Andrew has written at length, and with gratitude, about how he once thought he was given a death sentence with his HIV diagnosis, but medical advances have made it likely that he will live a normal life. If he did not live in a technologically advanced, wealthy society, and if he did not have health insurance that pays for his expensive treatment, the sexually transmitted disease he carries would likely have killed him by now. In the not too distant past, no small number of people died of sexually transmitted diseases, and a shocking number of women died in childbirth. Sex had real life-or-death consequences, and that’s before one gets to the issue of maintaining a livable social order.

Uh... whuh... so, sex is a sin because Sullivan has HIV which you get from sex and, though he's doing alright now, in another era and/or income bracket he would have died from it? Or maybe "Sullivan has HIV" is all he means. I don't know. Is this what they mean by speaking in tongues?

•  Finally, can you guys tell me which it is: Was Noah Rothman unaware that the interpretive dance at Normandy was France's doing, not Obama's, or was Rothman just hoping to lead his readers to believe otherwise?