Monday September 27, 2010

FURTHER ADVENTURES IN THE WAR AGAINST COMMON SENSE. A press release for a Jon Stewart book has made its way to the National Review editorial cages. One passage:

The book ends with a plea to the aliens to reconstruct the human race from DNA in the hope that, with guidance from the visitors, “we could overcome the baser aspects of our nature… and give this planet the kind of caretakers it deserves,” revealing the tears behind Stewart’s clown.

Clumsy copy, but it seems to describe a standard satirical trope about man's misspent time on earth, seen in such disparate works as H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and the popular doggerel "Evolution -- The Monkey's Viewpoint."

John J. Miller, the Kulturkampfer who brought you "The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs," pulls it in through the bars and poops an analysis:

What a perfect embodiment of liberal utopianism: a call for extraterrestrials to make us better by changing who we are.

Within two weeks, expect the rightblogger bottom feeders to spread the word that Jon Stewart has betrayed America and declared his allegiance to alien powers.

Sometimes I think they must have classrooms where the teacher holds up a hard-boiled egg and asks, "Johnny, why is this conservative?" and if Johnny can come up with an answer like "Because it is nature improved by man!" or "Because it is suitable to fuel Jonah Goldberg's farts of wisdom!" he gets promoted.

UPDATE. Further down The Corner, we learn what happened to Jim Manzi, who was a reliably dunderheaded NatRev commenter until the Epistemic Closure fracas last April, when he criticized made man Mark Levin for taking the whole global warning denialism thing a little too far and was denounced for wrongthink by his fellow wingnuts. He writes from Paris:

Living in Europe has created for me a mostly pleasant sense of distance from a lot of the day-to-day of U.S. politics, hence my limited blogging over the past months. Or maybe it’s just that the warm summer breezes and French wines and cheeses have put my ambitions at bay.

Jesus Christ, he had to leave the country! These people take omerta pretty seriously.