More good sentences for the week

One view is that a book is just another consumer product, and if people want to buy jalapeno-and-oyster flavored ice cream, then companies will sell it to them.

This is from a writer at the National Review, a well known right-wing blog/magazine. Criticizing another such writer for writing a sloppy and close-minded book which was "acclaimed", by which we mean that it sold lots of copies to other close-minded people and more or less the rest of us rightly ignored it as ignorant ranting. All of this started a couple weeks ago with this brilliant post on the behavior of the right (and at times the left, Joe Romm is a popular example there on the same topic of climate change) and its politics. And then a few bright people on the right went looking for examples, and cited the booting of people like David Frum from polite conservative talking heads circulation and now find that the behavior of the people doing the booting resembles so much as a chicken with no head running about flailing at, well, something.

Except there are apparently a whole bunch of these chickens all moving in the same circle and expecting all of them to stay in line. It's kind of amusing from the outside naturally when someone like Palin speaks and people bark and squeal to appease her contorted winks and contort her speech of madlibs into something like English, but apparently the exercise internally is like a siege mentality. Rather than an insistence on finding someone who can break the siege, to an extent the way Reagan did but which Bush and Palin are and were incapable of, it's more amusing to lob rocks down and pretend they are smashing and crushing their enemies when really "we" can see them coming and are sitting out in the hills laughing as they throw them blindly around. Basically like any of the Monty Python castle sequences.

So they are apparently the folks who speak with the French accents while in England and fart in your general direction. Only with a bit more competent knights outside who aren't banging coconuts together.

So as you can imagine, one right-winger crosses another coming through the rye and a fist fight breaks out. The ideological fealty where the principle is agreement within mutually exclusive thoughts and opinions gets really annoying. It gets more annoying still when people who pay attention notice that these opinions change every 5 minutes as the next newsmaker opens their mouth to say something incoherent and everyone moves back behind their new and fresh perspective. Even if it was diametrically opposite of where they stood just weeks, if not months and years earlier (for example in the case of health care, both with the eventual bill and the subsequent defence of medicare, and even over the "death panel" idea).

And all with no obvious or apparent explanation for the change (other than that either "prominent conservative A" said so or prominent target Barack said the opposite).