1/ Rick Perl­stein, Baf­fler-approved polit­i­cal his­to­rian, in the Wash­ing­ton Post:

Lib­er­als are right to be vig­i­lant about man­u­fac­tured out­rage, and par­tic­u­larly about how the main­stream media can too easily become that outrage’s entry into the polit­i­cal debate. For the tactic rep­re­sented by those fake Nixon let­ters was a long-​term suc­cess. Con­ser­v­a­tives have become adept at play­ing the media for suck­ers, get­ting inside the heads of edi­tors and reporters, haunt­ing them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cos­mopoli­tans and that their duty as tri­bunes of the people’s voices means they should treat Obama’s cre­ation of “death panels” as just another jus­ti­cia­ble polit­i­cal claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Steven­son would be get­ting time on cable news to explain her­self. That, not the para­noia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be dif­fer­ent. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a pro­posed mental health clinic in Alaska is actu­ally a dump­ing ground for right-​wing crit­ics of the president’s pro­gram, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain them­selves on the air. The media didn’t adju­di­cate the ever-​present under­brush of Amer­i­can para­noia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against lib­eral claims. Back then, a more con­fi­dent media unequiv­o­cally labeled the civic out­rage rep­re­sented by such dis­course as “extremist” — out of bounds.

2/ Bruce Bartlett, the last honest Repub­li­can, at Steve Benen’s blog:

I know I promised, but these two crabap­ples were swing­ing from the low branches, and I couldn’t resist:

+ Over at the National Review, they can’t figure out why on God’s green earth Google wouldn’t want to com­mer­cial­ize the 9/11 tragedy by putting–what, a sketch of smok­ing towers?–on its home page.

+ And at the Wash­ing­ton Post George Will has pub­lished a column–on this day of all days–that argues fire­fight­ers are making too much money. Oh, and the head­line, keep­ing it classy, is “Pension Time Bomb.” (Hat tip: David Sirota and Rick Perlstein.)

Rick Perl­stein, yesterday:

Nearly every con­ser­v­a­tive has some ver­sion of this–some way of saying that if self-​identified con­ser­v­a­tives fail or fall short, it’s because they’re not “really” con­ser­v­a­tive. But the stan­dards of what is a “conservative” are sub­jec­tive, shift­ing, self-​contradictory, and always self-​serving. A con­ser­v­a­tive will always give him­self the out of saying “conservatism has never been tried.”

What always gets me about this defense is that it’s a page straight out of the old Marx­ist play­book. Crit­i­cize Marx for what the Soviet Union had wrought and you got a stan­dard answer: don’t mis­take “actually exist­ing Communism” for “true” Communism.

I sup­pose in gen­eral that this rhetor­i­cal ploy is one every utopian move­ment needs for that inevitable moment when his­tory refuses to coop­er­ate with the best-​laid plans of mice and men. (And don’t for a second doubt the utopian sub­text of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.) As Perl­stein says,

This single blunt fact cannot be over­stated: here was the first chance in the modern era con­ser­v­a­tives have had to prove them­selves. And they failed. Imag­ine if some­how Leon Trot­sky had sur­vived and was restored to the lead­er­ship of the Krem­lin, after gen­er­a­tions of “Trotskyists” had built an entire cul­ture around the notion that if only they were in the Krem­lin, the rev­o­lu­tion would have suc­ceeded. But their reign proved to be shit from start to finish. The psy­chic wounds would be pro­found. The dis­ar­ray, mutual recrim­i­na­tion, con­fu­sion, anger, are only to be expected.

But Perlstein’s little thought exper­i­ment encour­ages the thought that there might be some­thing more direct (and less meta­phys­i­cal) than his­tor­i­cal irony at work in the con­ser­v­a­tive par­rot­ing of a cen­tral Marx­ist apolo­gia. The thought, for instance, that they actu­ally did learn it from Marxism.

I couldn’t help but cringe a bit when news of my native county crept up in sev­eral news sto­ries about gay mar­riage in Cal­i­for­nia, for exam­ple in this Wall Street Jour­nal article:

June 17 marks the date that gay and les­bian cou­ples can marry legally in Cal­i­for­nia, fol­low­ing a land­mark ruling by the state’s Supreme Court in May that struck down the ban on same-​sex mar­riage. The day will be marked by joyous cel­e­bra­tions and eager cou­ples earn­ing a right they have waited years to obtain.

Yet, the occa­sion will also be punc­tu­ated by the divi­sion it cre­ates through­out the state. On the one hand, San Fran­cisco County has added addi­tional staff and expanded hours so the clerk’s office can accom­mo­date the surge in demand from same-​sex cou­ples seek­ing mar­riage licenses and wed­ding ceremonies….

In con­trast, the Butte County clerk-​recorder issued a June 11 news release saying her office will stop per­form­ing wed­ding cer­e­monies alto­gether–for gay and het­ero­sex­ual couples.

For Rick Perl­stein and others, actions like this last amount to noth­ing less than a twenty-first-century ver­sion of the mas­sive resis­tance cam­paigns that fol­lowed Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion. Until I looked into it, I was inclined to agree.

But it turns out that what’s going on in Butte County is much less sin­is­ter than the WSJ and others would have us believe.