I hate when a famous junkie dies and we get empty gestures like, “We just lost a legend the likes of which we will never see again.” Why not say, “That cute English girl who became the personification of a walking mess took the whole thing too far and apparently OD’d on a cocktail of cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, and ketamine”? When celebrity roast-master Greg Giraldo died, all the Tweets were along the order of, “Greg was and will always be a legend RIP.” Nobody said, “Greg Giraldo just OD’d on Xanax and booze at the age of 44,” because that would be rude. Xanax is a heavy downer and when mixed with alcohol it can easily induce a coma, as it did with Greg. That side of the story is a little more important than remembering what a great guy he was, because it can save lives. Junkies aren’t as concerned about honoring the dead. I knew junkies in Vancouver who, upon hearing someone OD’d, would scramble for the phone trying to find out who the guy’s dealer was because if people are overdosing, it must be some good shit.

Heroin addiction isn’t a disease, as Russell Brand so despondently put it. It’s an indulgence—like obesity, but in reverse. Russell says we need to stop treating junkies like criminals and treat them “as sick people in need of care.” But England already treats them like sick people, with little success. In Scotland, that approach has fallen flat on its face like a junkie on the nod.

Drug addicts don’t need kid gloves. They need an iron fist. I know this because I’ve watched a dozen heroin addicts die over the years, and the ones who survived always say the same thing: “I can’t believe you didn’t just punch me in the face.”

If you know a drug addict, there will be that moment when they say they’ll call you back and then they don’t. Then you call them, but there’s no answer. What do you do? I’ll tell you what you do: nothing. If you charge over there and kick their door down to make sure they’re OK, you will have tagged yourself as a mark. The junkie then knows you can be relied on to help him get out of trouble, AKA loan him money. They will lie to your face and steal from you like common politicians because the drug has taken over their brain like a parasite. I’ve known junkies who committed crimes even when they knew they were going to get caught because, as one put it, “I didn’t care. I was so junk-sick, all I cared about was getting money to get high right now. What happened ten minutes later was totally irrelevant.” What happened ten minutes later? He went to jail.

The rabidly politicized, mad-as-hell, accept-us-or-die quotient of gay Americans—at last count, somewhere between 97 to 99 percent of them—seem determined to prove that they can get just as offended as your average hillbilly breeder mountaineer, if not more so.

It’s as if they’re taking it to the streets, up into the hills, and down into the hollers to spread a simple message—“You think you can get offended, you stupid, hateful, one-toothed, inbred, Christ-worshiping rednecks? You ain’t seen an uptight bunch of whiny wah-wah emotionally retarded walking fetuses until you’ve tangled with us!”

Exhibit A: The highly publicized story of butch cunnilinguists Jennifer Tipton and Olivier Odom, the latter of whom on Tuesday apparently didn’t deem it an act of cultural provocation to attend Dolly Parton’s Dollywood Splash Country up in the generally Christian, generally conservative, generally heterosexual Appalachian Mountains while clad in a “[marriage is so gay]” sleeveless T-shirt that showcased Odom’s rippling biceps and tribal forearm tattoo.

At the entrance, a park official requested that Odom turn his her T-shirt inside-out in compliance with a park policy that bans potentially “offensive” apparel and body adornments. Odom complied, then filed a complaint with the park, and then apparently went crying to a receptive and empathetic press. Her partner Jennifer Tipton, whose voice isn’t nearly as deep nor her hair quite as short, said she found it “so offensive” that park officials found Odom’s muscle shirt so offensive. She also accused Splash Country of hypocrisy for not banning “rebel flags” and “offensive tattoos” among its other patrons.

Clearly, offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder. So is the concept of whether acting like a barbarian when in Rome makes one an asshole.

Since the flapping lips—both oral and vaginal—of gay America’s radical wing don’t seem willing to relent even the tiniest bit and stop their childishly needy demands that everyone on Goddess’s Pink Earth accept them, we think it may be time to force-feed them a spoonful of their own medicine. 

We’re going to stereotype and assume that, despite yer occasional Log Cabin Republican oddball, an overwhelming quotient of gay America leans strongly to the left. We wouldn’t even be surprised if every penis on every male homosexual in the USA also leans to the left side of its underwear. Since radical gays have recently seen fit to run up into Appalachia and the Ozarks demanding tolerance, we wondered how they’d react if their own dreaded cultural “others” were to return the favor. So we encourage our readers to buy these T-shirts, don them proudly, and head down to lesbo-ghettos such as Atlanta’s Midtown, Seattle’s Capitol Hill, or every square inch of Portland, Oregon. Our instincts tell us you’d be received with far less kindness than Dollywood treated the aforementioned pair of Sapphic Southerners.

“I MAKE LESBIANS GO STRAIGHT” T-SHIRT
No sassy smock or provocative pullover in the known universe is likely to offend lesbians more than one which suggests Goddess didn’t make them that way and that their lifestyle may be purely a matter of choice—or of not getting enough good dick. The pink skull and penile crossbones add a thick spermy layer of douchey inappropriateness to the entire project. It would help matters tremendously if you’re also a fat and ugly dude like, say, Chaz Bono.

SARAH PALIN LADY LIBERTY 2012 T-SHIRT
This item will molest several lesbian-leftoid nerves simultaneously—it features a phallic firearm, it mentions the notion of “liberty” (a term that shares the same root word with “liberal”), and it showcases the toothily grinning, 100%-hetero-meat Alaskan baby machine about whose offspring it’s perfectly acceptable to use the word “retarded.” Hey, it ain’t sexism when you call a gal a stupid twat if she doesn’t share your egalitotalitarian statist beliefs! Upon sight, this shirt—as well as anything depicting Michelle Bachmann in a positive light—is guaranteed to make any lesbian within a half-mile radius crap her boxer shorts.

“CHE SUCKS” GOLF SHIRT
Amid an array of literally dozens of “Che Sucks” tees, we settled on the golf-shirt design because it seemed to be the most passive-aggressively preppie. Bulldykes walking their bulldogs along Castro Street will have their pug noses rubbed in the fact that Fidel Castro, as well as his oft-lionized leftist T-shirt icon henchman Che Guevara, were mass murderers. If anyone hassles you, hold your nose high and sanctimoniously accuse them of endorsing mass murder. Whip out your handy laminated bar graphs comparing Nazi body counts to communist slaughters. Tell them that Che was a homophobe in order to elicit their rampaging homophobophobia. If all else fails, say you thought that “sucking” was a time-honored practice of the gay-male lifestyle.

“AMERICAN IDLE” ANTI-MEXICAN WOMEN’S PLUS SIZE SCOOP
Boldly stand against illegal immigration and reinforce negative stereotypes about Mexican laziness all in one shirt! When predictably irate and invariably Caucasian lesbians surround you and start yipping like angry chihuahuas, say, “Listen, Sappho Gonzalez— homophobia is rampant in Mexico. Even the hate-hunting souls at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who are never wrong about anything, acknowledge at least a “tiny” sinister undercurrent of gay-bashing amid the giant brown sea of Mexican nationalism.” Tell them the Mexican hate group in question targets Jews and uses the phrase “nigger scum.” If that doesn’t do the trick, inform them of the ancient Aztec practice of disemboweling homos. Lesbians hate that sort of thing.

“MARRIAGE MATH” T-SHIRT
If these mincing male sprites and steroidal female truck mechanics demand the right to run around promoting gay marriage while splashing their bodily fluids at Country & Western water parks in the unspoiled and mostly anti-Sodomite Tennessee hills, the spirit of free speech—and spirits don’t have genitals—would insist that heterosexuals have to right to walk into any of the Eagle bars that dot this nation’s urban areas like Kaposi’s sarcoma bumps and piss on the idea of gay marriage. Equal standards, equal treatment, and equal tolerance are the popcorn kernel of everything that we mean when we say “equality.”

“IMAGINE NO LIBERALS” T-SHIRT
We’ve never run across anyone who literally wants to exterminate liberals—it’s more like we want them to shut the frick up and quit pushing historically failed and logically implausible egalitarian social-engineering policies. But since an unfounded persecution complex seems central to liberal identity, why not indulge their perverted fantasies by pretending you want to liquidate them? If a bevy of lesbians—and “bevy” is the official term for groups of three or more—corners you and asks what’s up with your T-shirt, smile and say, “The camps are ready…but will you be ready for the camps?” If they physically attack you, mace them with a canister of male grizzly-bear pheromones.

“MAKIN’ BACON” T-SHIRT
There is no conceivable place in the solar system where this T-shirt would be considered tasteful. Its value in offending lesbians may not be as immediately overt as any of the aforementioned items of apparel, but its subtext is potentially more devastating than all of the others combined. Despite all the yippity-yap about equality and gay marriage, the fact remains that it takes a man and a woman—pigs or not—to make a lesbian baby.

I have argued elsewhere that at the age of twenty the normal human being’s development is pretty much finished. He is “cooked all through,” as it were. Not that we can’t learn, adapt, and change after that age, but our deep outlook, our worldview’s bedrock contours, are set. The rest is just sprinkling soil on that bedrock, perhaps growing a few turnips.

This came to mind last week when reading two newspaper pieces from the old country. One was actual news; the other was commentary.

The commentary piece was by veteran Tory journalist, authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, and former (very briefly) editor of mine Charles Moore. It had the striking title: “I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right.” Moore says that global capitalism, at its present point of development, bears a disturbing resemblance to the old leftist caricature of it:

It turns out—as the Left always claims—that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.

The other piece, which was actual news, concerned Maurice Glasman, who was elevated to the British peerage as Baron Glasman this February by Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party. (New peers are created by the monarch on the Prime Minister’s advice; but the convention is that the PM includes in each batch a few worthies recommended by the Leader of the Opposition.)

Glasman is fifty years old and, like Miliband, Jewish. (He describes sitting in the House of Lords as: “It’s like being in shul. People talk while others are speaking and when they get up to make a speech it’s like having an aliyah.”) He grew up over his parents’ small shop in a seedy area of North London. He has spent his adult life as an academic (Econ., Poli. Sci.) and—oh no!—community organizer. A few weeks after his ascent to the peerage he was at a meeting hall in Bloomsbury—yes, that Bloomsbury—in central London to launch a movement he’d thought up: Blue Labour.

I need to do some translating here. First, the Jewish business. These are British Jews I’m talking about. British Jews differ in some important ways from their American co-religionists. Most notably, they are less hostile to Christianity—as they can afford to be, there being very little ardent Christianity in Britain. They are consequently less prickly—less hostile to white gentiles in general. Furthermore they—most commonly, their great-grandparents—came into Britain when it was monoracial and monocultural. There was no ethnic or racial Other to excite them into sympathetic alienation by reminding them of their own ancient subjections, as blacks did in the USA. The upshot is that British Jews are better assimilated, better liked, less defensive, and more at ease in their nation than are American Jews. (For insights into Anglo-Jewish life I recommend the quietly funny novels and essays of Chaim Bermant.)

Then there’s that “blue.” Our big political movements’ heraldic colors have become hopelessly confused. In Britain, red means left and blue means right. The Labour Party’s annual conferences have traditionally concluded with a rousing chorus of “The Red Flag.” Tory Party leader Margaret Thatcher, when on the campaign trail, never wore anything but blue. In the USA, for reasons I do not know, every election since 2000 has been reported the other way around: Democrats blue, Republicans red.

Since the Tory Party is officially the Conservative Party, blue can be taken to be the color of Conservatism; and thence, by the merest sleight of rhetoric, of conservatism. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour is a conservative Labourism. In his own precise words, it is “a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity.” Blue Labour harks back to mid-20th-century English socialism; to the Left Book Club, volunteers for Spain, Independent Labour Party summer schools, and above all to George Orwell. (Maurice Glasman, like Orwell, rolls his own cigarettes. No working-class Briton has done this since about 1955: It is entirely an affectation of middle-class leftists.) The nearest American equivalent would be communitarianism.

ONBOARD S/Y BUSHIDO—The thickly pined forested hills form a perfect backdrop to the not-so-wine-dark waters off the Peloponnese. Soft greens and blues are Edward Hopper colors—as is the yellowish-white midday sunlight—noon’s inviolate stillness being a keynote of his paintings. The sea in Greece is mystically wedded to the mountains, the craggy peaks acting as phallic domes to her femininity. The beauty of sailing is the absence of other people, the lack of noise and crowds, the solitude, the presence of only water and nature—but for the occasional bore who speeds by in a stinkpot. I sailed by Nafpaktos—Lepanto to the barbarians—where in 1571 Don Juan and a Christian coalition of 208 ships and 22,840 men soundly defeated the Ottoman fleet comprised of slaves in the galleys, Algerian bandits on the bridges, and Ali Pasha as the head. Speaking of his head, after a ferocious and bloody battle the Christians chopped it off and stuck it on top of his mast, the rest of the towel-heads losing heart at the sight of it and leaving the premises in a hurry. The Ottomans were all over the Med back then. Having finally put them back in their place, some 440 years later, the nice guys who have given us the EU and the euro have allowed them back in again, and this time they’re all over the place, not just Nafpaktos. I will get back to these bums momentarily.

This is the first time after three weeks of sailing with a boatful of friends that I am alone. Isolation can be a beautiful sensation. The onboard saloon where I spend most of my day is spacious and festooned with samurai swords, kamikaze flags, and pictures of my judo, karate, and tennis wars. And books.

My crew is the best I’ve ever had. The captain, Marcus, is as eager to hoist sails as previous ones were to avoid doing it. The engineer, Finn, is a miracle man. The cook, Carmella, makes Marco Pierre White look like a burger-flipper at Yankee Stadium. The captain’s wife, Kerry, is a jewel who would put to shame Buckingham Palace staff. And then there’s Ram, a Gurkha soldier, retired after twenty years of service to the crown, a man with two wives back in Nepal, with many children and grandchildren. I want Ram to find a third wife, a rich Greek widow, but all he does is smile and say, “Thank you, sir.” If only I could convey the wonderful feeling of isolation on one’s boat with a crew such as I have. I seriously am thinking of leaving everything behind and going on a Flying Dutchman trip, but it ain’t my style. Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1896 that “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

Project Nim is a critically praised documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of one of those attempts to teach American Sign Language to an ape, a fad that once fascinated the popular imagination.

Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2008 documentary Man on Wire about another 1970s phenomenon—the French tightrope-walker who strolled from one World Trade Center tower to the other—Project Nim turns out to be an engaging, entertaining, manipulative, and characteristically lowbrow animal-rights polemic. Project Nim’s never-quite-articulated message is that chimpanzees should have been left in Africa. Perhaps, but there’s much this movie ignores.

Like the liberal college professor played by Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo who raises a chimp like a child to show that nurture overrules nature, Columbia U. psychologist Herbert Terrace (Marsh’s designated villain) bought a baby male chimp in 1973 to prove Noam Chomsky wrong.

The MIT linguist (more widely known as a critic of American foreign policy) had interjected himself into the ancient philosophical arguments over human nature and language’s origins. Chomsky pointed out that the remarkable speed with which young children learn to create novel and complex sentences suggests that syntactical language isn’t just monkey see, monkey do. Instead, Chomsky argued, humans have an innate and unique capability for generating new well-formed sentences.

Terrace delegated the satirically named Nim Chimpsky to one of his grad students (and former girlfriends), a “rich hippie,” to raise in her Upper West Side brownstone alongside her three children and her new husband’s four kids. ABC wanted to make a heartwarming, Brady Bunch-style sitcom about this ménage. But Nim felt that eight is enough and set about driving off his new mother’s mate with vandalism and violence. She sided with Nim, and divorce ensued.

Terrace moved Nim to a posh 28-acre estate in Riverdale, where better-organized students (one of whom Terrace slept with) tried to teach him ASL. He learned, by their initial count, 125 words.

Yet as Chomsky’s former protégé Steven Pinker wrote in his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct:

Jane Goodall, visiting the project, remarked…that every one of Nim’s so-called signs was familiar to her from her observations of chimps in the wild. The chimps were relying heavily on the gestures in their natural repertoire, rather than learning true arbitrary ASL signs.…

Moreover, the decisive test was not whether Nim could grasp individual signs, but whether he could create new sentences using signs in different fashions. For example, “Dog bites man” is not “Man bites dog.”

Unfortunately, “Chimp bites woman” became common as the growing chimp’s chimp-outs became terrifyingly vicious. After he ripped half the face off one young lady, he was dispatched back to a cage at a U. of Oklahoma chimp-breeding farm. There, Nim became friends with a Deadhead graduate student who shared many a joint with him.

In the most intriguing interview, another Sooner claims that Nim wasn’t interested in learning any highfalutin language. Instead, she asserts, he was most content when assigned honest work cleaning cages. (Nim is briefly shown sweeping and hosing, but this somewhat implausible assertion is dropped.)

HOOTERS CASINO BLUES

Dear Delphi,

My best friend of more than twenty years and I decided to have a boys’ long weekend in Vegas just for laughs before we get any further into our middle age. The problem is, my best friend insisted on making the arrangements and has gone and booked a single room (at Hooter’s Casino, no less) with a package that has connecting flights stopping at every state capitol between Vegas and home because he wanted to save money. This is a guy who makes six figures. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have balked, as I would expect no less than to share a room with my best buddy filled with pizza boxes, beer bottles, and overflowing ashtrays. However, we are now men in our early forties who make very good money, and I have no desire to share a room so I can watch him belch in his underwear, nor do I want to spend twelve hours getting home when it normally takes a quarter of that time. I would also like to stay at a decent casino as opposed to some backdrop from “My Name is Earl.” My question is, how should I go about telling my best friend to stop being such a cheapskate and spend some of that moolah he worked so hard for without hurting his feelings? He takes a lot of pride in being frugal. My wife thinks I should just come out and tell him. Is she right? Or should I just suck it up and go through with it?

—Not a Middle-Age Miser in ???

Dear Not a Middle-Age Miser,

If you care anything about keeping this friend, you have to tell him the truth and object to the weekend plans. If you try to just suck up and endure that kind of Trip From Hell, chances are your friendship will end before your tour of state-capitol airport cocktail lounges comes to an end. Tell him exactly what you think: “Stop being a cheapskate and spend some of the moolah for which you work so hard.” Show him all the nice casinos on the Internet with beautiful rooms and luxurious amenities. Talk about the sweet benefits of being alone in his own room—no wife, no kids, no dog—to do just as he pleases, master of his universe. If he can at least buckle in on the living conditions, maybe next year you can get him to try spending a bit more on travel plans. If you can convince him to just try it once, he will never look back and will probably be laughing that he ever dreamed up such a hideous trip.

LOWBALLING HOW MANY YOU’VE BALLED

Dear Delphi,

I have been dating a man for about three months now. He asked me what my “number” was, as in the number of men I have slept with. I told him I was not going to tell him, and this caused a problem. Do you think I should tell him?

—Should I Tell in Telluride

“Like a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, “this momentous question … awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri’s entry into the Union, as foreshadowing a civil war.

And that massacre in Oslo, where a terrorist detonated a fertilizer bomb to decapitate the government and proceeded to a youth camp to kill 68 children of Norway’s ruling elite, is a fire bell in the night for Europe. For Anders Behring Breivik is no Islamic terrorist.

He was born in Norway and chose as his targets not Muslims whose presence he detests, but the Labor Party leaders who let them into the country, and their children, the future leaders of that party.

Though Breivik is being called insane, that is the wrong word.

Breivik is evil—a cold-blooded, calculating killer—though a deluded man of some intelligence, who in his 1,500-page manifesto reveals a knowledge of the history, culture and politics of Europe.

He admits to his “atrocious” but “necessary” crimes, done, he says, to bring attention to his ideas and advance his cause: a Crusader’s war between the real Europe and the “cultural Marxists” and Muslims they invited in to alter the ethnic character and swamp the culture of the Old Continent.

Specifically, Breivik wanted to kill three-time Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the “mother of the nation,” who spoke at the camp on Utoeya Island, but departed before he arrived.

Predictably, the European press is linking Breivik to parties of the populist right that have arisen to oppose multiculturalism and immigration from the Islamic world. Breivik had belonged to the Progress Party, but quit because he found it insufficiently militant.

His writings are now being mined for references to U.S. conservative critics of multiculturalism and open borders. Purpose: demonize the American right, just as the berserker’s attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson was used to smear Sarah Palin and Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing was used to savage Rush Limbaugh and conservative critics of Big Government.

I’ve had a longstanding instinctive loathing of those who perpetrate gimmick art, a genre of which Lucian Freud was a master. His art was as sordid as his person, reflecting his loathing of human nature in general and women in particular. In the modern age, we are surrounded by manmade ugliness. And artists, who used to devote their effort to idealizing the human form, to recording nature’s charms and bringing order and beauty into our lives, are no longer interested in these tasks. Freud, like Picasso, found his niche in the human body’s ugliness and the horrors of age.

The great Paul Johnson once wrote:

Sensitive and sophisticated people, who love art and defend civilisation, now greet each other with the following exchange: ‘Death to Picasso!’ ‘And long live John Singer Sargent!’

Let’s add, “Death to Freud—Sigmund and Lucian!”

Lucian Freud’s life was as awful as his art. He loathed his brother Clement and sent him a vicious telegram when the younger Freud lost his seat in Parliament in 1987. He claimed to have loathed the Germans, but when he had an opportunity to serve the country that had taken him in at age ten, he refused to volunteer for military service against the Nazis and managed to also avoid the draft. He spent six years having a very good time at various race courses while others did the dying.

In person, Freud was as unpleasant as they come, worshipped by professional gays such as John Richardson and bootlickers of that ilk. He fathered many children and was beastly to most of them, but that is not my point. His various ugly women and children are not my concern. His art is. It’s ugly and it’s bad, as he used much too much paint to cover his lack of talent—although, unlike most of his contemporaries, Freud knew how to draw. The hucksters who control the art world pushed his ghastly works to unheard-of amounts, and the hacks who write about the art world decided he was England’s greatest living painter. Well, no more. The grotesque person whose name was Lucian Freud has done us the favor and left this world, although he left it much too late—88 years too late, to be exact. I hope one day his awful art and even uglier subjects disappear in the sinkhole where they deserve to lie in repose for the ages.

When I first read Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future, better known as The Unabomber Manifesto, I was impressed with how logically dispassionate it was, especially its devastating dissection of leftist masochism and hostility. Each paragraph—sequentially numbered as if they were biblical verses—built upon the previous one with mathematical precision, and I found myself nodding along with Kaczynski’s premise that technology was potentially the biggest threat to personal freedom in world history.

And then, walking placidly through all that ice-cold logic, I stubbed my toe on this line: “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”

A Norwegian police officer who assisted in Friday’s arrest of Anders Behring Breivik described Breivik’s demeanor as “cold as ice,” an especially disquieting observation when one considers he was talking about a man who’d just claimed the Spree Killing World Record by piling up at least 76 bodies—eight via a fertilizer car bomb in downtown Oslo and 68 using automatic weapons at a Labour Party youth camp on Utøya Island.

The downtown bombing preceded the island massacre by an hour or two. The New York Times, CBS News, and several other mainstream outlets initially reported that an Islamist group called “Helpers of Global Jihad” had claimed responsibility for the bombing. It wasn’t an entirely farfetched proposition, seeing as Norway has roughly 500 troops stationed in Afghanistan, a smattering of soldiers in Libya, and had also participated in the publishing of those infamous Muhammad cartoons a few years back. In 2004 and 2008, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s current leader, had publicly threatened Norway for its involvement in Afghanistan. And it’s not as if certain Scandinavian Muslims haven’t been acting a mite, shall we say, pushy and entitled of late.

Then, when reports began drifting in that the gunman on Utøya Island was a Norwegian national, the sort of press outlets who lectured us not to “jump to conclusions” during the Ft. Hood Massacre—and who always seemed careful never to describe Islamic terrorists as “brown-skinned and brown-eyed”—made a point of repeatedly noting the killer’s white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.

When Breivik’s Internet postings and 1518-page manifesto went public, most of the press fairly exulted in describing him as a “right-wing Christian extremist,” which had me wondering when was the last time I heard anyone in America’s mainstream media describing anyone as “left-wing,” much less a “left-wing extremist.” Breivik appeared to be exactly the sort of terrorist that every Europhobic, Christophobic, conservaphobic, whitemaleophobe had been praying to Goddess would come along.

Breivik identifies himself as a conservative Christian, but the press didn’t make much mention of the fact that he also described himself as “anti-racist/pro-homosexual/pro-Israel” and that his writings repeatedly lumped Nazism in with Marxism and Islam as “hate ideologies.”

At last count, Breivik has killed at least thirty times as many people as Kaczynski did, and his manifesto—2083: A European Declaration of Independence—seems at least thirty times as long. The year 2083 is significant for Breivik because according to demographic calculations, it’s when Muslims are scheduled to exceed 50% of Europe’s population. Although 2083 includes several essays from other anti-Islamist writers—fully credited but presumably without permission—Breivik’s sprawling tome even plagiarizes and slightly alters a couple of Kaczynski’s paragraphs without crediting him.

But as with Kaczynski, I found myself agreeing with much of what Breivik had written.

And then you get to the parts where he says he has to kill people.

He condemns Nazism—saying he wished he had a time machine so he could go back to 1933 and kill Hitler himself—and the 10 to 20 million corpses it left in its wake. He also condemns Marxism and estimates it led to 100 million fatalities. He’s especially critical of Frankfurt School-styled “cultural Marxism” for opening Europe up to a mass influx of Muslims, adherents of a faith he accuses of murdering 300 million nonbelievers since its inception 1,400 years ago. Breivik claims that Western Europe only hosted 50,000 or so Muslims in the 1950s, whereas 25 million hyper-fertile Mohammedans currently call it home. In a creepily elaborate section of instructions for waging a New Crusade to purge Europe once and forever of Islam, he urges would-be Crusaders to focus their violence toward multiculturalist European “traitors” rather than the Muslims whose presence they sanction and encourage. Accordingly, his victims last Friday were overwhelmingly Nordic leftists rather than brown Islamists.

NEW YORK—I tried. I really tried. I wanted to be the only person in America who didn’t know anything about the Caylee Anthony murder case.

I intentionally avoided it whenever it would come on cable TV. I have such an aversion to that caterwauling condescending public scold of a schoolmarm named Nancy Grace that I took Headline News Network off my remote control so that it automatically skipped to the next channel anytime I was surfing. Sometime in the past year they apparently gave Nasal Nancy a 24-hour show dedicated to the reinstatement of flesh-flaying, foot-roasting, and iron-maiden impalement for all criminal defendants. Her acolytes spread Nancy Graceisms all over the Internet through articles predicated on the idea that innocent victims’ blood has morphed into vengeance-blogging directed by the Almighty. But as I said, I managed to step aside. Whenever someone would post a photo of Casey Anthony with some slogan like, “Look at this slut partying while her baby is dead,” I would move onto the next subject or delete the email without answering.

And then when they finally got through the investigation, the arrest, the years of pre-trial hearings, the actual trial, and the verdict, I thought I was finally safe.

How wrong I was.

Not only is Casey Anthony still on my TV screen, but Nancy Grace has migrated to every other network so she can keep talking about it even if you have your remote control set so that you never have to listen to Nancy Grace.

The thing is over, people. She’s not guilty. Not guilty means what it’s always meant. It doesn’t mean innocent; it means not proven guilty. Give it a rest.

I don’t get the “party slut” emails anymore. What I get now are the “Caylee’s Law” emails. Vote for Caylee’s Law. Go to your Congresspeople and tell them to pass Caylee’s Law. Caylee’s Law says that if your child is missing and you don’t report it, you’re guilty of a crime. If you’re planning to kill your child and hide the body and spend a lot of time covering up the crime, you won’t be able to do that anymore because at some point you’ll slap your forehead and go, “Damn! I can’t hide this body! I can’t destroy evidence! Caylee’s Law says I have to report the kid missing right now!”

It’s the most meaningless addition to the criminal statutes since “hate crime” laws. Those were invented under the assumption that if you simply murdered your wife or husband or business partner, you probably didn’t hate them, but if you yelled, “You stupid wop!” right before pulling the trigger, your obvious Italophobia should qualify you for 30 extra years. Every decade or so some collective insanity runs through America’s various legislatures and we suddenly have a raft of statutes dedicated to making sure that nobody wearing dark gloves and fleeing in a white Bronco on a Friday afternoon ever again goes free for lack of DNA evidence in a double murder case in Brentwood. And we call it the “Justice for Nicole Law.”

There have been lots of comparisons to the O. J. verdict, which makes no sense to me because that verdict was widely celebrated, not reviled. I was on the #6 subway train when the O. J. verdict was announced, and there was universal cheering and shouting and hooting about “O. J. is innocent! O. J. is innocent! They let O. J. go!” Unless I’m missing something, the Casey Anthony verdict has inspired the opposite response. There were people fainting on the streets outside the Orange County Courthouse. There were mobs massed outside the jail when she was released, holding up placards reading “No Justice For Caylee!” in their non-pitchfork other hand. When her SUV pulled away from the jail last weekend, they had one of those traffic copters chasing her down the freeway like it was a high-speed chase! For all I know the copter pilot is still on the case. I know that “Casey sightings” have been bandied about the Web. Reporters have filed stories about mysterious women seen boarding private planes in the middle of the night, begging the question, “If you were able to prove that Casey Anthony was in a particular place at a particular time, what exactly would the story be? That she’s still breathing?”

Like most reporters, I spent my early years hanging around courthouses and covering murder trials, and there is almost always a rabble outside. Sometimes the rabble is there to ensure “justice” for the dead person—justice being a term that everyone in a courthouse constantly uses for reasons that have an inverse relation to the Aristotelian meaning of the term—and on some rare occasions the rabble is there to ensure “justice” for the unfairly accused defendant.

So what are we taught to do in Journalism 101?

Acknowledge and ignore. Acknowledge that the rabble is outside. Write about it if it threatens to contaminate the jury. Ensure that we the media don’t become part of the story.

I never went to journalism school anyway, so I wasn’t around when they apparently added Journalism 102, which can be summed up by reporters’ attitudes at the Anthony trial:

STIR UP THE RABBLE! TELL THEM HOW RIGHT THEY ARE! GET IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY AS AN ADVOCATE FOR JUSTICE BUT DON’T QUOTE ARISTOTLE!