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On the back of my review copy of "The Tyranny of Clichés," Goldberg's latest, it still claims that the author "has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize." That, of course, was revealed yesterday to be utter bullshit. He is a two-time entrant for Pulitzer consideration -- to enter requires solely an application and a $50 fee -- and while Goldberg claims not to have added that line to his bio, it appears everywhere he writes, and it's hard to believe he hadn't noticed it until this week. That said, I can't imagine a person dumb enough to actually believe that Jonah Goldberg had been seriously considered for a Pulitzer. (Well, OK, I can imagine one person dumb enough.)

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Gus from Little Green Footballs found documents showing O'Sullivan was on the board of the "Lexington Research Institute Limited," aka the VDARE Foundation, from 2006-2010. During that time, VDARE helped found nativist site "Alternative Right" with a $35,000 grant. Alternative Right is edited by Richard B. Spencer, yet another racist/racialist white nationalist.

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These two were not fired for suddenly revealing some hitherto unknown and successfully buried racist attitude -- these were not out-of-left field outbursts, like Michael Richards' onstage meltdown -- but for beliefs they had always had and had always expressed. This is what makes it a purge -- a decision that this sort of modern "racialism" is no longer considered an acceptable mainstream Conservative attitude.

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Although founder William F. Buckley is widely credited with driving John Birch Society extremists out of the conservative movement, he made his own contributions to the ugly coarsening of American politics on the issue of race. He and his magazine defended segregation and white supremacy in the South (though he later apologized), while in the North, he played a leading role in making the issue of rising crime both racial and political – with arguments and tactics still being used in the Trayvon Martin case today.

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Like any old friend of a publication's founder who considers it his right to contribute lazy nonsense only when it pleases him, John Derbyshire seemed to pop off from his National Review perch for weeks or months at a time. He would eventually resurface on National Review Online, perhaps touting a playful new book on the apocalypse, to share his oddball musings on various affairs while his more dependable, hawkish colleagues busied themselves with outrage at the Democratic Party. A latter-year blog post from Derbyshire -- "Derb" or "The Derb" to colleagues and critics alike -- would usually go something like, "My flowers have just come in, looking a bit limp I must say. Did you hear about this latest fashion preoccupation among teenage girls? Nor did I. Watch out for the blacks." These blasts of Derbitry had become the only reason to visit National Review Online, reliably providing rich material to satisfy the daily fixes of outrage and mockery.

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A vital early job for the party is setting the boundaries of what is and isn't "fair game" for political attacks. While most negative rhetoric is sort of cheerfully accepted by the objective press and "Village" elders as part of the wonderful game of politics, some lines of attack -- like stuff involving children and families and oftentimes health -- are considered beyond the pale. The line is informally negotiated early on. In 2008, the right largely failed to make it seem improper to go after John McCain's age. Liberals (though right-wingers will disagree) failed to make Barack Obama's church membership off-limits.

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The media then created a special rubric “white Hispanic,” when its narrative of white-on-black crime was endangered by new information that Mr. Zimmerman had a Latino mother, although it normally does not use such terminology for others of mixed ancestry — Barack Obama himself being a good example.

I think the argument here is that if the media wants to claim Hispanics can be white, they better also call the president a mulatto.

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Gingrich should not listen to them. At all. (Not that Gingrich listens to anyone, besides perhaps his wife, but still.) This editorial can be safely ignored for the following reasons:

First of all, everyone should always do the opposite of whatever a National Review editorial says to do. The opposite of what "The Editors" want is invariably the correct choice, morally and politically. If politicians always made "doing the opposite of what The Editors of the National Review want" a top priority, there would be universal peace and prosperity and kick-ass super-trains crisscrossing the nation.

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She was so excited, in fact, that she forgot that the decision was NOT ABOUT ABORTION WHATEVER GAVE YOU THAT IDEA. Later she posted that hilarious YouTube video of Komen CEO Nancy Brinker explaining that the Planned Parenthood decision was not in any way political, no sir. (At least one commenter noted the disconnect: "Really curious what K-Lo thinks Komen is actually doing here. When the news broke, she seemed pleased and pointed out right-to-lifers had been trying to force Komen to shuck PP. But she also believes Komen's [ridiculous] assertion that the decision has nothing to do with politics and was just a big coincidence? Hunh?")

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(If Glenn Beck, for example, could trust "the reins of power" in any current GOP candidate, it would apparently be Rick Santorum.)

Some are wise enough to bemoan the entire remaining slate, though they of course blame outsiders, and not the actual rank-and-file of their own movement. Jim Geraghty hates Iowa, and says the kooky results (Ron Paul!!!) can be blamed on the lack of a Democratic primary sending unreliable "independents" -- presumably baked out of their minds -- to GOP caucuses to spoil the entire campaign.

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Belief in American exceptionalism is declining, the Pew Research Center concludes in a new report:

About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;” 44% in Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

While opinions about cultural superiority have remained relatively stable over the years in the four Western European countries surveyed, Americans are now far less likely to say that their culture is better than others; six-in-ten Americans held this belief in 2002 and 55% did so in 2007.

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In all seriousness, it cannot be easy to be governor of Texas and run for president at the same time.

That is the entirety of the post. (Commenter "motherofthetroops": "K-Lo, I say this in Christian love: what Perry is to debaters, you are to Corner commentators." People who preface things with "I say this in Christian love" are people who are about to say something awful to you, usually.)

This morning, she published a longer reaction to last night's debate, informed by a night of careful consideration. "These candidates aren’t half bad," she declares. "I do wish Santorum would have his moment," she sighs, wistfully, imagining herself chastely holding hands with the former senator on a lovely spring day as they block the entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

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"But when you look at history, the 'largest number' is only about 1,700 more than two years ago," Krikorian says. So most deportations ever, but not by a large enough margin.

If Obama really cared, see, he'd deport a zillion people:

Nor is the stagnation in the deportation numbers due to a temporary diversion of resources, as after 9/11: The Obama administration, as a matter of policy, refuses to even ask Congress for the resources needed to deport any more than 400,000 people. Now, 400,000 deportations (of illegal aliens, of course, but also of legal aliens who made themselves deportable because of crimes) is a lot, but it can easily be doubled; I remember one of the top people at INS in the Clinton years telling me that the 114,000 removed in 1997 was a really, really big number and sufficient proof of their seriousness about immigration enforcement.

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Polls show Republican Bob Turner slightly leading, so obviously any result other than a Turner victory means ACORN paid homeless people to vote 100 times under false names. "Will [close polls] tempt some locals to resort to the kind of voter fraud that Kings County and Brooklyn are infamous for?" asks former Fulton County, Georgia Republican Party head Hans A. von Spakovsky, who is apparently unaware that "Kings County and Brooklyn" is redundant.

Spakovsky suspects imminent voter fraud because some people listed on the registration rolls have moved or died:

A source within the Turner camp tells me the campaign sent a letter and campaign literature to all the voters on the permanent list maintained by the Board of Elections who are automatically mailed absentee ballots. They have received hundreds of pieces of returned mail marked “address unknown” or “return to sender” and at least five marked “deceased.”

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The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been hating on Romney with great intensity for some time now, and while they'd like to see a Mitch Daniels onstage (to the point where they've even flirted with Obama-loving pseudo-moderate Jon Huntsman), they seem to be getting comfortable with Rick Perry. Here's longtime WSJ fixture James Taranto praising Perry's lust for capital punishment and Carl Kelm noting Perry's "authenticity and boldness."

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Dick Cheney's memoir apparently mentions a lot of books he read and enjoyed. Mostly books about wars and frontier settlers and so on. Good Republican books. But the Washington Post's nonfiction book editor notes that Cheney doesn't mention reading anything while actually in office as vice president:

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The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

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Kathryn Jean Lopez says "Obamacare strikes again" (when did it strike last time?) and then writes some lies about how now Obama will force Catholics to give prostitutes abortions, or something. I dunno. The Catholic church's prohibition against contraception is pretty medieval and stupid, I don't have a lot of sympathy for her argument. The Archbishop of Galveston-Houston threatens to shut down every single Catholic hospital, school, and charity in America if they don't get an exemption from the rule. Why does every minority want Special Rights?

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Oh, sorry, how much attention possible Islamic terrorist attacks get.

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