Must Read of the Day: Circular Firing Squad, with Strobe Lighting

Fascinating Charles Homans piece about Trotskyite liquidationist tendencies on the right. Yes, I know it is a stale topic, but somehow I had missed "Culture11" a righty answer to "Slate," with the surprise hook of some dazzling snark:

Culture11’s in-house writers also had a gift for whacking their own partisans, with varying degrees of constructive criticism and snark. "Filmmaker Jean Luc Godard famously declared that, to do his job, all he needed was ‘a girl and a gun,’" [Arts Editor Peter] Suderman wrote on the occasion of Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate, alongside a photo of the Alaska governor posing with a stuffed grizzly bear. "On his hunt for a Vice President, John McCain apparently came to the same conclusion." A month after the election, when even respectable right-leaning publications were expending ink and pixels on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Culture11 offered up a mischievous list of the "Top 11 Fringe Right Arguments Against Barack Obama Becoming President" (Number two: "He’s not really black." Number one: "He’s black."). [James] Poulos, the political editor, wrote about Democratic and Republican dynasties with equal acidity: the Clintons were "wily, and probably deathless, political opponents, with an arsenal of depleted-uranium loyalists"; Bush was "a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters." When Palin, at the apex of her popularity, held a campaign rally in Virginia, he stopped by and was perturbed by what he saw. "In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised," he wrote, "the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree—but they do require a tree."

Update: A brief search of my archives shows that League of Ordinary Gentlemen knew all about Culture11; I just wasn't paying attention. And here's an Atlantic piece about a new Poulos enterprise.