It’s probably helpful to think of the Corner as the webpage version of a glossy and plain-colored institutional wall, like the kind in lunatic asylums made so that noxious stains and inane crayon scribblings may be easily wiped-off when everyone is put to sleep, only to be soiled with drivel and excrement the next day: a grim cycle indeed.

Put another way, it’s like a palimpsest for the reactionary Id, whereby all the spittled hate and fear and mania and ..well, shit may be quickly wiped away and rewritten with often contradictory hates and fears and manias and shits: what matters is not coherence and consistency of thought but rather of tone.

So let’s see take a look with a janitor’s-eye-view at what was smeared on the walls yesterday:

John Derbsyhire is still ogling nubile young starlets.

Doughy Pantload weasels around Ezra’s point on Wal-Mart, accuses Ezra of weaselling, then solemnly declares that his friends Nick “Lysenkoist” Schulz and Tim “Crooked Timber’s reactionary troll not named Sebastian Holsclaw” Worstall will fix Ezra’s wagon.

Stanley Kurtz, apparently tired of framing arguments for anti-Gay marriage amendments metaphorically as political fallout shelters good Christian families must use against the filthy radiation of homofagfag culture, gets literal. Kurtz argues that since liberals have stabbed America in the back, there’s just very little chance that Jesus Bush will bomb Iran. So, now, with considerable relish masked in the tone of mourning he advocates the next best wingnutty option: Missile defense and a return to the halcyon days of CD drills and duck and cover routines. Sweetly and neatly, he argues that those who are against bombing Iran into the stone age should be most responsible for getting behind the new old CD plan.

Derbyshire responds to all this hysteria with sarcasm — I think. It’s hard to tell. At any rate Kurtz appears to take it that way, demurs in a poor-little-ol-me tone that if Derb doesn’t like it, he’s free to do better.

Larry Kudlow argues that Ben Bernanke will singlehandedly save the Republican Party in this fall’s elections by his counter-inflationary measures which will have the effect of knocking gasoline down to 2.79$ a gallon, a price that Larry the Crackpot apparently thinks consumers will delight in, and thank Republicans for.

John Hood allows that Jon Chait might have a point after all, but Doughy Pantload ain’t buying it, says that corporatist kleptocracy is too a victory for Liberalism, so there! Actually, Chait is more right than his dreadful sensible centrism allows him to know. The variety of conservatism that argues against overtly corporatist policies only exists in certain Republican rhetoric. In actual practice, it has only existed (among those that can be called rightwing) on the libertarian fringe. The modern Republican party has been about corporatist plutocracy/kleptocracy for a long time now, which figures for it’s been in their blood since the Gilded Age. When figures like Grover Norquist say shit about drowning government in the bathtub what they mean is useful government or more precisely, government useful to the middle and underclasses, not corporate welfare, “special interests”, or, especially, defense contractors, long the prime recipient of wingnut largesse.

Meanwhile, Tim Graham approvingly cites the WaPost’s third-rate Tom Friedman clone, Sebastian Mallaby, on the subject of Wal-Mart. This is especially fun and illustrates how similar the neo-liberal “centrists” and wingnuts are to each other. But then neo-liberal is just a polite term for a devotee of laissez-faire who is relatively socially liberal, which in turn is the older description of libertarians. There’s more than one way to corporatism. One is the direct way — the wingnut way — then there’s the roundabout way — the libertarian way — which, by allowing the corporation’s power to trump democracy’s, reaches the same conclusion.