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LUDIC LOG

Regular readers of this space, if any such creatures could be found, are no doubt familiar with my endless gags about the neo-conservative pinheads who staff Town Hall. But who are they? I'd like to think that people get at least one of my running jokes, so let's meet a few of the players. Believe me, you'll see them again.

BRUCE BARTLETT. Bruce is the neo-con gang's go-to guy for arcane economic discussions, and consquently is generally unreadable. He's good for lowering your blood pressure after reading the rest of the columns on Town Hall. Of course, he's almost always wrong, but at least he's wrong about things that are difficult to comprehend, and thus not infuriating.

LINDA BOWLES. Linda, an inflexible Christian moralist and an inveterate foe of feminism, is essentially the Judge Judy of the Town Hall crowd. Whenever you want someone who seems less like an insufferable prick or a pompous gasbag and more like a finger-wagging scold, or just somone who hates women in a different way than Ann Coulter does, Linda's your gal.

BRENT BOZELL. Brent is the resident culture warrior of the group. Head of a "media watchdog" group, his job is to tell the world how immoral movies, TV, rap music, amusement parks, magazines, the internet, and anything else people enjoy are. In addition to having a name with an unfortunate similarity to "Bozo", Brent looks exactly like stick-butted EPA bureaucrat Walter Peck in Ghostbusters.

PAT BUCHANAN. Fightin' Pat is the intellectual heir to the crown once worn by crypto-fascist Catholic priest Father Couglin. Entertaining for his histrionics and "kill them all, and God will care for his own" rhetoric, he's anomolously pro-labor and enjoys pissing off the other conservatives, but is in most regards a poisonous, anti-Semitic fuckhead. An old-school conservative, he likes to kick people's necks.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY. Notorious for his slurred, patrician speech and for calling Gore Vidal a queer and threatening to punch him in the face on national television, though it's hard to imagine someone less threatening than Bill. Another old-guard conservative, he's actually socially liberal on some issues (drugs) but not on others (gays). He's amusing for his frequent misuse of three-dollar words.

WARD CONNERLY. The grand pubah of black conservatives, the California-based Connerly has been labeled an Uncle Tom by everyone from Robert Johnson, CEO of Black Entertainment Television, to RJ's arch-enemy, Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder. The latter famously suggested that Connerly should be beaten up with a baseball bat by Raekwon the Chef, whose cachet was no doubt lost on Ward.

ANN COULTER. Scion of a rich New England family, reputedly attractive, and as deliberately infuriating as a kick in the back, Ann is the mega-star fire-breathing dragon of the neo-conservative right. For someone who claims to be a satirist, she isn't funny, and her odious-harpy image is not lessened by her frequent and bizarre public utterances. Ann has been passed around the men of the right like a doobie.

JONAH GOLDBERG. In a different world, the transparently nerdy Jonah would be a harmless Star Trek geek who eked out a comfy living as the proprietor of a gaming shop or a video arcade. Alas, he was born the son of domineering, hideous neo-con grand dame Lucienne Goldberg, and had no more choice in becoming the smug prick he is today than an acorn could choose to become a fir tree.

DAVID HOROWITZ. Showing why you should never trust a convert, former Ramparts editor Horowitz spent the '60s and '70s masturbating over the Black Panthers and the '80s and '90s shitting on them. As disagreeable and awful a human being as the right has ever nurtured, his current quest, bafflingly enough, is to prove that there are not enough conservatives in college liberal arts departments.

MICHAEL KELLY. Kelly, who has ushered The Atlantic magazine into a golden new era of cranky, defensive conservativism, is one of the people who gets trotted out when the neo-cons want to appear reasonable rather than rabid. He's intelligent, although frequently arrogant and sloppy, and not entirely objectionable. His pet theory is that there's no international problem that can't be solved by saturation bombing.

JOHN LEO. Leo, along with Bill Murchison and Marvin Olasky, is part of an evil triumvirate of fat, bald, ultra-Orthodox Christian men in sweaty dress shirts who blame every social, fiscal and political ill on the alleged triumph of postmodernism and the subsequent moral untethering of our nation. None of them understand postmodernism, or even know what it is, but they know they don't like it.

DAVID LIMBAUGH. Yes, that Limbaugh. Riding his older brother's hefty coattails to the relative stardom of Town Hall, he's not quite as maniacal (and subsequently, neither as offensive nor as entertaining) as his brother Rush, but he sets the gold standard for the new right in blaming Clinton for things. His columns very rarely are about anything other than how bad the Democrats are.

MICHELLE MALKIN. Also known as "Oh, Daddy, I am a bad little slut-girl, please spank me", the tasty Eminem of the neo-conservative movement is about as bold an example of hypocrisy as you can imagine: her father, a Filipino, came over on a student visa as an immigrant, and his daughter now spends all her time writing the most virulent anti-immigration screeds imaginable. She is kinda hot, though.

OLIVER NORTH. Again, yes, that Oliver North. The former Iran-Contra megacriminal has, like most Iran-Contra criminals, found new success in the Bush years as a columnist, TV talking head, and speaker. His columns are noteworthy for having absolutely nothing to say, even by the zero-for-content standards of Town Hall, but nonetheless being markedly egomaniacal.

BILL O'REILLY. Deemed (by my pal Christian) "America's Dumbest Man", Bill lives up to that title once every Saturday by penning a barely literate column for Town Hall. Mostly a variation on his "hey, what is this, come on already" TV schtick, he has used the space to declare a one-man kulturkampf against rap music, and to stick his moronic, underinformed nose into any issue he decides he knows about.

KATHLEEN PARKER. Representing every soccer mom in America married to someone who bullied them into not voting for Clinton, Kathleen Parker writes columns that would be only mildly offensive if it weren't for her disturbingly frequent essays about how George Bush makes her wet. Her extented stroke fantasies about the Man from Crawford are among the most upsetting things you'll read on Town Hall.

DENNIS PRAGER. Longtime Los Angeles radio talk show host Dennis Prager is the most monstrously pro-Christian Jew in America. Like most of the Town Hall denizens who are TV and radio people, his columns are particularly stupid even for neo-conservatives, and only worth reading for his frequent ridiculous errors. He wrote a famous column in which he boasted that his son has a black friend.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS. By far my favorite author of the Town Hall crowd, the former undersecretary of the Treasury and editor of the Wall Street Journal is always good for a chuckle, whether he's saying that taxation is worse than slavery or that rich people in 2002 have it worse than black people in 1850 or that the darkies are destroying this beautiful, crazy experiment we call "America". A must.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY. The dizzy dame who almost single-handedly defeated passage of the Equal Rights Amendment is still at it, and is particularly a heroine to the ladies of the new right, whom she ensured would not get equal pay for their work. She's rededicated her substantial energies to a new target -- dirty foreign devils who come to America -- but she's a scrappy, and completely retarded, as ever.

BEN SHAPIRO. Benny-Boy is the Great White Hope of neo-conservativism's future. A nineteen-year-old college student at noted bastion of political correctness UCLA, Ben has quite clearly never gotten laid, and his columns are sophomoric in the most precise and literal sense of the word. In a few years, he could be as obnoxious and horrible as David Horowitz.

CAL THOMAS. The mustachioed, constantly smirking Cal is one of the Grand Old Men of the neo-conservative right; he's been there since the early days of Reagan and will probably be there when Jeb Bush finishes his second term. He's always cocky, always repugnant, always controversial, always filled with great moral certainly, and always, without fail, completely wrong.

GEORGE WILL. The bow-tied, grinning homonculous was probably the most noteworthy conservative talking head in America until Rush Limbaugh cannonballed into the pool and left him the soaking wet weenie that he is today. Will is actually fairly intelligent, if often wrong, and a big fan of baseball, albeit in a misguided and irritating way. Think of him as the Bob Costas of the right.

WALTER WILLIAMS. Another black conservative, noteworthy for using the free association clause to defend segregation in a way that would have assured him heinous treatment if he'd been unlucky enough to be born in the south around, say, 1920. He refers to himself, in every column, as "Williams". He's hinted vaguely that he's "going away" soon, so maybe we'll get lucky and he'll die.