Like (I suspect) most viewers, I wasn’t too troubled by self-recrimination at the end of Quentin Tarantino’s must-see exercise in “Jewish revenge porn,” Inglourious Basterds. (The description comes from the Jewish Daily Forward, not from me.) I wasn’t worried about Q’s preposterous deviations from history, nor was I concerned that some Jewish folks might not appreciate – indeed, might be appalled by – their forebears’ cinematic transformation from victims to vigilantes. Screw the strictures of morality, the heavy burden of humanity! The way I figure it, most people leave the theater thinking just one thing: Man, if only the Jews had been able to open up a can of whoop-ass on those damn Nat-zees – that woulda been sweet.

My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” Liberty and Tyranny (which leaves some question as to where his sympathies lie), Glenn Beck’s Common Sense (the first of two oxymorons in this column), Dick Morris’ Catastrophe and Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The latter two tomes, which see fit to pass final judgment on the new administration, were released in June and July, respectively – which, even accounting for the sped-up timeline for publishing political books, means they were written no later than March or April … before the stimulus bill had even been signed into law. (more…)