Every night is 50s night

Ireland survived the National Review cruise seemingly intact but our Scottish brethren are now under serious pressure. The Keyboard Kommandos are on the North Sea with a stop near Edinburgh, and lead warmonger Jonah Goldberg provides an update for the landlubbers:

FIFTIES NIGHT [Jonah Goldberg]

Last night was "fifties night" on the ship. Several passengers as well as the entire staff dressed up like greasers, preppies and the life from Happy Days and the like. (I wore a blazer and slacks, which is precisely how I would have dressed in the 1950s were I to have dinner with William F. Buckley).

The striking thing to me was how odd this must seem to the overwhelmingly non-American crew. The waiters and bartenders are mostly from Eastern Europe. You've got to wonder what these people think. The 1950s were not a universally American time. These waiters' grandparents were hiding from Commisars and eating canned cabbage -- if they were lucky -- during the 1950s. Sock-hops and cheese burgers weren't the norm.

That said, Kate O'Beirne had a great idea which we've had a lot of fun with. Shouldn't the NR cruise celebrate a different 1950s? Couldn't we create a Cruise Committee on Un-American Activities? [predictably unfunny "joke" follows]

Now while this sounds like Hell, it's no worse a version of Hell than as noted by Roger Ailes for the similar Weekly Standard Cruise. And yet the level of buffoonery is even higher. For one thing, Goldberg's supposed niche is reactionary lunacy but with Simpsons references, and yet he misses the obvious one where Homer and Marge go to a theme park restaurant (T.G.I. McScratchy's) where it's always New Year's Eve, complete with singing of Auld Lang Syne; Marge assumes that a waiter would be thrilled to be around such non-stop joyousness, to which he responds "Please kill me."

And since it was 50s night, who did the reading from a National Review editorial from that era?

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

Occasionally people try to make excuses for the intellectual implosion of the reactionary right by saying "they were reasonable before 9/11." But the National Review Jumped the Shark a long time ago.