FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I found this wonderfully crabby Richard Lloyd interview and

it reminded me to listen to three hours of Tom Verlaine.

•   You may not have noticed because it's such a small state, but Lincoln Chaffee's performance Tuesday's debate has left Rhode Island mortified  -- from the Providence Journal:

Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination imploded on national television Tuesday night with a number of stunning gaffes, said several political observers Wednesday, and he’d be wise to bow out now or risk embarrassing himself. 

“I’m hoping that somebody he really trusts sat him down either last night or this morning and convinced him to withdraw, otherwise his candidacy will become a laughing stock if he remains,” said Joseph Cammarano, a political science professor at Providence College... 

State Democratic Chairman Joseph McNamara defended Chafee, to a point.
“I give him a lot of credit for participating and a lot of people who criticize him are people who have never stepped into the battlefield of public discourse.”

Still, McNamara said he was relieved Chafee didn’t bring up the advantages of the metric system, a point he raised when he announced his run. 

“I was afraid he would start quizzing the others about how many kilometers they had traveled.”

Now I don't know shit about Little Rhodie, so maybe the Journal has it in for Chaffee like the New York Post has it in for de Blasio, and one needs to go to the Woonsocket Call for the real truth. But I am beginning to feel for the guy. Not only did he put in a truly disastrous performance -- so bad that, on recollection, I'm not sure that when he referred to himself twice as a block of granite, it wasn't because the drugs had kicked in and he literally thought he was a block of granite -- but now he has to slink back to his small-town-with-Senators, headlines like "You thought his debate was bad? Wait till you see what Wolf Blitzer did to Lincoln Chafee" and "John Chafee loyalists anguished over Lincoln Chafee’s White House run" ringing in his ears. Also, since he seems to be a decent guy, he is probably capable of shame, unlike such Republican shitheels as Rick Perry, who responded to his national humiliation with four years of fundraising and fifteen minutes of campaign. If you care at all, politics is a hard dollar.

•   But fuck that noise. How 'bout them Mets?

•   Jonah Goldberg, man. The National Review legacy pledge claims that while Republican Presidential candidates got "tough" questions in their debates-slash-personal-marketing-events ,"The Media Tossed Softballs at the Democratic Debate." Here is literally the first question Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton on Tuesday:

You were against same-sex marriage. Now you're for it. You defended President Obama's immigration policies. Now you say they're too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the "gold standard". Now, suddenly, last week, you're against it. Will you say anything to get elected?

Some softball. Goldberg claims in evidence that Cooper never asked the Democrats questions like "would you be okay with Planned Parenthood then selling that healthy fetus’s brain and heart?” The simple explanation is that they're saving this kind of thing for the two-party Presidential debates next year, to heighten the element of surprise when the Republican candidate (odds-on favorite: a brain-damaged street preacher who will storm a demoralized GOP convention, speak in tongues, and be nominated by acclimation) screams MURDERER at Hillary Clinton and splatters her with a jar of goat's blood.

•   Maureen Mullarkey at The Federalist  thinks abortions happen because we want to live forever. The madness started, apparently, with organ transplants ("celebrated technical successes, born of biomedical refusal to accept mortal limits, encourage us to view our bodies as machines that can be rebuilt"), and now we're trying to cure Alzheimer's with dead babies.

This technical morality horrifies us when we see it at work on the abortionist’s operating table. Yet we want it both ways. We want to hold the moral high ground by condemning the “Moral Rot at the Core of Planned Parenthood,” as one headline shouted. At the same time, we assent to the spoils of advanced bio-technical research and those laboratory procedures that employ fetal tissue.

If it ever sinks in that they can't win without female and minority votes, I suspect Republicans will become the anti-science party in earnest.