FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

He was good solo, too. RIP.
•  I know it's been quiet here at the old homstead and I do apologize. I've been busy. The Goddamned Job, like just about everyone's Goddamned Job in this low, mean era, ever increases my workload. (This week I was actually sent to a conference. And these people know I'm anti-social! I think they're trying to break me.) Plus which I have had to devote the greater share of my writing time to my paid newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Like Little Boy Blue, I need the money, especially since the Voice shut down. So if you like quantity with your quality, pitch seven bucks a month into my upturned newsboy cap and I'll make it rain -- with the tears of our enemies!

•  If Antifa were involved in direct actions that killed several people, you would see the usual suspects screaming bloody murder about The Violent Left. But at National Review Michael Brendan Dougherty looks at the Paris gas price riots and declares,

Finally, France has a bona fide working-class riot. Rather than the usual, a riot of bourgeois students on behalf of a notional working class.

These people aren't hippies -- it's all good! White riot, I wanna riot, white riot, a riot of my own!

We live in odd times, when many conservatives see working-class people pitching a riot in France and instinctively sympathize with them.

One of those many is evidently Dougherty, who is crafty enough that instead of crying "Helter Skelter, off the pigs," he just suggests the stodgy stand-pat liberals have it coming:

And at the same time, many liberals are tempted to defend the political leader who started the uproar with the imposition of a regressive tax, and who finds his primary support among financial workers in London and the establishment at home.

There's more at work here than riot envy, though. Dougherty refers to the European wave of "populism that combines the grievances out on the peripheries of left and right and advances them against the liberal center." That's great if you're a conservative who doesn't mind playing both ends against the middle -- like the Koch playthings whose idea of free speech advocacy is sending nuts like Milo Yiannopoulos to stir the shit on campus, then acting aggrieved when shit starts to fly. The idea is, after the clash of the KPD and the Nazis -- I mean, the "peripheries of left and right" -- the responsible parties will clean up! This time for sure.

•  I haven't said much about the George Herbert Walker Bush memorials, which have been multiple and ridiculous -- here, for an example let me unlock a newsletter item on the dumb Douthat one -- but I will note that I am gratified by the pushback by folks like Erik Loomis, Joshua Clark Davis, Steven Thrasher, Amanda Marcotte, Corey Robin, et alia. GHWB is painted a "moderate" because he talked about points of light and did the awful things Republicans have been doing since Nixon in a clean-cuffed patrician manner rather than crudely and Trumply. But he sucked. He was a warmonger and a racist who pushed a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw flag-burning, invaded client states and tried to make it look idealistic, and saddled us with Clarence Thomas. And it's nothing but a good thing that at least some people are hearing, perhaps for the first time, the rest of the story.