DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:

Don't Blame the Republican Party for the Rise of Trump

Because he's the Democratic nominee presumptive? No. Because he's the nominee presumptive in some other party that isn't the Republican Party? No. Because [throws a handful of dirt in your face, runs]. This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written. Seriously, look at this:

Or maybe those liberals shouldn't be forgiven so easily. I’ve been pondering these theories -- advanced by everyone from Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Bill Maher -- and the thing is, they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. They seem to posit a Republican electorate that is, on the one hand, so malleable that the GOP leadership could create the emotional conditions for a Trump candidacy -- and on the other hand, a Republican electorate so surly and unmanageable that it has ignored the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals, in order to rally behind Trump.

That there is some bullshit, and not just because what she presents as either-or choices are not mutually exclusive, but also because both the "either" and the "or" are gibberish. GOP voters don't have to be "malleable" to turn from covertly pyscho to overtly psycho: They only needed to suffer through two Black President terms, bookended by the humiliation of George W. Bush (hey, wonder if the Republicans will finally invite him to a convention this year?) and the recent Gay/Trans Apotheosis, for their psycho-sap to rise and run over all by itself.

Neither is there anything weird about the Trumpenproletariat "ignoring the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals." Who, aside from some National Review cruise-goers and Inner Circle party donors, has ever cared what Jonah Goldberg and Billy Kristol said or thought? The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up -- hell, they were hot for President Sarah Palin until she decided to run a safer grift. And before Ronald Reagan's elevation to sainthood, he was just a talking doll with a nice smile and strong appeal to the Strom Thurmond wing of the Party -- which wing never went away, but only got older, grimmer, and mad that they can't say the n-word anymore because of political correctness.

The rest is also crap and who has time, but I will say that anyone who writes "triple-distilled balderdash … high-test twaddle … self-congratulatory swill … nonsense on stilts" ought to be sent to a young-fogey rest home and given plenty of sedatives.

Believe it or don't, McArdle was still out-crazied -- but, less surprisingly, by David French:

The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option.

And at this point, Mitt Romney is the only man who combines the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.

Does French actually think Romney has a chance in hell? He has at least enough brain cells left to be sneaky with his answer:

A third-party Romney bid would introduce the chance of a different outcome, giving millions of Americans the important option to choose a man of integrity as their president.

Similarly, millions of Americans had the important option to choose windshield washer fluid over Coca-Cola as their beverage at lunch. It could happen!

But the goo-goo ga-ga winner is David Marcus at (where else?) The Federalist:

How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

Long story short, liberals are talking about bad things white people do, and how else can a rational honky react except by going neo-Nazi?

White people are being asked -- or pushed -- to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more.

I see a crying cowboy in Oklahoma, who can't watch TV no more without seeing them Key and Peele fellers talking down His People -- and since you libtards injected race into things, this is forcing the cowboy to "identify with it more." Marcus laments:

This is a remarkably bad idea. The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.

When we start lynching people, remember who started it! Why must you always provoke us.

RED LIGHTS ARE FLASHING AROUND ME/ GOOD LORD IT LOOKS LIKE THEY FOUND ME.

I'm beginning to think I've been too generous in my assessment of the Republican Party. I assumed they had enough ward-heelers, shoulder-hitters, and all-around goons to defend against the Trump onslaught, but it looks as if they can't even keep it close enough to steal.

Well, if I'm disappointed, you can imagine how actual Republicans think about it -- and by that I don't mean a majority of Republican voters, I mean Republican operatives who got #NeverTrump tattoos and whose media perches are now under threat. Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal seems to have suffered a brain injury. He's tut-tutting Trump's adoption of "America First" as if seven years of boob-bait articles about Obama's "apology tours" hadn't crossed his field of vision without raising so much as a Bretpeep. Oh, and get this:

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase?... 

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

I guess in this reading Rodney Dangerfield is the muse of ignorance and Bruce the muse of provocation, though I can't imagine how his editors let him speak better of Bruce than Dangerfield. Oh, but the follow-up makes it:

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering.

No wonder he's got it in for comedians -- in the depths of his seriousness the guy's a laugh riot.

UPDATE. Ted Cruz has dropped out, and the #NeverTrump gumps have gone gaga. National Review's primary Jesus freak David French weeps, as is such people's wont, over the "culture" that kept Trump prominent even while French was furiously writing nasty columns about him. If only we could do something about that damned culture! one imagines French seething -- though his own writing suggests that culture, as understood by normal human beings rather than culture-war dumbbells, had nothing to do with it:

The great tragedy of Trump’s Republican establishment is that — unlike mainstream media outlets that are built from the ground up to chase ratings — these “conservative” institutions and individuals were allegedly built around principles. Yes, they wanted eyeballs and page-views, but until this presidential race, many of them took great pride in their ability to attract an audience through the force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions. Indeed, these individuals and institutions used to pride themselves on policing the conservative movement, on calling out the “RINOs” and moderates in our midst.

And who are these "tragic" figures who once stirred the masses with the "force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions" -- like Burke, like Buckley? According to French, they are "Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Drudge, multiple Fox News personalities, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and... Rush Limbaugh."

I'd say part of the problem, at least, is that conservatives have been grading tragedy on the curve.

Oh, for lagniappe let me mention that French also denounces (now that it hasn't worked for him) "furious rhetoric" because it's "polarizing." You can search my archives for evidence of French's moderation, but spare yourself and just take in this item about French denouncing Griswold v. Connecticut -- yes, the landmark 1965 birth control decision -- as a tribute to "the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic." In short, French is nuts, and now he's standing in front of the Trump mob screaming I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS! Notwithstanding that this is the fall of the Republic, you have to admit it's damn funny.

Anyway, all hail Donald Trump -- Republican standard-bearer! It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.


UPDATE 2. French is getting weirder:

Now is an ideal time for the Libertarian Party to get its act together and nominate a truly serious candidate — a person who may not meet the party’s typical purity tests but who can at least make a serious argument and advance a range of policies that unite both conservatives and libertarians.

The Libertarian Party! This, from a guy who thinks birth control should be illegal. Well, libertarians aren't too into women's rights anyway; in fact, sometimes I think Reason magazine's refreshing opposition to trans bathroom laws is based on the fact that some of the persecuted parties have penises.

POSITIVELY THE WORST PRINCE MEMORIAL COLUMN.

Almost without my noticing it, David French has become the worst thing at National Review. Jonah Goldberg has, as we know, a distinguished history of stupid, but his recent columns are just so lazy and aimless that they're not even worth making fun of (I mean, look at this shit). Contender Kevin D. Williamson seems at first a clinical sociopath, but once you tumble to his shtick (call everyone else stupid, drop in an obscure reference or two to make it look intellectual-like) it's kind of like Porky Pig tumbling to Daffy Duck's "People shouldn't push me around... I'm a split personality!" routine; the magic is over.

But French just keeps finding new ways to be wrong. Take his Prince column. Yes, seriously, this horrible wingnut Jesus freak wrote one.

Prince died last week, and America overreacted. No, I’m not diminishing Prince’s talent. He was one of pop music’s most gifted songwriters and musicians. As millions shared his more memorable performances, I realized I’d forgotten what a great guitar player and showman he was. He could write hit songs like few others, and he shared his talent freely, “gifting” songs to other artists. In short, he was one of the few pop stars whose fame was fully justified.

You can really feel his pleasure at Prince's work, can't you? You can't? Well, of course not; this is exactly the sort of thing I would write about a NASCAR driver ("I had forgotten what a great NASCAR driver he was... he could turn left like no other") if I were trying to pretend I liked him as a way to win the confidence of someone whose intelligence I didn't respect.

But to spend time on the mainstream and left-wing Internet last week — or to listen to some of the web’s more popular podcasts — you would have thought America lost a national hero, and not merely an immensely gifted artist.

You heathens didn't cry like this when Andrew Breitbart died!

...In our post-virtue culture, we worship celebrity and talent not for its own sake but for ourselves. Their talent is all about us. Their fame is for our amusement. Pop music fills the hymnals in the temple of the self. We are the stars of our own biopic, and we just lost someone who wrote part of the score.

Can't you see how selfish, how narcissistic it is to enjoy music? I mean, music that isn't hymns?

The sentimentality is understandable, given the millions of people who could remember some significant moment in their lives that happened to the sounds of “Lets Go Crazy” or “When Doves Cry.”

(You know he had to look them up.)

...Our country doesn’t lack for heroes, but our true heroes certainly lack for fame. Even on the Left’s terms, valorizing Prince for his transient activism disrespects those who spent their lives in the trenches, fighting for their vision of “social justice.”

Hmmm -- I don't remember "the Left" telling me not to mourn Prince; maybe I missed a meeting... but hold on, brother French has taken up a snake:

For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience.

GLORY HALLELUJAH THIS "PRINCE" WAS A VILLAIN IN A CHICK TRACT, MAKING THE KIDS GO A-FRIGGIN' AND A-FRUGIN' WHEN WHAT THEY NEED IS CHEESUS!

...I don’t say any of this to denigrate Prince or his talents.

Fuck you.

And I don’t say this to shame people out of listening to music they enjoy, though not all music is worth hearing.

You heathens ever hear Three Doors Down?

Rather, it’s time for a dose of perspective. Music has its place...

!!!!

...and gifted musicians undeniably enhance our lives...

You know, like air conditioning or wall-to-wall carpeting.

...but if our hearts are given to these songs and those who make them, then our lives are unnecessarily impoverished.

And then it hits you -- French isn't just ignorant of Prince, or even just of music -- this poor, twisted freak literally doesn't know what art is. He doesn't know its place in human history, or why human beings invented it, or why it persists even when it doesn't make money or is suppressed. He thinks it's upholstery. He thinks it's some sort of trivial comfort. And he thinks so because he's been taught that all you need are Jesus and Bill Buckley and the pleasure you can take from the suffering of your inferiors, and anything else that has a claim on the human soul, whether it's justice or sex or art, must be crushed lest it steal their thunder.

These are the monsters that monsters bred. You think Trump is bad? You have no idea.

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN.

National Review God-botherer-in-residence David French tells us corporations are people -- and a buncha dang liberal people at that! He knew this even while at Harvard Law:

...my classmates were recruited not just by top law firms but also by top consulting firms and multinational corporations. Very few of them were conservative. Barely any of them were social conservatives.

French was at Harvard in the early 90s. Why weren't these left-wing corporations pushing for gay marriage, a living wage, and trans bathroom rights back then? Musta been Newt Gingrich holding back the red-and-grey-flannel tide. Plus which,

Back when I still did commercial litigation, my larger corporate clients were almost uniformly left of center, and the few Republicans on staff were stereotypical “Wall Street” conservatives.  They may have been fiscal hawks, but they positively loathed the religious Right. 

They don't hate homos so they don't count. 

My small-business clients were far more mixed. Conservative communities tend to spawn conservatives.

Jesus, to hear French tell it, liberals have been totally running American big business for decades, with only a small rump of Mom-and-Pops holding the line. Chamber of Commerce meetings must be total drug orgies by now! 

Progressives mock the notion that corporations can have “values” when those values are religious or conservative, but then they endlessly obsess over the progressive culture and values of their favorite companies. 

Yeah, I seem to remember the other day Bernie Sanders was talking about how corporations are our buddies. Anyway, French proposes his comrades reverse "the Left's long march through America’s most significant religious, cultural, and economic institutions" thus:

Conservatives must do the hard work of institution-building and institution-joining — of reshaping the notion that the “best” conservatives are those who become activists or politicians. Board members and CEOs can have far more cultural impact than governors or legislators. A single, high-level conservative academic program can place top talent in every major industry.

So French proposes conservatives seize power by... going into business.

Conservative persecution mania is really getting out of hand. If they're not in business -- nor, per French's "long march" statement, in the arts, nor academia, nor the churches -- then where the hell are they? In the military, it would seem, and in think-tanks and wingnut sinecures like French's at National Review. If so, maybe they're not losing because they're blocked by nefarious libs -- maybe they're losing because there just aren't enough of them.

THIS FALLEN WORLD.

David French seems to have taken over National Review's Rod Dreher Chair for Manic Street Preaching. Today French tells us that some observers believe young men should be kept away from porn because it warps their sexuality. This French dismisses as "progressive morality":

When sexual liberation in one area leads to less sexual pleasure in another, no one on the left knows quite what to do. After all, the new anti-porn activists “are all at pains to make it clear that they are not anti-sex.” Well, that’s a relief...

Lost intimacy, however, is but one piece of the puzzle. Step-by-step, pornography decays moral character, and when character decays, so does culture...

Yet our nation builds morality around consent, not character, and it is strangely puzzled when the result is an ocean of heartache.

Don't eschew porn because you want a healthy sex life -- eschew it for the "culture," which from all I can tell means a world where no one laughs when David French yells from a soapbox through a bullhorn, and all the balls are blue.

Rare is the person who lives the libertine life but suddenly becomes responsible the very moment they "fall in love."

If you've been impure, you are rendered incapable of falling in love except in scare-quotes. But here's the bestworst part:

There’s a reason why so many romantic comedies end mere minutes after the promiscuous jerk vows to change his ways and runs through the rain to carry his “true love” to the world of happily-ever-after. Keep the camera running for six months, and you’ll find that same guy alone in a dark room watching celebrity sex tapes on his iPad before flipping through his Tinder options.

Oh God, wouldn't you like to see those Director's Cuts? Like, I don't know, Silver Linings Playbook -- six months after the dance contest, Bradley Cooper's back up in his attic bedroom whacking it to hentai and Jennifer Lawrence has joined a convent in despair. "That's a crap ending," says some kid in the audience; "No better than you deserve," says Feargod French, taking down the kid's name. "Wait'll you see what we've done with Bridget Jones."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fuck it, this is still great.

•     In the wake of Donald Trump's brief advocacy of "punishing" women who have abortions, there have been several stories published asserting these women are already being punished by absurd restrictions in several states. In Texas, for example, you have to get a medically-unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound, a shaming lecture, and a 24-hour waiting period. Soon, in Indiana, you'll have to give your fetus a funeral. Many states make it so tough to open a clinic that they have only one abortion provider; Kansas has three, down from four when Dr. George Tiller was murdered in 2009. (And some states make women go to the clinic twice for one abortion.) Meanwhile conservatives are always trying to make it worse: last year North Dakota tried to make abortion illegal after six weeks, and was only blocked because they got a good judge -- who knows what future graduates of the Scalia School of Law will do. But don't tell this to National Review's David French, who thinks abortions in America are like a sweet trip on the good ship Lollipop:

These writers aren’t making a serious argument. They’re simply following the standard leftist playbook by redefining words in service of shrieking hyperbole. To “punish” typically means to make “someone suffer for a crime or for bad behavior.” But if it serves a woman’s right to kill her unborn child, the Left will happily stretch “punishment” to include any minor inconvenience... 

...Yes, some women are inconvenienced in their quest for an abortion, but not so inconvenienced as to prevent abortionists from plying their deadly trade more than 700,000 times per year. No, women are not punished, and neither are their unborn children. To argue otherwise is to imply that an aborted fetus is guilty of some transgression, when in fact it’s the opposite: the innocent fetus is simply killed.

That last part is merely Jesus-gibberish, but note the similarity of "it serves a woman’s right" to "it serves a woman right" -- composition can be psychologically revealing. Their current shtick is to pretend they'd never, ever punish women who want abortions; it's just their accomplices who'd get the chair. But, as is proven by the crazy laws they've managed to pass, they'll torment women who defy them any way they can.

•     It's hard to pick a Wingnut Whine of the Week as all their weeks are whiny these days, but I'm short of time so I'll just say they're all winners/whiners and leave you with this one by Steve Berman at The Resurgent, in which he gets a load of all the youngsters going for Bernie Sanders and commences to sputter:

The word “socialism” has lost its boogeyman quality to these young people who grew up with No Child Left Behind, Hope scholarships, Obama phones, and heathcare as a right. Basically, they see daddy-nanny-government as the way things should be, and the left is happy to hand them even more goodies. 

Even Trump likes to play candyman (“nobody will die in the street”).

"Nobody will die in the street"! God, way to encourage the moochers, Donny!

....We (me being among the last of the baby boomers) have screwed them and they know it. Sanders’ appeal is just the beginning of the trend, if conservatives can’t force-feed a government grown fat and comfortable some very bitter medicine.

"Force-feed"! It's the revenge of the Down Our Throaters! Yeah, expect to see this guy with his head shaved and crying for a Golden Dawn next election cycle.

ANNALS OF ESRD (END-STAGE REAGAN DISEASE).

Some other folks wandered out of the National Review freak show tent looking spooked, so I wandered in and got a load of Kevin D. Williamson's latest outrage. It is indeed a corker. His thesis is that the declining state of working-class whites in America (which seems to spur them to support Donald Trump) has nothing really to do with economic circumstances such as job flight -- the figures may say it's massive but look, here's a factory town that died many years ago, so there! -- and their troubles are their own damn fault and they should open a map, look up Opportunity, and go find some:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Most of the discussion I've seen around this marvels that Williamson dares to spit on "the base" -- those normally reliable masses of Republican voters who need only the merest sign that the leadership shares their concerns, prejudices, and objects of worship to be kept aboard. Why was he abandoning such a successful shtick? You just show some concern for their increasingly tenuous employment prospects, and (while continuing tax policies that encourage offshoring) promise to kick out Mexicans and to immiserate the other, darker poor so these good sons of the sod will never be mistaken for them, and they follow you like baby ducklings. It worked for decades! And you didn't even have to give a shit.

But in truth, conservatives have been losing that knack for a long time. I notice the one traditional conservative instrument Williamson employs in his essay is Marriage & Morality Nagging. We're rich because we no longer worry about meat shortages, says Williamson, but "the family-life numbers, on the other hand, came down on us like a meteor... divorce in 1960 was so rare as to carry a hint of scandalous glamour... add to that the violence of abortion, which fundamentally alters the relationship between men, women, and children," etc.

So Williamson does blame heathenism -- but he shows no sympathy for the poor crackers he says suffer from it. It sort of makes sense -- after all, backwoods preachers (on whose act modern scolds base their own) didn't show sympathy for adulterers, they called down wrath and invited shame.

Other conservative thinkers who specialize in M&MN may be gentler that Williamson, but they're not so much sympathetic as clinical. Charles Murray, in his Fishtown/Belmont mode as poor-white diagnostician, wants the enlightened richie class to "drop its condescending 'nonjudgmentalism'" and "start preaching what it practices" -- that is, telling white wastrels to get married and do other things richies do, presumably ballet lessons for the kids, golf for the men and service on charity boards for the ladies, which the poors will afford by floating a loan.

And there's Williamson's colleage, David French. When word got around about the elevated suicide and drug abuse rate among working class white people last year, French shook his moralizing fist. His target then was liberals; thanks to their "celebrating hedonism" with love-ins and pot parties, "the sexual revolution is gutting the working class," he cried, and not only that, these "cultural aristocrats" look down on their victims, the poor whites, because "mocking poor whites is among the last acceptable forms of bigotry."

But then came Trump and now look at French: He has a post called "Working-Class Whites Have Moral Responsibilities -- In Defense of Kevin Williamson." No longer does he rage at hippies for sexing up the honky proles -- though he sticks in a brief mumble over "the role of progressive culture and progressive policies in cultural decline," perhaps by reflex. Mostly he rages, or rather sighs dismissively, at the proles themselves:

For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best. 

Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying.

As proof, he tells us how his church tried to help a bunch of these meth-addled hillbillies and it didn't work -- so obviously it wasn't the church's approach that was the problem, it was the trailer trash's "sense of entitlement":

...it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor.

In short, it's everything they've been laying on their traditional enemies -- the hippies, the blacks -- except now they're turning on their traditional friends. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe grifts don't always die when the sucker catches on -- or even, as the Trump phenomenon suggests, when the sucker moves on to a splashier grift. Maybe grifts also die when the confidence man loses his confidence.

THEY HAD IT COMING.

Peter Beinart worries that

The United States is headed toward a confrontation, the likes of which it has not seen since 1968, between leftist activists, who believe in physical disruption as a means of drawing attention to injustice, and a candidate eager to forcibly put down that disruption in order to make himself look tough.

At National Review, David French agrees:

It would be painfully easy for leftist activists to position themselves close to a group of strategically-chosen Trump supporters, initiate a disruption, and then resist the instant the crowd tried to push them out. A racially-charged brawl would be endlessly replayed on the nightly news, complete with injured, bleeding victims, and national tensions would start to boil over.

Ours is an amazing country, where black people can get the shit beat out of them for hundreds of years, and chuckleheads agree that the real danger in a demagogic racist's volatile campaign is that black people might make his white supporters look bad by forcing them to beat them up some more.

GOING DOWN WITH THE FLAGSHIP.

That National Review broadside against Trump last month seems not to have done the trick, and the magazine's employees are hysterically demanding Republican Presidential contenders lay down their political lives for the good of the Bush tax cuts and their phony-baloney jobs.

Culture-warrior David French sputters that Ben Carson and John Kasich, good Christians though they may be, have given in to the sin of Pride by staying in the race, and must repent:

And here’s the ultimate irony — these pro-life Christian candidates can do nothing by staying in the race except help a biblically illiterate, thrice-divorced, proud philanderer hurtle ever closer to the nomination. Every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio is a vote toward embracing Planned Parenthood and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. It’s a vote away from sensible judicial nominations or a rational foreign policy. And it’s a vote toward the potential destruction of a Republican Party that — for all its faults — is America’s last political hope of protecting life, religious liberty, and national security...

Ah, but "every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio" is also a potential vote for John Kasich or Ben Carson! Think how many more books they'll sell, how many more dollars their speaking engagements will draw! And isn't that really what the Almighty wants -- whatever will make any given member of the Elect richer? Read your Bible, French!

As the race goes on, my respect for Scott Walker and Jeb Bush grows. Both men had plausible paths to the Oval Office. Both are immensely accomplished public servants with solid conservative records. Both were once favorites to win the nomination. But they both had the integrity and foresight to bow out the instant it was clear they’d missed their chance.

Walker had the "integrity and foresight" to see he'd run out of donor-suckers, and Bush, whose heart for the struggle seemed to have caved in like an overdone soufflé months ago, probably quit in dutiful response to a note shoved under his door by The Family.

Meanwhile imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke says "It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project," and blames not the candidates but that plurality of the GOP electorate who won't vote for National Review-approved, housebroken wingnuts:

For the last eight months or so, a significant portion of the Republican party’s voters have been in thrall to a bizarre, Occupy-esque conspiracy theory, which holds as its central thesis that sabotage and pusillanimity are the root causes of the Right’s recent woes. In this mistaken view, the conservative movement’s failure to counter all of the Obama era’s excesses is not the product of the crucial democratic and structural factors that prevent any one faction from ushering in substantial change, but of a lack of will or desire...

On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk.

Shall he, now? Yet Cooke is the same guy who, a few years ago, wrote in "In Praise of Paranoia" that "reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic," and also this:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Now, having fluffed the black-helicopter-watching, lunatic fringe of his movement in expectation that all the benefit would accrue to him, Cooke has seen them go Trumpers -- who could have predicted! -- and tries now to summon sensible conservatives to shut them down. But don't worry, he has suggestions:

If Donald Trump can flood the airwaves with his nonsense, his opponents can counter it incessantly. And while they are at it, they can tie him up in court, just as he’s trying to do to Cruz. There are a good number of “just asking” questions ready to be put to them, among them “Trump’s mother was Scottish, can he really be president?” and “Trump ran a host of scams designed to rip off the poor; surely one of them would like to sue him?

Ha ha, Scottish! Imagine the confusion among the Trump fans: "S'coatish? Is thet what them funny-boys call a nigger?" Also try to imagine Trump confronting an aggrieved poor person in front of an audience of Republicans -- they'll probably start chanting "moocher!" and kill the pauper before security can haul him away. Here's Cooke's closing peroration:

“If not us, who?” Ronald Reagan asked in the heat of the 1981 budget battle. “If not now, when?” Time to go nuclear, chaps.

I say! Screw your courage to a sticking place, wot? There's a good fellow. I hope they pushed a few desks aside to make some room for volunteers at NR headquarters.

But hold on, it's not over till the fat homey sings: Jonah Goldberg, raise the roof!

As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That’s awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don’t become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely.

It may be cribbed from his freshman comp assignment "Our Friend, The Beaver" but it still sings! After some similar rhetorical dazzlers, Goldberg proposes to the Presidential Candiate action figures on his desk "a Rubio-Cruz ticket":

Cruz won’t work at the top of the ticket for the simple reason that too many GOP quislings fear Cruz more than Trump. But a unity ticket — a la Reagan–Bush in 1980 — in the form of Los Hermanos Cubanos might just do the trick.

But the silence of the action figures seems to have gotten to Goldberg --

There are real costs to such a deal (not least the fact that there are better general-election running mates for Rubio).

A series of tiny farts like the squeaks of a trapped mouse (Frrt frt frt FFrrt frt), a drop of flop-sweat,  and Goldberg lunges to close the deal:

Maybe there’s another way, but I haven’t heard it.

[A concussion grenade of farts.]

And in a race where Trump has changed everything with his boldness, it’s long past time for his opponents to provide some of their own.

Be bold, shitheel Republicans who will never have a better chance at the Presidency, and stand down at the command of magazine editors! Your reward will be great in the buffet of their next subscriber cruise!

UPDATE. The struggle is joined! Pimped by futility infielder Megan McArdle herself, there's a conservative anti-Trump PAC called "Make America Awesome" -- cuz "America's already great," get it -- run by Republican operative Liz Mair. Did you know they've been around since December? They kinda sneak up on you. Check out their humorous ecards, e.g., "When I get hitched, it'll be to a guy who won't invite Hillary Clinton to our wedding." Feeling the Rubiomentum yet? No? Obviously they need more donations to make the magic happen. Then, when the GOP finally puts Trump on Double Secret Probation, they can have a beer bust with the leftovers and pad their resumes with declared victory. The grift goes on forever and the party never ends!

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT.

The title -- "Sanders and Trump Have Risen from the Wreckage of a Broken Culture" -- makes it look like yet another of those "I literally can't tell them apart" comparisons of the share-the-wealth Senator to the TV bully-boy. But National Review's David French doesn't explain the rise of the two candidates or what it means, and I'm not sure he was really trying. He mainly talks culture war. That's his usual hobby horse and it's even lamer than usual, but in an instructive way. He begins:

Pop culture can normalize radicalism with astonishing speed. Conservatives have long known and lamented the truth of Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher’s famous declaration: “Let me write the songs of a nation — I don’t care who writes its laws.” Artists and the media shape our cultural environment so profoundly that their progressivism has become the default, the air we breathe. Wherever the progressive current flows, the people will drift.

Taking his own Zhdanovite POV for granted -- that liberals have the Billboard 100 while conservatives have Congressional majorities -- I'm not sure what this political operative has to complain about. If you're getting the laws you want, why do you care what the art looks like?

Since its birth, the modern conservative movement has fought bravely to create its own counterculture, in hopes that at least some people could drift the right way, and eventually the current would be reversed.

"Fought bravely to create its own counterculture"? What could that possibly mean? Have they been woodshedding or workshopping their counterculture in a black-box theater at the Heritage Foundation? Before attempting to explain, French bitches about how hard it is for such as he to make how-you-call-the Culture:

But it’s impossible in one generation to either replace or match liberal-dominated institutions that have existed, in some instances, since before the founding of the nation. One doesn’t simply create a conservative Harvard out of thin air. Hollywood is the product of generations of artistic effort. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast media are collectively immense institutions, governed by a set of shared assumptions and located in geographic regions where dissent is rarely heard.

This makes no sense. If you don't like Harvard, why not build up Bob Jones University and other Bible schools into the academia that you claim to desire? If you don't like Hollywood, why not make your own indie flicks? People do it all the time. And haven't you guys been telling us that the Liberal Dinosaur MSM is dead as the dodo, and pumping out conservative newspapers, magazines, and TV networks for literally decades? But French goes on whining:

The Right, by contrast, hasn’t truly had time to build institutions, so it has built celebrities.

OH COME ON.

It’s easier to make one man famous than it is to make Harvard --

Oh, well, if it was easier I don't see what else you could have done

-- so conservative culture is dominated mainly by a series of personalities, and those personalities are often defined and exalted not so much by the quality of their distinct ideas but by personal charisma, with particular emphasis on anger and “fearlessness.”

Long story short: The dog ate their manifesto, so instead of building a counterculture they built a living pantheon of radio shouters, bow-tie dicks, and other assholes, and now one of them is the Republican Presidential front-runner and it's someone else's fault.

... As William Butler Yeats wrote at another time of existential crisis, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” We’re left with a world where “the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When a culture breaks, so does a nation.

Buddy, you don't know what culture is. Nor counter-culture. Those movies, books, videos, songs, etc. that you wish were promoting your values? You can have them -- all you gotta do is make them yourself. Don't waste time squawking about how Big Culture is against you -- or go ahead if it makes you feel better; avant gardists and punk rockers did it all the time, when they were the new kids on the block. But they also did work. That's the only way anything gets done. If Jasper Johns or Patti Smith just bitched about how they ought to be the next big thing, raised a bunch of money off that, and didn't use that money to make art but instead used it to bitch some more about how they ought to be the next big thing, you never would have heard about them.

I mean, holding the back of your hand to your forehead and moaning like Dr. Smith on Lost in Space isn't getting you anywhere -- unless you goal is to get some saps to pay you good money for it, in which case mission accomplished.

UPDATE. As is traditional at alicublog, comments are excellent. Yestreblanksy gives us the full provenance of that Fletcher quote, and it's so much richer than the looka-me-I-read-books use French put it to. MichaelNewsham posits:

If only there was a vast entertainment complex producing its own movies and TV shows, owning its own studios and broadcast and cable network, owned by a right-wing billionaire who also had an enormous chain of newspapers to help push his conservative productions without fear of the liberal MSM.

As I've been saying for years, Murdoch knows better than to throw good money after bad.

JINGO JERKOFFS.

A U.S. Navy vessel floated into Iranian waters and was detained by Iran along with its sailors, who were fed and sheltered for 16 hours and released. Wingnuts are furious that they didn't have time to put up yellow ribbons, and also with shame, because Iran didn't just say "go ahead and float around the place, guys -- it's not like we don't have some history." Even worse, we apologized for the incursion, and the Party of Trump doesn't go for that! At National Review David French finds a picture of the sailors sitting on a rug, and reacts as if they were cartoons of defiled American maidens in old jingo propaganda:

This photograph violates international law. Article 13 of the Geneva Convention (III), governing the treatment of prisoners of war, requires Iran to protect prisoners against “insults and public curiosity.” This photograph — including a female sailor apparently forced to wear a headscarf – is a quintessential example of “public curiosity” and would be interpreted as insulting throughout the Muslim world. (And if you don’t think Iran is in a state of armed conflict against the United States, tell that to the families of hundreds of American soldiers who’ve lost their lives to Iranians and Iranian-backed terrorists.)

"I understand you lost your boy in the War against Iran." "Huh?"

The sight of members of the American military, disarmed and under Iranian control, is of enormous propaganda value in Iran’s ongoing war against the United States. To its allies in the Middle East, the photo demonstrates Iran’s strength – how many jihadist countries have had this many American servicemembers under their power? – and it demonstrates American weakness,

Thus does Rouhani build morale for the American invasion! Meanwhile Erick Erickson wants to blow something up to show how fightin' mad he is as a red-blooded, ham-faced American. After all, Reagan blew something up in '88! He did so after one of our ships hit an Iranian mine, which Erikson doesn't mention -- nor does he mention that we were protecting supply lines for our buddy Saddam Hussein at the time. But never mind that -- blowing shit up is patriotic, but Obama won't do it so America is humiliated while Iran is "flexing its muscle in order to show the world that even the United States must at times bow to the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air is mad that the sailors had to sit on a carpet, like they was Ay-rabs or something. "Iran had no chairs or couches for their 'guests' to use?" he thunders. Also they had to eat Ay-rab food -- not hamburgers and Cokes like real Americans! So much for your Geneva Conventions!

You see the problem. This ain't the U.S.S. Pueblo; the sailors were home in less than a day and seem to have suffered no ill effects. But conservatives have to at least try to gin up outrage over it, because military strength is one of their equities, and if Americans are content to settle these things with an apology and some hummus, it makes Republicans look like blustering idiots.

SOTU NRO LOL.

Hee hee.

Hee hee hee.

Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee 

Ah, I see their tweets are slowing down:

And getting pissy:

And when Obama talks against racism, David French gets even more David Frenchy:

And Kevin D. Williamson gets more Sparky, or drunk:

Now, I could go that same route -- like, "Bleargh attend my words earthlings my avatar is a FOUNDING FATHER"--

But, as Charles Laughton said in Advise and Consent, "I can afford to be charitable." Whatever you think of Obama and his SOTUs, you have to admit a large check in his favor is how mad he makes the biggest assholes in America.

Oh, and in conclusion...

...fart.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg extended fart!

Ultimately it was a forgettable State of the Union Address – as most are. But there is one way it will be extremely memorable. President Obama not only celebrated his ridiculous and dangerous Iran deal in his remarks, but he totally ignored the fact that Iran captured 10 U.S. sailors today. The administration is telling reporters it’s not big deal and they will all be released in the morning, Iran time. 

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to tell you that the sailors were released about five hours later. But let's see how Goldberg prepared for this eventuality:

Well, if that’s true, the incident will likely be quickly forgotten. But, if it turns out that this becomes anything like a hostage situation, Obama’s final State of the Union will may be remembered as symbolic of his denial and delusions. It could make his claim, right before the Paris attacks, that ISIS is “contained” seem like a minor gaffe.

If only a terrorist had killed Obama during his speech! That would have been highly ironic!

My hopeful expectation is that won’t happen, and we will get our sailors back ASAP. But even if that does happen, I have every expectation that Iran will commit some other deed that will make Obama’s confidence seem ridiculous. Because on the Iran deal, and so many other things, his confidence is ridiculous.

One of these days the Iran-America deal will slip up, and when it does Detective Goldberg will be there to catch it. At least he hopes so: He's not very good at hiding, not least because when he gets nervous he flatulates like the 124-foot pedal on a pipe organ.

HE MAY BE A FOOL, BUT HE'S YOUR FOOL.

Now that the Republican Presidential front-runner has anted up his bigotry, conservatives are trying harder to disown him. But it really cuts against their grain. When Trump proposed keeping Muslims out of the U.S., David French had just put up a post at National Review all about how dangerous Muslims are -- the title, in fact, is "Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth – the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate." Among the choice bits:

...jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting... 

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism... 

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views... 

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy...

Etc. To be fair, he stops short of calling them vermin. If you said something like this about Christians, French would file a hate-crime complaint. You can imagine some goon reading this and thinking Shee-it, them Muslims sound awful, I better vote for Trump an' keep 'em all out!

But today French is trying to distance himself from Trump. Not on the grounds of their mutual beliefs, mind you -- French reiterates that "it’s foolish to admit a class of refugees when we know the world’s leading terror army is attempting to infiltrate the displaced masses or recruit from their ranks." But the ones that are here already, they can stay, French says -- and we can let in a small, select group of "good" Muslims, such as "interpreters who’ve laid down their lives to serve our warriors downrange... members of allied militaries who are training to be the Muslim 'boots on the ground,'" et alia. Everyone else can go die in the sea.

Oh, then he talks about what a menace political correctness is. Which is weird, because he and they are really just waiting to put in a nominee who can be as racist as Trump but keep his mouth shut about it.

UPDATE. As has become his habit of late ("We Didn't Start The Fire: Who Created Trump?"), Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller emerges again to tell us that Trump's strong support among Republicans is bad for Republicans, especially when they were getting so pumped up denouncing Obama after his pro-reason terrorism speech:

Yesterday, the media cycle was focused on radical Islamism and President Obama’s inability to counter it. Today, Donald Trump has changed the subject. But it’s not just that. Yesterday, the view that radical Islamism was a serious threat that President Obama has not taken seriously (polling backs this up) was a persuasive mainstream position that evoked sympathy and agreement. Today, it’s marginally harder to make that argument.

Now when Ralph Peters calls Obama a pussy, people will think we're intemperate! At the end Lewis admits Trump will probably get a boost from his statements -- another case of Republicans being unfairly made to look bad by other Republicans!

UPDATE 2. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

It defies explanation, but I'll try: Everyone thinks Obama's a failure and hates him (never mind showing Domenech polls that suggest otherwise, those are all run by liberals), and "our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics." In other words, if you point out that their argument is wrong, that just makes Republicans more insane and racist -- so it's all your fault! "And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides," Domenech goes on, "offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites." I hope you're proud of yourself, liberals!

Like the rest of our subjects, Domenech basically agrees with Trump; he, too, thinks Muslims are toxic and "elites" are losing the War on Whatchamacallit with their "tolerance" bullshit ("Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and authority of the elites..."). But he got the Trump-bad memo, so he portrays Trump as a menace while embracing his message. Look, it's at The Federalist -- it's not like it has to make sense.

UPDATE 3: You see this shit:

"The author advises Marco Rubio’s campaign for president." Presumably he advises on non-sequential thought, because his column is just the usual rightwing froth crowned with an "if it weren't for Joel Grey singing 'Wilkommen' there'd have never been a Hitler" assertion. And actually that's not new either: Conservative factota have been trying to blame Trump on Obama, or draw parallels between the two men, since Trump became the front-runner, and because they've saturated their little world with this false equivalence, there's no longer any reason to even pretend to back it up with evidence.

UPDATE 3. What have I been telling you people.

BOOBY PRIZE.

You have probably seen some of the rightwing hate-ons for Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me in recent months. National Review has posted what seems like dozens of them; my favorite is by David French, entitled "White Liberals Love Black Radicals — That’s Why They Love Ta-Nehisi Coates." (You can guess.)

Expect the sputtering rage to redouble now, because Coates' tome won the National Book Award yesterday. The first volley, which will be hard to beat, comes from an email newsletter called Prufrock from the The American Conservative. The item is by Micah Mattix:

The National Book Award winners were announced yesterday, and, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates won the non-fiction award for Between the World and Me. Sigh: http://bit.ly/1NF58zj. I have read a few poems from Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the poetry award, and was not particularly impressed. (I haven’t read Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, which won the fiction award, so I can’t comment on it, but the reviews are interesting.) Anyway, if you know the Koch brothers, can you please tell them that a $500,000 gift to start a book award that honors actual literary merit, not identity politics, would do America a hell of a lot of good?

I've often thought that's just what they should do, and if the Kochs are big enough suckers to fund it then why not?  We can be sure "honors actual literary merit, not identity politics" is code for  "lifetime achievement award for Tom Wolfe," and that the inaugural field of Ayns or Ronnies or whatever will be swept by Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, and Kurt Schlichter, creator of "The Wildman." Shortly thereafter, the budget will be repurposed to fund Ted Cruz robocalls, and the awards themselves will be made available to any customer for each thousand dollars he spends at Goldline.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

THE YAM IS THE POWER THAT BE

•   The right-wing commentariat has gone absolutely bonkers over the college kids with their microaggressions and their safe spaces and whatnot -- especially since the Missouri crisis got a significant number of black people involved. It's like S.W.I.N.E. meets the Black Panthers! Hence, headlines like "The First Amendment is Dying" (National Review), "The Self-Destruction of the American University" (Weekly Standard), "A Generation that Hates Free Speech" (Commentary), etc. NR drama queen David French has a good one: Before inviting his fellow nuts to purge the universities of liberal taint ("Conservatives possess the power of the federal purse... It’s time for a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left"), he tells this cautionary tale of the commie campus and what it did to a friend's kid:

Years ago, I left my law firm — where I worked as a commercial litigator — to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process on campus, first as president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), then as director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. As I left, a friend asked why I’d give up my practice to take on higher-education reform. He was incredulous. His daughter had just been accepted to an elite college, he’d just visited, and he found the school to be everything he imagined — expensive, yes, but beautiful, prestigious, and fun.

In less than a year, he apologized. He understood my career choice. His daughter had come home for the holidays, transformed. The vibrant, joyful Christian girl who’d left for school had returned sullen and depressed. She hated her family’s values, she resented her parents, and she was obviously drinking too much. The school had stripped down her value system — all in the name of “critical thinking” — and replaced it with angry groupthink. Life and hope were replaced with fear and loathing. A social-justice warrior was born.

The kid went to college and rejected her family's values. Obviously they should have sent her to a Christian finishing school instead of an "elite college." Now it'll take a shitload of reprogramming to get her to sing hymns and hate paupers again! [shakes fist] Liberal academia, you have made a powerful enemy! We won't rest until Yale and all those radical hotbeds teach nothing but Reagan, God and Jesus!

•   I'll tell you the real problem with the kids today. Many years ago I lived at 174 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. You'd think there'd be a plaque there, but no. Instead, according to the New Yorker, there is this:

Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, bad-taste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu...

I weep for this generation.

•   Real quick, for theater fans in New York: The Ivo van Hove production of A View from The Bridge is stateside now. I saw a simulcast of it from London some months back. I'm always nervous when a classic text gets the whoopee treatment from an ambitious director, and when the actors came out barefoot into what looked like an oversized bocce pit, I steeled for the worst. But it turns out turning the dial up one or two notches on the subtext, and even getting a little Grotowksi with it, actually helps this already-weird play a great deal, especially with brave actors like these embodying the furies. I bought it all, including the quasi-choral handling of the climax, and when it was over I felt like I'd been somewhere and I don't mean Red Hook. Recommended.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yeah, one-hit wonders. But what a hit! 

•   Quentin Tarantino pissed off some cops, so David French of National Review went argh lieberal Hollyweird I’ll show you and all those so-called “critics”  how it’s done! Here French explains to Tarantino why Tarantino is “the Most Overrated Director in Hollywood.”

Your movies, however, are terrible. And I don’t mean “morally reprehensible” or “too violent.” I mean they’re simply bad.

Strong opening, surely he has a killer argument coming up.

But don’t tell the movie press. Rarely has so much celebratory ink been spilled on a director who has made such dreck. Ever since Pulp Fiction — your best movie — they believe you’re an artist, but over time you’ve proven to be nothing more than a splatter-film director who can attract top talent.

I wonder why those top actors want to work with Tarantino instead of, say, Eli Roth. Must have something to do with liberal media bias. Anyway:

And you’re the least original splatter-film director in the United States. You simply can’t stop making the same movie. Consider your recent offerings.

To sum up: A lot of his movies have a revenge plot and mayhem. Don’t anyone tell French about Jacobean tragedy. Or the Elizabethan, for that matter. Anyway:

And yes, I know that I just said that I don’t hate your movies because they’re morally reprehensible, but let’s be honest: They are pretty vile. You gotta admit, you love that N-word.

So he’s “politically incorrect.” I thought conservatives loved that.

...Everything else about your movies can be ludicrously unrealistic (think of the mighty mountains of Mississippi in Django Unchained, the fiction of “mandingo fighting,” or virtually any scene in the Kill Bill series)…

Leave it to French to fact check works of fiction. I mean, come on, Hitchcock, birds never act like that!

…And the media — mostly — is fine with it. Why? Because you’re an “artist.” But mostly because you’re liberal. So all the typical double standards apply.

When I go around yelling “nigger” and attacking people with swords, I get in trouble, but you do it and you're an "artist"! Also, liberal media bias because, come on — that's what French has; that’s the only reason why he bothered — he doesn’t give a shit about art (excuse me, “art”), he’s just throwing shit because he doesn't like QT's politics.  Indeed, from this wretched example it seems as if he’s never tried or learned how to explain what’s good and bad about a film in his life. It’s always sad when propagandists pretend to be critics, but why is it always the least qualified ones who try?

WHEN THEY SAY IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY...

You may have noticed the statistical review on white working class mortality covered by the Washington Post:

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

And you might have thought, as I did, well, no wonder: the white working class was doing great for decades after World War II, but in this generation it's seen its jobs offshored, then onshored at much lower wages -- and the jobs that stuck around don't pay so well either. Having excavated everything that can be excavated from the poor and the black, our system has taken to chipping at the lower end of the middle class. Between the economic and the emotional toll of this de-privileging, no wonder so many of these people are killing themselves, quickly or slowly.

National Review's David French read the same story, and of course his conclusion is that liberals are to blame:

While the economic challenges of working-class voters are well documented, the cultural challenges are just as notable. 

You may think  trying to raise kids on twenty grand a year is rough, but your lack of culchah is just as much of a problem -- and cheaper for me, so let's tackle that first!

At every turn, the cultural aristocrats cause harm. Mocking poor whites is among the last acceptable forms of bigotry.

You mean like "Li'l Abner"? Or "South Park"? French is unclear -- I assume purposefully, and that the picture he wishes to paint is of callous urban sophisticates laughing at a meth-addled cracker, rather than of salt-of-the-earth middle Americans laughing at "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Even the white working-class voters struggling with declining wages, declining health, and increasing despair are derided as somehow “privileged.” Those who speak for them are labeled bigots.

Like how they treated this fella. Obviously it was class warfare against white people.

Meanwhile, people keep dying, and families fracture. This is more than just mocking suffering, though — it’s celebrating the disease while rejecting the cure. Self-indulgence is the animating force behind the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is gutting the working class.

If you callous sophisticates hadn't done so much coke and had so many orgies, right out there where people could see it, Cletus and Brandine would never have took to moonshine and sex with their cousins.

As Murray notes in his book, cultural progressives flood the nation with messages celebrating hedonism and sexual experimentation even as they tend to preserve their own wealth and power through remarkably restrained and disciplined personal lives — getting married, remaining faithful, and investing in their children. They don’t practice the hedonism they so loudly preach.

Make that "if you callous sophisticates hadn't etc. etc. and nevertheless managed to live happy productive lives, etc." Why, it's like having to put up with a cheerful atheist -- it sets a bad example for the proles!

On the one hand you have wingnuts like French crying that the middle class is collapsed or collapsing because of Playboy and rap music; on the other you have wingnuts like David Harsanyi who claim that this shit economy is actually "dynamic" and you should all go get Uber jobs and feel the dynamism of a week-by-week struggle to afford a hovel and slop. Pick your confusion; doesn't matter which, so long as millionaires get all the tax breaks and we zero out welfare.

UPDATE. At The Federalist Ben Domenech gets in on it. He implies -- slightly more gently than other benefit cops like Jonah Goldberg -- that the growing ranks of erstwhile workers on disability are swollen with frauds. And natch, it's about the culchah:

As a cultural matter, the picture is even worse. The surrender to the permanent trap of disability payments is a consequence of a loss of a certain American working class stoicism, which grappled with the tragic nature of life with what was essentially a 19th-century mentality.

We were a stronger, more American America when crips were left to forage or beg.

It was hard enough to deal with such a vision before the disintegration of working class marriage in the country – notice the contrast drawn by Charles Murray between the attitudes toward marriage and the experience of divorce in the white working class versus professionals.

When we've finally turned into the neofeudal hellscape of Lang's Metropolis for real, I expect there'll be a statue of Charles Murray in every town square.

UPDATE 2. Some very fine comments here. e.g., Susan of Texas:

What is it about white culture that is destroying white Americans? 

You vote for politicians who outsource your jobs. Your own crap job, when you can get one, is hard on the body and soul- and dignity-crushing. You go to the doctor for pain-killers to ease the bodily pain and take too many to anesthetize the mental pain. You fatally poison yourself with drug and alcohol anesthetics or get a DWI and lose more jobs or drive away your family. (I'm still waiting for someone to tell us how getting married and not having kids will create factories out of thin air.)...

Worth going in and reading in full. I should add that, especially when you get past a certain age, physical labor is hard on you -- which is something you might miss even if you were a waiter at 20 but never a fry-cook at 55. Go to any actual working-class neighborhood and you'll see some people limping or hobbling from the bus to their homes -- and if they stiffen up they tend not to work it out at the yoga studio. I wonder if French and Domenech have ever seen this, or if they think it's really like the Seven Dwarves whistling to and from the mine.

BIBLE BEATOFFS.

The saga of Kim Davis, bigot-martyr, and her pig-eyed enablers has ascended into legend:

Of the two presidential contenders who attended the rally, it was Mr. Huckabee, making his second White House run, who grabbed the political spotlight. Before Ms. Davis appeared, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Staver took the stage to tell the crowd, in unison, “Kim Davis is free.” 

When Mr. Cruz, who met with Ms. Davis, exited the Carter County Detention Center, a throng of journalists beckoned him toward their microphones, but an aide to Mr. Huckabee blocked the path of the senator, who appeared incredulous.

I'll bet he did! This is such ripe hillbilly Gothic it makes A Face in the Crowd look like Barchester Towers.

Anyway, Davis and her Liberty Counsel lawyers remain belligerent, which promises an interesting first day back at work for Davis as her deputy who's been issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples says he'll go on doing it no matter how hard Davis tries to holy-roll him.

Meanwhile it's not just crackpot Republican candidates who think the law should bow to Goodwife Davis -- here's David French, writer for the once-reputable National Review:

Had her stand happened a few short centuries ago, Huckabee and Cruz would likely have been joined by a few notable figures from Christian history — men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox — the men who first put the “protest” in “Protestant"... 

When rulers defy God, they lose their God-ordained authority. When rulers require lesser authorities to cooperate in and facilitate evil, the lesser authorities must resist... 

...to put things more bluntly, Justice Kennedy can purport to change the Constitution, but he can’t transform Christian conviction. Unless his social-justice church grows more tolerant, the Kim Davis case is a harbinger of more conflict to come. We Protestants are simply returning to our roots.

One imagines French running amok in  sackcloth, crying HELTER JESUS! SHE'S COMING DOWN FAST! and looking for some homosexuals to pummel with slurs in hopes of being arrested by the Pinkshirts, thus hastening the "conflict" that will bring the New Reformation.

Between this and Trump it's been a great pre-pre-pre-election. I wonder what these clowns will come up with after Opening Day? I predict the new litmus test will be that every GOP candidate has to do an abortion clinic bombing.

THERE'S NO CONSENT UNLESS JESUS SAYS "YES" AND HE NEVER DOES.

David French has always been -- or has been at least since first I encountered his terrible columns at National Review -- tightly wound, but his latest, about the rape accusations at elite prep St. Paul's, takes it a little further than usual. First, he explains that Saint Paul’s is "an 'elite' boarding school in New Hampshire (and Secretary of State John Kerry’s alma mater)"; the school's alumni also include John Jacob Astor, William Randolph Hearst, and J.P. Morgan, but hacks gotta cheapshot and there's no percentage for a Christo-conservative to associate long-dead press and robber barons with rape when the real issue is the mortal sin epidemic of our corrupt modern age:

For me, the legal and evidentiary analysis is difficult, but the cultural analysis? Not so much.

Fasten your chastity belts, boys and girls. For even if there was consent all around,

that doesn’t change the fact that something is deeply wrong on campus — in high schools and at college. The moral code that valorizes the orgasm and establishes consent as the only limitation on sensation and experience is the moral code that gives us the “senior salute,” the drunken hook-up, and the broken, regretful hearts that contribute to soaring rates of anxiety and depression...

You let people have sex whenever they want it with willing partners and what else can you expect besides pain? (BTW everyone should have guns, that's just common sense.)

The sexual revolution is built on a fundamental lie — that the rejection of traditional sexual virtue leads to individual liberty and personal fulfillment. In reality, “liberty” depends on the ultimate backstop of taking another human life to keep the party going...

Taking another human -- what, they have blood orgies? Oh, abortion, right -- in French's demo, they no longer bother to explain their signifiers: That we normals have not risen up and mass-Tillered Planned Parenthood proves we're all damned anyways.

...while “fulfillment” is elusive as the human heart defies the animalistic ideology of the secular Left.

I envision a human heart, shaped like Bobby Jindal perhaps, wrestling a priapic Left, and grow faint of heart and upturned of stomach, yet press on --

It turns out that the connection inherent in the sexual act is not so easily discarded — especially by women — and a sex act without a relationship not only is unfulfilling, but actually causes deep and painful emotional wounds.

I see he's already decided that the slut is lying, but (liberal) society's to blame.

And so a purely legalistic analysis of campus sexual culture will always be lacking. Even in the celebrated cases where reports of crimes prove exaggerated or false, something wrong generally still occurred.

Trimmed of some of its excess verbiage and pretensions, this sounds like something Gladys Kravitz would say before her husband told her to stop spying on the Stephenses and let him read his paper in peace. "I tell you something was going on over there!"

By equating the sacred with something as banal as a good buzz on a Saturday night, the sexual revolutionaries are plunging an entire culture into a doomed crusade to reject thousands of years of human wisdom and experience. Since time immemorial, men and women have sought to test sexual limits, and since time immemorial, the efforts to escape the constraints of sexual virtue have brought personal and even civilizational ruin.

That's what happened to the Romans, you know. Those lie-beral profs will tell you it was imperial overreach and Christianity, but in reality they fucked themselves to ruin, and succumbed to the Goths, who were more interested in whiteface and shitty music.

With the Obergefell decision, Bruce Jenner’s “transition,” and the continued fracturing of the family...

Yeah, we can stop there. So to sum up: Sex destroys everything, not only billions of preborns but also the delicate sensibilities of young people who don't know enough to channel their energy into clinic protests and exorcisms. You heathens have been warned!

I wonder if Buckley knew this was coming and that's what killed him.