KOTKIN AND CARSON: PERFECT TOGETHER.

Joel Kotkin, whose massive hate-on for city living has been examined here before, has posted a Daily Beast essay under the headline “Progressives Have Let Inner Cities Fail for Decades. President Trump Could Change That.” Kotkin approves and apparently shares the cartoon portrayal of cities that Trump barnstormed with during the campaign (“If ya walk down the street, ya get shot”). For one thing, Kotkin reports, there’s more crime in Chicago than in Fritters, Alabama. But Kotkin knows urban crime’s not nearly as bad as it was back in the Archie Bunker era. Trump’s marks, whose idea of urban life is mostly based on Death Wish, neither know nor care to know, but they aren’t reading the Daily Beast; Kotkin clearly wants to sway housebroken neoliberals who are reading his essay but also live or work in big cities and haven’t been raped and/or murdered by Jeff Goldblum and his gang and have no reason to agree that cities suck.

So Kotkin tries gaslight and guilt: the “much ballyhooed ‘back to the city’ movement” is “mindlessly overblown by the national media” but only really “impacts basically the downtown cores” — so if you like living in Brooklyn or Silver Spring, you’re suffering from false consciousness, comrade. See, the grass is greener on the far side of the Walmart: “Roughly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has been in suburbs and exurbs.” Now doesn’t Fritters look good? Come on, you don’t want to be left behind as your peers are driven by economic necessity, I mean flock willingly to Fritters:

And with millennials now entering their thirties in greater numbers, these communities, generally safe and with good schools, seem to be growing in popularity much faster than the inner cities. These are unfortunate facts for Democrats, who have long celebrated, sometimes garishly, cities’ glaring problems—thus helping make Trump’s campaign comments sound that much more reasonable.

Stop garishly celebrating cities’ glaring problems, Democrats! You're just making Real Americans hate you. Oh, and plus you’re the Real Racists too because, unlike small towns and suburbs where the races live together peaceably so long as everybody stays where they're wanted, cities “force poorer, largely minority areas out of areas that, in essence, are considered too valuable for such populations… minorities and working class families are being driven into less desirable areas, often further from work locations” in “a kind of progressive apartheid.”

Don’t get it twisted — this has nothing to do with capitalism, still less with any endemic racism — no, it’s all caused by attitude, as evinced by “hipsters” of the “creative class,” sissy liberals who think they’re not racist but who actually enforce progressive apartheid every time they sip chardonnay and eat Brie (excuse, have to adjust slurs for contemporaneity: sip Kombucha and eat formaggio). Their high-falutin' tastes drive simple Mom and Pop businesses away. If only they could have enjoyed the culture and excitement of the city on a diet of Cheez Whiz, Ritz Crackers, and Michelob, it might have stabilized the local economy! But you know how selfish these people are.

Now, if these sissies worked with their hands and voted for Trump, their voices would certainly be more important than that of the minorities, because ours is The Day of the White Working Class and their judgment cannot be challenged, whereas the opinions of hipsters can be disregarded because they go to subtitled movies and voted for Hitlery Klintoon.

Kotkin admits (though politely, for obvious reasons) that Trump has “hardly built his career in fighting poverty,” and that his HUD Secretary nominee Ben Carson basically has no idea what he’s doing, but yet insists their “outsider” status “may prove something of a blessing” — because maybe that means they’ll go for unorthodox (or nonsensical, depending on your POV) approaches to urban policy. They might even “keep industrial jobs in what’s left of the manufacturing economy,” which would be easier to believe if Trump and Carson had ever given even a clue of a policy that might achieve this. Kotkin’s imagined Trump fixes only get slimmer from there — fewer HB-1 visas (that’ll help local minority software engineers out of the ghettos!), “deregulating some businesses, like in cosmetology” (yes, the famous Yglesias Libertarian Maneuver, back in fashion at last), and of course vouchers, a key grift in any GOP Administration. But it’s okay, hopeful noises will do — not to fix anything allegedly wrong with cities, or even to make them more Republican-friendly, but possibly to get Kotkin a HUD sinecure or at least some higher-profile editorial gigs — for in Trump Times, when consevatives howl that city-slickers’ votes are too contaminated to be counted, there must be opportunities aplenty for a city-hating urbanist. Maybe someday they'll put his name on a workhouse.

THE STEYN GAME: EVERYONE'S A WINNER! Mark Steyn has proof that Montreal and great European cities are in a death spiral: the citizens are having a wonderful time.

John O'Sullivan and I occasionally discussed Montreal, and he observed that a big-city heritage without big-city overcrowding can be very pleasant: You've still got all the art galleries and symphony orchestras and so on. You've got tickets for Pavarotti at the Place des Arts. Curtain up, 7.30pm. So you leave at 7.20, park outside the front steps and stroll in. As John put it, societies in the early stages of decline can be very agreeable - and often more agreeable than societries trying to cope with prosperity and rapid growth.

Which brings me to my usual everything-comes-back-to-demography shtick. Precisely because the first stages of decline are so agreeable, it's very hard to accept it as such. Part of the problem in Europe is that, when chaps like yours truly shriek "Run for your lives! The powder keg's about to go up!", etc, the bon vivant enjoying his Dubonnet at the sidewalk cafe thinks: Are you crazy? Life's never been better. Civilized decline can be so charming you don't notice it's about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.

You have to remember that Steyn and his fellow NRO lunatics operate out of, and often vacation in, great cities which are thought by the yokels to whom they peddle this nonsense to be citadels and vice and corruption. Some of these yokels may wonder why Jonah Goldberg, Steyn et alia don't relocate to, or at least spend long weekends in, Fritters, Alabama, and other conservative redoubts. The NROniks couldn't very well tell them that they actually prefer New York or Paris to Fritters, so every now and then they write something like this Goldberg complaint that Burlington, Vermont is full of people who don't like Bush, which presumably spoiled for him the many fine Burlington restaurants through which he no doubt burned a path.

Thus the readers thank the Lord they don't have any contact with these Sodoms, and the writers get to live, work, and play in them. Everyone's a winner!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightblogger response the Democratic National Convention and its speakers, including the father of Iraq war casualty U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan. At my time of filing Khan had mainly been denounced for his grief by fringe lunatics such as Pamela Geller, but he’s now getting it in some mainstreamier outlets: At The Hill, for example, Charles Hurt claims Khan “was tricked into smearing Donald Trump” by Hillary Clinton, who was only using him to promote her campaign, which Khan could not have possibly known when he accepted an invitation to the Democratic National Convention. The whole thing’s repulsive, but the worst part is Hurt telling Khan’s he’s all upset over nothing:

Despite all efforts by the media to distort Trump’s position about “banning” Muslims, he has made perfectly clear time and again that he does not want to ban all Muslims. He wants to simply perform thorough and complete background checks on all immigrants coming from countries presently in the grips of violent Islamic terrorism.

(Obligatory note that this is bullshit.)

Yes, that means if you are a Muslim who wants to immigrate from Syria or Afghanistan, you are going to get a lot more scrutiny than if you are a Jew trying to immigrate from Canada. That is most unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as innocents getting slaughtered by 10th Century savages killing in the name of Allah.

So you see, Mr. Khan, our Muslim ban — which I’m denying is a Muslim ban because I’m talking to readers of The Hill rather than to a howling mob in Fritters, Alabama — is necessary because when you people aren’t dying for our country, you’re killing for Allah.

CULTURE WAR HIGH COMMAND, LACKING CANNON FODDER, ENLISTS MENTALLY DEFICIENT VILLAGERS, ARMS THEM WITH SHARPENED STICKS WHICH THEY POINT THE WRONG WAY. Via Chuck Gilligan, who got it from Paul Krugman, I bring you this Gary Silverman FT item in which Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review and wife of GE blowhard Jack Welch, tells a no doubt dumbfounded TV audience the difference between Romney singing "America the Beautiful*" and Obama singing "Let's Stay Together":

In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”...

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

I still think this thing can go either way because the economy sucks, but when you listen to these guys make their case, it really sounds like they only expect to carry Fritters, Alabama; whatever counties have an active neo-Nazi movement; and Utah.

*UPDATE. Originally had the Romney song as "God Bless America" until some guy in comments gave me a hard time. Speaking of comments, here's Ben: "Al Green, being in his late sixties, now leaves much of the day-to-day work of destroying America to John Legend."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I was just listening to his "Girls Talk," and realized

some of you good people may never have heard "Trouble Boys."

•   Whoever wrote the dek for Daniel Henninger's latest at the Wall Street Journal -- "Donald Trump is running against two things -- immigration and free trade --that made New York City great again" -- had to have read the whole thing to the end, poor sod, because the column starts very differently, with Henninger pulling on his overalls and pretending to despise the Big City: Ted Cruz "had a point" with his "New York values" slur on New York, says Henninger, "but he blew it by not describing it so that even many New Yorkers would agree." Oh yeah? So what should Cruz have complained about that would touch on what the locals hate about their own home -- scumbag landlords, gentrification, subway delays? No, among the real New Yorker issues Henninger sees is how mean Bernie Sanders has been to rich people:

More revelatory of New York values, though, is Vermonter Bernie Sanders, ranting about “Wall Street” and “bankers.” To be clear: Those people, much mocked of late for living on Park Avenue and such, annually give tens of millions to support charter schools, scholarships to parochial schools, social entrepreneurs, and innumerable nonprofits and arts institutions. Most, Republican and Democrat, would do it without the tax deduction.

Then let's remove the deduction and see what happens! Anyway, why does Henninger even care what New Yorkers think when this is what he thinks of them:

...Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, like Jerry Brown in blue California, stay afloat on public unions and a liberal urban sea of smug, yuppie self-absorption. Donald Trump learned this week that these people don’t even bother to vote. In 2013, New York’s now-unpopular Mayor de Blasio won with 17% of eligible voters (turnout was 24%).

If only the Republican silent majority weren't too busy on Election Day lighting bums on fire to vote for Joe Lhota! Then Henninger has a mood swing (or a phone call from an editor who reminds him this is not the Fritters, Alabama Journal) and starts yelling at Trump for going upstate to appeal to rubes, because his trade policies which so excite the folks in Rome, N.Y. would fuck up New York City. Suddenly Henninger is the self-absorbed yuppies' best friend! But he still doesn't like the way they vote:

Also true, however, is that in 2012, an incredible 71% of Asians voted for Barack Obama because living in Democratic cities like New York, they rarely hear the alternative.

Really? They're unable to read the Wall Street Journal? Plus Charles Murray told me they were all rightwing anyway.

Mr. Trump, an entrepreneur, should be the ideal pitchman to New York’s many Asians, or to the black voters former Texas Gov. Rick Perry appealed to in his remarkable July speech.

You just know Henninger started that last bit with Jack Kemp and his editor said, "you know Kemp's been dead for seven years, right?" and Henninger thought a while and finally said, "hell, why not Rick Perry -- no black people are going to read this anyway."

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BUMFUCK.

PJ Media:

GOP Cities Have Cheaper Houses than Dem Cities

Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE POOR PEOPLE? Liberal Cities Like L.A. Face Much Higher Housing Prices.

TownHall:

Most Expensive Housing Markets in US are in Liberal Districts 

...Correlation or cause? Union work rules, land availability, and building restrictions (or lack thereof) are all likely in play.

I thought these guys believed in the free market, but they seem not to understand that when people want something a lot, the price goes up, and when they don't want it so much the price goes down. Ordinary citizens pay large sums just to visit New York City; it makes sense they would pay top dollar to live in it, unless you've convinced yourself that it must be awful because of all the blacks and socialism.

Conversely, I don't see anyone paying top dollar to live in Fritters, Alabama, despite the many advantages of Republican government. Sorry for your self-esteem, comrade, but that's capitalism!

UPDATE. I can't believe people are still going on about this. (Oh, of course I can believe it -- it's standard-issue Liberal Plantation crap.) As he has in the past, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson suggests that if you can't buy a three-bedroom house in the liberal city of your choice, you're being oppressed:

Progressivism is a luxury good for coddled urban professionals; it immiserates everybody else.

Why then, I wonder, don't New York's poor head out like the Okies of yore to the promised land of North Dakota? "Maw, I can smell the fracking from here!" Except the rent in those boom towns is no bargain either -- though of course you're probably closer to a Wal-Mart and a Chick-fil-A, so there are cultural advantages.

UPDATE 2. Williamson's other recent expression of sympathy for the poor is amazing: he would like to imagine shoeshine men paid more when they work on more expensive shoes, though he offers no method to accomplish this save the free market, which from recent evidence seems unlikely to come through. For this daydream philanthropy Williamson considers himself morally superior to liberal policy wonk Eva Longoria. I swear they recruit these people from nuthouses.

FEAR OF A RAD PLANET.

You folks have probably seen some debate over the Electoral College, and how some people say it's a vestige of slavery, and others say Hamilton the musical Founder meant it to save us from people like Trump and now look, etc. Well, Michael Barone has a new angle for you:

Ditching Electoral College Would Allow California to Impose Imperial Rule on a Colonial America

California Über Alles! You can tell he's got a strong thesis from the front-loaded slurs:

They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours. 

The seemingly endless dillydallying of California's (presumably union-represented) public employees has obscured two interesting things about this year's presidential election.

I know, you were thinking Little Deuce Coupe and I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but Michael Barone's California is a bureaucratic dystopia where you can't even get votes counted for Chrissakes because the Vote-Counters Union demands a papaya and tantric sex break every couple of hours. Anyway, first "interesting thing" is sure she got a majority but not as big a one as some guy in 1876, and second...

...the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum. 

You can see this easily if you array the states in order of Democratic percentage. At the top, before any state, was the District of Columbia, where 91 percent of voters chose Clinton. Next, some 5,000 miles away, was Hawaii, which went 63 percent for Clinton. Then came giant California, the nation's most populous state. As I am writing this, the latest count has California at 62 percent Democratic.

And the United States, using the same metric, is also more Democratic than Republican. But that doesn't count because California is too Democratic -- not like normal folks who are only Democratic when their parents and pastors aren't looking:

Well, yeah, you might say. California has been called the Left Coast for quite a while. Just about everyone in the Silicon Valley except Peter Thiel and in Hollywood except Pat Sajak supported Clinton. White middle-class families have been pretty much priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic.

The "white middle-class families" have all left, replaced by "Hispanic and Asian immigrants." One wonders why all the rich stars and computer nerds haven't abandoned this Third World hellhole and moved to Fritters, Alabama, where you can open your car elevator and see white people! That alone would make the constant drone of neo-country tolerable.

Barone rolls out some old electoral maps and shows us California and some other big liberal states used not to be that liberal -- they even voted for Reagan! -- so it was okay if they were on the winning side sometimes, but now that they're reliably Democratic -- unlike such famously purple states as Mississippi and Kansas -- if they were on the winning side it'd be tyrannical because they have the unfair advantage in population (unlike Texas) and because, need he remind you, they just ain't normal.

...The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers' fears that voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation.

You mean like Florida in 2000? Wait, he's got a point -- their will was thwarted!

...California's 21st-century veer to the left makes [the Electoral College] a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London's disdain for the "lesser breeds" it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.

Actually that's the current state of the nation under the cruel tyrant Obama, who craftily got Imperial Cali to vote for him twice. For nearly eight years honest crackers have been forced to endure colonics, Mexican food, and wind farms. Some of them, no doubt suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, began treating members of minority groups with respect, and doing yoga. But now, Trump time is a-comin', and these real non-Hispanic-and-Asian-immigrant Americans can go back to hog jowls and hate crimes, like the Founders intended, and inhale the meth fumes of freedom.

IF YOU'RE PISSED THAT A BURGER-FLIPPER GOT A RAISE, YEWWW MIGHT BE A WINGNUT.

Aargh blaargh from "professional comedian and writer" Stephen Kruiser over Seattle raising its minimum wage to $15:

Hippie infestation... 

Apparently unaware that it doesn’t have the weather advantages that other places pricing themselves out of existence do (Los Angeles, anyone?), Seattle seems to be ready to set a record for how many businesses it can ruin. 

The earnest idiots who whip up this minimum wage frenzy... "...BECAUSE FAIRNESS.” No discussion of the fact that an entry level, part time job isn’t supposed to be your adult income wage for life. 

What they don’t discuss is just how stifling this progressive feel good, math-hating nonsense is to current and aspiring small business owners. 

Because they want to drive as many people as they can into financial hell.

Seriously, what is he bitching about? He believes in the market, right? So this foolish decision will cause businesses to abandon commie Seattle for the red-state hinterland, and capitalism wins!  I can see those bright folks currently working at Seattle-based businesses like Amazon, Starbucks, Safeco,  Nordstrom, Cray, Corbis, et alia, not to mention the venture capitalists and internet jockeys, and the hipster entrepreneurs of Sub Pop and Babeland, deciding they've had enough of this command economy and running off to Fritters, Alabama or North Dakota to enjoy all the freedom and fracking.

Maybe this'll be the tipping point for that great blue-red inversion of economic energy Joel Kotkin,  Rick Perry, and other great minds are always predicting.

Of course it'll take a while:

As Steve Allen first said and I like to repeat, how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm?

UPDATE. Some commenters are wondering what kind of capitalist announces his desire to keep workers' wages down. I doubt Kruiser really qualifies as a capitalist, though maybe he employs a maid. Neither do the wingnut-welfare cases at libertarian flagship Reason qualify, which explains this headline: "Seattle Prepares for Robot Revolution by Setting $15 Minimum Wage." At first I thought they meant that granting peons an almost-living wage would speed the rise of robot workers, though bosses need no such provocation and in fact already employ robots as soon as they can get them. You aren't going to slow them down by pretending to be happy with shit wages.

Then I realized it was a revenge fantasy.

Interesting too that they found a cleaning lady who allegedly had a "401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation" only to see it see it ruined by the high-minimum-wage commissars. Maybe the poor woman should get out of that line of work and start driving a cab.

HERITAGE AND HATE.

Moderator: As more of accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof’s racist beliefs come to light, some are suggesting that South Carolina take down the Confederate battle flag that flies on its capitol grounds. Others say the flag is part of Southern heritage and has nothing to do with Roof’s twisted ideas. To discuss this we have here in our studios Rev. Walter Hudson of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, which has just had a bomb threat, and Beauregard T. Dogwhistle, a member of the Fritters, Alabama city council. Before we begin, though, I have to ask Mr. Dogwhistle: Is that actually a Confederate uniform you’re wearing?

Dogwhistle: Indeed it is, suh. This heah is the unifo'm of a colonel in th’ Ahmy o’ No’thern Vuhginny, ve’y lahk one woah by mah great-gran’pappy at Seven Pines and Chancellorsville. It even has some o’ mah great-gran'pappy’s buttons and so fo’th — the original clawth coul’n’t last, o’ co’se, soaked as it wah with all thet Yankee blood my grand-grandpappy spilled at Chancellorsville! (laughs) Musta kiwwed fifty Federals thet week with his swo’d alone (mimes swordplay). Oh, thet wah a great vict'ry, suh!

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, the Civil War cost the lives of more than 600,000 men and, more to the point, ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Why do you think it appropriate to wear on this program a Confederate uniform,  particularly after a horrible tragedy like the shooting at the Emanuel AME Church?

Dogwhistle: Why, suh, they is a princ’ple at stake heah! When this heah Roof fella killed them — well, Af’ican Amer’cans, guess ah’m s’posed to call ‘em — that-all had nothin’ to do with mah heh’tage! And thet flag is mah heh’tage, suh, just as this heah uniform is, and ah see nothin’ t' be ashamed of in eithah! If’n them folks don’ wish to see it, wew suh, they can lowah they eyes o’ sumpin’.

Moderator: Well, Mr. Dogwhistle, when some people, particularly African-Americans, see the battle flag and your uniform, they can’t help but think about the war fought by your grand-grandfather and others to defend the institution that made them slaves.

Dogwhistle: Slanders, suh! Why, the woah had nothin’ to do with slavery nohow. No, we was fightin’ ‘cause we was invaded, an’ ah don’t give a hang foah Foat Sumter — thet wah a what d’ye call it nah, a fawse flag, thet’s it, a fawse flag t’ covah Yankee aggressiousness --

Rev. Hudson: Well, Mr. Dogwhistle, you know that’s just not so. Not only the leaders but the Confederate Constitution show that —

Dogwhistle: (coldly) Excuse me, Mistah Moderatah, yo’ guess heah don’t seem t’ know he is interruptin’ a whaht man.

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, I don’t even know what to say in response to that. Do you really expect us to abide by your openly racist standard of behavior?

Dogwhistle: Of c’ose I expect’ yo t’ honnuh it, suh; it is mah heh’tage. An’ ah dispute yo’ calling’ it racist. Whah, suh, there ain’t no moah racism in thet requiahment o’ mah dignity than they is in mah flag, o’ mah unifo’m, o mah collection o’ manacles an’ slave collahs an’ such lahk, no mattah what them statist rapscallions at eBay say about it. My heh’tage ain’t jes’ symbols; it’s mah whole way o’ lahf, passed dahn bah mah great-gran’pappy an’ f’um his great-gran’pappy. When you Yankees took owuh slaves, we still fahnd ways to keep our heh’tage, lahk with Jim Crow an’ the poll tax; an’ when y’all took thet fum us, we put it in legislation and gerrymand’rin’ and po-licin’ an’ whatnawt. It hain’t lahk it waws, but at leas' we all know how we feel ‘bout things and hah it’s s’posed t’ be, an’ if thet ain’t heh’tage, whut is? As fo' yo’ guess, ah was civ'lized -- ah didn’t use no “n-wo’d,” did ah? No, ah restrained mahse’f, an’ ah mus’ say it put a cramp in mah vocabulerry t’ do so. Now ah have obse'ved yo’ No’thun customs thus fah, an’ I expec’ y’all to obse've mahn. A man can only be pushed so fah!

Moderator: Mr. Dogwhistle, these security guards will escort you out of the building.

Dogwhistle: Humph! Ah guess Jonah Goldberg was raht -- you lib’ruls just woanna silence the opposition!

SISSY FUSS; SHRUG.

Some people are dealing with the age of BlackLivesMatter worse than others. At City Journal, which usually disparages cities only insofar as they allow black people to walk around free, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson of the Mexican-Stolen Chainsaw is allowed to disparage cities in toto because they are filled with sissy liberals, whereas the country, where he lives part-time, is filled with chesty men of noble purpose:

Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.

That's how Jonah Goldberg got so conservative -- harvesting Cheetos in the noonday sun! Hanson seems to hope his message will spread far and wide and reverse a trend, which he notes with alarm, of Americans moving away from red-state garden spots like Fritters, Alabama and into the debauched Democratic cities. But, as Steve Allen altered the old song years ago, how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm? And Hanson doesn't have a lot of tools for the job, alas (perhaps because they were stolen by Mexicans): he is dependent as usual on hoary wingnut tropes, in this case Sandra Fluke, The Life of Julia, and even that most risible of reactionary tropes Pajama Boy to get his story across:

Pajama Boy’s smirk and his message of arrested development and dependence, even if a con, offered a damning portrayal of what millions of urbanites now see as cool: getting up late, staying undressed, and sipping childhood drinks. America’s Marlboro Man he wasn’t.

No childhood drinks for VDH! And apparently no socialistic public water service either -- only pure well water replenishes his precious bodily fluids: "At my house, I worry constantly about whether the well will go dry," he tells us. "I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 PM, I go to the door armed." Guess Mexicans must be after his water, too.

One wonders why he spends half his time in the urban wastelands at all  -- perhaps, like many of the sissies he disparages, for the money? Or maybe it's a psychological issue. Attend this plaintive passage:

Half the week, when I live in downtown Palo Alto, I have no idea who else lives in the high-rise apartments—and no interest in finding out. I could be a felon or a saint and no one on the street knows or cares. That the rest of the time I live in the same house on the same farm where my great-great-grandparents lived is of no interest. I could dye my hair green and pierce my nose and the reaction would be “so what”—not “Old Victor Hanson out there on Mountain View Avenue finally went crazy.”

You can imagine Hanson walking the streets of Palo Alto, the heedless sea of humanity coursing around him, and thinking, "I could dye my hair green, pierce my nose -- no one would say a word!" Who knows what else he could do! That saloon he just passed is full of harlots, with only liberal sissies to keep them company. And in the alley, bums who would not be missed if they wound up in the river. If he can just get to the lamppost and back without succumbing...

Hanson also has one up at National Review inspired by that study of white working-class people in trouble. Of course he blames the "'hands up, don’t shoot,' Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set," and takes care to let us know that black people get all the breaks:

As a professor at California State University, Fresno, over some 21 years, I had hundreds of conversations with working-class white kids from Merced to Bakersfield, who had stellar academic records in the humanities and who wished to go to top law schools or Ph.D. programs. I ended up offering them roughly the following caveat: “I’m afraid the chances of you as a white male from Fresno State being admitted to a top program are almost nil.” I was being neither alarmist nor nihilist, but simply reflecting the experience of my own lobbying efforts for brilliant students to gain admittance to top-ranked graduate programs.

Which is why university faculties and corporate boardrooms are chock-full of black people, while whitey must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Unless he has a sweet half-the-week-in-the-city gig.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, CONT. Let's look into what prominent libertarians say about the Weiner case. Surely they won't want him thrown out just for dick pics -- they're pro-freedom, and philosophically consistent; they hate Democrats and want to legalize weed! Nick Gillespie:

A lot of people say that there's lying (not a good thing) and then there's lying about sex (also not a good thing, but a more understandable thing). But then there's lying about cellphone porn and tweetpics by saying that the attacks on you may be the "point of Al Qaeda's sword," or some sort of super-terrorist cyberhack of a sitting member of Congress. Which is what Weiner says above (via CNS News).

That's such an awful lie on every possible level that I think it should really remove any doubt about his fitness for office. It's one thing to do stupid things and cover them up with misstatements and obfuscations. That's wrong but understandable, at least within certain limits and when it doesn't directly impact his job. But to play the Al Qaeda card in an attempt to throw folks off the scent of an embarrassing (not even illegal!) misstep is really something else...

Yes, Gillespie is actually affecting to take seriously Weiner's sword joke -- a joke even the dimmer rightbloggers get. And with the help of the ridiculous Conservative News Service, yet! Gillespie even warbles about "the very city that suffered the greatest terrorist attack in U.S. history" as if he were a GOP Congressman from Fritters, Alabama pretending to love Jew York on 9/11 anniversaries.

Well, surely the artist formerly known as Jane Galt won't play the witch-doctors' psuedo-moralistic game!

But I also don't think it works to say that it's nobody's business but the couple's whether people keep their marriage vows. Andrew [Sullivan] has been a great proponent of gay marriage--not civil unions, but marriage. Why was it so important to call it marriage, if everything about it is entirely private? Why not stop with legal equality and leave marriage to the heterosexuals? If all the benefits are private, then a combination of legal visitation/property sharing rights...

[Blink.] [Blink Blink.] OK. So -- if Weiner's digital cheating isn't our business, McArdle wants to know, then why do you want gay marriage, Andrew Sullivan? I guess she knew this would piss him off enough to distract him.

Also:

Did [Mrs. Weiner] show up at his campaign events? If she did, they were both happy to have the marriage be part of a very public persona.

And so they both deserve to suffer.

Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages...

While Jane Galt morphs into Maggie Gallagher, let's turn from Weinergate to the doings of the most prominent libertarian in the U.S. Senate:

To Rand Paul, Legal Immigration Is Also a Concern

It’s common to hear a senator express concerns about illegal immigration these days, but Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, is also concerned about legal immigration.

“We have 40,000 students coming to this country from all over the world,” he said. “Are they would-be attackers?”

I grow more convinced every day that libertarianism only exists to give young Republicans something marginally less repulsive to call themselves when they're trying to get laid.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on, in roundup fashion, Kathy Griffin, the Paris Accord pullout, and the London Bridge attacks. Among the director's-cut bonuses: alt-right dummy Jack Posobiec explaining why terrorists don't bomb Fritters, Alabama:

Yeah, suicide bombers don't go to car races because they're afraid they might get hurt. At this point it's a given that rightwing residents of America's hollers, junctions, falls, bluffs, and whatnot are terrorized by the exceedingly unlikely prospect that jihadis will come to the Father-Daughter Dance and blow them up, while those of who live in actual terror target towns keep calm and carry on. But it's still ridic.

By the way, I hear Wonder Woman broke $100 million at the box office last weekend, despite men being kept out of a few screenings. I notice Stephen Miller, the wingnut who said he was going to force himself on an Alamo Drafthouse all-female showing, hasn't declared victory, but who knows -- maybe he watched through a hole in the wall, like in Porky's.

NOT A DOG IN THE BUNCH.

Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar -- which site I for some reason never had on my blogroll before now -- has done his annual great job of collecting 2015 blog posts chosen by the authors themselves for the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. You should go sample some -- you might find a genius or two you hadn't seen before.

You'll also find one by me there --  that riff I did on Ben Affleck's family tree problems in April. Which reminds me: As much fun as I had with the Village Voice rightblogger round-up last weekend, I believe it was missing something -- namely, shameless self-promotion! To follow are my 10 favorite posts of 2015 by my favorite author, me! If you missed 'em before, it's not too late. Happy New Year, all, and don't drive drunk -- stay home and finish that keg yourselves.

A Week of Shorter Rod Drehers. In which I chart America's favorite Xian drama queen, post by post, for seven days ("4/6/15, 5:35 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 12:05 am: Facebook and the gay drag queens are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 5:08 am: Buy my book...").

It Can't Miss. A memo from the Central Committee to the Brethren on how to handle the Bruce Jenner thing ("The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays").

Have a Miserable National Review Christmas! A look at what America's premier conservative magazine chose to present to its readers on Christmas Eve ("How could we have guessed [Victor Davis] Hanson would spend Christmas bitching about furriners? Guess he never got over the loss of his chainsaw").

My Advice for the Republican Party. What I told them they should do with their first debate, but they didn't listen, the idiots ("just say to hell with decorum entirely and flood the stage with other joke candidates who will distract from [Trump]. Some possibilities: A Howard Stern fan who just says 'Baba Booey, Baba Booey'...").

What to Expect. Speaking of the first GOP debate, I had to miss it, so I just made one up for my readers and I must say from what I heard mine was better ("George Pataki will be found dead, his face pressed against the crack at the bottom of the door of the auditorium like Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer").

Heritage and Hate. An interview with Beauregard T. Dogwhistle, a member of the Fritters, Alabama city council, on the controversy over the Confederate flag ("Whah, suh, there ain’t no moah racism in thet requiahment o’ mah dignity than they is in mah flag, o’ mah unifo’m, o mah collection o’ manacles an’ slave collahs an’ such lahk, no mattah what them statist rapscallions at eBay say about it").

This Used to Be My Playground. Spurred by yet another essay on New York in the 70s, I talked about my own experience of that place and time, and why it was still interesting to people who weren't there ("I don’t think they thrill to it because they desire to be mugged; I think they like it because they suspect that the danger came with something they would want, but can no longer get on any terms. And they're right").

Season 7, Episode 14. The last of my Mad Men recaps ("Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists").

Au Revoir, Niedermeyer. A farewell to Presidential candidate Scott Walker ("I wouldn't say I felt bad for the guy, but it must be something to have pandered your ass off for months and then discover that it wasn't enough to be a bully -- you had to act like a bully, too").

Twenty Minutes Wasted with Goldberg and Murray. In which I did a scorn-language interpretation of a promo interview between two of the worst people in the world, Jonah Goldberg and Charles Murray ("'what [academia] looks like is people making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private sector,' that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only break a sweat during squash or rough sex...").

THE BIG CON GOES INTERNATIONAL. Sarah Palin gave in Hong Kong a speech to bankers and investors which, from the limited excerpts available to an excluded press, sounds pretty much like what she might have given at a Fritters, Alabama Rotary luncheon. The Wall Street Journal, perhaps under advisement, swapped out its earlier, risible excerpts for fuller risible excerpts. It is reported that some people walked out of the speech -- "Palin-haters," says Allahpundit; who knew the tentacles of American lieberal media reached all the way to Hong Kong? Regrettably, no quotes were captured from attendees regarding Palin's denunciation of the effects of cap-and-trade on American farming, nor on her remarks about death panels. Maybe the crowd was a little parochial that way.

The usual suspects boo-yah Palin ("Palin gives ‘em hell in Hong Kong"), which seems strange, given that she chose to sell the natives on human rights by telling them "it’s not just a U.S. idea. They’re very much more than that. They’re enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and other non-American documents. Maybe this is Palin's idea of internationalism, but she'll have to disown it when she gets back to Yahoo Central, lest the rednecks suspect she has gone Trilateral.

Anyway Palin's training-wheels comeback proceeds apace. What they have to do now is find a way for her to give a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Maybe it can be arranged for Alan Greenspan to win and send her to Oslo as a surrogate. Then she can tell the astonished Norwegians what Levi Johnston is really like.

HOMETEAM CROWD.

LOL

The two towns Trump has lived in -- New York and Washington -- both hate his guts. What does that tell you?

I see a remedy: super-creep Senator Josh Hawley's dumb bill to send federal employees to Bumfuck:

Under Hawley’s proposal, 90 percent of the USDA’s workforce would move to Missouri and an additional nine other federal agencies would relocate their headquarters to “economically distressed” areas. 

“It’s such an insular place and people forget that there’s a vast country out there and there’s lots of places in the country that aren’t like D.C. and haven’t seen gobs of money poured in,” Hawley said in an interview on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon... 

Under Hawley’s proposal, several agencies would land in swing states critical to the presidential race. Pennsylvania would become home to the Department of Commerce, the Department of Transportation would relocate to Michigan and Ohio would host the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Interior would migrate to New Mexico. 

The rest of the states in Hawley’s plan are solidly Republican.

Why not include the Presidency? Try to imagine Trump trying to get an in-house around-the-world and a bucket of blow in Fritters, Alabama! (I mean, in the manner to which he is accustomed.) He'd resign in a week.

UPDATE. GUESS WHO'S THE REAL VICTIM HERE! If you guessed "civility," yewww might be a pundit.

In my many happy days and nights at Shea Stadium, the fans often rained boos down on their own team. I begin to wonder if these guys have ever been to a baseball game.

UPDATE 2. The go-to wingnut response is that citizens of Washington, D.C. loved Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, late head of ISIS, and are mad at Trump because U.S. forces killed Baghdadi last weekend. Chrissy Clark at The Federalist:

The timing of the crowd’s reaction was revealing. The crowd booed Trump on the same day he announced his administration and U.S. personnel had taken out the founder and leader of ISIS.

 Yes -- a very adulterous reaction! "If you’re gonna go around whackin’ austere scholars, Washington can be tough," burbles Andrew McCarthy, National Review's impeachment bullshit expert. Oh well, guess the days when a crowd at the ballpark was considered salt-of-the-earth American rather than treasonous are over, Wrasslin's America's sport now!

THE VIRTUES OF HYPOCRISY. Beliefnet's Rod Dreher starts out saying "there's something ...not quite there when conservatives who don't have families give advice and commentary on family-related issues." He tells us how a "conservative acquaintance... explained that the experience of raising kids, especially the one who suffers so much, has made him far less willing to pass judgment on other parents."

You know the drill. After several paragraphs Dreher executes a McArdle Maneuver and ends up talking about murderous teens who won't do their homework and "self-centered, couldn't-give-a-s**t parents." (He also says that having children "made me less quick to judge others harshly.")

Dreher's apparently in a mood to advise his fellow conservative commentators on lifestyle choices. Some days earlier, he told them to leave "Leave the NYC-DC Bubble":

I wonder if The American Spectator would be better off moving back to Bloomington, Indiana. I wonder how different National Review would be if it kept its DC bureau, but relocated its offices to Dallas or Atlanta. Similarly with the Weekly Standard. And so forth. For one thing, there would be much greater attention paid to culture, and less to policy and pure politics.

More attention to culture? Didn't he see Jonah Goldberg's review of Cloverfield? (Spoiler alert: it's about 9/11, "a message worth pondering.")

We've been over this before. Pleasing as is the prospect of Goldberg spending his lunch breaks at the Cracker Barrel in Fritters, Alabama, there's no reason for rightwing columnists to walk the walk. They're big idea men; they have read Hayek and Bloom and Coulter. It is for the lumpen to follow their social prescriptions, while the Smart Ones ponder welfare policy over phyllo-wrapped salmon at Persephone.

It would be easy to twit them for hypocrisy, but let us say this for them: they want others to think as they think, but draw the line at demanding that they live as they live. Dreher wants them not only to think as he thinks -- insofar as they can follow that snaking stream of half-baked ideas -- but also to live as he lives: religiously, away from major cities, with kids, organic food and compost heaps. He's the sort who will worry over "what American conservatism has become," and in the very next post worry over those who are "policing conservatism from within." And he thinks he's being non-judgmental. Some kinds of hypocrisy really are worse than others.

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

The Wall Street Journal announces that Emily Zanotti has joined their staff. alicublog readers will know her as E.M. Zanotti, and perhaps recall my review of her culture-war work ca. 2007. Highlights from one Zanotti post at National Review:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it... Somewhere along the way, [art] became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness... what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck...

Modern art, whatta racket amirite? You may wonder how National Review let this one get away: Her last post for NR, filed from the 2008 Michigan GOP primary, contains this:

McCain has added difficulties of his own making as his Michigan campaign winds down. His sudden affinity for plaid dress shirts has ensured visually painful clashes with the blue backdrops at press briefings.

We also learned from this valedictory post that "good hair and rolled-up sleeves are in the Romney blood."

Zanotti kept her own blog for a while, too, where she tackled head-on and without a helmet issues like "If [abortion] IS a killing, why don't you just throw everyone who has one in jail?!"

To answer the question outright, if its a life, then taking the life is murder. We have no problem with that assertion, and frankly, believing it to be a life makes even their arguments easier. Its hard to stand on stable ground when your fundamental argument involves a distinction you cannot prove, but allowing, for a moment, that the fetus is a human could present a wealth of not esoteric but legal defenses...

[Blah blah, Margaret Sanger, the Spartans, Peter Singer, murder, etc.]

That said, its not as though making something illegal necessarily makes it punishable. Widespread recognition of the dignity and worth of human life by making it a crime to take one isn't something we brought into being by majority vote. Its a long-standing tradition. Some might call it the "natural law." Whether humans punished it was up to them...

On and on through thousands of words of point-dodging, but nothing resembling an answer; those who hung on till the end, however, got some nice anti-feminist insults ("everything short of unfettered access is totally unreasonable to Anna [Quindlen], though she'd never care to admit it"), and were probably satisfied.

Then came years of banging out boob-bait for outlets such as the American Spectator; last week, while other outlets were covering the recent Department of Justice report on Ferguson with headlines like "DOJ Report Condemns Ferguson Police Department's Practices" (NPR) and "Ferguson Officials Suspended After DOJ Report Have Resigned, City Confirms" (NBC), Zanotti's Spectator dispatch was headlined "DOJ FERGUSON REPORT VINDICATES OFFICER DARREN WILSON." She has also served as a "strategic partner" at Republican consultant bullpen Hynes Communications, and occasionally goes on Catholic sites to bitch about "the stretch pants ladies’ substituting Maya Angelou poems for Gospel readings." Can't say she hasn't paid her dues!

Zanotti seems to have calmed down, or at least gotten hungry enough to send in better first drafts. Her first offering for WSJ is a thumb-sucker on the Chicago mayoral election -- did you folks know that progressives are dissatisfied with Rahm Emanuel? Zanotti characterizes the contest as "two unappealing candidates who are battling for the measly one-third of the electorate that hasn’t checked out completely," which may seem a strange way to describe Chuy Garcia, an activist who came out of nowhere to win 34% in a primary against a standing mayor, but Zanotti huffs that Garcia's "a man who has many progressive dreams and no idea how to pay for them," and though she currently lives in Chicago she really wants to move away (presumably to some conservative oasis like Fritters, Alabama, to serve as the village strategic partner), and what else do Wall Street Journal editorial page readers need to hear?  I predict a bright future, for Zanotti if not America.

WATERING THE TREE OF LUNACY WITH THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN, PART INFINITY.

Another day, another bunch of dead kids, and Republicans reliably rush to aid and comfort the NRA. At National Review we have yet to hear Charles C.W. Cooke's traditional post-slaughter sermon about how you cahn't ban assault weapons, it's in the cawn-stuh-tyu-shun, but we have had proposed alternative solutions from other staffers such as David French:

Rather than tweet impotently, I’ve armed myself to protect my family and my neighbors; in my past role as a member of a school board, I’ve worked to better secure my kids’ school; and I’ve vowed that if — God forbid — I ever see evidence or warning signs of the darkness of a killer’s heart, I’ll have the courage to seek the intervention that can save lives.

That is to say: He bought more guns, and fantasized about what he'd do if he ever saw someone suspicious. That's usually the beginning of a success story, alright.

French's colleague Robert VerBruggen has a simpler solution: "Arm Teachers." I don't recall him suggesting that we arm preachers after the church shoot-em-up in Sutherland Springs last November, but maybe his condition has only recently advanced to this stage. VerBruggen elaborates:

[Training is] something a teacher could easily accomplish during summer vacation, even if schools insisted on rigorous training.

And why would they? Clearly any gun-wielding amateur marksman will be able to quickly take out a heavily armed mass murderer, and avoid shooting the wrong people or themselves in a panic -- they must be superhuman or else why would we pay them so generously?

If this sounds more like a recipe for Roddy McDowall in Class of 1984 than a sane society, remember that a sane society is the opposite of what they want: This is why they were so enraged to see New York City's crime drop after years of strict gun control, and why they're so eager to inject guns into polities that have benefited from their exclusion -- they want to make every part of America as hair-trigger gun-crazy as Fritters, Alabama, because that's how you breed Republicans.

UPDATE. Regarding French's I'll-know-one-when-I-see-one, Patrick Blanchfield makes a good point:

I wonder who David French and guys like him are likely to pre-cognize as a poison-hearted potential killer?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Charlottesville and Boston, and the hard time rightbloggers are having with their Scary Alt-Left bullshit.

Among the fun sidelights: Susan Wright of Red State explaining what's really so terrible about the Nazi-Confederate comeuppance --

What we’ve seen, as a result of the filth they brought to Charlottesville and the subsequent loss of life, is that any meaningful discussion about the importance of maintaining our nation’s heritage – every part of it – has been lost. 

They gave Antifa and every other leftist group wiggle room to claim the high ground. Anybody who might be thinking about defending some of those time-worn monuments to the southern side of the war between the states will have to wade neck-deep through a cesspool of liberal rage and accusations of racism.

Wait, here's the best part:

Not that anyone not a liberal would ever be given the benefit of the doubt, anyway.

The party of personal responsibility just can't seem to catch a break!

Also, I refer briefly to Peter Ingemi's Boston post in the column, and his obvious frustration at having no juicy alt-left ultra-violence stories to tell. Ingemi was extremely upset by the crowd yelling at two Trump guys, mostly because one of them was holding an Israeli flag, which I guess is supposed to protect you like a St. Christopher medal protects travelers, or an American flag pin protects a Republican politician. Though no harm came to the two men, Ingemi says,

To me this was a turning point, it is a moment that in my opinion will get replayed over and over in states that Trump carried and I can’t think of anything else that would infuriate and energize Trump supporters more.

I'm sure they're very sensitive to criticism of Israel in Fritters, Alabama. Ingemi also tweeted, "Can't imagine any Massachusetts supporter of @realDonaldTrump walking through #BostonCommon today without thinking 'I need to arm myself.'" LOL. What was someone saying about snowflakes?

[SOBBING] BUT I HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO YOUR LOVE!

LOL: It starts out being about how "Maxine Waters does not speak for Democrats or liberals," but then guest columnist for The Hill Alan Dershowitz suddenly snaps and blubbers that his posh friends won't hang with him no more:

I am a liberal Democrat in politics, but a neutral civil libertarian when it comes to the Constitution. 

But that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard. For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard. One of them, an academic at a distinguished university, has told people that he would not attend any dinner or party to which I was invited. He and others have demanded “trigger warnings” so that they can be assured of having “safe spaces” --

"Trigger warnings" = "Hate to tell you, but we have to invite that asshole Dershowitz, my wife feels sorry for him," and "safe spaces" = "Don't worry, I told Dershowitz we'll be out of town."

-- in which they will not encounter me or my ideas. Others have said they will discontinue contributions to organizations that sponsor my talks. 

This is all familiar to me, since I lived through McCarthyism in the 1950s...

"I have here in my hand a list of one jagoff I don't want to go golfing with" just doesn't have the same ring. And if I were in a pissier mood I would say the rich and infinitely connected Dersh cheapens the memory of people who actually lost their jobs, not just some fucking dinner invites, because of Joe McCarthy. But the absurdity of this has buoyed my mood, so I will just observe this really is the modern conservative idea of McCarthyism: Not the disadvantaged losing the little they have because of their beliefs -- why, says your average conservative, would anyone care about losers like that! -- but rich fucks being told to fuck off. 

But I see Dersh is making loads of new friends:

This suggest a fish-out-of-water comedy, in which Dershowitz loses his social standing in Martha's Vineyard and is forced to decamp to Fritters, Alabama and do shooters and swap coon jokes with the hoi polloi. "Hain't that squirrelmeat better than them fancy Wellfleet oysters yore sissy friends made ya eat?" asks his host, Festus. Hey, Roseanne says she's ready to come back to TV!