DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

We've seen the other Republican candidates, fading in the face of Trump, going "Look at me! I can be crazy too!" What might be the journalistic equivalent?

It would seem a tad overheated to speculate that Hillary Clinton being elected president could trigger an American civil war. Unfortunately, it’s not. If not an outright war, massive civil disobedience would likely be in the offing. 

If our chief executive is assumed to be dishonest by the majority of the population — a solid plurality and possibly even a majority believing her actually to be criminal — before she takes office, what would be the natural outgrowth to society, if not a breakdown of one sort or another?...

Just kidding -- while I'm sure PJ Media could use the attention, this is not really new for Roger L. Simon, he's been totally mental for years. Anyway: Simon thinks "the chances of Hillary’s nomination are decreasing on a near-daily basis," so I guess she would have to win on a third-party ticket, or maybe just ride into the Oval Office singing Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, and when that happens --

Almost no one who voted against her would be giving her the benefit of the doubt. Why should they? They would be looking for ways to reject her presidency.

Not like now!

Tax avoidance would be endemic. Why give money to a country where the president abjures the rule of law? (Yes, that’s already happened but this would, after a political campaign, be a force multiplier.)

Maybe these patriotic tax cheats will be supported by Charles Murray's Honky Freedom Riders. Then Simon dons sackcloth and sayeth the sooth:

With the national treasury under threat, all sorts of results could occur — a stock market meltdown beyond what we are experiencing now, full scale depression like the 1930s, urban riots that make Baltimore and Ferguson look like Kiddyland, nonstop demonstrations of all sorts from all sides, millions of people opting out á la John Galt (most without knowing who he is), an American decline beyond recognition (if you think things are bad now, you haven’t seen anything), little border control with giant Islamic spillover from Europe, terror attacks routine, and, yes, remote a possibility as it may be, a violent civil war between between sides in a hugely split society.

The Go Galt schtick is the tip-off: This is everything these guys predicted for the Obama Administration, stuffed into one big bag of crazy for the next potential Democratic President. They did this when de Blasio got elected, too, and you could conceivably convince the rubes that the mayor really is turning New York into a gritty urban drama out of the 70s because most of them don't live there; getting them to believe the election of Hillary Clinton will lead to armageddon, as opposed to the sylvan glade that awaits under President Cruz (or the woman Simon apparently favors, Carly Fiorina, who wants to bring the skills that nearly destroyed Hewlett Packard to national governance), may take a bit more doing. Perhaps Simon would like to revisit during Halloween? I hear haunted houses can make a good bit of money, and they don't have to be convincing.

ROOTING FOR INJURIES.

In a truckload of Trump articles A-list conservatives have tried in vain to get B-listers-and-lower to abandon Trumpism. They've compared him to everyone they don't like from Obama to John Stewart to Gore Vidal*. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, who previously compared Trump to Allen Ginsburg, shows the growing exasperation this week in a column called "Trump Has Succeeded in Convincing Conservatives to Discard their Principles Overnight." The British transplant sniffs at the salt-of-the-earth Americans who have elevated Trump to the lead in GOP Presidential polls -- why, don't they know Trump is a tax-and-spend liberal? Cooke explains to the lumpen what they're supposed to think:

Contrary to the fevered imagination of the exasperated American Left, conservative candidates for public office do not tend to take a free-market approach to fiscal policy because it helps “the rich,” but because they believe in earnest that it helps the whole country. By and large, this same rule applies to conservative voters, many of whom may not always benefit directly from the lack of meddling and modest confiscation, but who conceive nevertheless that a capitalistic economy is likely to deliver better results in the long term than is a power-hungry Uncle Sam... 

Honesty requires us to acknowledge that had President Obama endorsed exactly the same policies and rhetoric, the reaction from the Trumpkins would have been little short of nuclear. Where are those fawning Paul Ryan memes and indignant Founding Fathers’ quotes now, chaps?

I like to imagine Cooke reading this aloud to the "chaps" at a county fair, through a megaphone and while sporting a straw boater.

Maybe Cooke and the rest of the wingnut welfare top-feeders are upset because they find themselves on the wrong side of conservative history (which, I will tell you right now, ends in fiery ruin either for conservatives or for America). Once upon a time, any bylined rightist in need of an Amen could call out those true believer's mortal enemies, the RINOs, either vaguely or with some Congressional figurehead's name attached, and the whole congregation would have a nice grouse over the not-right establishment that was holding them down. Now the punters consider Cooke and his buddies to be the RINOs. You see it in the comments sections of all their anti-Trump columns. And you can hear it from the commentary choice of Trumpites, rightwing radio, which has seized the market opportunity presented by the occasion. At the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens has his own snarl at Trump-followers ("[Trump] isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue"), and is answered by broadcast shouter Mark Levin:

Freaking out at WSJ -- the editorial page stands for amnesty and open borders, endless debt ceiling increases, hundreds of billions in bailouts for Wall Street under Bush, attacks on the Tea Party movement, etc., and now this guy pretends to hold the banner for conservatism as he smears conservatives and laments the state of conservatism. Many conservatives have not endorsed anyone yet, but are attentively listening to the candidates as the primary season has barely begun. The WSJ editorial page has become mouthpiece for the GOP establishment and an overall joke.

In a year this may all be forgotten. Or it may turn out to have been a hardhats-vs.-hippies moment, leaving lingering resentments and schism. Mister, we could use a man like Mittens Romney again!

*UPDATE. Speaking of those Trump comparisons, about the stupidest has been the comparison with Bernie Sanders made by Glenn Reynolds, Ira Stoll, Nick Gillespie et alia. Well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stuffs it today:

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders faced his own challenge at a political event last month, when two African American women pushed in front of him to use the microphone to demand four and a half minutes of silence to honor the death of Michael Brown. Sanders left the stage and mingled with the crowd. Later, Trump criticized Sanders as being “weak” for allowing them to speak, but truly he showed grace under pressure by acknowledging their frustration and anger. Instead of bullying their voices into silence or ridiculing them as losers, pigs or bimbos, Sanders left. After all, it was not his event; he was a guest. Besides, his voice was not silenced, but came back booming even louder: The next day, Sanders posted a sweeping policy of reform to fight racial inequality. (The timing coincided with Michael Brown’s death and had nothing to do with the two women.)

The two approaches reveal the difference between a mature, thoughtful and intelligent man, and a man whose money has made him arrogant to criticism and impervious to feeling the need to have any actual policies...

All this and the Hall of Fame, too. In alicublog comments, coozledad remind us of Krugman's column on the Trump travesty ("What happened to conservative principles? Actually, nothing — because those alleged principles were never real"), pretty good for a guy with no hoop skills.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

You and I are well acquainted with the awfulness of Rod Dreher, and it's gotten to the point where I don't check his site much anymore, because it's too often the same old lather-rinse-repeat of gay oppression and the Benedict Option and I can't even. But I wandered over there today and came across a paragraph in a post called "Trump, the American Pim Fortuyn" (yes, Dreher managed to top the other ridiculous Trump comparisons) that epitomizes not just what's awful about Dreher, but also what's awful about a certain cast of mind all too common in this great democracy:

When I think of Trump’s appeal, I think about the conversations we used to have at the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News years ago. All of us involved in the discussion had good private health insurance, so none of us had to use the city’s public hospitals, which were jammed by immigrants, many of them in the country illegally, demanding health care. If we were poor or working-class citizens — white, black, or brown — who depended on the public hospitals (or for that matter, the public schools in small towns or non-white suburbs), the immigration problem would probably have looked a lot different. But we weren’t, so immigration more often than not appeared as a matter of socially tolerant liberalism and pro-business conservatism. People of all races who weren’t well-off enough to have good private health care, to put their kids in private schools, or to move to suburbs with good public schools — who spoke for them? Who speaks for them?

Dreher is a Christian of the most strenuously self-promoting kind. Christ's least-of-my-brothers stuff is, of course, also the least-assimilated part of the Gospels for people like him.

But for most of them it's enough just to be a flat-out hypocrite and act as if those poor people who aren't dropping the little extra they've got in their favorite megapastor's collection plate don't exist: No, Dreher acknowledges them, but cunningly finds a way to turn these out-group paupers, these desperate Mexicans who risk death in coming to America, risk uprooting and disaster once they've arrived, and are regularly and viciously exploited while they're here, into the real oppressors.

They can't legally get health insurance, see, so they clog up the emergency rooms that can't turn them away when they're sick -- which Dreher characterizes as  "demanding health care," as if treatment for illnesses were the equivalent of an iPhone or a pair of fancy sneakers. And in seeking medical attention, these immigrants deny native-born Americans the emergency room elbow-room they deserve. No, it has nothing to do with the shitty bottom-layer funding and attention we give to all our public services, including emergency care, in this country -- it's those even poorer poor people who are to blame.

And, naturally, liberals who give a shit about these bums are just pretending to do so because they secretly despise the non-Mexican, legally-working-for-the-most-part, and (most importantly) reliably-Republican class -- especially if those liberals have "good private health insurance." Because if you think everyone should have the privileges you have, then you should feel guilty about having them yourself; but if you don't think everyone should have them, then your possession of them, even in the midst of thousands suffering for lack of them, is just the earned blessing of the righteous.

Evil's not too strong a word.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Maybe I should see them tonight? Everything I've heard is good.

•   I recently noted Ross Douthat's attempt to portray the Donald Trump phenomenon as a boon to reform conservatism (i.e., the latest rightwing nerd jobs program). It appears the longer this thing goes on, the more slide-rule boys rush to offer their services. At the Weekly Standard, after some pro-forma yak about what a boor Trump is, Christopher Caldwell tells that Trump's "economic critique" -- yes, he's talking about Trump's brayings, to which he'd referred a paragraph earlier as "talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are" -- "fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance." Not sophisticated itself, mind you, but it fits into something sophisticated, just as Trump himself may be fitted into a $5,000 suit. Then, at Slate, Reihan Salam has all kinds of exciting ideas for Trump. Apparently inspired by single-issue candidate Larry Lessig's praise of Trump as a campaign finance reformer, Salam suggests Trump embrace Lessig's program, as this "would add intellectual heft to [Trump's] populism, which would force his media detractors to give him at least some begrudging respect." I don't know what's funnier: the idea of Trump's campaign acquiring "intellectual heft," or that of Trump showing respect for an egghead like Lessig who doesn't have his own private jet and probably eats in a school cafeteria like a schlub. Funniest of all, perhaps, is the idea of these pencil-necks hovering around Trump, telling themselves that if only they can press their policy papers into the paws of the Strongman, the Golden Dawn may be hastened.

•   And what can make Trump talk worse? Peggy Noonan! Today she explains Peggy Noonan through the avatar of that Non-Partisan Nameless Friend:

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”?

Hope so -- it'll be easy to beat an imaginary constituency. Also, Hispanics love Trump, Noonan's friend "Cesar" from the bodega tells her:

Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you..." 

I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.

Take Peggy Noonan's word to the bank: Your neighbors from the DR, Trinidad, Sudan, Chile, Vietnam -- they're all raring to vote Republican so long as the party nominates a suitably aggressive TV clown.  Morton Downey Jr. gazes on this from the Hereafter and sighs at what might have been.

•   Stella Morabito, the craziest shrink since Robin of Berkeley, is back to tell us how PC is destroying everything by preventing sensible conservative discourse, like how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is:

A perfect example is how the transgender lobby has saturated the media and pop culture with its talking points through Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and incessant Hollywood shilling. Suppression is the PC practice of quashing ideas that compete with the PC message, usually through speech codes, shout-downs, or smears... The twin processes of saturation and suppression, if diligently applied, can produce the illusion of a public opinion shift, or a “cascade.”

Fans of Morabito's work will understand that these "cascades" are bad because they make you accept homosexuals:

Consider how the Left’s propaganda machine manufactured an “opinion cascade” on the issue of same-sex marriage, by first using “surprising validator” conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, polling pundit Michael Barone, and especially David Blankenhorn, who was one of the most persuasive and powerful supporters of organic marriage until he broke down and published a recantation. Not surprisingly, stealth conservatives—particularly those who work in increasingly politicized professions such as psychiatry, social work, teaching, or the arts—have enormous potential if they come out as surprising validators.

Amazing what how much gay-PC we've accomplished thanks to stealth conservatives like Dick Cheney, eh? (Though personally I think it was the recantation of David Blankenhorn that really turned things around for us.)

Anyway Morabito bids her readers go out and make their own cascades:

So conservatives, engage in those polarized, gridlocked places—like the neighborhood picnic, the local swim club, the farmer’s market, the student union, etc.—and engage one on one. Come out to a neighbor or a classmate.

Oh boy! Is this where we say "I hate faggots" and wait for everyone else to do the same, like Spartacus?

Don’t bother with talking points, because the purpose is not to win the argument but to simply to put a human face on your beliefs. 

Just be who you are and be friendly. In today’s PC-saturated culture, that’s the only way to draw out the lonely like-minded person or to influence a fence-sitter. It’s also the only way to water down PC stereotypes of conservatives. Ultimately, it’s the only way to start those ripple effects that can create cascades of truth.

Wait a minute -- your war against PC is to be nice? I gotta tell ya: 1.) If that's the plan, every other anti-PC conservative I've seen has definitely got the instructions upside-down; and 2.) If your goal is to get people to like you, maybe dispense with the hysterical columns for starters?

FRIEND OF THE WORKING MAN.

In 2013 Katrina Trinko told USA Today readers that, instead of raising the minimum wage to help those moocher fast-food workers make a living, right-thinking consumers should "pressure fast-food companies to allow tip jars, so that people who wanted to pass on more to the workers had a way to do so." Well, big cities are still raising the wage, and Trinko has turned around, in a way: At Acculturated she now says she'll even countenance the evil of a minimum wage hike if it's used as a substitute for tipping in restaurants.

It's neither an obviously terrible nor an unheard-of idea. Is Trinko attempting conservative outreach to working people in election season? She certainly expects to benefit from a no-tip world herself: "I’m ready for relaxing dinners that don’t end with me having to calculate percentages." And she makes a feint at arguing that the waiters would benefit, too:

Imagine getting a performance review from someone who had worked with you part of one day (a day that might or might not be typical of your experience), and who likely knew little to nothing about your job. Most of us would (rightfully!) protest. We’d point out that the person simply wasn’t qualified to rate how well or poorly we did our job.

But the more she talks about it, the clearer it becomes that she's not worried that this poor performance metric harms waiters; she's mainly concerned that it's inefficient ("the data show that when it comes to judging the excellence of restaurant servers, we are lousy"). The real object of her concern comes out in a passage I'm surprised they left in:

Businesses have other ways besides tips to hold workers accountable for customer service. When I worked at Borders (R.I.P, non-virtual bookstore), managers constantly observed our interactions with customers, and mystery shoppers and callers made sure we stayed on our best behavior.

See, there's an alternative model! You get the feeling that Trinko is more concerned waiters might be getting away with something than that they might be under-compensated -- like she saw the scene from The Grapes of Wrath where the truckers leave a large tip for a waitress ("What's it to ya?"), and her face burned at the injustice of it.

Coincidentally, I saw a story in MIT Technology Review today about workers on a construction project "being monitored by drones and software that can automatically flag slow progress." It includes one of the more depressing gifs I've seen in a while:

Again, getting rid of tipping might be great, and feel free to debate it in comments. But I am very aware that the scene above is what innovation generally means to the people who cut paychecks, and that's why, when people like Trinko make even reasonable-sounding neoliberal proposals about improving the world of work, I keep my guard up. 

UPDATE. Comments are very sharp; among the tales of woe from the New Workplace, derelict's:

But that, I guess, is not as bad as what one of my sister-in-laws put up with when she worked for Ameritech. They forced all employees to go on "retreats" at which the employee's personality was broken and remade into what the company wanted it to be--pliable, conformist, unquestioning. The "counselors" used the same techniques that cults use. The company did not simply demand that you do your job competently--it demanded your soul, the totality of your being in exchange for a paycheck, some meager benefits, and the knowledge that you could be terminated with no notice at any moment.

There are several references to Taylorism and the cult of efficiency (I'm surprised no one brought up Modern Times). The abovelinked article contains this apposite journal quote:

The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen an erosion of job security in both manual and professional occupation… employee involvement schemes in manual production and the growth of temporary employment, outsourcing and project-based teams in the professions have influenced working conditions in both settings… these practices represent not a departure from scientific management, as is often presumed, but rather the adoption of Taylorist principles that were not fully manifested in the era of mass production.

The authors refer to this revival as neo-Taylorism, but I'm more partial to the term neo-Feudalism, as it makes more vivid the respective roles and conditions of serf and baron.

A few commenters lingered over Trinko's claim that she yearned for relief from the awful burden of calculating a tip, which strikes them and me as rich. Commenter Gabriel Ratchet says he heard one of the Freakonomics guys making a similar claim ("YOU'RE AN ECONOMIST FERCHRISSAKES!! FIGURING OUT PERCENTAGES IS PART OF YOUR FUCKING JOB DESCRIPTION!!"). I can find no evidence Megan McArdle has complained about tipping too (seems a natural, no?), but one of her summer replacement drones, Courtney Knapp, got into it in 2010; she talked about the "complicated etiquette of tipping" as if a coffee-shop were the Court at Versailles, and sniffed that "there is little evidence that tips are related to objective measurements of quality service." Again, I'm open to reason, but the fact that libertarians feel the need to make such self-evident bullshit arguments on behalf of this idea is at least one strike against it.

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.

THAT'S NOT FUNNY, THAT'S SATAN!

There are a couple of quasi-Trumpers at National Review, but by and large they are embarrassed by him, which they naturally express with belligerent stupidity. (Here for example is Kevin D. Williamson, in a column called "National Fronts," tying the rightist-racist parties of Europe to Trump -- and Bernie Sanders, because National Socialist get it; plus, Sanders is racist against Mexicans because he complained the Koch Brothers want "all kinds of people" to "work for $2 and $3" -- which is the kind of stretch that, had it been employed by a black person as evidence of racism, would have spurred a National Review special double issue.)

Why embarrassed? Well, there's an election coming up, and when this whole Trump thing blows over they'll want the voters to remember that National Review supported sensible conservatism, such as that championed by their author David French. For example:

Not even kidding. (Actually, before they changed it the teaser read "Satanists Reveal the Abortion Movement's Rotten Core." See, they do too have editors!) Let's read a bit:

One story is interesting, two stories even more so. But six stories are a trend, in this case a particularly appropriate one: Satanists are become a leading public voice for abortion rights. In their mockery of Christianity they reveal the dark heart of abortion-on-demand: the radical worship of self.

You laugh, but I predict that "radical worship of self" thing gets a big cheer for some 5 pm speaker at the GOP Convention next year.

And what are these six Satanic stories? One, Wendy Davis supporters mocked some holy rollers with "Hail Satan." Satan and mockery -- that's SatanAlinsky! Then the Satanists cheekily filed suit against some anti-abortion laws... wait a minute -- are these all jokes French is complaining about?

And many on the Left gleefully passed around a Salon article declaring that a Satanic Temple spokesperson took Megyn Kelly “to law school” in an appearance over the Temple’s desire to place a statue of Baphomet at the Oklahoma state capitol.

Never mind Salon, that gag got coverage everywhere from Boing Boing to Bloomberg. The only thing worse than a joke about Satan is a popular joke about Satan, apparently. And oh wait, here comes a good one:

With the release of the Planned Parenthood videos, abortion sympathizers are upping their Satanic game. At a Chicago Planned Parenthood protest, speakers apparently located inside the clinic broadcast “horror music” at pro-life advocates in an effort to drown them out.

Horror music leads to Satan just like show tunes make you gay. Eventually French is reduced to sputtering:

[Satanists] also declare that man is “just another animal.” It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate set of doctrines for the rutting life of the sexual revolution, where restraint is evil, physical experience is king, and people are simply sentient mammals trying to get the best out of life. A baby is thus no more sacred — and often less — than any other animal. Just ask Cecil the Lion.

Cecil the Lion! Maybe I've been getting them all wrong, and National Review stories are all basically drinking games.

In some ways this is the best part:

While the vast, vast majority of abortion-rights supporters don’t identify with Satanists and would recoil from comparison with the Church of Satan, prominent Satanist involvement in the abortion debate does have a clarifying effect.

This is being said by the same guy who a few months ago was telling us why his love of the Confederate flag doesn't mean he's racist.

Maybe they should embrace Trump. It's their best hope of going mainstream.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 62,936.

Peter Wood at National Review:

Compare Mr. Trump with the episode in 1968 when William F. Buckley Jr. responded to a taunt by Gore Vidal on ABC in televised commentary on the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The famous exchange — Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley responds by calling Vidal a “queer” — is receiving fresh attention in the documentary Best of Enemies. Buckley, in the words of Hendrik Hertzberg writing in The New Yorker, “immediately regretted” the slur, “and eventually wrote that he had returned to his dressing room in a state of despair.” But “Vidal had no such regrets about calling his opponent a crypto-Nazi. He knew he had triumphed.” 

Buckley, the man of traditional values, despairs because his flash of verbal anger is a failure of self-control. Vidal, a man of the new era, exults because his taunt succeeded in breaking his opponent’s reserve. Today, Trump plays the part of Vidal, sneering at those over whom he would triumph.

Yes, you read that right -- someone compared Donald Trump to Gore Vidal. If this degeneration of conventional wisdom continues, by next week they'll be comparing him to Adlai Stevenson.

WHO'S ZOOMIN' WHO?

Franz von Papen (From Wikipedia):

Under the Weimar Constitution, the Chancellor was a fairly weak figure, serving as little more than a chairman. Moreover, Cabinet decisions were made by majority vote. With this in mind, Papen anticipated "boxing Hitler in," believing that his conservative friends' majority in the Cabinet and his closeness to Hindenburg would keep Hitler in check. Papen boasted to intimates that "Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far in the corner that he'll squeak." To the warning that he was placing himself in Hitler's hands, Papen replied, "You are mistaken. We've hired him."

Ross Douthat, "How Trump Might Help Reform Conservatives":

First, I’m not sure it’s true that Trump’s campaign is substance free: Detail free, maybe, but he’s clearly associated himself with a kind of nationalistic politics that bears some resemblance to the Perot phenomenon, and some resemblance to European right-populism.. That’s a combination of ideas that conspicuously lacks support within the nation’s elite -- but it’s one that has a fair amount of popular and bipartisan appeal... 

Now of course as manifested by Trump this anti-Bloombergist spirit is crude, clownish, extreme, politically unrealistic, and so on down the list... 

But there’s a real opportunity here for reformers as well. Because so long as a protean, ideologically-flexible figure like Trump is setting the populist agenda in the party, you’re less likely to have stringent ideological tests applied to other candidates and their ideas; so long as the voter anxieties he’s tapping into are front and center in the debate, you’re less likely to see other candidates ignoring those anxieties while chasing support from donors or ideological enforcers instead.

As I've shown previously, the "reformcons" Douthat endorses are more con than reform -- a bunch of pencil-necked repackagers of Gilded Age philosophy, looking for jobs in the upcoming GOP Bureau of Bold New Boondoggles. I can appreciate, from a comedy perspective, blinkered and hubristic social policy wonks as well as much as the next fellow -- but to see them holding up a broken chair and cracking a licorice whip against a charismatic buffoon bully-boy, and imagining that they're the ones in control, strikes me as a formula for disaster.

WHAT, THOSE PEOPLE USE THE INTERNET TOO?

Michael C. Moynihan, formerly of Reason (the magazine, not the capacity for consciously making sense of things, obviously), goes blar har over the latest political correctness:

His buddies concur: "Good grief. How about 'might not contain the same views as yours. Go ahead and listen; stretch your personal envelope,'" "What, did someone in the program use a gender-specific pronoun or something?" etc.

You may recall that Buckley was a full-throated segregationist and white supremacist:

He didn’t stop there. In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

And this is from the WNYC broadcast descriptor:

During the question period [Buckley] endorses the concept of a "white backlash" if it means repudiating the views of such black leaders as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Bayard Rustin.

Maybe these are the kind of sentiments that WNYC wanted to warn visitors about. Do these guys really think it's a bad thing if the website thinks some black kid might like a simple heads-up before opening a file from an advocate of "white backlash"? Probably -- I expect they think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a big statist nuisance too, depriving consumers of the freedom to discover poison in their food by eating it.

I'm not crazy about trigger warnings and other sissy evasions of rough and tumble public discourse, but if someone wants to warn Jews that Hitler's about to make his big pitch, or warn blacks that William F. Buckley is about to speak, I count that as elementary good manners.

UPDATE. In comments, Maclean's cultural critic Jaime Weinman reminds us of the trigger-warnings-avant-la-lettre that have appeared before old cartoons that feature pickaninnies and whatnot for many years now:

I'm pretty reflexively anti-PC (or anti-anti-anti-PC?) but I also think the most important thing above all is to keep stuff available and uncut, whether it's a cartoon or a radio interview. And I don't think people realize that the choice is between sending this stuff out in public with a warning and not sending it out at all.

"No longer politically or socially appropriate" is awkward phrasing, I admit, but then Warner Brothers' first try at a content warning for cartoons had Whoopi Goldberg walking out to warn us. They replaced this with a disclaimer card. It's a work in progress.

I can understand how the degradation of black people might be something some viewers (including black people) would want to avoid; I can also understand why some viewers would want to see the cartoons as they were meant to be presented, not shot full of censor-holes. (I should mention that syndicates also cut non-racial things out of cartoons, like Porky and Daffy's iron lung gag.) The warning seems a reasonable accommodation, but I can also understand how that lets libertarians out.

STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM.

Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds says capitalism is great and you stupid intellectuals are just jealous of capitalism because you don't make as much money as capitalists. (It seems Donald Trump's influence on the movement is really spreading.) Reynolds writes:

At the same time, markets deliver the bad news whether you want to hear it or not, but delivering the bad news is not a sign of failure, it is a characteristic of systems that work. When you stub your toe, the neurons in between your foot and your head don’t try to figure out ways not to send the news to your brain. If they did, you’d trip a lot more often. Likewise, in a market, bad decisions show up pretty rapidly: Build a car that nobody wants, and you’re stuck with a bunch of expensive unsold cars; invest in new technologies that don’t work, and you lose a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. These painful consequences mean that people are pretty careful in their investments, at least so long as they’re investing their own money.

If that's true, how'd the Perfesser and all his pals miss the 2008 recession? The neurons in his economic foot weren't working too goddamn good then.

Well, I expect there's an excuse having to do with "crony capitalism" somewhere. Lagniappe: The Perfesser bolsters his case by making fun of foreign socialist dictators out of Bananas:

It is simple really: When the "Great Leader" builds a new stadium, everyone sees the construction. Nobody sees the more worthwhile projects that didn’t get done instead because the capital was diverted, through taxation, from less visible but possibly more worthwhile ventures — a thousand tailor shops, bakeries or physician offices.

Or did he just get confused and use Scott Walker as an example?

UPDATE. In comments, ADHDJ: "Remember when Reynolds was predicting in early 2009 Obama was going to destroy the stock market? The DJIA has more than doubled in the seven years since he made that pronouncement. I'm sure Reynolds' opinion of Obama has changed accordingly -- the market demands it!"

AND IF YOU LISTEN CLOSELY, YOU'LL FIND HE HAS A SLIGHT LISP.

Jonah Goldberg explains that Donald Trump isn't the "politically correct" he-man he purports to be:

So first let me say, as I said to the caller, that I agree that political correctness is a huge problem, one I’ve written about many times (often punctuated with many un-PC jokes). 

One can imagine. ("So black not even The Man can keep it down!")

Second, as I also said to him, maybe I’m not the one who is befuddled. Perchance Trump fans are the ones who are confused, while I see the man more clearly... 

It is a lie that Donald Trump stands athwart political correctness, yelling Stop. For example, you may recall that Donald Trump and I got into a Twitter fight a few months back. At one point I wrote that he was “relentlessly tweeting like a 14-year-old girl.” 

How did Trump respond? If you guessed with Churchillian statesmanship, you guessed wrong. If you guessed with anti-PC fearlessness, you guessed wrong again. 

Instead, he played the political-correctness card. He said my tweet was a “horrible insult to women. Resign now or later!”  

I still love the “or later."

He followed up with more demands that I lose my job because of my insult to women.

In our debased era, portents of societal decay are all around us, like confetti at a Rip Taylor show. But this is a doozy: The author of a book about how liberals are fascists telling his Donald Trump fans that they should abandon their new idol because he played the war-on-women card like a PC sissy. Yeah, that'll move the needle. Doesn't Goldberg realize that none of Trump's followers, dumb as they may be, are so very dumb that they would take that "insult to women" stuff seriously? They recognize it for what it is, a mean joke -- because among guys like them, what else could a profession of sensitivity toward women possibly be?

If this is how Goldberg expects to keep the punters in the National Review tent, things must be worse than I thought. Perhaps it's time to drop the prices on those NR cruises, and add more proletarian on-board entertainments, like Goldberg on a dunking stool.

I DON'T CARE A STRAW FOR YOUR NEWSPAPER ARTICLES; MY CONSTITUENTS DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ, BUT THEY CAN'T HELP SEEING THEM DAMNED PARODY VIDEOS!

Funny or Die did a Planned Parenthood sting parody that's only borderline amusing in and of itself, but hilarious in its impact on dummies. Megan Fox of PJ Media:

Funny or Die has probably been on your Facebook feed once or twice. It is...

...that website that had that Will Ferrell bit with the little girl landlord who swears and the Zach Galifianakis interview with Barack Obama and some other online laffs, right? Thunderously no!

...a project founded by a spoiled rich kid who asked his very wealthy father to fund his frat-humor-turned-money-maker online comedy show. The wealthy daddy-benefactor is Mark Kvamme, who happens to be Governor Kasich’s sugar daddy. Kasich has been flying around in Kvamme’s jet with his campaign.

Are you not-laughing yet?

Unfortunately for Kasich (and Mark Kvamme), Michael Kvamme (pampered trust-fund baby) seems to think that Planned Parenthood’s scandalous and barbaric — not to mention illegal — methods of altering abortions to preserve organs to sell on the open market is funny.

Well, when you put it that way --

All of this is told by what I think might be minor celebrities (or semi-successful comedians) I’ve never heard of...

The video stars Kristin Wiig.*

Then Fox goes on about the latest real PP sting vid ("StemExpress employees taking blood samples from women and fetal tissue their aborted babies for research without their consent!") and yells at Funny or Die some more:

I’m surprised that this Funny or Die sketch didn’t go for broke and just make fun of aborted babies, like the pro-abortion Left usually does. Normally, when they are feeling secure in their dominance, they’ll really go for the disgusting abortion jokes.

Yeah, doesn't Jimmy Fallon do a couple of these every night?

None of that is in this video, which leads me to believe that they know exactly how much trouble Planned Parenthood is in and this is the best damage control they can manage.

They're only not doing these disgusting jokes because they know they'd get in trouble!  After a while she sniffs that Funny or Die is made up of "unfunny losers" and melts into a puddle.

You know why Donald Trump is really leading the GOP polls? Silly as Fox's column is, try thinking of it instead as a longform version of those Trump tweets in which The Donald lays down what he surely perceives as wisdom on subjects ranging from outside his expertise to in another universe from his expertise ("Everyone knows I am right that Robert Pattinson should dump Kristen Stewart. In a couple of years, he will thank me. Be smart, Robert"). Trump scores with conservatives because this is how they "analyze" everything -- that is, the same way Fox analyzes this modest video joke. They don't really think about it, they just react, making up ludicrous shit on the spot about how Kristin Wiig isn't anybody and those so-called comedians aren't really funny, etc. But in the silence that ensues, they have to imagine that people are cheering in response, whereas Trump has had the money and media access to train people to provide actual cheers. That's why they love him -- he's living their dream.

UPDATE. I see Greg Gutfeld, the Shecky Greene of Punching Down, had something to say about this parody video on his Fox News show. This line is already justly celebrated:

It's called Funny Or Die, but fetuses don't have that choice because they're already dead.

But with comedy greats like Gutfeld, the backswing is often choice too, and this one's no exception:

It's a shame that Funny Or Die didn't exist generations ago because they would have been great propagandists for Stalin.

And you thought the Jon Stewart butthurt was bad! Ain't culture-war hell? (I'm working from a partial transcript, so apologies if I missed any mention of Alinsky.)

*UPDATE 2. Commenters tell me that's not Kristin Wiig in the video -- apparently I misidentified Alice Wetterlund from The Interview and Silicon Valley. The whole cast is lesser-known comedians or, as Fox has it, "unfunny losers." Still pretty good, though.

BEST IN SHOW.

There are different kinds of conservative reactions to the hilarious phenomenon of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. There are lofty denunciations from rilly smart conservative True Scotsmen like this one from Charles C.W. Cooke: "Trump’s devotees consider themselves to be the rebels at the gates," he sniffs, but "by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuancless drones, as might be found in a novel by Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin" yeah yeah whatever Limey Brainiac hey didja see Trump smack down that fat bitch Rosie O'Donnell?

Others just compare Trump to other things they don't like, or blame him, as conservatives do everything else, on Obama; for example, here's some guy at the Washington Examiner who understandably did not demand attribution, bidding us "imagine America with an older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version of Obama as its president, and you get some idea of what Trump is all about," though he doesn't explain how Trump differs from an "older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version" of, say, Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

And there are outright Trump defenders, generally small fry or once-major wingnuts who no longer have anything left to lose, like Ben Shapiro.

But in a category all by herself is D.C. McAllister from The Federalist. Like Shapiro, she's upset that conservatives are dissing The Donald, but for her it's intensely personal, and by way of explanation she chronicles her own feelings from 2009 to the present. First:

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I felt helpless as I sat in front of the television in the fall of 2008, watching Barack Obama become the 45th president of the United States.

If only we had elections back then! Happily for McAllister, then came the Tea Party, which she characterizes as a response to the "huge government bailout of the housing market," a popular but woefully incomplete rightwing theory that doesn't explain what the Tea Partiers themselves actually yelled at their rallies. Bliss it was to be alive then, but alas, the tricorn rubes were teabagged by Anderson Cooper and stabbed in the back by the Republican Establishment. This taught McAllister that Mitch McConnell was no different from Barack Obama -- they both believed in "Money. Power. Cocktail parties. Media incest." So McAllister did what any patriot would do -- she became a blogger. "I made friends," she tells us, "and I made enemies because I didn’t care about playing politics.... I didn’t have a fancy degree. I didn’t have a fancy fellowship," unlike all us other web writers who went to Breadloaf with Saul Alinsky and swim in Moscow gold.

One of the things she discovered during this journey of personal discovery was that the Republican base was "motivated by fear," an assessment she stands by today:

Some might not want to admit this fact. It sounds weak, maybe even naive. But fear in the proper context is anything but naive. It’s wisdom based on experience and knowledge...

And this, brothers and sister, is where things get weird:

Let me explain a little something about human nature. When someone feels oppressed and controlled and you continue to belittle them and push them against the wall, they get angry. They’re not going to be particularly rational at that point. They’re in a corner and they lash out—that’s human nature. They fight. They get angry. They grab hold of whatever weapon they can find to defend themselves. That’s what you mostly see with Donald Trump. It’s anger, fueled by fear and stoked by insiders who continue to demean the base, who refuse to listen, and who want to maintain the status quo... 

This reminds me of a toxic relationship between a man and a woman in which the man continues to control the woman, keeping her from speaking her mind, calling her stupid whenever she does. She tries to find ways to win her independence, to be heard, to be free, but he keeps pushing her back against the wall, telling her that she’s the problem. Over time, the anger swells within her. She’s afraid. She isn’t free, and she hates it. She’s powerless. Anytime she tries to stand up for herself, she is mocked and slapped down. Her fear resides. Her anger grows. Her hope recedes. One day, she just loses it. She lights a match and burns the whole house to the ground. Give me liberty or give me death takes on a whole new meaning in the context of oppression and abuse.

RINO-abused with John McCain, then with Mitt Romney -- what choice does a true conservative have but to BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! It's a good thing McAllister can afford mental health coverage.

SCARE 'EM WITH CITIES.

Joel Kotkin, who’s been declaring urban life so over for years, is back to preach the gospel again to the conservatives who love his schtick. The last U.S. Census revealed a 12% jump in urban population between 2000 to 2010 – a significant reversal of decades of white flight – and the trend seems not to be reversing, but Kotkin still reassures the rubes that the outlands will always be #1:

Despite all the constant claims of a massive “return to the city,” urban populations are growing no faster than those in suburbs, and, in the past few years, far slower than those of the hated exurbs. This means we won’t see much change in the foreseeable future in the current 70 to 80 percent of people in metropolitan America who live in suburbs and beyond.

This seems rather defensive – who hates exurbs, besides the people forced to live in them? Anyway what really seems to bother Kotkin is that cities no longer give us Republican mayors like Rudy Giuliani, but commies like Bill de Blasio, and Republicans’ vote numbers in cities, traditionally lousy, are even worse than they used to be. Kotkin laments this as a sign of “increasingly homogeneous political culture,” because diversity suddenly ceases to be a swear word to conservatives when it benefits them.

What really seems to piss Kotkin off, though, is the kind of people who are beefing up the cities. The “white-majority, middle-class neighborhoods in places like Brooklyn, Queens and the San Fernando Valley” have gone away, replaced by “racial minorities, hipsters, and upper-class sophisticates” – a trifecta of rightwing boogeymen!

Kotkin complains about the collapse of manufacturing – as if it were caused by liberal elitism, not by rampaging capitalism – but seems less interested in giving poor and marginally educated citizens back their traditional employment than in nostalgia for old Archie Bunker types versus the young, black, collegiate crew that has supplanted them. The new-class resentment is so thick I thought at times I was reading a Megan McArdle column.

While I have never seen Kotkin disturbed by the vast gulf in wealth between Wall Street bankers and the lumpenproles, he is very sensitive to inequality now that hippie-commies are in on it:

This urban economy has created many of the most unequal places in the country. At the top are the rich and super-affluent who have rediscovered the blessings of urbanity, followed by a large cadre of young and middle-aged professionals, many of them childless.

These childless cadres go for “good restaurants, shops and festivals, not child-friendly parks and family-oriented stores. Sometimes even crazy notions—such as allowing people to walk through the streets of San Francisco naked—are tolerated in a way no child-centric suburb would allow.” You can practically hear his audience gasp at this like simple country folk watching a melodrama of wicked city life.

But any Sodom-and-Gomorrah story worth its pillar of salt must predict doom for the ungodly, and Kotkin obliges:

Such social imbalances are not, as is the favored term among the trendy, sustainable. We appear to be creating the conditions for a new wave of violent crime on a scale not seen since the early 1990s. Along with poverty, public disorderliness, gang activity, homelessness and homicides are on the rise in manyAmerican core cities, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and New York. Racial tensions, particularly with the police, have worsened. So even as left-leaning politicians try to rein in police, recent IRS data in Chicago reveals, the middle class appears to once again be leaving for suburban and other locales.

The plague-o-crime card is a popular favorite with this crew; we see it in cruder iterations at places like Infowars (“PROTESTERS DECLARE THEY ARE READY FOR WAR AS AMERICA’S IMPOVERISHED INNER CITIES THREATEN TO ERUPT“), but also at National Review, most recently in a story by Stephen Eide called “Revive Law-and-Order Conservatism”:

The spectacle of chaos descending on cities long dominated by Democrats obviously plays to the GOP’s advantage. Independent voters in purple-state suburbs don’t like riots. If next summer Philadelphia erupts around the time of the 2016 Democratic national convention, that’s going to be hard for the Left to explain.

This is so wonderfully ripe you almost want to ignore Eide’s vague nod to the facts – “Yes, murders, assaults, and robberies have plummeted since the early 1990s, but the peak was very high to begin with.” (Since he buried it, apparently he’d like you ignore it, too.) But whether up or down, crime is important as the talisman with which the GOP will win nervous honky voters. But first the brethren have to toughen up:

But short-term political calculations aside, Republican candidates must provide leadership on this issue. Conservative attitudes toward crime and punishment are notably softer now than they have been in many decades. Nebraska, which hasn’t voted Democratic in a presidential election since 1964, outlawed the death penalty in May.

That “libertarian moment” was fun while it lasted, but there’s an election coming up, and so it’s back to magic lantern shows of “racial minorities, hipsters, and upper-class sophisticates” casting long shadows across the electorally-fruited plain.

IT'S ALWAYS PROJECTION.

Both at The Federalist -- first:

Farewell To Jon Stewart, The Left’s Donald Trump

and:

But Stewart is no more an honest newsman than, say, Donald Trump is a serious presidential candidate.

Meanwhile:

Jeb: Trump's rhetoric 'reminds me of Barack Obama'

Of course Bush is not smart enough to make this up himself -- earlier:

Marco Rubio Says Obama Is Like Trump

 No round-up of dumbasses would be complete without David Brooks:

...bumper-car politicians thrive. Bernie Sanders is swimming with the tide. He’s a conviction politician comfortable with class conflict...
The times are perfect for Donald Trump...

Over t'England they have a forthright Labour candidate and guess what:

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are two of a kind

The one thing wingnuts can't admit is that Trump is their own id monster, so they have to tell themselves and anyone else who'll listen that he's actually the same thing as other people they also don't like, for reasons that don't make any sense.

If this travesty goes on much longer the name "Donald Trump" will take its place with "9/11" and "political correctness" as terms that used to mean something but, thanks to overuse by conservatives as fake synonyms for "liberal," no longer mean anything at all.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

Trump’s rise is, like that of his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders...

They have so much in common. For one thing, Sanders "once wrote that women dream of gang rape," or at least his writings can be thus willfully misinterpreted. Plus Sanders is "an avowed socialist." Why, it's like they're twins -- no wonder you always see Sanders hanging around at Trump's casinos,  goosing the cocktail waitresses! Further, Reynolds says,

Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential [?-ed] essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation...

Those of you familiar with Codevilla's and Reynolds' schtick will know their standard solution for this is the election of  rightwing Republicans -- a groovy anti-ruling-class revolution that surprising coincides with the goals of the RNC. (The "country party" of true sons of liberty, Codevilla writes, "in the short term at least... has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party." Trust us, comrades, once we cut taxes on the rich it's on to Jerusalem!) The Tea Party act with its knee-breeches and triconers has gotten a bit long in the tooth, though -- maybe this time they should cosplay 60s radicals instead, and march around dressed as members of S.W.I.N.E. What the hell, they're led by a tenured radical.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I had the great pleasure and privilege to see Harold Prince's

stripped-down version of Candide on Broadway in 1974 and still 

appreciate its crispness, but I just love the original version of this song.  

•   I think I made the right choice to skip the debate and go see Loudon Wainwright III last night. He opened with "Double Lifetime" and "Heaven," which set the tone -- death and jokes! Wainwright seems to have repurposed some of his material from his Surviving Twin thing about fathers and sons -- in fact he not only prefaced some of his songs with bits from his father's Life magazine columns, he even performed one of those columns as a  comic monologue. I wanted more songs but it made an interesting point of comparision: LWII's stuff is pretty good for magazine work; it's well-crafted and has the old-fashioned, better sort of middle-class attitude toward the big issues -- that is, a becoming gratitude for one's privilege, and respect for the mysteries of love and death and the inadequacy of privilege before them. It strikes me that his son picked up some of that, and though he likes to be more irreverent and playful that's still his grounding. Which may really be the reason he never got to be a big star -- not because of the "novelty-store garlic gum" bitter surprise lyrics I blamed when I wrote about him years ago, but because his truths are literally old home truths, a hard sell to a pop music audience (unless of course you lie about the truths).  Concert highlights: A song for his upcoming Alaskan family boondoggle called "Meet the Wainwrights" ("Rufus used to be a tit man/Now he checks out pecs at the gym"), and a really good "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House," a song that sounds pretty mature considering it debuted in 1971.

•   Tell you why else I think I made the right call: I saw the video clip where Donald Trump excuses calling women "fat pigs" on the grounds that "this country" doesn't have time for "political correctness," and I have to say he exceeds even my satirical gifts. I also see that the mainstream National Review conservatives, who were pissed when Trump began hogging attention, are starting to love him for it.  A month ago Jonah Goldberg was calling Trump a fraud -- now he says, "[Trump] makes the debates entertaining and his competitors look more serious and responsible -- what’s so bad about that?" which suggests that they could have gotten the same effect with the Iron Sheik, who I understand has a higher Q rating. Jim Geraghty crows that Trump "killed with that 'Only Rosie O’Donnell' line" (in re women as fat pigs); he's slightly more protective of Megyn Kelly, which is perhaps just his way of showing that there's no principle of chivalry at stake, he just like fat jokes about lib chicks. I wonder what election this is meant to win? These guys already had date rapists and gamergaters locked up. On the plus side, Ben Carson mentioned Alinsky, thereby alerting whatever normal people may have been watching to this weird conservative secret handshake, which ought to help them decide how seriously to take the Republican Party as presently constituted.

UPDATE. Gack:

"[Megyn Kelly] gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump said in a CNN interview. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"...

How will the Trumpenproletariat react? Let's see what Breitbart.com commenters have to say about it:

The more toffee-nosed cons protest: National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke sputters, "Trump has no attractive qualities at all. He's not a conservative, he's not a good politician, he's not eloquent, he has no experience." Which seems a harsh thing to say about his party's front-runner.

THAT'S NOT FUNNY! OR, MICROAGGRESSING THE WINGNUTS.

As we have seen, the winding down of the Jon Stewart show has prompted a right-wing sputterfest. Now we are at the close, and some of the brethren are seizing the last-minute opportunity to steer some hapless internet bazaar patrons into their tents. The Federalist has two essays devoted to this -- one in which a Washington Free Beacon writer insists Jonah Goldberg really mopped the floor with Stewart, thereby executing the prized clickbait-logroll; another in which the house hipster actually says out loud that "Jon Stewart Isn’t Funny Because He’s a Coward" and "The purpose of the show is to entertain, sure, but the purpose of the entertainment is to discredit political opponents of the Left." To be fair he didn't mention Alinsky, which may be a sign that ol' Saul has fallen out of fashion (maybe at this moment all the cool kids in Woodside are citing the Frankfurt School, or some even more obscure conspiracy you squares haven't heard of), but it's the same idea: laughter is illegitimate if it's at your expense.

Oh, and they both compare Stewart to Donald Trump, because words that end in "Trump" are funny. It's amazing no enterprising conservative has explained yet how Will Rogers was a shill for Roosevelt. Get scribbling, crybabies!

UPDATE. Reason has a video about how Stewart is "full of shit," but do you seriously expect me to watch a Reason video? Have you ever seen one of those things? They make PJTV look like HBO.

UPDATE 2. The tears just keep on coming: At The American Spectator, Aaron Goldstein's actual subhed is "Jon Stewart is neither as funny nor as smart as he thinks he is." That'll show him! Goldstein goes on: the show "is more smart-ass than smart. It is the sort of humor geared to the mentality of a 12-year old... The approval Stewart receives from his audience and critics isn’t because he’s actually funny, it’s because they agree with him... Simply put, Stewart thinks he’s a lot smarter than he actually is." Then Goldstein pushes out his lower lip, dips his head, and stomps back to his deserted clubhouse. Cheer up, Aaron, you've given my readers lots of laughs in the past, and I assume more are to come.

UPDATE 3. Never sleep on alicublog commenters, e.g. Dex: "First they ignore you, then they say that you aren't as smart as you think you are, then they say Jonah Goldberg totally laid a sweet burn on you back in 2007 or whenever it was, then they say you were actually conservative."

GOLDBERG BONANZA!

Jonah Goldberg has had a fartful morning. At The Corner, he reacts to a feature about Chelsea Clinton -- first, by acknowledging that he wrongly characterized it as a puff piece without reading it  (for which he blames Twitter, no dog or intern being handy); then, by taking the opportunity to harsh on C. Clinton at length for -- well, for existing, it would seem, and for allegedly being a "total political mediocrity" which might mean something if 1.) the current GOP Presidential field did not exist as a point of comparison and 2.) C. Clinton were actively running for something. (She has said she's "open" to running for office in the future.) Also, she only got where she got to because of her family. "Are there many average people who can take inspiration from Chelsea’s 'struggle'?" asks Goldberg. "I doubt it." (To quote August J. Pollak, "PLEASE tell me Jonah Goldberg is whining about someone getting where they are because of their parents." Oh, here's a bonus.)

Goldberg then tries a few carom shots to get at Hillary via Chelsea ("she is also a total political mediocrity. In this sense she takes entirely after her mother," "she certainly didn’t get her dad’s political chops. This is pure Hillary," etc.), but this hot mother-daughter action isn't really doing it for him so eventually he just unpantloads:

As for the bit about her being the closest thing America has to a princess, well, when you think about it for a second, I think that’s right. The problem is that the closest thing to a princess in America is very, very, very far from an actual, you know, princess. We don’t do royalty here very well. The thing that makes her most princess-like is that she really doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself except get caught up in the lie of her family business. What I mean is that she may actually believe that the Clintons are a kind of secular royalty and a dynasty. No doubt she’s been told that a lot. No doubt her parents don’t loop her in on the seamier side of how the Tudors of the Ozarks operate. She probably thinks the primary purpose of the Clinton Foundation is philanthropy rather than extending the Clinton brand and empire, in much the same way descendants of the original medieval robber barons believe their family has always been about public service. Bless her heart

There is no coherent meaning to the paragraph other than "Are you proud of me now, Mom?" In the ancient tradition of Goldberg's less-connected colleagues coming to his rescue, Jim Geraghty tries to hand Goldberg a much stronger case against C. Clinton -- that she's been promoted beyond her competence in the media world due to her celebrity -- to which Goldberg responds that he entirely agrees "about the broader phenomenon of Chelsea Clinton, which is why I assumed that Contrera’s piece was just another one of these insipid sweeteners." Well, Jim, you tried.

Goldberg also has an anti-Planned Parenthood article that starts with the kind of bloody fetus prose-poems that have become his movement's new lazy-man equivalent of clinic protesting, and proceeds to what I'm sure he thinks is a brainstorm:

...It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” 

It was at least partly on these Jeffersonian grounds that proponents of removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds won their argument. The statehouse belongs to everyone, and forcing those who abhor that flag to pay for it, even symbolically and even if many of its supporters meant no offense, is still sinful.

Well, if you don’t believe that a fetus with arms, legs, a face and a brain is an actual human life worthy of protecting, or at least deserving of a level of respect greater than a hangnail, it’s doubtful anyone will ever persuade you otherwise.  

But maybe you can still accept that other people disagree with you. Abortion is not simply a symbolic act, but perhaps it would help to see it as one. And, if you can muster that much imagination, maybe you can also understand why those truly offended by the practice don’t want their tax dollars subsidizing it.

In other words: Look, be fair -- we took down our tributes to the Confederacy, the least you can do is enact the Hyde Amendment what you already did well no uh because fungible did I say that right and in conclusion  farrrrrrtttt.

WHAT TO EXPECT.

I’m busy Thursday, but it’s okay because I have some great inside dope on how that Republican debate will go down from a lady who said she was psychic, or a sidekick, or psycho, I don't know, but she sounded sure of herself. Here are the good parts:

Chris Christie, emaciated and frail, will appear confused and rambling, and after ten seconds break down and admit to America, “It’s this goddamn lapband surgery. They told me after a while I wouldn’t miss it — that great big old styrofoam clamshell heaped with hot ground beef and peppers and a loaf of French bread on the side — Big Gulps lined up like shots at a wild west saloon - and I know, I know I couldn’t get all that down now if I tried — but I want it.” His jaw will press forward, showing teeth: ”I goddamn WANT IT!” he’ll roar, falling ravenously upon the fingers of Donald Trump, which he will have mistaken in his delirium for sausages, and be hauled off the stage.

“The media elite, they’re lying about me,” Ben Carson will say. “Once again, they’re saying I compared Obama to Hitler.” The crowd will groan. “But it’s true,” Carson will say. "They say that. But it’s not the same thing. It’s just not the same thing to say this: Look everybody, I’m Obama," and then he’ll give a Nazi salute and goose-step around the stage, dropping on the ground little fetus effigies made of surimi and mashing them with his jackboots. This will receive wild applause, which will mostly drown out Carson crying “FINAL SOLUTION FOR UNBORN BABIES,” which Fox News commentators will later claim was actually a Bible quotation about food stamps.

Ted Cruz will come onstage with a rifle, hold it over his head, and cry, “COME AND TAKE IT!” to wild applause. But when the applause dies down he’ll still be holding up the rifle. “I’m serious,” he’ll say. “Come and take it! I don’t see any of you coming forward, just as no one came forward when Hitler laid a specter over Western Europe. And then — came the war.” Cruz will fire the rifle into the ceiling, a chunk of which will come down and fall heavily on Marco Rubio, knocking him unconscious. “Poor Marco,” Cruz will cry as he is restrained by guards, “another victim of Obama’s appeasement.”

Jeb Bush will seem at first to be doing well, if only by comparison and very clumsily ("This Iran deal is not a deal with, actually it is, it's a deal of the devil, with the devil. Not the literal devil, I don't believe Obama is... it's not the devil but the devil's in the details and it's a bad deal"). But someone in the control room will notice that Bush's responses are tracking remarkably closely with the reactions of a live dial-testing group conducted by Frank Luntz on CNN. The moderator will bring this up, and Bush will go into a spasm, ejecting from his jacket some sort of device that will break into pieces on the floor. "Fourscore and seven years ago," Bush will say as the pieces are swept up and inspected, "ask not what your country, my fellow America."

Instead of responding appropriately to questions, Donald Trump will at every availability promote his new project, Trump Branson. Sample: "This Obama's making a mess of everything, but he can't make a mess of Branson, Missouri, wonderful town, beautiful people, and site of the new Trump Branson, a ten-thousand unit hotel, entertainment and fine dining complex in the heartland of America. That's ten THOUSAND, as in four zeroes, like the zeroes we have running against me here tonight." At one point he will demand that, in lieu of his response to a question on national infrastructure, a Trump Branson promotional film be shown. And it will be.

"I'm not saying that old-fashioned siding isn't quaint or it didn't do the job it was supposed to do," Scott Walker will say. "I'm saying that this new siding is made of carborundum, and it can't rust, it can't break, if lightning hits it it won't conduct the electricity, if you hit it with a missle it'll just turn that missle into a little old crumpled ball of paper and drop it on the ground, like I'm dropping these coffee grounds here, and I'm doing it to make a point, which is that this vacuum cleaner can pick up anything, coffee grounds, dust, rocks, pencils, candy wrappers, the people of Israel, the unborn, I don't care what anyone says, death threats, intimidation, with your prayers, and my wife and I feel them, we will pick up anything and everything, and that's a promise from me to you."

The other candidates will just go "awwwwwwk" and turn into steam. And 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.