OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the National Review anti-Trump issue and the schism it reveals among rightbloggers. It's sort of like the schism in the Republican Party, only instead of quotes from some guy at a Trump rally we have quotes from people with websites and, in some cases, budgets, which do not necessarily make them more coherent.

UPDATE. In comments, Yastreblyansky refers to one of the NR "Against Trump" contributors I didn't quote, William Kristol. Kristol's rhetorical linchpin in this case is "in a letter to National Review, Leo Strauss wrote that 'a conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity' ...Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?" Yastreblyansky has the bad taste to remember what Kristol was saying about "vulgar" Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin some years back. It's amazing that someone so willing to say any goddamn thing as Kristol yet remains the wrongest man in the world.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I like the Bob Luman version okay, but this one sounds lonesomer.

•   National Review has decided to stand athwart Trump, yelling "Stop!" -- which is rather ungracious of them because, despite their protests, he's their Frankenstein, his candidacy the logical evolution of their politics of demonization and dumbassery. Or maybe it's better to say he's NR's Shakespeare, a great popularizer, raiding their ancient classics to make blood-and-thunder crowd-pleasers. Nearly every shtick he pulls -- the superiority of the super-rich, peace through belligerence, xenophobia -- was previously promoted in the pages of NR, but writ fancy-like, to make it look respectable to dummies. Trump had the genius to realize that Republican voters, at least, no longer need all those pseud curlicues; why trifle with the coy racism of Mark Krikorian, for example, when you can hear about a Giant Wall Against Messican Rapists from a Man of the People, and roar along yourself?  In fact I'm sure that's one of the reasons National Review is going hard against him: when conservatism under Trump is reduced to its essence -- namely broadsides, ring shouts, and racial slurs -- what will happen to their editorial wingnut welfare? (The other reason, probably more important, is that Trump won't promise to destroy Social Security, which is a deal-breaker for the guys who pay their wingnut welfare.)

•   Should you venture into that National Review Trump thing and find yourself struggling, go straight to the Thomas Sowell part; while the other guys either sputter or rage or sputter with rage, Sowell is in approximately the same territory as the Major in The Magnificent Ambersons ("Sun... Earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the Earth..."), a place where Godwin's Law is not only broken but also strewn around in bits:

No national leader ever aroused more fervent emotions than Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. Watch some old newsreels of German crowds delirious with joy at the sight of him. The only things at all comparable in more recent times were the ecstatic crowds that greeted Barack Obama when he burst upon the political scene in 2008.

Elections, however, have far more lasting and far more serious—or even grim—consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.

Perón, Obama, Hitler: An Eternal Golden Braid. Yeah, these guys will save conservatism.

THE PATTERN BECOMES CLEAR!

From the cacophony of their commentary, conservatives seem of late to be experiencing all the Kübler-Ross stages of grief simultaneously.  Jonah Goldberg, sent out to enforce wingnut orthodoxy in the face of the Trump-Palin challenge, is basically just going homina homina homina like Ralph Kramden caught in a harebrained scheme ("The problem is this implicit notion that if you are an 'establishment candidate' you aren’t a 'real' conservative. It may be true that if you are an establishment candidate you aren’t a populist" farrrt). The others have been telling each other Trump is Obama's fault so much that they seem at this point to bore one another.

So credit for initiative to Mario Loyola at National Review, who digs into history to get to the heart of the matter: It's not Obama who's to blame, it's that bastard FDR and his political equivalent in Europe, the Third Reich.

The Nazis succeeded in selling themselves as the solution to the workers’ plight. Of course, they were nothing of the sort. Hitler promptly led German workers from a bad situation into an infinitely worse one, a world war that ended in the destruction of whole cities, the deaths of 3.4 million German soldiers, and a record of crimes against humanity that will forever shame that people more than any other had organized Western civilization. 

What bears remembering here are the worries that led Friedrich Hayek to write his classic treatise, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek started his most famous work in Britain, and worked hard to finish it after the Anschluss joined his native Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. He wrote it in English, for English-speaking audiences, to warn them that the road to the serfdom of totalitarian rule starts with the embrace of socialist policies. Hayek argued that replacing market competition and stable rules with heavy-handed regulations and arbitrary control of social outcomes leads inexorably toward tyranny. 

He saw the great English-speaking peoples committing the same mistake the Germans had made in embracing the socialist policies of administrative government 30 years earlier. He saw them sleepwalking down the same road to serfdom, and he wanted to warn them of the consequences. Though one book could hardly make a difference, his timing was impeccable. In the United States, the Supreme Court had just caved in to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had dismantled just enough of the U.S. Constitution to make way for socialist policies and the capture of government by special interests.

Makes you wonder why Roosevelt sent us to war against Hitler, when to hear Loyola tell it they were basically after the same thing.  Bonus points for this:

My purpose here is not to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, which would be preposterous and stupid...

Wait for it...

...but rather to show how dangerous it can be for working-class folks to lose trust in the leaders of mainstream democratic parties. The Nazi Party styled itself a workers’ party. Its opposition message was essentially the same as that of Michael Moore in movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11...

Maybe we should have a Godwin Challenge to check the speed with which columnists transition from citation of Godwin's Law to breaking it.

SEVEN COME ELEVEN, SNAKE EYES WATCHING YOU.

Oh, thank fuck, there’s a transcript, I don’t have to listen to her psycho Tupperware party pitch. Though from what I did hear on C-Span, I have to say Sarah Palin's delivery today was a lot more focused and easier to follow than it was at CPAC ’14, where she performed Kabuki versions of ancient wingnut tropes. Well, of course, Palin’s a pro — she knew this time the audience was not those weary shock troops of the movement, looking for a little pep talk, but the restless masses who might follow Trump — people who have the same bitterness in their souls as the CPAC attendees but don’t know the cues and need a little more reason-why. Sure, she hauled out the “weak-kneed, capitulator-in-chief” routine, and shouted hopey-changey; she had to remind the crowd who she was. But the heart of her speech came out of a slightly different tradition:

He’s been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system. The way that the system really works, and please hear me on this, I want you guys to understand more and more how the system, the establishment, works, and has gotten us into the troubles that we are in in America. The permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class, and that’s why you see that the borders are kept open. For them, for their cheap labor that they want to come in. That’s why they’ve been bloating budgets. It’s for crony capitalists to be able suck off of them… 

Look what’s happening today. Our own GOP machine, the establishment, they who would assemble the political landscape, they’re attacking their own frontrunner. Now would the Left ever, would the DNC ever come after their frontrunner and her supporters?…

It’s a little too easy to say “stabbed in the back,” though Dolchstoßlegende is certainly part of what she’s peddling. The “crony capitalists” bit is the tip-off. What do you do with a Party of Business that, eight years after they left the economy a smoking ruin, still can’t bring themselves offer anything better than tax breaks for the rich and Social Security cuts? You talk about the betrayed ideal of true capitalism, not crony capitalism but the real deal.

This is not so much an indictment against the nameless other as an excuse for previous Republican disasters: Last time was fucked up, but this time we’re going to make it work! Capitalism is, in the ideal, a hit or miss proposition, at least if you believe (as Republicans must) that your current losing streak is something that's gotta break because baby needs a new pair of shoes. And as a cartoon capitalist of the old school, Trump is just the man for this approach: His career may have been, in its own small way, as much a bankruptcy-prone disaster as the Bush economy, but look at him with his expensive suits and his swagger, he came out smelling like a rose!  Despite their famous optimism, Palin and Trump aren't offering a sure thing; they're just telling voters they may as well put their chips on them, so at least in the interval before the croupier sweeps those chips away you can enjoy the promise and presence of a winner.

UPDATE. Comments are, as ever, a joy. Hearing La Palin cry, "the permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class," redoubtagain adds, "whereupon she pledged to donate all of SarahPAC to Trump. (Oh, that's not in the transcript? Never mind.)"

Even better are the conservatives whining, like Neil Young on "Tired Eyes," it wasn't supposed to go down that way! At The Federalist, Robert Tracinski:

We have been tempted into embracing as our leaders and spokesmen a series of media personalities whose main selling point is that they are outrageous and controversial and like to stick a finger in they eye of the Mainstream Media and infuriate “the Establishment” and the “PC Left.” 

All of which is well and good, if it is in pursuit of a coherent pro-freedom ideology, by which I mean a coherent view of the world and of the role of government as embodied in a broad and consistent political agenda. That’s what Rush Limbaugh used to do.

Remember when it was all about the mega-dittos, man?

But when we embrace these media personalities, the danger is that we will end up just having the outrageous and flamboyant personality, without the coherent ideology...

...namely, tax breaks for the wealthy and persecution of minorities! And Trump and Palin had to spoil it! You and I may not deserve what's happening, brothers and sisters, but at least the pig-fuckers are getting a bit of agita as well.

UPDATE 2. OK, here's the line of the day, and possibly the decade, from former CNN correspondent Erick Erickson:

Sarah Palin gives Trump legitimacy.

They'll be putting us in camps soon enough, but for the time being this is really fucking funny.

UPDATE 3. National Review's David French is upset that his fellow conservatives are piling on his wife's former meal ticket:

I’m not saying she’s beyond criticism or that one should support Trump because of her endorsement.. but perhaps we should consider that the combination of her personal relationship with Trump, her personal experience suffering from years of the most vicious and personal attacks directed at any current or former politician in the United States, and her deep convictions regarding policy priorities for the next president have led her to this decision. In other words, she’s not simply hunting for headlines — she’s doing what she thinks is best for the country she loves.

You can almost see the looks of incredulity on readers' faces, ratcheting from bemusement on "personal relationship with Trump" to squinting disbelief on "suffering" to gaping incredulity on "deep convictions" until finally, at "best for the country she loves," they explode in laughter. Well, everybody gotta eat.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' pissing and moaning over the sailors and prisoners released from Iranian custody. This is such a clear-cut case of conservatives trying to portray an undeniable Obama accomplishment as something shameful that I'm surprised more hasn't been written about it.

Source-wise this was a embarrassment of riches, accent on embarrassment. Take Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag. He sucks in general ("Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," 2013) but when the cause is extra hopeless his propaganda gets extra foamy. After one long snarl ("Iran isn't even bothering to threaten Obama. It just slaps him around") failed to disgorge his Obama rage, Greenfield wrote a post called "IRAN IS TRAINING OBAMA LIKE A DOG," using not, as you'd expect, a metaphor about Iranian masters Pavlovizing a drooling Obama, but one in which the dog controls the master:

What Obama has going on with Iran isn't mutual. It's a relationship in which Iran's ‘moderates’ show that Western governments can be trained to give them what they want or they'll make a mess on the floor by taking hostages or blatantly violating nuclear protocols... 

Iran knows how to use diplomacy, but its intentions are not diplomatic. So instead it's using diplomacy to train Obama and his European allies to dispense more treats even as it continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program. 

And the most pathetic part of this is that Obama and the Europeans have been trained to treat every payout like a victory.

Yee-eah, so Iran is like a dog that cheats to get treats... except they're still a dog and Obama's still the master. Concise analysis. Maybe Greenfield had a longer version in which the Iranian dog attacks Obama because its brain got too big for its skull from all those treats, but someone at FrontPageMag decided to edit for a change.

Anyway, have a look at the column. Some good ones there too.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See first item below

•  At the Old Firm's latest Pazz & Jop poll, Robert Christgau says something I took to heart:

One reason I’m so glad Pazz & Jop still exists is that for all of its flaws, it does provide kind of a consensus, so that if you go, if you’re still interested in albums, you go down to 300, you find stuff that you’ve never heard of, and every once in awhile, you find something that’s really good... You don’t just look at the Top 40: you go down to 300 and you make a list and hear most of it in one place or another. It’s better than checking out the track of the day on fifteen different blogs.

Thus, our F'RTH videos this week: Pile, "Mr. Fish" from You're Better Than This, #265; Joanna Gruesome, "Last Year" from Peanut Butter, #287; Carol Lipnik, "Almost Back to Normal" from album of same name, #309; and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, "Waiting for Blood" from The Night Creeper, #330. I look forward to more spelunking.

•  Jonathan Chait thinks he sees the GOP capitulating to Trump:

Indeed, Trump’s numbers have not only risen, but the entire backdrop of his position has changed. The percentage of Republican voters who could see themselves supporting Trump has grown from 23 percent last March to 65 percent now. Trump could now beat Marco Rubio (a popular figure within the party) in a head-to-head matchup. He remains far from inevitable. The first vote will still not be cast for weeks. Yet those of us who believed Republican elites would kill Trump’s candidacy out of self-preservation have to face the increasingly plausible prospect that, for whatever reason, they may lay down their arms before a shot has been fired.

I said in December, and believe to this day, that while some prominent conservative propagandists have learned, let us say, a strange new respect for Trump lately, Trump will not be the nominee. For one thing, no one really knows if he even has a get-out-the-vote operation. "Trump campaign officials declined to provide information about its GOTV effort" to the Washington Times, a not-unfriendly organization, though those officials do tell WashTimes "Mr. Trump has taken steps to set up a robust operation." Smells like bullshit, don't it? Also, look at his fundraising. This is a Potrumpkin campaign! But the main thing is: The RNC is not a bunch of assholes. I mean, they are, but not in that sense; history suggests they have their best shot since 2004 this year; they know it, and they're not about to blow it by letting a TV buffoon (who owes them nothing) represent the GOP to an electorate which -- and people keep forgetting this -- is not entirely comprised of Republicans. This ain't a student council election, hell, it ain't even the Golden Globes. If there's a threat they'll find a way to block it. I suppose I can only afford to be so definite because if they do nominate Trump I will no longer care even as little as I do about being embarrassed, because I will have become emotionally prepared for the End Times.  But there you are.

•  The whole Ted Cruz "New York values" thing is beyond idiotic, but the duh-prize goes to Todd Starnes at Fox News, who near the end of his sub-literate yak says New York values are "the kind of values that would compel someone to use a national tragedy like 9-11 to score cheap political points." Man, someone hasn't been paying attention, or at least hopes no one else has.

RETRONUTS.

The National Institutes of Health is one of America's greatest accomplishments. It does the slow, hard work of building up medical research that turns into cures and better health for our citizens. They're the reason we got fluoride in our water. The built the Human Genome Database. Here's an accounting of just some of their research internal breakthroughs (not to speak of work done with their grants). Their scientists have won 87 Nobel Prizes. I've been in their clinical trials for years and I can tell you they are one impressive bunch.

Ben Howe from RedState thinks they're a bunch of malingerers growing fat off Gummint welfare:

In case you thought that Republicans had in any way turned their back on frivolous spending, here is a reminder that they have not. According to The Atlantic, Republicans have completely surrendered on even the idea of curtailing government spending on frivolous research that could just as easily be funded by the private sector. 

In this case, we’re talking about funding for the National Institutes of Health, which I’m sure does many useful things, but also spends a lot of money on really dumb experiments that have been done over and over again for years with self-evident results. A choice example of waste in taxpayer-funded “research spending” is seeing whether monkeys being addicted to cocaine has adverse health consequences for monkeys.

Haw haw! They's givin' cocaine ta monkeys! They should ask them monkeys why they ain't ee-volved yet! Also, they studied sexual responsiveness in rats, which is also ridiculous, like that time in the 1940s they experimented with X-rays and rat tumors. Using radiation to kill cancer! Have you ever heard such a crazy idea!

This is such an ancient trope -- crazy scientists doing outrageous experiments with money you could be investing in my uranium mine -- that I wonder if anyone actually falls for it. My guess is even Howe doesn't believe in it; its appeal is almost entirely nostalgic and emotional, based on fading memories of vaudeville comedians in fright wigs running around with giant hypodermic needles. In fact, in a way it's a scientific experiment in itself -- how little or how much power to enrage does this ancient bullshit still hold? Guess we'll find out!

JINGO JERKOFFS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOTU NRO LOL.

Hee hee.

Hee hee hee.

Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee 

Ah, I see their tweets are slowing down:

And getting pissy:

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

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

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

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

Oh, and in conclusion...

...fart.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg extended fart!

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightbloggers' latest spasms of gunsense spurred by Obama's executive actions last week.

Longtime readers may know I have more sympathy with the 2nd Amendment absolutists than most liberals. But when I read shit like what I had to pick through for this column, and actually pay attention to their distortions and willful hysterics, it's hard to miss that conservatives are far less interested in the Constitutional right to dispense 800 rounds a minute at will than they are in maintaining a political equity that keeps their more bellicose constituents happy.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Funeral today tomorrow. Words of wisdom from the deceased. 

•   When Obama said he was going to do all those gun orders, Charles C.W. Cooke did a long, weirdly wound-up post called "President Obama Has Let His Emotion Get the Better of His Judgment":

Has Obama lost his mind? This is a man, remember, who is supposed to be admirably dispassionate; a man who is supposed to understand how the game is played; a man who is supposed to reflexively refuse to be taken in by the emotion of the moment. And yet he’s going to use a good deal of his last year’s political capital in order to tweak a few minor rules around the edges? Why?

Also, "Which is to say that Obama’s behavior is not at all rational," "Even if he wins this round, he will have done precisely nothing of merit," "Were I a gun control advocate I’d be livid with him. Livid," "Obama has let his emotion get the better of him here. He and his fellow travelers will likely pay a price," etc. Lots of italics, there, Chuck. Today we see what he was so hysterical about: A CNN poll finds that, while they disapprove of Obama using executive orders to do it, the American people approve of his gun control measures 67%-32%. Even 51% of Republicans and most gun owners support the measures. The respondents are also skeptical that the measures will work, which makes sense -- but what a pity CNN didn't also ask why they were skeptical, and list "because the Republicans will do everything they can to fuck it up" among the possible choices. (Extra credit, BTW, to Breitbart.com, which headlines its poll coverage "CNN POLL: MAJORITY OPPOSE USE OF EXECUTIVE ACTIONS FOR GUN CONTROL" and adds this kicker: "The majority of respondents to the CNN/ORC poll were not gun owners. Only 40 percent said there is even a gun in their house." So how can true patriots even take them serious! Show us a poll taken by gun owners instead, preferably not while they're on the way to the emergency room.)

•   So many examples, but I might as well take one of the more egregious, from The Federalist:

Hillary Clinton Should Stop Excusing Juanita Broaddrick’s Sexual Assault
Juanita Broaddrick recently opened up on Twitter over her sexual assault by Bill Clinton and Hillary's dismissal of her suffering.

Look on the bright side: At least there's one woman in America conservatives believe was raped. Favorite kicker and author bio on the subject, from Newsday:

I’ve often wondered how she and Juanita Broaddrick and Eileen Wellstone and Sandra Allen James and Christy Zercher, among others, have felt watching Bill Clinton go on to become a revered national and international statesman. 

If Trump can give them a second hearing in the court of public opinion, maybe his candidacy is worth something after all. 

William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.

I guess it could be true -- the guy pushed through NAFTA, after all, so in my book he's capable of anything.

•   How about a quick run through the gibberish pits of the culture war? Ross Douthat did something for National Review that defies analysis....

And then there’s pop culture itself. In the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.” Thirty years later, the biggest blockbuster of 2015 was about . . . Darth Vader’s grandchildren. It is directed by a filmmaker who’s coming off rebooting . . . Star Trek. And the wider cinematic landscape is defined by . . . the recycling of comic-book properties developed between the 1940s and the 1970s. Even fashion shows a similar repetition, as Kurt Anderson pointed out in Vanity Fair several years ago...

Yeah whatever beardo, fast forward:

...we’re dealing with issues (from an aggressive Russia to, yes, Libyan-linked terrorist groups) that Marty and “Doc” Brown would recognize immediately. (Though in fairness, we do make movies about colonizing Mars, and the special effects are excellent.) 

The word for this kind of civilizational situation is “decadence.”

Well, at least it's highfalutin' and incoherent. Most of the current cultwar crop is quotidian propagandist yak: Operatives like John C. Goodman and Steven Hayward, for example, instructing their minions to see The Big Short as an indictment not of unregulated greedheads wrecking the economy, but of poor people getting mortgages. Connoisseurs of longform cultwar can take in Kyle Smith, who at Commentary tells us that Hollyweird often changes the details of supposedly "true stories" -- not to make them more dramatic, as you may have thought, but to please their Stalinist masters! Keep fucking that culture war chicken, comrades.

•   Speaking of culture warriors, Virginia Postrel says David O. Russell's Joy is better than The Social Network (a movie from five years ago) because it's nicer to capitalism:

The respect extends to products and customers. “Joy” acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.

Book my seats now!

...Most of all, however, “Joy” makes its protagonist an untragic hero. She gets tough and she gets rich, but she winds up neither lonely nor mean. 

Mildred Pierce was originally like that, but FDR made them change it to promote socialism.

Audiences embraced Sorkin’s compelling but dark fable of the friendless tycoon as if it were a much sunnier story. The real-world triumph of Facebook overpowered the fictional desolation of "The Social Network." 

“Watching this movie makes you want to run from the theatre, grab your laptop and build your own empire,” wrote one moviegoer. If Hollywood won’t give people an inspiring movie about big-time entrepreneurship, audiences will imagine their own version.

Hollywood's always trying to tell us that ambition may isolate us from other people, but that's just because they're communists; what regular people really see in The Social Network is wealth production -- because why else would anyone see a movie except to celebrate an economic theory? The whole thing's full of howlers, but here's my favorite part:

Hollywood regularly produces positive movies about small businesses, often in the hospitality industry. “Chef,” “The 100-Foot Walk,” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” come to mind.

But really, what's the point of these recommendations when audiences will imagine their own versions? Helps her meet her word count, I guess.

WHAT IS THE CORRECT PRONUNCIATION OF "BULLSHIT"?

I already addressed it on Twitter, but I wanted to make sure everyone I know sees this. It's one of those things our descendants will look at and go, "Oh, so that's why they choked to death on their own waste."

UPDATE. I mean, shoot, that ending:

For now, there is nothing notable about pronouncing these words as “muz-lim” or “IZ-lahm,” but one day there might be. One can’t help but wonder whether these words will truly become a kind of political Shibboleth. Pretty soon we might be outing ourselves as so-called Islamaphobes, simply for pronouncing a word the wrong way.

Somebody tell her PC Camp also awaits honkies who call it "quin-oh-ah." I'd feel sorry for her if I thought she actually suffered from this persecution mania, but I expect she's just trying to instill it in whatever rubes actually read this shit.

ONE-STOOP SHOPPING

Announcing a brand-new supermarket of rightwing barf -- The Resurgent, brainchild of onetime CNN commentator and RedState kingpin Erick Erickson. Why'd he start it?

Our desire at The Resurgent is to build a website unafraid of any arc of history imposed by men knowing that history ultimately bends towards our Creator and His is the side of history on which we should stand.

So, for nuts, then, and perhaps also to funnel wingnut welfare to conservative writers -- Erickson belly-aches that "boycott and harassment of advertisers by the left" has made it hard to generate income with these grifts, but he expects to support the thing with weekly sponsorships drawn by the lovely site design ("Try printing this page. Seriously. Just look at the thought we put into the print template. It is gorgeous") and the brilliance of his copy. "I want to control every pixel so if I get blamed for something, I will actually deserve the blame," he says, and he's not kidding: Some of the articles are by Steve Berman, mostly Ted Cruz rah-rah disguised as horse-race journalism ("Sen. Ted Cruz has the left running scared... he was mobbed by adoring fans like he was Mick Jagger crowdsurfing at a Stones concert," etc). But most of the current output is by the boss himself, and indeed the site bears his distinctive, belligerent-in-a-Barcalounger stamp. Let us review his first offerings:

"Republicans and the Lessons of 2014." Mostly pimping ("Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is your must read of the day") a National Journal story about how the radicals are taking the GOP over from fuddy-duddies like Paul Ryan, possibly leading to a Trump nomination. Erickson claims not to like Trump, especially since Trump was mean to prospective future Erickson employer Fox News, but he hates the Republican Establishment more, enough that he'd chain the party to a buffoon-led disaster and then scavenge the saving remnants. Bonus quote: "...I can give you names of tons of activists who, for example, would not even consider Rick Perry this go round because he hired Henry Barbour after the Cochran mess."

"The One Thing We Know About The GOP’s Response to Obama on Guns." The Republican Establishment will do nothing to stop Obama's fascist gun takeover. And what does this tell us?

The very reason Barack Obama can get away with what he is doing is the very same reason China is building islands in the South China Sea, Putin is helping Syria, and ISIS is spreading like a virus. The only force willing to block them is impotent, just as the only force willing to stop Obama is impotent.

Apparently the boss wants so much control he won't hire an editor for himself. Charitably, this glurge might mean that Obama is a sissy before Xi Jinping, Putin, and ISIS, but the Republican Establishment is even sissier because they're sissies before sissy Obama. "The only force willing to stop Obama is impotent" is a puzzle, though: Maybe Erickson has some nut, driven by despair over his erectile dysfunction to consider killing Obama, holed up at his klavern.

Speaking of which...

"Our Impotent President." Obummer cried over those kids at Sandy Hook but "never shed a tear over the innocent lives butchered in the Planned Parenthood videos..." All he ever does is hold press conferences -- "the Washington equivalent of viagra" which "only scratches the itch of 'JUST DO SOMETHING,'" and "ignore he really can’t get up to anything more than a pregnant pause these days," ha ha. This is a real Erickson hallmark: While his contemporaries like to tell us Obama is a tyrant, Erickson prefers to demean him with sexual imagery -- see "Barack Obama is Vladimir Putin’s Submissive Gimp," "Barack Obama is a Moral Coward and Fluffer of Totalitarians," etc. If Erickson gets anywhere the 2016 candidate's image-making apparatus, we can expect lots of rape-porn images of Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps related:

"Rubio Slams Christie Pretty Hard." "It slams him pretty hard and I suspect it is going to leave a mark."

There are also video and audio modules, but life's too fucking short. Final analysis: If there's room for one more angry white man in the hearts of wingnuts, Erickson has the inside track

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES....

This week Conor Friedersdorf cried The people united will never be defeated! and asked his brothers and sisters to make common cause with the Bundy gang in Oregon because they, too, are against mandatory minimums -- at least for their fed-threatening wise-use buddies, the Hammonds. But the Bundy gang's demands have nothing to do with mandatory minimums -- they want Gummint land for themselves and their pals, which belongs to them by some unspecified right having to do, one would guess, with their folksiness and skintone:

BURNS, Ore. (AP) - A leader of the small, armed group that is occupying a remote national wildlife preserve in Oregon said Tuesday they will go home when a plan is in place to turn over management of federal lands to locals. 

Ammon Bundy told reporters at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that ranchers, loggers and farmers should have control of federal land - a common refrain in a decades-long fight over public lands in the West. 

"It is our goal to get the logger back to logging, the rancher back to ranching," said the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights... 

Earlier, Bundy offered few specifics about the group's plan to get the land turned over to local control. But [Arizona rancher LaVoy] Finicum said the group would examine the underlying land ownership transactions to begin to "unwind it."

But word must have been passed to the gang's Minister of Information of Friedersdorf's bullshit, because they're at least making a show of outreach: Ammon Bundy compared the gang's armed seizure of federal land to Rosa Parks (*see update, below) -- a schtick I remember from the original Bundy caper in 2014:

Bundy got another chance to show some downness-with-the-peopleness in an interview with Margaret Corvid at Jacobin, but he just couldn't quite do it -- see if you can guess why!

Millions who have never heard of your movement are now watching your actions, and some say you’re a racist. How would you respond to them, and how do you feel about the Black Lives Matter protests and the police reaction to them? 

In today’s society if someone doesn’t have the same views as you they consider you racist. That’s just how I see it. I don’t know a lot about the Black Lives Matter movement but I know their initial protest involved lots of looting and violence towards businesses and innocent citizens which I do not agree with. I do agree with them standing up for what they believe in. I just think during their protest they were unorganized and not well-planned.

Corvid gave Bundy a big, fat pitch that could have bought him some cred with lefties, and he basically said it was good for people to stand up for what they believe in but hey, those guys were violent, we're only threatening violence, and unlike those looters, we're organized and well-planned; now please send us some snacks. (I wonder why Corvid didn't ask Bundy about three-strikes drug laws. That would have been an entertaining exchange.)

I don't like mandatory minimums and I'm willing to entertain the notion, at least, that the arsonists in this case don't deserve theirs, despite their belligerent history. But that's not what the current protest is about -- it's about seizing government land. which I guarantee you would not in such a case be equitably distributed among We the People, but would instead get funneled to the usual shitheels whose cries for devolution of government resources always come down to "gimme."

*UPDATE. Apparently that Rosa Parks tweet was a hoax. Bundy's restraint in the Jacobin interview makes more sense now: The idea of comparing himself to black liberationists must have never occurred to him,

NEXT: IS "JEOPARDY" MAKING US ANSWER EVERYTHING IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION?

A Federalist essay by Melissa Langsam Braunstein, "a former U.S. Department of State speechwriter":

Finding love is hard. Making love deepen and last is even harder. If reality TV is any indication, love has gone off the rails in America.

If reality TV is any indication, I'm joining ISIS.

Contrary to so much of what women read about modern romance, the men on FYI’s reality show “Married at First Sight” are eager to commit. It’s the women who are either ambivalent or outright negative. 

Maybe the men are feebs and losers.

They say they want love and marriage, but it’s not clear they are all relationship-ready. 

And I suspect feminism is part of the problem.

Of course! Why else would game show contestants who agreed to marry a stranger to be on TV decline intimacy?

...David, the only participant whose parents reportedly had a loving marriage, lost his father at age seven. He commits eagerly, while his wife Ashley is incredibly skittish. Ashley declines physical contact and is an emotional wall.

That bitch!

Vanessa, who hasn’t spoken to her father since her parents divorced during her high school years, worries her new husband, Tres, isn’t committed. Tres, whose own mother abandoned him in toddlerhood, feeds Vanessa’s fears by saying he hadn’t actually been looking for marriage.

Actually he's been looking for a career in trash TV, but is now thinking Vines was the better way to go.

It’s only after a revealing chat with the show’s psychologist that the honeymooning Vanessa relaxes and agrees to give Tres another chance. In the most recent episode, they both demonstrate an interest in care-taking. Tres offers to pay the larger portion of rent since he earns more, and Vanessa cooks dinner. This combination of trust and mutual care-taking make Tres and Vanessa the season’s most promising match.

That and the hand jobs.

The rest lacks even this much coherence, so I'll just dish you some fragments:

Abuse and constant conflict clearly justify a divorce petition, but does dissatisfaction?

When conservatives finally Take Back America, spouses who want to separate will be obliged to demonstrate that they're not divorcing whimsically, the way you might, say, shoot a guy who pulled into your driveway.

In recent decades, boys have been told that they must not be overtly masculine, let alone chivalrous, because that would be sexist.

That's true -- all the young parents I know are teaching their male offspring to go to the playground and shove girls off the swings. They figure it'll get 'em ready for that dystopian socialist society we're all planning on as soon as you cracker motherfuckers die off.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Bundys and their moron-labe crusade in Oregon. As the original Cliven Bundy clownshow in 2014 showed, straight-up insurrectionist sentiment has become part of mainstream conservatism, and now we see not only the usual crackpots but also allegedly serious writers like Glenn Reynolds and Jazz Shaw siding with the crazies. Speaking of crazy, here's Kurt Schlichter -- a frequent guest on talk shows for some reason -- discussing the matter at The Federalist:

There’s no denying that the Oregon action is contrary to the rule of law. But then, is there really a rule of law anymore, at least for the kind of people who participated in this action?... 

You look at it from their perspective, and you see an Obama administration that enforces two sets of laws. Its opponents, like troublesome ranchers, get the Department of Justice going to the Court of Appeals to send them away for longer terms than the judge would impose over relatively minor misbehavior. 

But friends of the administration like Hillary commit crimes...

The sheeple think it's the rich who get away with everything, when in reality it's Hitlery Klintoon! Someone should write a tea-party version of The Silver Box for Schlichter to star in ("she took the purse -- she took the purse but [in a muffled shout] it's Saul Alinsky got 'er off--JUSTICE!"). Then Schlichter tells us we better watch out because his buddies the Bundy boys represent a "pre-insurgency with terrifying potential to expand" that's had enough of your gay wedding cakes and is a-fixin' to muscle America into doing what they want:

When they do make their will clear at the voting booth, like with gay marriage, five judges on the coast tell them their vote doesn’t count, and if they don’t submit and bake a wedding cake their life savings will be taken. Now you can argue about whether they are right to feel this way, but the reality we need to deal with is that they do feel this way. Simply telling them to shut up and accept it isn’t going to work—this situation in Oregon is going to be repeated until they feel they are being heard... 

But these guys are spread out over the rural West. Many of these guys are themselves ex-military. They are not street thugs. I bet few of them even have a criminal record. They have sympathizers—and some of them are law enforcement.

That they're resorting to threats, and using a bunch of numbnuts in a bird sanctuary to back it up, says a lot about the modern conservative movement. Anyway, read the column, my editor left in most of the jokes.

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...").

ANOTHER MOMENTARY OUTBREAK OF REPUBLICAN CIVIL LIBERTARIANISM.

So Obama continued the ancient tradition of spying on our allies and found Netanyahu conspiring to fuck up the Iran deal with some Congressmen. Right sport, say I, but conservatives pretend it's triple #Benghazi. The slightly-less-duplicitous among them, such as Jazz Shaw of Hot Air, even while huffing that "this smells of a Nixonian enemies list" (how dare you allow your surveillance of Mr. Big to reveal that my clients were his flunkies!) has to admit that "we spy on our friends and our friends spy on us. Nobody likes it very much, but it’s the way the world works." The real shitheels don't bother. (For the record, I'm much less exercised by spying on Angela Merkel et alia than I am by spying on U.S. citizens.)

And in a special category are those who actually seem to think Obama invented it, like Even-Steven bipartisan  Ron Fournier: "Democrats," he thundertweets, "If you allow your guy to do this, no complaints when the next GOP POTUS runs amuck with Obama precedent." I expect we're also not supposed to complain when President Cruz spends three trillion dollars fucking up the Middle East some more, because Polk invaded Mexico in 1847 and he was a Democrat.

Anyway, enjoy this latest libertarian moment while it lasts, which is until they all remember it's time to spy on Muslim-Americans.

UPDATE. I think I'm funnier, but you should probably still read Glenn Greenwald on the subject instead of me. Oh, you already read mine? Well, still go ahead. (I didn't know that about Jane Harman; it's very disappointing.)

UPDATE 2. It's kinda fun to watch Jonathan S. Tobin chasing his own tail at Commentary, but nothing else in it can top the beginning:

The unfortunate implications of Edward Snowden’s leaks of security information have been many...

As often, I suspect a lot of these things are written on a bet.

SEDUCED INTO GAYNESS! ONE WOMAN'S STORY.

Not that D.C. McAllister of The Federalist had ever written anything that made sense to me before (Sample: "If we’re going to warn people of the perils of Big Gulps and French fries, shouldn’t we warn them of the dangers of sex?"), but when she started talking about how some people, particularly children and butch dudes, have problems with sexuality and friendship I thought she was in the ballpark at least of rational discourse:

Just this morning I was watching Fox NFL Sunday, and Terry Bradshaw was talking about how he was excited by Howie Long the first time he saw him play. The eruption of uncomfortable laughter was expected. But he kept on, saying how Long “took his breath away”—which incited even more snickers. 

While I grinned, having seen this same scenario played out over and over again, I was also saddened, because I saw it as just one more knock on a kind of love we desperately need in our lives—passionate, nonsexual love. But we’re so uncomfortable with the expression of intimate, familiar feelings among men that we’ve given it its own name—bromance. 

I should have known when she started quoting C.S. Lewis that things would go badly wrong (quoting Chesterton is also a useful warning sign). Ditto when she started ranking on Romanticism and The Sexual Revolution. Then:

Let me illustrate this point with two men—let’s call them Steve and Paul—who are both very expressive in their feelings. This is an important distinction because it’s no accident that the top personality types by a large margin for people who identity as homosexual are “feeling types” —INFP and INFJ for women, and ESFJ and ENFJ for men.

Steve and Paul—two highly extroverted-feeling men—meet one another and they have an immediate connection and common interests. The effect of a Puritanical attitude still pervasive in our culture says “Don’t show affection, be controlled with your feelings.” But that’s not who they are. They’re passionate... 

Maybe, if they lived in times past, when men had places where they could really connect as men, they could express themselves in some way. But that’s not the case in modern culture with fluid interaction between the sexes and lack of “man-only space.” So what do they do with their feelings now? Suppress them or show them? 

Not sure what's wrong with "fluid interaction between the sexes" (I could go for some right now!), nor why guys who need a "man-only space" can't just join the Man Scouts and go hang out under a bridge, but okay.

One would hope they can simply show them, but because of the impact of sexualization, they interpret that expression in a sexual way. As a result, the two men either don’t want to be thought of as gay (because they’re not, not because they necessarily think homosexuality is wrong), and they withdraw.

That does sound sad. But there are alternatives to submitting to this kind of social pressure. Changing you support system, for example --

Or, they begin to doubt and wonder, Am I gay?

Oh fuck me.

“I get excited when I’m with Paul,” Steve says to himself. “He puts a spring in my step just talking to him. I’m stimulated by his intellect and insight. He makes me feel more alive after talking to him than I did before. Those feelings are so strong they must be sexual. I must be gay.” Paul feels the same. But they’re not gay at all. They don’t want to have sex with each other. They’re simply men who feel and express deep passions and feelings, and they want to connect with someone with common interests.

Ya gotta wonder how McAllister knows they're not gay. Maybe she decided while staring into Steve's dreamy eyes during one of his long talks about how Paul puts a spring in his step.

Anyway, it turns out the big problem is not that jocks will be awkward among their fellow bros, but that "the more friendship is misunderstood and ignored, the more people will identify as homosexual and bisexual." Out of pure confusion of eros and phileo, men wind up sucking cock and women wind up eating pussy. Not to mention the polyamory! "What you need are friends," McAllister tells one poor soul who has been seduced into multisex, "real, loving friends -- not more sexual relationships." She explains that eros is "a throaty passion that can end badly and lead to tragedy," but that probably just got them more turned on.

Me, I'm all for nonsexual love, including the demonstrative kind, but if my friends are getting laid I'm usually happy for them, not convinced they've made a throaty mistake (unless they've picked up a thrush). Why is sex such a puzzle for these people?