RETURN ENGAGEMENT.

I'm not great at crowd estimates, but we marched from Lafayette Park down Pennsylvania Avenue to about 7th Street, and when we left the street was filled with people in both directions. Looks like we have to keep this up until they get it right. 

UPDATE. In case I wasn't clear, this was not from last weekend's march, but today's organized-at-the-last-minute march against the Trump Muslim ban -- excuse me, the Trump "danger" ban. And bad as I am at crowd-guessing, I'd say this one drew more than 10,000 and perhaps substantially more. On 48 hours notice. Good to know it can be done. 

THEY MADE ME A NEO-NAZI!

Hey it's another Rod Dreher "Reader" Mailbag! As with previous editions, you have to believe everyone who writes to Dreher has approximately the same literary style and language skills level. It's possible! And anyway it's more fun if you suspend disbelief. Ready? Good! Today's a double feature -- two guys who are thinking of joining a White Identity cult because the blacks and the liberals turn them off!

This is from Baby Skin #1:

I’m a white guy.

Let's get that straight right off the bat!

I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

Dunno, but I have a feeling once you start talking the mystery's over, Mr. I'm A White Guy.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it.

Well-educated, and smart and informed! And white! I can see why we're all paying attention to him.

It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

Then maybe it's time you made new friends. Maybe try that before becoming a Nazi! I mean it's a big decision.

After telling us he's not rolling in dough, and has to mow his own lawn despite his brains and education -- ha, tell me about it, bro! -- Baby Skin #1 tells us what's really ticking him off.

But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Maybe he's more broke than he lets on and the only "media" he has access to is an old Black Panther newspaper he found at a yard sale. More likely he's one of those conservatives who lost his TV remote during the Clinton Administration.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

But though intellectual effort should come easy to a bright feller-me-lad like him, he's not sure how long he can hold out against the pull of his Aryan heritage. And if he can't, guess whose fault it'll be?

...It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza. Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

And we're about to lose him -- he, who might have been such a ornament to The Left! -- because we were too nice to blacks and Latinos and the TV was mean to Mr. Charlie. But I gotta ask: if he's so mad at liberals and so torn about going White Pride, why can't he compromise and just become a regular conservative?

Sorta answers itself, don't it?

We don't have to spend much time with Baby Skin #2, since he seems cut from the same cloth (or typed on the same laptop) -- he says libs made him Bund-curious, and you'll be real sorry when it happens (he even ends, I swear to God, "What follows from all of this cannot bode well"), but let me give you the flavor:

I totally get where [Baby Skin #1] is coming from. I’m in his shoes for the most part: white, Christian, male, straight. Add to that that I’m a Southerner. But I’m also a PhD candidate in the humanities...

The new Nazis -- they're so schooly!

...in a discipline where my whole demographic configuration is routinely and openly disparaged as being the fount of all evil in this world.

I've been saying this for years, but why do these guys never take their studies at Liberty University or Bob Jones instead of liberal hellholes where everyone hates them? It's almost like they seek this treatment out -- maybe so they can write about it in wingnut magazines and websites! Maybe both these guys are just woodshedding for their eventual gigs at The Federalist. Or for a book: White Like Me! They better hop to, I bet Dreher's already shopping it.

UPDATE. Comments to this post are up to the usual glorious alicublog standards. Don't miss one by Jeffrey_Kramer that begins, "Maybe we aren't even meant to imagine there's an individual consciousness behind these 'letters'; maybe it's sort of along the lines of those old Reader's Digest pieces like 'I am Joe's Kidney.'"

DEFINING REPUBLICANISM DOWN.

There's been a lot of sucking up to Trump, God knows. Matthew Continetti is making a specialty of it ("He draws strength from his gut connection with Jacksonian America" -- imagine Trump responding to that: "Yes, Michael Jackson was a tremendous entertainer, absolutely terrific. Ben Carson reminds me a lot of Michael Jackson").

But history should specially note this offering by David P. Goldman -- author of "Jay Z's American Fascism" and other gibberish ("Why can't we get 14 million people into the streets to proclaim that Obama is an idiot like the Egyptians did?"). In "Donald Trump, American hero," he invokes Jackson, of course, and also characters created by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John Bunyan, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Capra, and David Peoples. What do they have to do with Il Douche? Why, like them Trump is an American hero -- see, it's in the title. And what distinguishes these heroes? Maybe Goldman's comparison of Trump to Abraham Fucking Lincoln will clarify. Yes, he actually does, and Goldman knows what you're thinking:

That seems blasphemous, for Trump is no Lincoln; he is brittle where Lincoln was tolerant, resentful where Lincoln was self-deprecating, Philistine where Lincoln was intellectual, and often cruel where Lincoln was unfailingly kind. But the parallel remains.

Seems like everything we admire in Lincoln has been ruled out. So what's left?

Not since 1860 have American voters rejected their elite and chosen a candidate without apparent qualifications.

Ah, I see; so in 1860 Americans (40 percent of them, anyway) were sick of this shit and rolled the dice on a former Congressman at the head of a burgeoning movement and party who had stood for the Senate and whose debates with Stephen Douglas, a watershed in American political discourse, had been widely circulated... which lines up pretty good with "former reality TV star" and "famous bankrupt rageclown."

That is, they are both "outsiders," in the same sense that Cincinnatus and Rod Blagojevich were both outsiders. Unlike Lincoln, the new model outsider is unencumbered by toleration, self-deprecation, intellectualism or unfailing kindness. Neither Goldman nor his fellow Trumpkins seem to miss these attributes. In fact, from what I'm seeing they consider it good riddance.

WOMB AT THE TOP.

Welcome back to the pages of alicublog,  Ashley E. McGuire of Acculturated!

Is Ivanka Making Motherhood Great Again?

Is Ivanka Trump America’s Kate Middleton?

Quick primer for the uninitiated: Acculturated is one of those wingnut ladymags commissioned by culture warriors to make young female conservatives feel less lonesome. Their philosophical tradition is Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, but they seem to worry their target will find this dowdy and depressing in its pure form -- like Woman's Day meets Soviet Life -- so they try, as here, to glam it up.

In this viral photo posted on Ivanka’s Instagram page the day before the Inauguration, America’s new first daughter channels the Duchess rather mightily.

In the picture, Ivanka is rocking the whole Duchess package: walking down the red-carpeted steps of a private jet in nude stilettos and a gorgeously tailored outfit, with an incredibly intact blowout with a babe on one hip and a child holding her other hand.

There are entire Google image archives devoted to pictures of the Duchess coming down airplane steps with babies and toddlers in tow.

Great thing about the Internet -- something for every kink! McGuire cites one of her fellow Kate 'n' Kids furries who thrills to the Duchess towing tots in heels, specifically; "a bit precarious," he swoons. McGuire responds:

It is precarious. It’s also precarious trying to be both a mom and a public figure in today’s world: yet another parallel of mastery between Trump and Middleton.

Kate Middleton has done an exceptional job of making motherhood glam again. Unlike American celebrity moms, she doesn’t post on social media about being covered in throw up and never getting any sleep. She doesn’t complain in interviews about the travails of parenting. She doesn’t post the makeup-less 3 a.m. selfie that is supposed to make us think she is a “real mom” like the rest of us. Yes, she has the royal P.R. straight jacket on...

Straitjacket, surely? Or does she know something we don't?

...and yet, she demonstrates her authenticity in motherhood with the obvious care she puts into her children and the genuinely warm way she behaves with them, even under the camera’s glare. She commits the ultimate crime in today’s post-feminist world: She appears to enjoy being a mom, and lets the media run with that perception.

Being a mom must be heaps of fun if you're married to royalty with an army of nannies and minders to take the kids, clean you up, rub your shoulders, and put cream on your nipples as soon as the photographers leave. Speaking of promo, now to suck off The Leader!

Like Middleton, Ivanka has allowed herself to be very much defined by her role as a mom. While Ivanka has a demanding career, she seems proud to let the paparazzi make a fuss over her family life too, occasionally doing what Middleton does not, sharing a more candid and makeup-free moment with her kids with the world.

Which is gross when less conservative celebs do it but she has a way don'tcha think?

...It’s easy to scoff at Middleton’s lack of a career, but she is one of the most scrutinized women in the world.

"Object of male gaze" has been a career for many women, honey, but rarely so remunerative; that it's a crap deal only gets more obvious (thanks in part to the gruesome example of Ivanka's dad!). That's why Teen Vogue is woke and you're a snore.

A TINY FINGER POKING A GREASY TOUCHSCREEN -- FOREVER.

Washington (CNN) -- The Badlands National Park official account tweeted statistics about climate change on Tuesday that could contradict how President Donald Trump's administration may want to present it. 

The tweets were up for a few hours before they were deleted.

But that's been taken care of.

...and no wise guys, get me?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Inauguration and the Women's March and the unflattering comparison between them that set off the Trumpkins.

Among the outtakes, a RedState writer new to me, Mickey White, on Saturday's event: “Why women in Paris are protesting Donald Trump is beyond me, but when have these people ever made sense?” Also, the place is full of furriners. White further claims that at the DC march, “after a rousing musical performance that concluded in a drum circle, an aging hippie asked the crowd to chant ‘Hello, Charlie’ to him.” I don’t know why White did not, while he was at it, also claim that some hippie punk told a cop, “come on, pig, I know my rights,” as he lit his joint with a burning flag; lack of ambition, perhaps.

Among my favorite bits of wingnut reportage was Kira Davis', also at RedState, covering the inaugural entertainments:

The Trumps looked on dutifully as performers like Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood entertained onlookers.

Party of the year! (I will add that, despite the fun I've had with them, Trump's problems with the celebrity community are among the least of his negatives. For one thing, Meryl Streep et alia are reliably brought up in every bog-standard ThisIsWhyTrumpWon thumbsucker, so they're of at least marginal benefit to him as objects of ressentiment. For another, it's not the areas in which he is a failure that bother me so much as the areas in which he is a great success -- i.e. grifting and wrecking entities he's in charge of.)

UPDATE. The conspiracy goes even deeper than George Soros, says The Daily Caller:

Women’s March Organizer Recently Met Ex-Hamas Operative, Has Family Ties To Terror Group

And the wingnuts are whooping it up ("THIS is what Linda Sarsoul wants for America," arrgh blarrgh). I take it as a good sign -- this is exactly the sort of shit they were writing about Obama as he was cruising to the presidency.

PUSSY GALORE.

Even on North Carolina Avenue over a mile away, there was a steady stream of them -- nearly all women, nearly all wearing that hat, some carrying signs, all looking resolute and cheerful. They went to the space they'd been licensed and they owned it -- half a million flooding the avenues, spilling onto the sidestreets, chanting and cheering and ululating like Xena. They were strong without being macho -- that is to say, without being assholes. This was the biggest demo I've attended since the 2004 RNC protest in New York, and certainly the one with the biggest f-to-m ratio, and perhaps for that reason it was the most polite (no crowding, no shoving, every jostle came with an apology) while being at the same time the most fierce -- no one would expect a limo to be set on fire, but each time the ladies raised their voices by God you heard every one.

And this was replicated around the nation and around the world. Millions of women took the time to answer Friday's atrocity. I'm pretty sure that's why Trump's flak Sean Spicer lied his ass off so splenetically about the feeble attendance at Il Douche's douchination -- he knew that, as he'd been outnumbered in the election, so he would be outnumbered in the streets. And he tried to head this off in the only way chunkhead thugs like him know how: Bullying and bluster. That works with some of the more suggestible and insecure guys in this big high school we call America. But the girls, whether they're on the student council or smoking behind the gym, know better, have always known better. Of necessity they've gotten pretty good over the centuries at keeping their own counsel. But that is changing, and by the minute. 

IDAY NOTES.

I bike to Union Station weekday mornings to get the Metro to my job. Throughout the early part of the week they'd been polishing up the Great Hall at the station, setting out tables and erecting these grim-looking, 20-foot-tall, dark-grey replicas of the Washington Monument. Big deal inauguration-related dinner, thought I. Friday I left my bike parked as usual at the station's east end bike racks and as I headed for the Metro noticed the station's portals had been sealed up, which seemed a bit much. It wasn't until later that I thought to check the news and found that this was to be the site of a "candlelight dinner" for Trump donors and that Trump and Pence families would be there to press their cold, cash-rich flesh. Sure enough, when I got back to Union Station last night there was massive security -- cops and concrete barriers everywhere, with a five-block perimeter of parked, darkened buses and wire fencing -- and a long line of men in tuxes and ladies in gowns waiting to take their tables. I imagine them there, candles guttering, their light casting fluttering shadows from the dark Monuments like spectral hellgates.

I had to go wide around all this to get to the bike racks -- or to within fifty feet of them, as they were locked down too. So that's something else I have against the new Administration.

Buses being interrupted and cabs unavailable, I walked home, and back to the station this morning to get the bike (being blessedly granted home-labor on account of the Day). The station is just above the Red Zone where locomotion becomes difficult today. There were about a hundred of these #ResistJ20 guys on the plaza, giving the stream of inauguration-goers coming from the station something to scowl at. There were also lots of porta-potties, and lots of hawkers. "PONCHOS!" yelled one guy walking around in one as some drizzle came down, holding folded clear and yellow plastic in each hand. "You got it, buddy!" yelled another guy at his folding table of Trump t-shirts and hats.

Then back home through Northeast D.C., where all was the same as on any Friday except maybe a little quieter; I could hear birds filling the bare trees on F Street, singing.

UPDATE. I couldn't watch it; from the transcript the speech appears to be the same roaring gibberish as usual. The usual suspects are all like, hmm, he didn't pivot to Classy Presidential Mode, that's certainly a surprise -- like they were born yesterday and slow for their age.

As I alluded last night, conservatives are at the party but standing near the door, hoping to preserve plausible deniability when Il Douche does something too ham-handed; hence their coverage of the inauguration is a bit stiff and lacks the joyful rush you'd expect from people whose dream of wrecking the country is coming true. Take Dan McLaughlin at National Review:

I suspect the part everyone will remember is his invocation of “America First,” repeatedly and as a theme of his foreign and domestic policy and even as a theme of his calls for unity: ”When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” The implication here is that America is a family: outsiders viewed with suspicion, but everyone within treated with love and respect. Obviously, we’re a long way from the latter goal, and Trump has hardly been innocent of exacerbating that, but it’s at least a worthy aspiration.

Aspiration! Run that by Trump; he'll say, "Yes, that's 90% of success, I believe Thomas Jefferson said." People of all persuasions pretend to see the Emperor's New Clothes sometimes, but even McLaughlin cannot hide his embarrassment at having to project an aura of Lincolnian patriotism onto this brutal oaf. I expect he'll eventually get the hang of it well enough and with time his flopsweat will dry, but the smell of bullshit will never quite go away.

THE DIFFERENCE.

If you look at the Big Conservative Sites now, you will notice a trend. At National Review, along with stories of what a monster Obama was, you'll see stories of how the media was unfair to poor Rick Perry, the former Texas governor about to be in charge of a federal department he once swore to destroy ("the Times peddles fake news"), and to Trump himself ("Democrats will do everything they can to create disunity from the inauguration on"). It seems a lifetime ago that National Review declared itself implacably opposed to Trump; now they're his best friend, because his only effective opposition is liberals -- and vice-versa.

At The Federalist, along with stories of what a monster Obama was, you'll see stories of how an artist was unfair to Ivanka Trump (and how artists owe him allegiance), and how the media was unfair to Trump himself. The Federalist once promoted a less Trumpified conservatism ("Ted Cruz's Donald Trump endorsement reminds us never, ever, ever to trust a politician"), but they too have gotten with the new realities.

But it's not enough that these guys celebrate Trump's victory over the liberals; they seem to need to blame liberals for Trump, too. They did it earlier, but it's weird to see their need to keep at it as their despised champion blunders into the White House. Occasional NR contributor Peter Wehner recently went on the radio to tell us whose fault Trump really was -- but prefaced it becomingly with tears of regret:

I wish Trump had not won. I'm - lifelong Republican. I'm a conservative, and I was Never Trump from the moment he announced his campaign all the way through. But he wasn't elected in a vacuum. There was a lot of acrimony, a lot of division. A lot of Americans, particularly blue-collar Americans, felt dishonored and unheard and voiceless during the Obama years.

Touching! Or take The Federalist's David Marcus in his "Progressives Destroyed Normalcy And Now They’re Shocked Trump Isn’t Normal." Marcus claims to disapprove of Trump ("I say this as a dad who has to explain to my son why the President-elect is calling people rude names, when I teach him that is wrong"), but on the other hand liberals are in favor of "abolishing the police" and "running for president as a Socialist" (yeah, I don't know either). Plus Marcus read about some guy at Think Progress who was worried about the politics of his redneck plumber; Think Progress guy apparently didn't even say anything to the plumber, but even just thinking uncharitably of such people is the great sin of the Age of the WWC Whisperer, so instead of just dismissing Think Progress guy as a doofus, Marcus indignantly claims he was "indulging in the same kind of irrational racial bias that gets black kids shot in America" -- no, I'm not kidding -- and says this explains why America embraced an asshole-in-chief:  "Trump thrived in a culture that now accepts that rudeness, judgment, and condemnation of those with the wrong political views is justified." He doesn't approve of that thinking, you understand; he just understands it -- and takes pleasure in the lamentations of the libtards, presumably not while the kid is watching.

You get this same two-faced shtick from other factota like Andrea Ruth at RedState ("As a conservative, I still hold much skepticism of anything Donald Trump does" -- wait for it; wait for it -- "but this squirming and crying from the left is enough to make the fiscally conservative side of my heart smile for now"), Bernard Goldberg ("I was and still am not a fan of Donald Trump. I find him to be both a narcissist and a braggart" -- get on with it; get on with it -- "...But, I find it more than a little ironic, that the people who have brought me closer to the president-elect are liberals..."), et alia. They're happy to have won but... but... but they feel they have to say something to distinguish themselves from... people who don't need to distinguish themselves. After all, they have media jobs!

I just want to remind you, on the eve of this new era, that you folks of the defeated majority are not the only ones who know what a horrible mistake has been made; even these idiots know it. The difference is you have the balls to admit it. And that's all the difference in the world.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG.

"Why National Unity Remains So Elusive," by Jonah Goldberg. Did you guess libtards? Congratulations! But Goldberg makes us go through a detour -- specifically, the early part of his word count -- before we can get there. It's about how we're all mad at each other, despite Goldberg's attempts to bind up the nation's wounds with books like Liberal Fascism.

The front-padding done, Goldberg gets to the John Lewis thing and gives us a dull recap of the conservative take I described on Monday: Lewis "earned his icon status on the Edmund Pettus Bridge" but now he's just a mean libtard and did you know that "the goons who cracked Lewis’s skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were acting at the behest of a Democratic governor and Democratic local officials"? Lewis is just confused as to who his friends are, apparently; I bet he doesn't even know Robert Byrd was a Klansman.

All this would not be worth noting were it not for a choice Goldberg Easter Egg of the sort he often drops when he's in a hurry to finish up a column and get to the Cheeto trough. Here's today's:

Now, Lewis is going further still, refusing to attend Trump’s inauguration and arguing that Trump cannot be a legitimate president because of Russian meddling in the election. Lewis may have reason to believe that Trump did not win fair and square, but questioning Trump’s legitimacy is exactly what the Russians probably wanted from the beginning: to undermine Western and American faith and confidence in democracy.

Not only does John Lewis not appreciate the Republican Party's continuing commitment to civil rights, he's playing into the hands of the Russians -- like Edward Snowden! Maybe Trump should have him charged with treason. It'll show he's serious about foreign policy.

GAYPOCALYPSE NOW!

Good ol' Rod Dreher is predicting (based in part on the perorations of some guy who has Charles Bronson in Death Wish as his Twitter avatar) that the left will go crazy with violence soon:

[Fake Paul Kersey] says another big takeaway from his tweetstorm to that point are that political violence can come from anywhere, and that the left has the infrastructure to make it happen more than the right does, in part because there are mainstream leftist leaders who would accept it. These don’t exist on the right.

Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem --  but I expect my throat-clearing is wasted on Dreher, who believes that since liberals are "allowing courses that teach students of all races how terrible white people and their culture is," the only possible result is SJW Violence and Ooga Booga unleashed across the fruited plain.

[Fake Paul Kersey] gets very dark in this series, and says that the actions of the left on Inauguration Day may prove decisive. He links to this article about how various left-wing and anarchist groups are organizing to disrupt the Trump inauguration. If that goes down in a significant way, you can bet that Trump is going to break heads over it — and that a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be on his side.

I wonder why he's so confident liberals will riot at the inauguration -- wishful thinking, perhaps, or maybe he's got some inside information from James O'Keefe.  But more provocative than the blacks and the college students is Dreher's Pubic Enemy Number One:

There’s a report that queer protestors are going to start the ball rolling with a gay dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s home. If that happens, and there is anything lewd about it, then you can bet that the Christian Right, even people who aren’t fond of Trump, will begin to migrate solidly to Trump’s side...

Lewd gay dancing -- the thin, erect end of the wedge! When Mr. and Mrs. America get a load of gay people working it to "Bounce" in the presence of Vice President Pence, there'll be hetero hell to pay. Then maybe Dreher will get the Great Re-a-Straightening he's been dreaming of -- hell, maybe they can turn Milo!

I know we're supposed to be scared of Trump, but I can't imagine being as scared of anything as Dreher is scared of everything.

UPDATE. Dreher always brings out the best in my commenters. "Fidel from the Castro: 'History of Disco, Volume 3 will absolve me,'" and "RuPaul Revere: 'One if by glam, two if by glee,'" contributes J---. "Maybe Rod should drop Logo from his cable package," suggests AGoodQuestion. And Fats Durston gives us a sneak preview of the forthcoming classic, Rainbow Dawn:

Sergeant: The Bisexuals reinforced with some weird division. Subarus across the plains. Thrusting ever forward, right down our throats. Cut the pipeline we needed. Dykes overran the dikes we had set up round N'Orleans. Just when it stabilized, then six million screaming ladyboys.

Kid: I thought there were ten million screaming ladyboys?

Sergeant: There were.

Go look just to see what he uses for "Wolverines."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how conservatives celebrated MLK Day by beating up King's old comrade John Lewis.

The column came too soon, alas, to cover as alicublog has done in the past the more general rightwing Martin Luther King Day tributes. But some of the brethren stepped up early. At Laura Ingraham's LifeZette, Lee Habeeb, whose gibberish has been examined here before, claims "the media" doesn't want us to know that King was a man of God.

"Leaving God out of Martin Luther King's life," a friend once told me, "is like leaving naked young women out of Hugh Hefner's. It's like leaving the story of segregation out of Jackie Robinson's."

Yet the filthy media takes the segregation from Jackie Robinson's story and puts it in King's too, which is double-dipping!

But that won't stop the media from redacting any and all references to the source of King's inspiration. You'll hear endless references to Dr. Martin Luther King this week — but never to Reverend King.

The lesson is that King has been hijacked by race hustlers who think he was about equality or social justice or some shit. Similarly, at National Review Ian Smith says King was a fan of Cesar Chavez, so he would have been against illegal immigrants, just like You Know Who, and that's his Real Message, never mind this race nonsense. He looked forward to the day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by The Conscience of a Conservative!

Somehow these guys never bring up that King advocated a guaranteed national income.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm sure I must be someone; now I'm gonna find out who.
•   Amanda Prestigiacomo of The Daily Signal is enraged because the Washington Post ran a long tribute to our outgoing President and didn't do one for George W. Bush back in the day. But the Post is just giving the people what they want, as they say in show biz: Even casual observers will know that Obama is currently very popular, and that his 55% approval rating contrasts starkly with GWB's 34% at the same stage of his Presidency. (I guess WaPo could have done an 18-page "Thanks for the Recession" feature, but what advertiser would have plunked down money for that?) Cripes, even Republicans know this: It's no accident Bush hasn't attended a GOP National Convention since he left office; clearly no one at the RNC wanted to remind the public of how badly they fucked up the country last time they were in charge. In fact, the citizens may have begun to remember what Republicans are all about lately: the incoming Il Douche is at 37% the least-approved incoming President in recorded history. Nonetheless Prestigiacomo feels compelled to cry Liberal Bias, and even Conspiracy:

Perhaps the "fake news" scare was not only an excuse for Hillary Clinton's truly awful candidacy, but a move in a long game effort to get more conservative news suppressed, as if it hasn't been suppressed enough already.

Honey, it's so much simpler than that: If you don't want to get pelted with tomatoes, leave the stage when they start to boo.

•   Robert Tracinski, insufferable culture warrior, bitches out SJW Wars:

In ‘Rogue One,’ The Hollywood Empire Strikes Back 

'Rogue One' is a throwback to the highbrow Hollywood culture that the original 'Star Wars' film rebelled against back in 1977.

Manny Farber he ain't.

Not many people realize that the great conservative filmmakers of our age are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Forget about their personal political views, which naturally conform to the left-leaning Hollywood consensus. Think purely in esthetic terms. Lucas and Spielberg collaborated on the two great movie franchises that helped shape the culture of the 1980s: Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

It’s not just that these films were nostalgic tributes to an old-fashioned style of story-telling, the Westerns and movie serials of the pre-Counterculture era. It’s that the stories were told in bright, primary colors...

But this new stuff is about people who believe in something, which is a drag:

That’s the other thing that’s disappointingly different about Rogue One. There’s a lot of talk in this film about “the cause,” including a scene in which the two lead characters have a tiff about who is more down with the struggle. This probably helps Hollywood leftists feel more at home, because lefties pull this sort of thing on each other all the time. But in the original Star Wars films, there was little discussion of or interest in “the cause"...

It's like when Victor Laszlo told Rick "Welcome to the fight" in Casablanca -- gross, right? It should have ended when Rick got Ilsa to fuck him! That's capitalism, baby -- I stick my neck out for no one! I guess it never occurred to Tracinski that Han joined the rebels for something besides pussy. Or maybe (a stretch, I know) Tracinski doesn't actually give a shit about culture at all, and is just getting with the new realities. Come to think of it, force-choking is a sign of American Greatness!  

• Yet another wan column from Jonah Goldberg, who has been observably demoralized since his Liberal Fascism racket got queered by the election of Republican Mussolini. Or maybe it's not demoralization; maybe he's just taking the opportunity, like other great artists working under constraints, of exploring new frontiers -- in Goldberg's case, of intellectual sloth. The column is mostly "Our Friend The Beaver" phumphering ("With a bullpen of writers like that, it’s no wonder that Washington’s farewell ranks among the great works of literary statecraft..."). Kudos to historian Kevin M. Kruse, however, for noticing this:

Of course, the era of radio and television necessitated — or created the perception of necessity — that presidents address the people directly. Whether that amounted to progress is for others to decide. But until Obama, it never occurred to a president to deliver a televised address from anywhere but the Oval Office.

What a maroon. (Also: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this scale model of the Wall here on my desk in the Oval Office, from which all presidential addresses are given.") Oh, and according to Goldberg Obama's speech was "grandiose" and a "campaign rally." He quotes literally about a dozen words of it. I'll be frank, I don't think he saw or read the speech - I think at best it was on in the background while he was playing Battleship with Jay Nordlinger, or trying to get his fist in his mouth (his own, not Nordlinger's, though you never know, Nordlinger sure isn't earning a salary with his writing). And people think liberals are demoralized! At least we don't have to pretend shit is gold.

URINETOWN.

It's not the piss, it's the mop-up! Amusing as the story is, I think it petered out, so to speak, as a live issue when FISA declined the FBI request to authorize surveillance of Trump's goons -- though I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Till then, the reverse-field running of those crazy cucks at National Review will be my primary source for laffs. Today, here's Rich Lowry's terse communique:

My quick two cents: 1) In no universe should it be OK for a journalistic outfit to publish a document containing explosive allegations that it doesn’t believe are credible — this is just outrageous; 2) Until we have some confirmation of verifiable details — and no media entity has produced any yet, despite trying to chase them down — we should consider the most damaging information in the dossier to be garbage based on hearsay and rumor.

Hmmph! Annnnd here's Rich Lowry days before the election when the whole world was yakking about a Hillary Clinton email scandal that would prove bogus:

Before Democrats burn James Comey in effigy, they should think about how the FBI director came to have an outsized influence in the election in the first place.

It’s not something Comey sought or welcomed. A law-enforcement official who prizes his reputation, he didn’t relish becoming an object of hate for half the country or more. No, the only reason that Comey figures in the election at all is that Democrats knowingly nominated someone under FBI investigation.

Once upon a time — namely any presidential election prior to this one — this enormous political and legal vulnerability would have disqualified a candidate. Not this year, and not in the case of Hillary Clinton.

Not sure who's ratfucking in the present case, but some fucking rats are always on the scene.

THE ACTRESS VS. THE WITCHFINDERS.

I guess the brethren will be going on for the rest of the week about how Meryl Streep assaulted their snowflake sensibilities by saying it was bad when The Leader made fun of that crippled guy -- and, worse yet, did so using her evil devil-sent acting talents, rather than (as God intended) with high moral stiffness, like a pundit on a Commentary podcast:

On the first of this week’s podcasts, we dilate [!-ed.] upon Meryl Streep attacking Donald Trump and Donald Trump attacking Meryl Streep and how Trump represents a different kind of combative conservative—one who has his own form of pop-culture reach that is beyond the capacity of the Streeps to silence or control.

I'm not going to spend half an hour of my precious drinking time experiencing a dilated John Podhoretz -- that time I braved a Nick Gillespie podcast on how Trump could be good for libertarianism was bad enough. But what a pitch! Trump will not be silenced by the Streeps! He is beyond the Streeps capacity! He's taking it to the Streeps!

There are plenty of these idiots enraged over the mild criticism of their buffoon-king, but so far the worst (to be fair it was always a safe bet, though Dreher is a close second) is David French at National Review:

I have no particular affection for Trump, but I positively loathe the condescension, alarmism, ignorance, and self-regard of the wealthy Hollywood Left, and each of those elements was on full display in Streep’s speech.

As a believing Christian, I can't quite come out and say I love the pussy-grabbing Putin pal, but if there's one thing I positively loathe (you hear me, plain people? Looooathhe) it's elitism, at least as long as the bullshit-populism thing we got going now still plays. (Why he didn't just say "ah don' lahk me no fancy big-city actress nohow" and spit, I can't guess.)

French's arguments against the actual speech are ridiculous. Get a load:

Streep raised the specter that Trump would expel “outsiders and foreigners,” leaving Hollywood bereft of talent. Yet is anyone proposing deportation of legal-immigrant Hollywood actors?

That's even stupider than usual for him, because he's just making shit up -- there is nothing actually genuinely offensive in the speech except what he projects onto it, which is his own stark terror that anyone can claim the attention of an audience who isn't a beady-eyed Witchfinder General like himself or a blow-dried con man like the politicians he serves. And so he does the Whore of Babylon bit to get the rubes quaking:

Hollywood sells the best cultural drugs. Truth is optional, self-indulgence is a virtue, and bullying is bravery. And last night it was all wrapped in Streep’s alluring package, an emotion-laden call to arms that stirred the hearts of millions.

The humans -- she makes them feel things -- it must be the drugs! French rails about the baleful power of "culture" not because he knows what it is, nor why the human mind and soul invented it, but because he senses its power and sees it as a threat to his own.

What a sad way to live.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Russian troll revelations and the Chicago torture outrage. Lots of depressing fun all around!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It was better before, before they voted for What's-his-name.
This must be the new world.
•  Even among the other freaks, thieves, and mountebanks Trump has been hiring, the name Katy Talento, slated to advise The Leader on health care policy, stands out. First, she's a contributor to The Federalist, which as regular alicublog readers know is a bad sign right off the bat. One of her posts on the subject of health care is called "Ladies: Is Birth Control The Mother Of All Medical Malpractice?" and in case you're wondering, she thinks it is (h/t Jason Millman). Romper and Talking Points Memo do a good job of debunking her physiological ideas, but even laymen may gape at her connection of birth control with "economic and relational devastation that has left women and children abandoned by men who now feel entitled to consequence-free orgasms." This nut is telling Trump about women's health care and Congress is defunding Planned Parenthood. So much for the Trump third way, huh? But at least Julian Assange is happy!

•  At National Review, Jim Geraghty:

The worst among us do not represent us as a whole, thankfully. William Calley doesn’t represent men and women in uniform. Ward Churchill doesn’t represent professors. Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t represent chocolate factory employees. Aaron Hernandez does not represent the New England Patriots. 

Most of us know that. Most of us understand that it’s unfair, inaccurate, and a smear to take the worst individual in a group and contend that all members of a group are “like that.” James Holmes is rare among gun owners. Eric Rudolph is rare among abortion opponents. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik are rare among Muslims.

Come let us reason together! When have you ever seen a wingnut show charity toward Ward Churchill before this? But then Geraghty takes a graf-long detour for a Seinfeldesque didjaever-notice "authorities keep acting like they never want to admit that a mass shooter is Muslim?" and with a weary Not this bullshit again we are reminded that Geraghty is not a healer but a propagandist and his show of reasonableness is a ruse to soften white readers up for his energetic flame-fanning over those black guys in Chicago who tortured a white guy. It's a typical Trumpian "there's-something-going-on" routine -- encouraging listeners to stretch a specific incident into a general indictment without the assistance of logic. Geraghty also links the usual pull-your-pants-up bullshit from David French, whose dogwhistle is nearly split from overblowing; for one thing, the title is "Chicago is Breaking" but the URL is "black-thugs-torture-white-disabled-man-speak-truth-leftists." For another, French finds room in the middle of his customary Obama's-Chicago ululation for this:

Outlets such as Buzzfeed — ever vigilant in the quest to hunt down and expose celebrity Christians who might actually believe the Bible — write fawning articles about hip-hop celebrities who write and produce some of the most vile music imaginable.  

It’s all part of underlying liberal squeamishness about attacking anything that can be labeled authentically “black.” Music “from the streets” is worshipped, no matter its content.

The relevance of French's jungle-music criticism to a crime (the perpetrators of which, I remind you, have been swiftly apprehended) is not immediately apparent unless you're on the same Ooga Booga wavelength as French and his colleagues -- which is just one more reason why it was always a sure bet that, for all their #NeverTrump bullshit, the NROniks would fall in line with The Leader: Game recognize game. Proper conservative clubmen they may be, with good manners and manicured nails, but deep in their shriveled hearts they're delighted to have the cruder Trump and his deranged apparatchiks reverberating their slurs.

BUBBLE BOY.

if you don't know what it's like to drive a truck, you ain't a real U.S. male, sez tough guy Sean Davis of The Federalist. Davis' angle is that "A Bunch Of Journalists Freak[ed] Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck." In this case "Freak Out" means they asked, upon being questioned as to whether they owned a truck or not, what owning a truck has to do with anything. This Davis interpreted to mean that reporters are "the most cloistered and provincial class in America" and live in a "liberal media bubble." Davis neglected to mention what sort of truck he drives, what sort of loads he hauls, or if his rig is equipped with a CB and a jaker breaker.

Actually, turns out he's not talking about big rigs, but about Silverados and Tacomas and other such Canyoneros one sees driven by accountants and middle managers all across the fruited plain. But I suspect that is, as the saying goes, central to his point. Davis also lists a bunch of Twitter responses which he portrays as evidence of his thesis; in one of these, Jose A. DelReal says yes, he has a truck "b/c I'm from Alaska. Do any friends own one in DC or NYC? No, because they're unnecessary here." Davis' response: "This person writes for Washington Post and just missed the entire point." That point, apparently, is that in order to be unbubbled and in touch with the Real America you must have a truck, not because you need it, but because lots of Americans have them whether they actually need them to do actual hauling or not, just as many Texans wear cowboy hats whether or not they ever rode herd, or many conservatives revere the Confederate flag whether or not they ever faced the Union Army in battle.

In other words, it's purely symbolic, like a weekend boho's beret or a hipster's lumberjack threads. The only reason to treat the Chevy Silverado with more respect than a lumbersexual's duds or any other fetish object is to communicate to other pencil-neck types that you, and not they, are In Touch with the Common Man. Davis, his bio explains, is a former economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, CFO of Daily Caller, and chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn, and holder of an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School, so maybe he needs a truck to put it over. If that doesn't work, maybe he can add a pair of truck nuts. If that also fails, maybe he can resort to other traditional imagery. But doesn't all that posing get tiresome after a while?

UPDATE. Tweaked this to make clear that Davis is talking about suburban-dadmobiles. "I thought he was talking about driving a tractor-trailer!" says Frank McCormick in comments. "Shoot. Does he know that a Ford F-150 actually has automatic transmission and, other than a slightly more of a challenge in parallel parking, drives just like a car? What a sissy!"

Also in comments (which are well worth a visit) are several suggestions for a Wingnut Bubble Test, which might be worth formulating sometime, notwithstanding that such scams are much easier to put over on the other side. Questions might include: Have you ever...

• taken public transit to work?
• met a Muslim (protesting at a mosque doesn't count)?
• "strolled through the alleged 'no-go' zone of east Dearborn so feared by the wingnut community for its demonic Shariah law and roving bands of swarthy terrorists?" (h/t trex)
• Eaten a vegetarian meal because you were in the mood, not because you were too sick to keep meat down?
• Read a book for pleasure?

 I could use some more suggestions in comments.

THE CEO ALSO TOLD ME MY BEARD DIDN'T LOOK LIKE STRIATED DRYER LINT.

Rick: [bitterly] Yes, it's very pretty. I heard a story once - as a matter of fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began.

Well, at least this time it's not a cab driver.

Let's flip all the cards, shall we: Saying "many CEOs *want* to keep jobs in U.S., but the consultant/investor/shareholder CW pushes hard against" is like saying "many pushers *want* to stop selling drugs, but the broker/bank account/other people they owe money to CW pushes hard against." Douthat and his perhaps-fanciful interlocutor both accept that the capitalist yearns to be free to practice a more enlightened form of capitalism, yet somehow something's always getting in the way -- but surely it must just be some misunderstanding! Maybe the recently-elected grifter-in-chief can sort it out.

Strangely enough, neither Unnamed CEOs nor Douthat or anyone like him ever tells stories about how many CEOs *want* to raise workers' wages in U.S., but the consultant/investor/shareholder CW pushes hard against. But then, higher wages isn't part of Trump's racket -- in fact, he has argued for the opposite. I can imagine, though, a situation where more jobs stay stateside but wages stay flat or even go down, which I think is the play here. That way everybody wins, except the millions who don't count.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

....my rightblogger top ten with predictions for 2017. It's a double-length special edition. My post-democracy gift to you!

UPDATE. Hey, you see the gag in there about Hillary Clinton being prosecuted for running for president? Looks like that might already be happening.

UPDATE 2. Ooops! Link fixed.