FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of the greatest things ever.
•  Now that it's round-the-horn Friday I'd like to dish out some unpopular opinion. First, as regards the great Eryka Badu saying she could see the "good" in Hitler and other bad people, and people flipping out about it: I was raised Catholic, and as that upbringing was in a New England factory town,  it was neither a fussy nor even a particularly sweet-tempered Catholicism; but even so we were taught that it is wrong to assume anyone is in hell, because only God knows the heart of any man, living or dead. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" isn't a war-whoop, but a reminder that eternal judgment is above your pay grade. So what Badu said neither shocks nor particularly displeases me. I am more saddened that our prominent Christians are such poor exemplars of Christ that anyone should be so outraged and so displeased by it. (The worst reactions, to my mind, were those that lamented Badu's "bad PR judgment." First, as Lisa Respers France justly said, have you met her? Secondly, PR is by definition bullshit and these days we are drowning in it; so let us not scruple over optics, and think instead of right and wrong.)

•  I will also raise a mild demurrer over the rage that fell on Matt Yglesias (or, as the assholes at Twitchy put it, "Holy s*it: Matt Yglesias is getting DRAGGED") and others who criticized Judge Rosemarie Aquilina's speech at the end of Larry Nasser's trial. Nasser is scum and I hold no brief for him; nor do I find Aquilina's anger or her advocacy for the victims inappropriate. But I note that many of her defenders said as a point in Aquilina's favor that her speech was no worse than what you'd hear used against less powerful defendants in a county courthouse. I'm sure that's true, and that's the point: I would rather no one waiting for prison doors to swallow them be so used. We Americans have a thirst for retribution that, like our thirst for corn syrup soda, is entirely too easily slaked and no good for us.  (Watch an episode or two of Cops if you don't know what I mean.) So if someone objects when a judge beats on a convict, even one who is undeniably guilty, I sympathize. Call it unwoke if you will.

•  I hope now that the "Secret Society" bullshit has been debunked that we will not forget the wonderful prose poetry it engendered from such as Truepundit:

This isn’t just any rag-tag group of disgruntled employees complaining at the water cooler at the post office. This ‘secret society’ wields serious clout: the type of power that can investigate enemies (see Mueller vs Trump) or take others down (see Flynn)... 

Who belongs to this secret society? 

FBI agents gone rogue against Trump in favor of Barack Obama’s agenda who are linked to the many investigations into FBI corruption

• Federal judges
• Federal prosecutors
• Retired FBI
• Possibly one sitting Attorney General of a large U.S. state
• Possibly former Attorney General(s) of the United States

They communicate with meetings over cocktails, at homes, via encrypted chat rooms, texting on drug-cartel-inspired burner phones, and even via an email list, according to sources. Others have secured phones in the names of relatives to try to stay under the radar. 

Corruption in motion...

Secret societies. Secret lists.

The Deep State at work...

A conspiracy so vast oops never mind! Well, it's been a long week and we all could use a laugh.

BUT IN THE END, THEY'RE ALL LOSERS.

The Oscar nominations are out, and if I get some time I hope to watch more of the nominated films and luxuriate in stupid prognostication like I used to do back when I was single and had nothing to do but attend the ci-ne-ma. Speaking of nerds, I see the wingnuts are having their usual allergic reactions. Kyle Smith, who went from pretending to be a film critic at the New York Post (and sometimes a theatre critic -- see his review of Will Ferrell's one-man George W. Bush show, "Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?" Never forget!) to full-blown kulturkampfer at National Review, tells his readers what they want to hear, i.e. that the nominations prove "#OscarsSoWoke" and are all about appeasing the dark gods of liberalism: in this "highly politicized year... Academy voters are going to be very eager to send a duly left-wing cultural message" and so, Smith predicts, moviecommies will vote for The Shape of Water which he says is leftwing -- because of the human/nonhuman miscegnation, I guess. Then he says,

As for Get Out, I think this is a very fine movie that is being hugely overrated because it’s about racism and I can’t imagine Oscar voters, who are mostly senior citizens, will be as impressed with it as critics have been.

So Academy voters are too "senior citizen" to vote for Get Out, but "woke" enough to vote for some other woke movie? Maybe there's something in there about Hollywood liberals being The Real Racists™ -- I'm stunned Smith didn't tease that out!

In another post called "The Anti-Trump Oscars" (these guys are nothing if not subtle) Smith explains why The Post can't win even though, if we follow his Zhdanovite logic, its journalistic-heroes-beat-Nixon story would seem to be the obvious choice: "Perhaps the Academy found the film just a bit too by-the-numbers... or voters thought the film was a bit too blatantly intended to capitalize on the anti-Trump mood. The Oscars are a fan dance..." It's all so complicated! Or maybe it's actually simple: the whole idea of everything that happens in movieland being a proxy battle between Republicans and Democrats is a bunch of bullshit. C'mon, Agent Smith, think outside the box!

Also, while I think people who mope about "snubs" because their personal love-objects didn't get Academy recognition are silly, at least they're just harmlessly indulging fan-crushes; Zachary Leeman's "Conservative Movies Snubbed by the Academy" at LifeZette, on the other hand, is like a cross between 1984 and Tiger Beat. For example, Leeman tells us Wind River is conservative because it's "about the mental and physical stability and fortitude still needed to survive in some parts of the country." You know, like Cimarron or Walkabout! Thus it "deserved recognition for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay," and because it didn't get it Leeman has thrown himself on his bed sobbing and kicked off all the frilly pillows. (The other snubbed movies were ignored, Leeman says, because they have uniformed personnel in them, and Oscar never honors servicemembers except for The Hurt Locker and Platoon and Saving Private Ryan and Platoon and Patton etc. etc. [voice trails off])

Speaking of snubs, if you thought Wonder Woman didn't get any nominations because, news flash, not every big-budget comic-book movie gets the prestige awards that lonely dorks holed up with their "light saber" and a box of Kleenex believe it should, Brandon Morse of RedState is here to tell you it's really because "Hollywood, being the left wing haven that it is, couldn’t stomach a few of Wonder Woman’s glaring politically incorrect flaws." That seems weird, as I remember when the movie came out conservatives were mainly tumescent with rage at all-female showings of the film. But no, Morse tells us,

For one, feminists didn’t seem to think Wonder Woman was suitable as a rep for their narrative. She was too sexy and too beautiful.

And when he unsheathed his light-saber, an usher threw him out of the theater.

Others among the brethren run their own little fantasy factories -- like Victory Girls' Kendall Sanchez saying Get Out is about "how progressives attempt to understand the cultural experience of African Americans." I know, that's what we all took away from it. Also, while Kyle Smith thinks Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is "about a vengeful feminist looking for answers after her daughter’s murder and also has a racist character" and therefore is "just as woke as The Shape of Water" -- a damning assessment, indeed! -- Kendall thinks "it’s a great movie about a desperate mother urging police to find her daughter’s murderer. I went into the movie thinking it would be a giant slam against police" -- and therefore bad! -- "but it turned out to be a humble and empathetic story that emphasized all humans are 1) intention-driven and 2) both good and bad." Ebbing, Missouri is a land of contrasts!

Maybe Smith and Kendall can do a podcast where they argue over whether a movie is conservative-therefore-good or liberal-therefore-bad. That'll really show the libs and send the walls of Hollyweird tumbling down, and our children's children's children will have nothing to watch on the telescreen but Veggie Tales, God's Not Dead 1-3,927, and the Two Minutes Hate, as God intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For conservatives, culture war is not a war for culture but a war on culture.

AROUND THE BEND.

I'm fascinated by the Nunes secret-memo-that-proves-Obama-spied-on-Trump, but no-fair-asking-me-to-show-it-to-you thing, to which I briefly alluded in Monday's column. Mainly it's about the traction the story has found at the highest levels of the conservative movement, despite its profoundly unconservative premise. It's one thing for Infowars crackpots to tout an alleged copy of this memo (the prologue, "Update: Despite media claims to the contrary, our congressional sources confirmed..." tells you all you need to know), but quite another for actual Republican Congressmen like Steve King and Mark Meadows to serve as barkers for the fraud. I mean, King and Meadows are shitheels, but in olden times one would have expected the dignity of the office to prevent them for behaving this way out in public -- at least since the humiliation of Joe McCarthy made it unfashionable. (Update: And now they've got a GOP Senator raving about a Secret Society on TV.)

But it sure is in fashion now. And while a lot of the hooey conservatives have been spreading is of the old, expected variety -- Clinton crime family, Obama the Muslim traitor, George Soros and Saul Alinsky made babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me, etc. -- stuff like the Nunes memo is of the "Deep State" variety of conspiracy thinking, positing that a permanent government of spies, bureaucrats, and other unelected lever-pullers is subverting the will of the (not-quite-majority of the) people, while brave truth-tellers like Nunes and Trump (and Seth Rich, Julian Assange, et alia) try to bring the whole rotten apparatus down.

This strikes me as a really new propaganda frontier for them to be getting into -- and not because it's any more difficult to believe than their usual nonsense; in fact, on its face it's easier to believe, because there really are government agencies that are only semi-accountable to democracy. And though it's a total howl that conservatives, with their long history of authoritarianism, are suddenly bitching about a meddling FBI and CIA, it's not the hypocrisy that gets me. After all, this is America, where political movements only reform when they find it in their electoral interest to do so. There's nothing intrinsically weird about conservatives going all Jim Garrison -- look at James O'Keefe.

No, the real weirdness of the current situation is this: Conservative nonsense is usually at least based on the traditional values of the movement. Their Obama fantasies are based on their racism; their Hillary Clinton fetish, on their sexism; and their Soros-Alinsky-Frankfurt School shtick on the notion that the America dream cannot succumb to self-generated flaws because it has none, and can only be brought down by Satanic, foreign conspiracies.

But turning against the nation's intelligence agencies -- the guys who helped them fight, sometimes with extreme prejudice, the Communists, the hippies, the Black Panthers et alia -- that's not just a change in tactics; that's something like a psychotic break.

Speaking of which, now we have this I'm-not-saying-it-was-aliens from Rush Limbaugh (h/t Ana Marie Cox):

What if the intel on the war in Iraq was another disinformation campaign, to damage another Republican president?... 

What if the quote-unquote "intelligence community" misrepresented, on purpose, the degree to which Hussein had WMDs?... 

What if Saddam weapons of mass destruction was also a false narrative designed to -- what, did it ultimately embarrass Bush? Did it weaken the US military? Did it -- whatever it did, I mean, it opened the doors for the Democrats to literally destroy his presidency in the second term, which is what they did.

Again, once upon a time I assumed such a brain-melting idea as the Democrats using the CIA to trick Bush into the Iraq War would be beneath a popular radio star like Limbaugh -- the proof being that he never tried it before, presumably because even his numbskull listeners would assume he'd lost it. But in our new age he apparently thinks it's worth a shot.

I'm trying to imagine where this all leads and I have to admit I'm stumped. I'm used to them being full of shit, and had supposed the effect of having the Prince of Lies as a party leader had just made them even more full of shit, but this goes beyond mere shamelessness into schizophrenia. The one thing that sort of reassures me is that they haven't flipped on anything significant -- like, they show no sign of genuine interest in the plight of the poor and underprivileged, and Lord knows they're still doing what they can to destroy representative democracy. So maybe this is a difference of degree rather than of kind -- after all, since Americans are conspiracy nuts, one secret society is as good as any other. But if they start advocating for a universal basic income -- I mean for real, not as some kind of lame thought experiment -- all bets are off.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Women's March and why it burned conservatives' asses. Well, what do you expect: The shutdown they were eager to blame on Democrats, going so far as to pull out the "Liberals Love Browns Who Will Kill You Good White People" argument; and the Nunes peek-a-boo memo, the latest in a serious of increasingly crackpot efforts by wingnuts to derail the Mueller investigation by pretending to give a shit about FISA, is so shaky even Glenn Greenwald has turned his nose up at it.

This has left the brethren who have to push these "bombshell" revelation looking increasingly ridiculous.  Look at Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, for example, who posted about Nunes' memo under the bombshell headline “Meadows: You Won’t Believe What’s In This House Intel Report,” then talked the report down (“Why does #ReleasetheMemo feel like a set-up for a let-down?”), then told his readers, “Will the suspense be worth the payoff? Perhaps…” That, as we say, is how the pros do it, folks.

On top of that, the last thing they wanted was a bunch of mouthy chicks. Well, they better get used to them.

HOW THEY LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (TO SPITE THE LIBS)

Something weird I noticed: since that nerve-wracking Hawaii alert last weekend -- which brought back for this old duck-and-cover kid some old-fashioned end-of-the-world dread for which, it turns out, I was not really nostalgic -- conservatives have been talking about nuclear war as if it wouldn't be such a big deal.

“If a Missile Alert Sounds,” headlined David French of National Review, “Prepare to Live.” Hmm, I thought when I first saw that, some people are so jaded they need apocalypse porn to get excited; but it turns out French wants to convince readers that, despite what the nervous nellies say, they could happily survive a hail of H-bombs.

Prepare to live. As tempting as it may be, don’t spend the precious minutes between missile alert and missile impact texting family, sending tearful goodbyes on Snapchat, or attempting to reconcile old grudges. Don’t do it.

Your family will respect you more, knowing that in the final hours you didn't go all wobbly and tell them you loved them.

First, you have to understand that the odds are overwhelming that you’ll survive an initial blast. Nuclear weapons are devastating, but it’s a Hollywood myth that any individual strike will vaporize an entire American city, much less the suburbs and countryside…

Hollywood always exaggerates these things. For instance, they never show you the parts of Hiroshima that were open for business the next day.

Second, you also need to understand that you have far more control over your survival than you might think. Time and isolation are your friends…

No shock a conservative would argue for time and isolation — if living 80 lonely years in Gopher Hole, North Dakota makes you a loyal Republican in good standing, then being a nuclear attack survivor should make you a precinct captain!

Yesterday’s warning presents an opportunity to take stock. Do you have an emergency plan? Do you have a basic stock of emergency supplies? Do you know exactly where you’d go in your house? Have you gone to websites like ready.gov to understand the basics? There’s nothing weird or strange about being a basic “prepper.”

So stock up on Jim “Brother Love” Bakker’s Survival Chow!  And stock up on guns, ammo, crossbows, machetes (we calls ‘em “Mega-Bowies” so they sound less Messican), and quarterstaffs to fend off interlopers in your post-apocalyptic paradise! Remember, time and isolation are your friends.

French’s colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty chimes in: “a single, nuclear device exploding in a nearby city does not necessarily doom you and your loved ones to death.” He encourages readers to have “a little unpleasant discussion around the dinner table” with their families to prepare. Most memorable line: “If you ever received such a text warning, would you fill your bathtub with water, or with your family members?” Well, after they've been incinerated I guess your bathtub could accommodate quite a lot of them.

And Austin Bay — remember him? — complains that “the Clinton Administration slowed anti-ballistic missile development because hard left Democrats disdained Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative”; boy, some grudges really die hard. But his initial complaint is even weirder:

When told by government authorities that an attack was underway, Hawaiian residents felt vulnerable, even those who know the U.S. Navy deploys AEGIS ballistic missile defense warships in the area. Still, Hawaii's current missile defenses are quite thin, so many people panicked. 

Yeah, that’s why announcing a nuclear attack made them panic — they’d all been thumbing through Jane’s just the day before and had doubts about our missile defense system.

It's easy enough to conclude that they know a nuclear tantrum is a Trump possibility, and want to prep their people to roar approval rather than scream in terror when the mushroom clouds sprout. But as always I lean toward the psychological, and assume it's another form of culture war: Since back in the Cold War days liberals made all those movies about how bad nuclear war would be, for conservatives it stands to reason that nuclear war must actually be good. All it needs is the right publicity!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Republican MLK celebrations — always a shitshow, now in a shithole!

MONDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

(No, I'm not off for the holiday, but I did want to tell you good people the Voice column will be delayed till tomorrow because of it, and to file in recompense some short bits as time permits.)

•  Saw The Post. It’s a big old parfait of received opinion — but good, as the old joke goes. Many of the complaints I’ve heard about it have to do with the characters, such as they are, announcing the nature of their conflicts and the messages of their scenes, baldly and without shame; it’s only a little cheap when editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), half a movie after publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) chides him for keeping the Kennedys' secrets, comes back tell her “those days have to be over”; but when the first injunction against the New York Times is greeted by a little Greek chorus of Postmen talking about the First Amendment In Peril, it’s a big pot of fondue, and when Meg Greenfield (Carrie Coon), phone pressed to her ear, sings out to the hushed newsroom Hugo Black’s “press was to serve the governed, not the governors” line, it’s the whole fromagerie. But good! I loved it like I love Oliver Stone’s hallucinogenic JFK, and the old “message pictures” that I think are Spielberg’s real inspiration here; he has intuited that when a message pic gets off on being righteous, if you do it right it won’t turn audiences off — it will rather invite them to join in, and let the righteousness lift them up too. In such an exercise underdeveloped characters and aw-c’mon exposition fall far beside the point. I won’t go as far as Gandhi on that, but I’ll go pretty far and The Post is within my limit; if you too thrill to the scene in Sam Fuller's Park Row when Gene Evans drags a malefactor to the statue of Ben Franklin and smashes his head repeatedly against its base, it may be within yours, too. I will add that while Hanks, hard as he works on his gruffness, does little to disturb the shade of the great Robards, Meryl Streep, whom I never really liked, finally made a believer out of me. She usually strikes me as fussy, but her small, almost furtive emotional turns as she struggles against, then awakens to the full meaning of her duty struck me as completely appropriate to a great lady who is unafraid to be embarrassed but terrified to be wrong.

•  Department of Who's "We," Buddy: "We’re Becoming Like Him," reads the National Review headline over a picture of Trump, but no, it's not the erstwhile NeverTrumpers finally admitting the obvious, it's Michael Brendan Dougherty, as is his passive-aggressive wont, using "we" to mean liberals; instead of lamenting that top Republicans are currently trying to cover for Trump's obviously racist remarks, he tells us, "Kirsten Gillibrand now tentatively tries on a potty-mouth'; instead of criticizing Trump for using his cat's-paws to indulge his Clinton fetish with endless investigations, Dougherty tells us "loads of Russia-related stories blew up in reporters’ faces." The nadir is his implication that a federal judge restraining Trump's DACA directive was also "becoming like" Trump: "There is little chance a justice would have ventured to look so ridiculous, until Trump became our president." Judges blocked Obama sometimes, of course, but that was just Constitutional, see -- when you do it to Trump, you're becoming just like him!  I swear, if these people didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For obvious reasons.
•   You want to know why they're hopeless? At National Review David French is upset because America has seen its life expectancy decline yet again. The Washington Post reports:

The data a year ago set off alarms when they showed that in 2015 the United States experienced its first decline in life expectancy since that 1993 dip. Experts pointed then to the “diseases of despair” — drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism — as well as small increases in deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes. 

The 2016 data shows that just three major causes of death are responsible: unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease and suicides, with the bulk of the difference attributable to the 63,632 people who died of overdoses. That total was an increase of more than 11,000 over the 52,404 who died of the same cause in 2015.

Many of those "unintentional injuries" are drug overdoes. Now, you and I might look at this and think: Let's work harder on a cure for Alzheimer's, and on getting people more care for all those other diseases; above all let's make a society where everyone feels like valuable and cared for instead of just suckers whose only value is as prey in a vicious, winner-take-all society, because that's the kind of society from which people are inclined to seek an early exit. But French looks at this and thinks:

Government and the media are simply not up to the task. Think, for example, of the intensity of last month’s debate over the size of the child tax credit in the Republican tax bill. I shared the disappointment of a number of conservatives that the tax benefits for families weren’t larger, but I was under no illusion that even hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks would make a material difference in family outcomes. Yes, people respond to incentives, and positive tax changes help more than they hurt, but no reasonable person thinks that any single policy or series of policies in Washington will put the fractured family back together again.

French is a evangelical Christian (although -- and you'll love this -- he's talked about renouncing the term because his fellow holy rollers have gotten so depraved they're making him look bad). So it's a cinch that when he says government can't do anything for the vulnerable -- even though, in terms of child care policy, government has been effectively doing plenty for millions of children -- he expects Jesus to fill the gap, possibly through the reintroduction of the faith-based grifts of yore. In other words: pie in the sky and pass the collection plate. So I'm telling you: If you want a more just society, you can't just freeze out the obvious Trumpian crooks, you also have to get rid of the God-botherers who would tell you helping is futile and that the Lord will provide. In fact maybe get rid of them first.

THE GLORY THAT WAS GIPPER, THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS COOTER FROM THE DUKES OF HAZZARD.

The President Oprah thing is already beginning to die down, but before the historic moment passes let us bring to Clio's attention one particular piece of related gibberish from Opus Dei conservative Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review. It is, as one would expect, dismissive of Winfrey — “about how women are rising up to speak ‘their truth,’ telling ‘those men’ who have oppressed them that ‘their time is up’" is his sneer-quote-intensive description of her speech (Gad, isn’t it just like a woman to get pissy about rape and harassment!) -- and has a Big Idea about the Meaning Of It All, please God, but instead of sticking with the traditional mush about what celebrity culture hath wrought, Dougherty goes the extra mile to fix blame for celebrity culture on “wonks.” How ya figure, MBD?

The wonk’s role is well-fitted to the centrist political ideal in the post–Cold War West. For them, government is most highly admirable when it is totally denuded of questions of value or morality (these having obvious and uncontroversial answers), and reduced to a purely technical exercise. The politician working with the wonk finds that his job is reconciling the public with what’s good for them. 

Imagine — being so almighty arrogant that you want government to give people “what’s good for them” (like working bridges and highways, health care, etc.) instead of gifting them with your moral value decisions like “hmm, feeding these poor black people seems moral, but wouldn't it be more Christian to let their starvation and misery serve to spur others to thrift and industry?”

And this fits the machinery of the executive branch, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of civil servants, overseen by a much smaller retinue of political appointees almost all chosen from within the governing class of the country. 

He doesn’t mention private-sector government contractors, who soak the public fisc at least as well as any Gummint bureaucrat (no “what’s good for them” nonsense for those privateers — just good old-fashioned free-market self-enrichment!), because they are of Reagan, which is to say of the Lord.

Where this model of government is most advanced — in Europe — policy questions are routinely taken away from the passions of democratic peoples, and quarantined for expert management.

Dougherty is of the Dreher/Douthat school that wishes Eurocrats would stop thwarting the true will of white people and let neo-Nazis lead.

We could go on forever like this but ugh, let’s cut to the chase: according to Dougherty these silly “what’s good for them” government wonks are making a celebrity president like Oprah inevitable, while serious people like Dougherty prefer “the traditional politician, a person of judgment and charisma who represents the community from which he or she emerges, using his own wisdom in reconciling the diverse interests and needs of his nation and constituency” — you know, like Reagan and Trump. Or the have-a-beer-worthy George W., if you want to talk about genuinely manufactured celebrity -- for Bush Lite, who would have had neither business nor political cred without wealth and Republican handlers, was about as big a put-up job as Peter Lemonjello.

"Wonks are now the producers, behind the scenes," closes Dougherty. "The celebrities are just the talent, reading lines and leveraging their brand for the great project of governance." I don't know whether Dougherty saw Trump going off the reservation on DACA and being guided back to orthodoxy by Kevin McCarthy before he wrote that, but even if he didn't, he should know by now that you don't need good-government types to treat political leaders like the "talent"; simple goons and grifters are if anything even better at it.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about The Filth and the Fury or whatever it's called but really about the pushback from wingnuts who don't see how people can talk about such a highly accomplished public servant as Donald Trump that way, which will never not be funny. I'm no one's idea of a goddamn ray of sunshine but I think Trump's going to have to get better cheerleaders than the freaks and feebs he's got -- the Sig Ruman impersonator Sebastian Gorka accusing Wolff of "treasonous goals" is not going to win the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. America, and they would probably react to the approach of Stephen Miller by remembering some old story their grandparents told them about a ghost that eats children and barring the door.

UPDATE. No matter how low your opinion of these people goes, they will always disappoint you. As longtime readers will know, I am against distance diagnoses of politicians' alleged illnesses, including the mental variety, including Trump's; so I was not in favor of the 25th Amendment reactions to Wolff's book, and was at first sympathetic to wingnut Peter Hasson at The Daily Caller, who defended Trump from charges of clinical abnormality. Then halfway through his column Hasson started defending wingnut citations of Hillary Clinton’s allegedly disqualifying health issues in the 2016 campaign — such as a “prolonged, public coughing fit” — and insisted “questions about Clinton’s health weren’t pure speculation." To say Trump's very public incapacity for sequential thought is meaningless, and then turn around and defend the idea that Hillary couldn't be President because of various serious illnesses that have not, as of this writing, killed her, is a level of hypocrisy I think would most of us would be too embarrassed to perform for far grander sums than whatever The Daily Caller pays.

JUST SET THE BAR ON THE GROUND THERE.

Eddie Scarry at the Washington Examiner:

Why hasn't Michael Wolff's dementia-Trump ever been seen in public?

Dementia-Trump has been the only Trump I've seen, excepting those rare occasions when his handlers glue him to a teleprompter -- when he still sucks, but less crudely, causing the media dummies to swoon over him. Speaking of which, Scarry again:

But he's also delivered dozens of speeches off teleprompters, proving he can actually read...

Now that is one hell of a defense -- though it fails to account for the possibility that the cue-cards contain pictograms rather than words.

Then Scarry has the nerve to print a partial transcript of an interview in which Trump sounds like a mentally impaired geriatric, and commenting, "That doesn’t read like a mentally impaired geriatric’s interview," a maneuver I call the Hinderaker Fawn-and-Fleer.

Also, in answer to Wolff’s claim that “Trump is perpetually distracted,” Scarry said when he interviewed Trump, “Trump did stop the interview at certain points, interruptions you might call ‘distractions’” — for example, “he asked for me to hold while he watched a cable news segment about the speakers that were lined up for the convention. 'We have some great speakers, they’re just announcing the speakers now,' he said while I held. Then we resumed." Now, what does that tell you? Ha, "distracted"! He remembered who Scarry was and everything. At least I assume he did.

I wonder whether Scarry ever thought for a minute what a embarrassment that whole exercise was -- or what drugs one takes not to notice.

THE SPIEL OF THE CONVERT.

I'm so old I remember when those famous deficit hawks of the Republican Party looked the other way as George W. Bush ran a surplus into a huge deficit with tax cuts and foreign wars. (Actually not all of them looked the other way; some of them bullshat with all their might about how it wasn't Bush who did it, it was the bleeding-hearts' cavalier spending on stupid things like food and medicine for poor people.)

Well, you don't have to be old to remember last month when Trump and the Republicans larded another trillion-plus onto the deficit just so more rich assholes can douche with Dom Pérignon and wipe their ass with Treasury notes. At this point most Americans are clear about that and are probably at least closing in on the revelation that Republicans are full of shit when they profess concern with deficit spending.

It's so obvious even clue-averse Ross Douthat has picked up on it, and last weekend while people were distracted with New Year's preparations the Times columnist announced that if 2017 taught him anything, it's that deficits don't matter.

Douthat announced he had some "mistaken analysis to acknowledge and live down" and, after praising Trump because he "appointed decent judges and crushed the Islamic State" (Mission Accomplished!), admitted his error:

Now is a good time for intellectual humility, and for reserving judgment on an administration whose ultimate effects on domestic tranquillity and the Pax Americana remain uncertain. 

Instead, in the spirit of the longer view, I want to use this confessional column to reach back to the early Obama years, and the arguments I made then that assumed the urgency of deficit reduction, the pressing need for honest liberals to champion major tax increases and for honest conservatives to go all-in for major entitlement reform.

Yes, in those Obama years, for Douthat "it seemed reasonable to make deficit cutting a near-term priority from 2010 onward, to offset the surge of Great Recession spending with a period of belt-tightening." But he was wrong, oh, so wrong, and now believed "rather than pursuing a balanced budget for its own sake" America, being "a rich and powerful country with a stable government and control over its own currency," should not be "pursuing a balanced budget for its own sake."

Of course who could blame him -- Douthat certainly didn't blame himself: after all "people in the Obama White House" told him "it was important to reduce deficits pre-emptively," so it's really Obama's fault when you think about it.

Nowhere in this mea culpa did Douthat mention the geyser of new debt with which his former fellow deficit hawks had gifted the fisc; he's clearly hoping that we'll take it on faith that his was an organic growth toward his new loose money position, informed by careful study and fervent prayer. Maybe when the country's in ruins, Douthat will have another conversion experience; and, watching the senile Trump hauled off to prison, will like Harry Lynch in Wall Street say "the minute I laid eyes on you I knew you were no good." And expect us to believe it.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.

Sad news from Culture Warsyltucky:

As of January 1, 2018, Acculturated.com is no longer publishing new content. Our archives will remain available. 

Thank you to all of our readers, who inspired us to think about the many ways pop culture matters.

I still remember back in 2012 when, seemingly spurred by Ole Perfesser Instapundit's call for rightwing ladymags (but funded by Lord knows who), this outpost began tossing (but gently! And underhand, like a lady!) little Kultur bombs like this one about how feminism is alright but Downton Abbey showed you how the old-fashioned idea of womanhood was in many ways better, particularly if you were rich: "One side of me envies the women of Downton ever so slightly," thrilled Ashley E. McGuire. "Envies the thought of my husband referring to me as 'her ladyship.'" (I can't help but think of some slobby guy in a soiled t-shirt yelling from the kitchen, "Yer meatball sub is ready, yer ladyship!")

For five years, Acculturated gave us this and more; here are my few clips from their era which may be the only memorial some of their great works will ever have -- were it not for me, who would remember McGuire's "Is Ivanka Trump America's Kate Middleton?" or that ideas like "Drugs are ruining EDM" or pseudo-academic thumb-suckers like "'Fuller House' and the Disappearance of Marriage" were once entertained by presumably straight-faced editors before being released upon an apathetic public.

Acculturated also gave an outlet for Mark "Gauvreau" Judge, a Kulturkampfer with a long history in the movement that includes a 90s attempt to spread conservatism though swing dancing ("in the revival of swing dancing, [Judge] detects a model for cultural renewal," blurbed his publisher); without Acculturated, we may have missed such late Judgean gems as

When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.”

I confess, I worry for Judge; in our low, mean, Breitbartian time, what conservative publisher will accommodate his daintily daffy style? I worry less for the many, often three-named junior misses who filled many of Acculturated's pages; consider, for example, McGuire's resume:

She has appeared on CNN, CNN International, CBS News, Fox News, PBS, The History Channel, HuffPo Live, ABC/Yahoo News Live, EWTN, and the BBC, and her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Huffington Post, among others...

Like many a pundit maudit before me, I have a soft spot for lunatics and whackadoodles, and Acculturated's Bizarro analyses often came close to appealing to that part of my nature. But that was always spoiled by my awareness that when all was said and done, Acculturated was just a wingnut welfare warm-up studio, and instead of clawing their way out of incompetence or, like Ed Wood, apotheosizing it, these writers were just going to get kicked upstairs and given tighter briefs ("Nice idea about 'Fuller House,' honey, but howsa 'bout you dumb it down for National Review into something like, 'Why Lena Dunham Is a Whore'?"), and over time whatever mad effulgence they had would cool and harden into careerism, and they would still be shitty writers. Well, there are plenty of real mad geniuses out there to fuss over.

UPDATE. Comments are a gas, by which I mean part of the toxic miasma that has poisoned Western Civilization and which Acculturated sought in vain to dispel -- but funny! BigHank53 offers a clue as to why the site's doilies-and-dogma anti-feminism became unneeded in the modern conservative paradigm: "Today, of course, everyone has realized you can just walk up to those same women and grab 'em by the pussy." Pere Ubu remembers, apparently, and obliquely refers to one of the racier wingnut-ladymag articles I've covered, posted at The Federalist because (presumably) it was too hot for Acculturated: "6 Reasons to Sext Your Husband" -- which, despite the impression its title may leave, was meant to get the wife of said husband to sext him, not as a taunt; nonetheless it did contain the deathless phrase, "skin bus to Tuna Town." Top that, Peggy Noonan!

Oh, and I found us all a treat -- the Acculturated Pinterest Page! Sample:

Back in the early 60s nobody got depressed or syphilis because they had cocktails, sexism, and Jesus; also, if you get a high-and-tight you can tell the "cool chicks" you joined the Marines. Sigh, it was fun while it lasted, guys...

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...of my Top 10 Stupid Rightblogger Tricks. Special double-length column, no extra charge!

Long as it is, I had a couple of outtakes:

Wingnut lawyer calls civil rights hero a “fraud.”

John Lewis, now a Democratic Representative in Congress from Georgia, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and got his skull cracked for it. Lewis also got attacked by new President Donald Trump around the weekend of MLK Day 2017, after Lewis criticized his repulsive civil rights record, and Power Line’s John Hinderaker backed Trump thus: “Lewis is invariably described as a ‘civil rights icon,’ but the man is an utter fraud.”

How a man cruelly beaten in the cause of civil rights might be considered a fraud - especially by a guy whose greatest sacrifice to his own cause might be working late on Friday — Hinderaker didn’t explain. “There is no reason to treat John Lewis with kid gloves,” he sniffed, “and Donald Trump doesn’t do so.” Or, to paraphrase: You may be a national hero, but I am a shameless and energetic hack in the service of a buffoon, and history shows that I have the advantage.

Liberal Fascism for Dummies.

Normally I’d leave this spot open for Jonah Goldberg, and God knows he has plenty of worthy entries this year — like this one, in which he mused that in the post-Lincoln era, “I’d like to think I’d have been in the Radical Republican camp myself.” Try to imagine the inventor of the “Marion Berry cocktail… equal parts Jaegermeister, Kaluha, Bourbon and Coke; ‘So black not even the man can keep it down!’” hanging out with Thaddeus Stevens.

But Goldberg has been outstripped by Dinesh D’Souza, longtime rightwing operative and convicted felon: While Goldberg got his most recent fame boost in 2008 with Liberal Fascism, a dumb book about how liberals are the Real You-Know-Whats, D’Souza has published The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left, which, on the evidence of D’Souza’s August column, “THE SEX PERVERT AS ANTI-FASCIST,” appears to be similar in theme and even dumber.

I can hardly encapsulate it here, but the basic idea is that Frankfurt School Marxists tricked college kids into having orgies: “Marcuse’s celebration of outright perversion was a mantra that could not be more perfectly timed in the 1960s.” And getting all sexed up like this also made them liberal Nazis, because “while the rutting bohemians of the 1960s had no idea, Marcuse surely knew that the Nazis and the Italian fascists were themselves – almost to a man – bohemians.”

Hitler, for example, “was a painter and artiste before he went into politics,” wrote D’Souza; he listened to Wagner, and “was also a vegetarian.” And you stupid liberals think arts appreciation and tofu make you enlightened — if actually means you’re a Nazi!

Even being gay is part of the liberal Nazi nexus — did you know about Ernst Rohm? Indeed, “the Nazi atmosphere in those days… far more closely resembles that of the Village Voice or the Democratic National Convention than it does the National Review or the Trump White House.”

He’s got us dead to rights there. I just wonder why the guys marching around chanting “Jews will not replace us” don’t get in on the sex and bohemianism; I mean, I hear they can’t even beat off. Can merely hating Jews and pluralism really be enough of a payoff?

FORGET THE OLD PAIN, SING A NEW REFRAIN.

Last year was a fiasco, a real disaster, so full of sorrow,
This year will be a great year, I just can't wait, dear, until tomorrow

Listen, guys, it was a bad year, but we summoned our energy and sometimes our rage, and mostly kept our sense of humor, and -- I guess maybe I should speak for myself here -- it was that sense of humor that carried me though. The past year compares badly to recent years, but compares tolerably well to the past century; and throughout the tough years of that century guys like Nikolai Gogol, Jaroslav Hašek, Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh, Michael O'Donoghue, Kurt Vonnegut, Matt Groening, and others have on black days parted the clouds so the rest of us could see a way clear.

Let sad dogs nurse and worry gloom; I was born to be happy, and if there's nothing to be cheerful about I will rely on my gift of laughter and my sense that the world is mad. If you need, I will share it with you; follow along then into 2018 and devil take the hindmost.

UPDATE. Oh yeah, like last holiday weekend the Voice column will be delayed till Tuesday. If you need some funsies before then, check out the annual Jon Swift Roundup hosted by the brilliant Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar, in which some fine web writers select their own best work from the now-finished year. Not a dud in the bunch!  

REVERSE DEATH WISH STILL LIBERALS' FAULT!

Remember when Bill de Blasio, promising to stop stop-and-frisk, was elected Mayor of New York in 2013, and all the wingnuts were insisting the City would suffer a 70s crime wave as a result? (Which I hoped they were right about, because then maybe I could afford to move back.)

At City Journal Bob McManus raved about Bernie Goetz and Sonny Carson and murmured with a flashlight under his chins, "History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it whispers warnings. The wise will pay heed." "Mayor Bill de Blasio’s radical dreams are leading straight to chaos," moaned his colleague Myron Magnet.

When the cops were mad at de Blasio in 2014, fedora clown Jazz Shaw called for de Blasio to resign, claiming he had "open[ed] the door to anarchy." "Everyone loves a little nostalgia," said Susan L.M. Goldberg. "It's just too bad for New York that de Blasio favors the era of Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. Still thinking of watching the ball drop this New Year's Eve? Join the rest of us celebrating from the safety of our own homes."

And there were endless "Welcome to de Blasio's New York" fart-bubbles from assholes like John Podhoretz, and ooga-boogity one-liners like "DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK LOOKING MORE AND MORE LIKE TAXI DRIVER" from gomers and hayseeds.

Well, here it is almost 2018, de Blasio has been re-elected, and crime in the Apple is the lowest it's been since the 1950s. (The numbers were going down throughout de Blasio's tenure -- which you could tell because reporters started talking about how stop-and-frisk actually stopped before he became mayor, something you would never have heard had crime gone up.)

With their doomsday scenario in ruins, what's the play for lawn-order conservatives now? Fox News yesterday:

Does Trump deserve credit for drop in violent crime?

Ha ha, of course. But for the "intellectual" take, let us attend the first City Journal hack out of the bunker, Heather Mac Donald:

Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics.

Back when you libtards were made out of straw and called I.M. A. Stupid Libtard, you didn't like statistics! Well, Mac Donald has some stats for you -- New York's safer because it has fewer black people!

New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps...

And by "drug dealers and pimps," Mac Donald means African-Americans (and she's shockingly up front about it):

The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks...

A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker...

Yeah yeah, Racist Aunt, except in 1980, at the height of Death Wish Woo-hoo, black people made up 25% of the City’s population and today, it’s… also 25%. So, WTF? I guess maybe she means the shooty-stabby blacks all moved to neighborhoods where they don't have fancy restaurants. Anyway forget that, because Mac Donald rejoices that fewer cops are getting shot, which she imagines must make "libertarians and the anti-cop Left" mad, and for which of course she can't possibly credit the Mayor:

It is too soon to know definitively if the animus toward officers has fallen and if any such fall is behind the welcome drop in officer slayings. But without question, there has been a sea change in rhetoric and policy from the White House. Trump and Sessions do not take every opportunity to accuse the cops of systemic and lethal bias — yet when the facts warrant, the Sessions Justice Department has vigorously prosecuted and denounced cops who violate their oath of office. Sessions and Trump have repeatedly voiced their support for law enforcement, without coupling that support with a denunciation of phantom police racism.

So the intellectual wingnut perspective is essential Fox News': All good things flow from Il Douche! Well, why wouldn't they: Their base of Godly Country Folk and Righteous Suburbanites despises New York anyway, and are only interested in it as a symbol of the foul consequences of Other-loving. When stories like the New York crime drop make it apparent that in the Big Wicked Cities people of different races and creeds can actually live close together in relative harmony and comfort, they may become confused, and led to wonder whether there's something wrong with their own way of life, in which they can't be comfortable unless insulated from their fellow citizens by miles of waste space, opioids, and guns. That's where the MAGA fantasies come in most handy, assuring them that any way of life they weren't born into has to be wrong, despite the evidence. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...how the rightwing swoon over the tax bill reveals how completely those credentialed conservatives who once declared themselves "NeverTrump" have gone right past WhateverTrump into 4EverTrump. This has been obvious to me for a long time, and in the run-up to the tax bill I was frankly disheartened to see mainstream media outlets like the AP running heds like "For Trump and Ryan, a tortured relationship grows more so." Unless by "tortured" they mean Ryan and Trump like to get together and watch dark-skinned detainees doing stress positions at black sites,  this is ridiculous: As the old saying (one of many I have bequeathed to Barlett's) goes, he signs their bills and they let him grift. The loyalty this has engendered between their houses makes their relationship indistinguishable from any other political alliance, except this one is probably stronger than most, as it earns both parties an enormous amount of cash.

The rest of the commentariat are slow to catch up. The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt has a column called "The conservative resistance: the rightwingers who stood up to Trump," in which he scrapes up a few Republican resisters that Sam Tanenhaus missed, such as Jeff Flake -- but he fails to mention that while Flake's pretty good at talking the talk, he's not so great at walking the walk. And I'm willing to bet Gabbatt started his Susan Collins section before the final tax bill vote, necessitating the hilarious late addition, "like many on this list, Collins’ opposition to Trump has not been consistent."

AND WE'RE GONNA GET BORN NOW.

Let not the MAGA choads and their attempts to turn "Merry Christmas" into a war cry for assholes dismay you. Christmas is not a sack dance of wealth and power, and could never be. It is rather a call to all mankind to celebrate the birth of a child of poor and weary travelers who yet became Lord of lords. You can take that literally, or as a bit of poetry to remind you that though the fat thugs and their manicured grifters always expect the last word (and may seem to have gotten it, in those short stretches our attention-deficient media morons mistake for eternity), in time they are humbled, and the humble exalted -- or, as Alex Chilton sang in my favorite hymn, the wrong shall fail and the right prevail.

In the shortest term, in this very moment, you, my friends, who have a care for the world beyond yourselves and feel the lash of injustice even when it falls on others -- wheresoever you touch the world or embrace your fellow man, you hold the true gifts of life.

(Column will be up on Tuesday. Tidings of comfort and joy.)

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST.

You think being a conservative propagandist is easy? Well, maybe if you're brain-damaged, but otherwise think of how tough it must be to suppress your mental gag reflex at some of the things you're expected to pretend to believe. From Dave Blount at Right Wing News:

Last Jedi Chokes on Its Own Political Correctness 

Critics love the latest Star Wars movie. Audiences, not so much. This is in part because The Last Jedi is saturated with in-your-face political correctness. Therefore, it is not the movie’s fault if fans don’t like it; it is the fault of the fans, many of whom are probably the worst of the worst — that is, white males, just like the villains in the movie.

Wait a minute... "audiences, not so much"? People don't like The Last Jedi? Let's look at Box Office Mojo:

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $278,710,009 48.6%
+ Foreign: $295,000,000 51.4%
= Worldwide: $573,710,009

It opened less than a week ago and it has already made half a billion dollars. I should be so unpopular!

Blount supports his theory that The Last Jedi is unpopular despite its humongous grosses with a link to a story that says "On Rotten Tomatoes, The Last Jedi currently has an audience score of 60 percent, which is a stark contrast from its 93 percent Tomatometer score."

What do you think is a better sign of a movie's popularity -- how many millions of people pay money to see it, or the percentage of people who bitch about it on a film nerd site?

But then, what do you expect -- these are the kind of people who look at the 2017 elections, when Democrats ran the table, and a Democrat beating a Republican in a freaking Alabama Senate special election, and think, "Yeah, 2016 second-place finisher Donald Trump is more popular than ever." I guess they think about box office the same way they think about elections -- that they can always cheat.

UPDATE. I should have known, but had to be tipped off by commenters:

A Facebook page called Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys is claiming responsibility for tanking the Rotten Tomatoes audience score for the latest “Star Wars” film, alleging that it used bots in a concerted attack against the Rian Johnson-directed movie...

The page moderator HuffPost spoke to, who did not provide his name, said he launched this supposed bot campaign to protest the way “The Last Jedi” diverges from the franchise’s so-called Expanded Universe...

“Regarding female heroes: Did you not see everything that came out of Ghostbusters? That is why,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots. There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”

What a fucking dork. Well, like the Trump campaign -- and smaller related phenomena, like that Hollywood wingnut whose tiny anti-liberal poster campaigns are mysteriously always given star treatment by The Hollywood Reporter -- this really does fit the conservative pattern: fraudulently portray yourself and your positions as popular, then denounce actual evidence that you're not as the real fraud.

CAPITALISM CAN'T WIN IN THE FREE MARKET.

"Blue State Scrooges," eh? OK, how do you figure, James W. Lucas of American Thinker? He admits blue states subsidize red states by generating income, and federal tax revenue on that income, that goes to subsidize the low-income folks in Hog Waller, Arkansas. But because those blue states enjoy state and local tax deductions on their federal tax -- or did until they lost it to the GOP tax bill today -- that means "low tax states [were] underwriting profligate high tax Democrat state spending," and rootless cosmopolitans are "Scrooges" for not wanting to give up that deduction which was hurting Hog Waller's economy (unlike the incoming private plane and second-home mortgage deductions).

No, it doesn't make sense -- the blue states were already carrying the freight for the red, so Louisiana was in no way paying for Minnesota's decision to pay more in taxes to pave their roads and operate public schools -- but it sets Lucas' topsy-turvy victim-blaming tone. He then asserts that red states are entitled to some of that blue-state money because businesses in LA and New York get their money from red state customers:

...corporate taxes are ascribed to the state where a company has its headquarters. Thus, Disney’s corporate taxes are all attributed to California, and Citigroup’s to New York. However, the revenue upon which their profits and taxes are based normally comes from across the entire nation. Disney does not sell tickets to Star Wars only in California, and Citigroup branches and operations are not limited to New York. For them and all other companies with nation-wide sales, revenues, and the profits and taxes which are based on them, come from throughout the country. The profits and taxes may be ascribed to states like New York where the companies have their headquarters, but the money comes from West Virginia and Mississippi as well... 

What this analysis can show us is that if blue states are subsidizing red states with federal expenditures, red states are supporting those blue states with the revenues which are the source of those higher federal tax payments. Indeed, if I were a radical leftist rather than a firm supporter of free enterprise, I might point out that it appears that blue states are holding red states in a quasi-colonial relationship.

Ho ho, okay Hoss, then let's look at it from a "free enterprise" perspective: Red state people buy Disney movies instead of Festus' iPhone Camera Skateboard Stunts, and use Citigroup's financial services instead of borrowing money from Clem down at the general store, not because they have no choice, but because they do have a choice and judge the big-city product to be preferable to the homegrown. That's not colonialism, comrade -- that's capitalism!

And as much trouble as I have with corporations of all types, at least Disney offers a consistent stream of product to customers and strives to keep them happy -- not like the jes'-plain-folks, salt-of-the-earth, red state companies like Piggly Wiggly and Walmart which have a tendency to crush smaller local businesses and then, when the profits have all been wrung out, abandon them to economic misery. Which, judging by this tax bill, is the Republican Party's model for all 50 states, and is being instituted by them not in the interest of what these guys jokingly call free enterprise, but toward the political goal of making Oregon as miserable as Mississippi so their citizens will be equally inclined give up on life and take what pleasure they can from racism and war, which are among the few things a GOP government can reliably offer them.

Guys like Lucas act perplexed that millennials are leaning toward socialism, but never admit even to themselves that it's because they've made capitalism a shit product. And if articles like this are the marketing campaign, I don't see the numbers getting better.

'SWOUNDS, WHAT A DORKNERD.

The thing that makes nerds insufferable -- that promotes them to dorks, in fact -- is their complete lack of perspective, their inability to remember that it's only a comic book, a video game, or whatever. Take G. Shane Morris at The Federalist and his angry cri de cœur, "‘The Last Jedi’ Blasts The Heart Out Of Star Wars By Declaring War On The Past." If you thought your old lab partner was a pain in the ass raging about the lack of Lucasworld verisimilitude in some Star War thing -- maybe the grain of the robe on a Jawa doll or some shit -- get a load:

The appeal of Star Wars has always been its extraordinary heroes. When we first meet Ben Kenobi in “A New Hope,” we lean in and our arms prickle as he gazes into the past and murmurs, “Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”

Right up there with "This town needs an enema" and "To infinity and beyond." Yuh can't beat the classics!

...Contrast this with a pivotal scene in “The Last Jedi,” in which Luke and ghost Yoda burn down a gnarled tree that housed that last books of the Jedi library. “Page-turners they were not,” quips Yoda, who then chuckles as he watches the flames. Nobody, evidently, needs any of the wisdom in those books, or of the ancient religion they represent. 

This kind of lighthearted immolation of the past permeates “The Last Jedi,” which may be best summed up as a cinematic act of demolition. The movie doesn’t just kill an absurd number of characters. It represents a rejection of “Star Wars’” core concept: that in a galaxy full of mind-and-planet-blowing machinery, there is a power older and greater than any technological terror—a power wielded and taught by certain extraordinary individuals whose moral choices can change the fate of the universe.

You don't understand, he rages through hot tears. It's not just a Hollywood franchise, it's a celebration of the high school English teacher who told me I was special!

This being The Federalist, we eventually have to go here:

“The Last Jedi” transforms Star Wars from a space-superhero story into one consumed with what C. S. Lewis calls the “I’m-as-good-as-you” spirit. It’s a spirit all too common in our time, when “equality” is the sole remaining virtue, and young people rally to topple statues of historical figures about whom they know next to nothing.

You stupid hippies don't respect anything -- not my favorite proto-Douthat, and certainly not Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest! 'cause Star Wars is really about The Lost Cause, and The Force is honah, suh!

It's a pity we don't have adult lockers to stuff them into.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about conservatives convinced a "coup" against Trump is happening, and how that has less to do with any evidence thereof than with the black swan event of Republicans losing a Senate election in freaking Alabama (thanks to their increasingly obvious prion disease) and the panic it has sparked among the brethren.

One good thing about the whole get-Mueller movement is that maybe the dimmer bulbs will finally abandon the comforting fantasy of anti-Trump conservatism. At National Review -- onetime NeverTrump HQ, you'll recall! -- we currently have Jim Geraghty laying the groundwork, in his usual smarmy way,  for Mueller's ouster; that a new investigator (probably a former Trump hotel pool boy) "would be able to continue Mueller’s work without the perception of partisan bias," he claims, is an argument Trump can win "in the court of public opinion" (in which court he currently enjoys record-low approval ratings). Also at NRO, Charles C.W. Cooke devotes a column to blasting Jennifer Rubin for being seriously anti-Trump instead just throwing out the occasional "oh my word, how uncouth" while rubbing one's hands and dreaming of the day Trump can replace Ruth Ginsburg with Godwrath Darkykiller on the Supreme Court. Their above-it-all act is just another con.

BULL.

The Federalist is a uniquely awful piece of shit, not only for its wingnut politics, which you can get at a dozen other internet popsicle stands (and not only for the wretchedness of its writing, which ditto), but also for its culture-war crackpottery. Last week I mentioned their weird attempt to make a porn star's suicide into an anti-gay statement, and now there's this thing about a fucking cartoon:

Similarly, in the latest Ferdinand film, audiences will be told, “Be strong, be brave, be true… to yourself.” In the case of a bull who’d choose peace under his cork tree over fame with the matadors, we might argue that he chose the better. But our world is not the fictitious world of Ferdinand. For the human heart and mind, being true to oneself can quickly lead us to dangerous relativistic thinking.

Actually the relativism goes back to Dumbo, which betrayed our old certainties about how elephants should submit meekly to their bullhooks and do ordinary circus tricks -- and now look; Ringling Brothers is kaput -- talk about a Gramscian Long March of pink elephants through the Institutions! But let us not intrude on Federalist writer Jessica Burke's thesis:

Ferdinand, The Transgender Bull?

OK, let's intrude. Apparently someone has mentioned that the flower-loving Ferdinand "did not want to perform his or her gender as expected," making this cartoon in Burke's view "an emblem of gender nonconformity" and an assault on godly butchitude. Not only that, it encourages the sin of individualism:

But being true to yourself isn’t isolated to just rejecting classic sexual ethics or sex roles. We can be true to ourselves in any number of gluttonous, lustful, and selfish ways. My millennial friends are known to say, “You do you,” believing that each person has the right to pursue whatever makes him or her happy. They don’t want to deem any actions or beliefs as wrong or untrue because they believe that each person defines truth and morality. This thinking has led to a culture that often ignores sin and even calls it courageous.

In “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis...

Ugh, okay, I draw the line at citations of the proto-Douthats. So to sum up, Fendinand, like Dumbo and his mom, should have submitted to the will of heaven and led the children to Christ, but he made them into flower-sniffing do-your-own-thing hippies instead, so you will see him, heathen, bucking and snorting in Hell as you both roast for all eternity.

If nothing else this is a reminder that fundamentalists were nuts well before they embraced Trump.

WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM?

Now that the danger has passed, it will be something to recall and reflect how mere days ago conservatives were pee-dancing around Roy Moore, trying to look classy and moral while simultaneously endorsing a pedo. Rod Dreher had one of the worst takes: In "An Anti-Communist For Roy Moore," he told yet another of his patented "reader who doesn’t want to be identified" stories, this one about an Iron Curtain refugee who compared Moore to the persecuted souls back in the USSR, and explained why, given the chance, he would vote for him:

I would have no other choice. The reason being that if we accepted that a mere accusation — however credible — is the new basis of our political and legal systems, than we have already lost both. This principle was at the very core of the mechanism of communist terror. Did you neighbor have a better car? Well, you accused him of being a secret adherent of capitalism. That was enough. He would be done for, and with some luck, his car would be yours. We are not that far from it here …

I don't recall Dreher, or any of his alleged refugee readers, blubbering over Al Franken or giving him the benefit of the doubt -- in fact, quite the opposite ("Bring it on. This is necessary, and important"). But he was all sympathy for Moore, comparing him to Soviet show-trial victims, despite his more credible accusers.

One can guess why.

Of course when Moore lost Dreher gave a long gassy speech full of Moral Dignity, but barely a day went by before he returned to his lying-bitches theme, joining Claire Berlinsky in denouncing what they both characterize as a "Warlock Hunt." The least ridiculous thing about Berlinski's article is her acknowledgement that some of the powerful men brought down in recent scandals were accused of relatively minor offenses -- but she seems to think that, with the possible exception of Harvey Weinstein, none of them did much of anything wrong; in fact she is especially sympathetic toward the men who admitted they'd fucked up -- she assumes they only repented because feminism, like Soviet Communism, is so oppressive that it brainwashes true victims like Matt Lauer into thinking they're guilty ("The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess"). I bet feminists who hear this are wondering, like the Jews accused of running the world, when they will reap the benefits of this allegedly immense power.

Dreher of course makes everything hilariously worse:

It brings to mind the time I was accused of racism in the workplace on completely spurious grounds. This accusation would have been laughed out of any remotely fair-minded tribunal. But my accuser was a racial minority...

In this land where women and minorities are forever oppressing white men, Trump is king. But, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, he needs a majority.

JUST A REMINDER...

...there's no Voice column from me this week as I am on vacation -- or rather, in the after-vacation hellmouth caused by the snow in London, which has bollocksed my return trip. Kudos to the Edinburgh innkeeper who snuck into the closed bar and got me a Boddington's last night, and cheers to the British Airways staff on the ground who have been very patient; as to the BA organization itself, well, we'll see.

Anyway, while I'm up and the juice holds out, here's what you have to beat to make headline of the week, from Crazy Joe Walsh at The Daily Wire:

Police Murdered This Unarmed Man, But The Media Doesn't Care Because He's White

"[T]he media isn't interested in exposing police misconduct generally," claims Walsh. "They're interested in exposing racially motivated police misconduct, even if they have to fabricate it out of thin air." Out of thin air!  That's why you hear those stories about cops recklessly killing people of color -- and I guess why you see those videos too, which must also be fabricated out of thin air (and which must also be why the guy who videoed Eric Garner's murder was jailed).

It's always white men who have achieved fame and wealth despite having no talent or class whatsoever who are most convinced that black people get all the breaks.

DR. MACPHAIL GASPED. HE UNDERSTOOD.

Well, it's been a great vacation (not over yet; no column on Monday), but it's winding down so I better take a look-in on the brethren -- huh, seems Mark Hemingway is at The Federalist talking about a pornstar lady who got some angry emails because she wouldn't work with a gay pornstar guy, then killed herself. (scratches chin) Something tells me this won't be the usual fist-shake against Our Promiscuous Society, but will instead seek to pit gay rights against women's rights. OK, let's read:

Well, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a mob that would tell [August] Ames to kill herself if she won’t have sex with someone who has sex with other men would also happily pass a law requiring porn stars to be subject to penalties for discriminating in who they sleep with. Certainly, trans activists are already pushing the idea that you’re transphobic if you won’t sleep with transsexuals. You really have to marvel at how fast we’ve progressed from “Bake the cake, bigot” to “Take off your dress, bigot.”

(Polishes nails on lapel) Ya still got it, Edroso!

Hemingway's story and yet another one about August Ames are The Federalist's #1 and #2 most popular stories at the moment. I guess one part of that crowd is Ames fans who welcome the opportunity to mash up their appreciation of her oeuvre with their homophobia ("Thanks a lot, fags, now the world will never see Bang Bros Invasion 18!") and the other part is fundamentalists who would love to do a Reverend Davidson on a porn star themselves, preferably but not necessarily before she dies. I wonder how much traction they'll be able to get from this idea that LGBT activists seek to force porn stars to have sex against their will. Say, maybe that'll be a hot damsel-in-distress scenario for Bang Bros Invasion: In Memoriam!

Wish I could say it's good to be back.

LITERAL SPOILER.

It's been nice to take a break from the Homeland and not have the nonsense I usually look at in front of my eyes. But I made the mistake of opening Twitter and I saw someone talk about Megan McArdle and The Crucible. One click led to another and uggggh:

Later:

It's like watching Oliver trying to talk to Mr. Haney on Green Acres except not funny. To quote another work of art I doubt McArdle would like, I'd give everything I own to be able to take out my brain and hold it under the faucet and wash away the dirty pictures you put there tonight.

UPDATE. I really made a mistake and went to National Review and see how they were taking the Conyers resignation. Sure enough, Ben Shapiro is there complaining that the ooga-boogas will replace him with another ni-clang I mean Democrat, and like any Democratic safe seat this means democracy is through: "It’s obvious that we’ve stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and begun to think of ourselves as subjects," rant rave. Also, Shapiro says, "Who cares if Al Franken grabs women’s breasts as they sleep?" Aside from the observable fact that Franken was not touching Leeann Tweeden's breasts in that famous photo -- and Shapiro rushing that assertion in there says everything the intellectual vigor that got him elected "cool kid's philosopher" by the New York Times -- "who cares" is a weird way to describe the parade of Democrats calling for Franken to resign. It's like he's looking for new and exciting ways to be full of shit -- which I guess is why the Times got excited about him.

Ugh, enough. Back to my gelato and Bellini!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Kate Steinle trial -- or rather, the trial by rightbloggers of San Francisco for allowing dirty dirty immigrants to live in it, leading to one discharging a weapon and killing Steinle, and then not having the decency to hit the shooter with the full murder rap rightwingers demanded, despite the evidence.

The idea that an illegal drug-addict-fuckup is more dangerous to America than a homegrown drug-addict-fuckup is mysterious unless you fathom their absolutely hard-wired hard-on for the Other.

P.S. Over this week posting may be light -- yeah, I know, I mean lighter than usual -- because I am on vacation, stuffing myself with art and guanciale. There may be pictures here.