THE LATEST CRAZE.

If you see less of me here than previously, overwork at my cott-damn job and sloth are only part of the reason. So many of the conservative tantrums I see in print or online these days are dull beyond imagining and it's often hard to get inspired. Trumpism has made many of the brethren lazy; remember when they felt obliged to construct elaborate fantasies to defend their stupid ideas -- for instance, that marriage makes you rich? I sort of miss those days. I recall they used to even promote actual policies that were almost as funny as their rages against Lena Dunham. but why bother to try and make it look good when the most overt rightwing grifting and racism are now national policy, and your comrades in the Q miasma are coming up with ever more outlandish conspiracy theories for you to believe in? In this environment even my usual punching bags like Jonah Goldberg have lost quite a bit of sawdust; I mean, look at this shit. You see my dilemma.

But there are some Trumpkins\ tropes that are worth recording if only for the historical record (though I suspect future generations will remember us mainly from Leibowitzian memorabilia). A major example is the I'm No Trump Voter But shtick. I normally refer to this in the context of Rod Dreher, who is constantly using it in "I'm no Trump fan, but"/ "I'm no Trump supporter, but"/ "I didn't vote for Trump, but" locutions. Here's a recent example:

Politically speaking, religious liberty is the most important issue to me. I wouldn’t rule out voting against Donald Trump in 2020, because some other issue was so urgent, and so important, that it justified voting against my religious liberty interests. But every time I start to think that, some progressive organizations will come out with statements that portray ordinary First Amendment backers like me as some sort of unique and horrible threat to decency.

Dreher's column starts out as a defense of Jeff Sessions' obviously anti-gay God Squad, which he starts defending by quoting sympathetic lefty milquetoasts. But when he runs out of those, he seems to realize all that's left for him is to defend it himself, which would make him look ridiculous; so he flips the table by talking about how libtards are making him, A Reasonable Conservative, vote for Trump, so there.

(For extra entertainment catch Dreher's update: "If your a liberal who can’t come up with anything more serious than, 'Christians are just mad that they can’t discriminate against blacks anymore' — seriously, this was one comment — then you shouldn’t waste your time commenting, because I’m not going to publish it." Sheesh, what a snowflake.)

Another fine example is John Kass' recent column at the Chicago Tribune, the news hook for which is Paul Manafort's trial. Kass takes Manafort's side, believe it or not ("Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump"), and even quotes Mollie Hemningway, a hi-sign for Trump dead-enders. But, probably realizing (like Dreher) this tack will make him look stupid if he doesn't gussy it up somehow, Kass devotes most of his real estate to how the Media -- from which wingnut columnists always exempt themselves -- are dissing The Little People, and (everybody say it with me) This Is Why Trump Won. Kass declares himself Not A Trump Fan, of course -- "he wasn't my choice for president" -- but he kicks it up a notch by suggesting that even Trump's voters aren't Trump fans, either:

Many were shocked by Trump’s manner, by his bragging, his rude behavior, reference to his hand size, his boorishness, the way he treated women.

And still they voted for him. Why? Because they loathed the other side more. They loathed the establishment. They loathed the media. And their reservations about Trump were washed away by the laughter following Clinton’s “deplorables” line.

No wonder people seem so grumpy these days -- they all have a president that nobody wanted!

I've been trying to come up with a name for this line of guff. "Tsk-Tsk Trumpism" is one I like; @TelegramSam100 has offered "Trumpism Private Reserve (Not that yucky stuff the peasants drink)" ; @txoffender says "Trump Goggles." Any other ideas?

SYMPATHY AND THE DEVIL.

I read that Washington Post "White, and In The Minority" story. Excerpt:

She went to him. They kissed and sat side by side, legs touching. Flipping through Facebook, she told him about the meeting, how uncomfortable it had been. 

“They don’t give a rat’s ass about people with white skin,” he said. 

She nodded, feeling better. This was exactly what she had needed. Someone who understood, and Venson always did. She first met him last July. For months, she had called over any mechanic — most of whom were white on her shift — repairing a nearby machine, just to have someone to talk to, and then one day it was Venson. He told her he’d gone to the same high school she had, and it felt so good to connect that they soon had a relationship going, one whose core was their shared experience at Bell & Evans.
“Half of them know English and they just don’t show it,” Venson continued, pulling on a cigarette. 

“They do,” she agreed, smoking her own. 

“You get pretty much overlooked,” he said. 

She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder, feeling tired, and then the two of them were quiet as the trucks carting away the chicken rumbled off and the final minutes of their break ticked down to nothing.

Like many of you I've had it up to here with mainstream papers obsessing over the feelings of racist white Trumpkins.  Maybe in this instance I was just more responsive to reporter Terrence McCoy's craft, or to the specific literary pedigree markings of his story, but I really think his empathy for the disgruntled white folks working at Bell & Evans Plant #2 in Fredericksburg, Pennsyltucky, is humane and appropriate, and that he's not championing Heaven's and Venson's sad white-minority resentment as a serious point of view we're supposed to nod sagely over and try to make accommodations with for the sake of national unity -- you know, that way that idiot Margaret Renki did at the Times -- but simply showing us what's going on with these people, the way real writers can.

Nonetheless, as I expected, white supremacists have seized on the story on message boards --

If you are white,then YEP! You aren't allowed to be among your own people because that's RACIST! The government will FORCE DIEversity down your throat or force it with the barrel of a gun but you WILL obey their dictates! Fight back or settle for this.

-- and at straight-up, not-even-kidding Nazi sites like Stormfront:

This is just sad, but read it carefully, for this is the future in a land where the Whites who built it are a small minority... 

That article is just propaganda designed to demoralize whites and boost the morale of any (((liberals))) reading it... 

It's nothing more than Jew/Marxist gloating, and I for one can't wait to see these "journalists" proven wrong. Whites will rise up against this perpetual onslaught of anti-White BS, and we're eventually going to WIN! Sink that into your demonic skulls, Washington Post...

The problem is not that the Post portrayed, apparently accurately,  the bitter lives of American racists; real journalism, like real art, is never the problem, in fact we're ever in need of more of it. The actual problem is, as I see it, twofold.

One problem is that America is as suffused with racism as it's ever been, but also more aware of it than it has been in a long time -- and the more some of us own up to it, the more others of us just own it, convinced that, if the liberals they've been trained to despise are against it, then they're by God for it.

The other problem is that our nation suffers from shitty education and shitty politics. If we were where we were at in the 1960s on both counts, we'd still have racists, but we'd be able to recognize them as such, and we'd be able to recognize a story like McCoy's as being an examination of racists, and maybe a glimpse into our own sick souls. As it is, our crap politics tells us that racism isn't racism, but Heritage, or the White Working Class, or This Is Why Trump Won, or some shit; and our miseducation tells us that anything that makes you better understand and even empathize with anyone -- including the racists in McCoy's story -- is a piece of propaganda for them and what they stand for; if you feel for them, you have to stan for them, and if you won't stan for them, then you can't feel for them.

This literally infantile way of relating to the world is killing us just as surely as the whole miasma of insane, ignorant policies is killing us. In fact I am convinced that it's where our troubles begin. Which is why, instead of just shaking my fist, I take the time to try and think these things through and explain them.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest conservative fit over social media, and how, by crying censorship, they parlay their victim status into unearned advantages from corporate suckers. Gotta hand it to them -- they've actually found ways to be simultaneously at your feet and at your throat!

UPDATE. On the delusions-on-grandeur end of the mood swing, conservatives like Ridiculous Pseudonym at Red State are claiming that Twitter and Facebook have taken a bath on the market lately, not because they've run out of suckers, but because Mr. and Mrs. Average American are really mad that some neo-Nazis claim their names didn't come up fast enough in search results:

Facebook portrays itself as an open platform – on which anyone can freely participate. But they have demonstrated time and again – they are a platform closed to conservatives.

And it appears average people – are beginning to not like the inherent unfairness of it all.

"They call me mad, but one day when the history of France is written, they will mark my name well... Sidney Applebaum!" (Meanwhile I see Amazon -- run by Trump's nemesis Jeff Bezos -- is showing record profits; I guess by Sidney Applebaum's law, this must presage a blue wave.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of my favorite cover versions. What's yours?

• I saw a mean, funny David Klion tweet about Bari Weiss, showing the crowd at Chautauqua, N.Y. to whom she presented her "New Seven Dirty Words" speech to be mostly hella old, with the caption "The voice of a generation." Weiss, promoter of the Dark Interweb or whatever it was called (boy, if we have movies in the future about life in the late-'10s, won't that be a lazy signifier!), is a nightmare, of course, but when Klion's commenters pointed out that Chautauqua audiences tend to be older (though I see they have the Gin Blossoms coming in -- celebrating their 25th anniversary, eek!), I felt maybe it had been unfair of me to laugh. But then I saw a description of her speech in The Chautauquan Daily:

So while Carlin’s “7 Dirty Words” have lost their luster and invaded the mainstream, Weiss proposed a new set: the I-word, H-word, the other P-word, E-word, J-word, R-word and D-word.

Imagination, humility, proportion, empathy, judgment, reason and doubt.

???

Being an American only requires a commitment to a set of ideas, she said. In other parts of the world, these factors (race, gender, ethnicity) confine people, but not in America.

“The antidote to identity politics is imagination,” Weiss said, “a moral and political imagination that allows us to feel the spark of that electric cord, even today.”

Be black and get on the wrong side of a cop and you may well feel the spark of an electric cord, motherfucker! Then she brings in Laura Ingalls Wilder -- a big fave among libertarians -- and what a shame it is that someone took her name off a children's book award just because she said things like "There were no people, only Indians lived there" and "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." "The arbiters of culture," mourns Weiss, "are convinced that she deserves to be censored for 19th-century morals based on morals we hold dear today." I guess it's beyond hopeless to explain to wingnut grievance-mongers like Weiss that someone deciding not to associate with someone else (particularly a dead someone else) isn't censorship. Thereafter comes the Greatest Hits -- Evergreen College, Halloween at Yale, "no guardrails," "Weiss said she was uncomfortable by the euphemisms her pro-choice, feminist cohorts spread — that abortion is 'like a hip-replacement' or an appendectomy," etc. Well, suffice to say I no longer feel bad about laughing at Weiss -- in fact, I think mockery is far too good for her.

• Rightwing tantrums over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have practically become a convention, and Meghan McCain's conniption was a lovely example of the form. While we have no similar tape of Roger Kimball's voice growing increasingly hysterical, and though, unlike McCain, he has access to a thesaurus, his rant at the American Spectator seems to boil up from a similar well of ancient enmities. He, too, professes to believe all social democracy results in Venezuela and people who want a more equitable distribution of America's plentiful resources are "children of all ages" who "whine and rant," and even resorts to a cryptic daddy-spank threat: "the fact that calls for socialism are once again crowding the airwaves reminds us that folly is a noxious hardy perennial that prudent gardeners need to be eternally vigilant to spot and extirpate." I can see Kimball proposing Prudent Gardeners to a perplexed Trump mob as a name for the new Brownshirts. But the surest sign that Kimball is letting the little lady get to him is this primordial splurt:

There are, after all, many salubrious processes that produce unpleasant by-products as part of their activity. You see it in manufacturing, you see it in biology. You eat the steak, it nourishes you and makes you strong, but it also results in odiferous and potentially toxic by-products.

Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth that the ingenuity of man has ever devised. But after it achieves a certain level of prosperity, it regularly excretes characters like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, beneficiaries of capitalism whose contempt for its strictures is equaled only by their ignorance of its tenets.

I predict this dive into Kimball's dreamlife will do little to stop her rise, though it may get him some fan letters from conservatives who are into scat.

INDIRECTLY ABOUT THE COHEN TAPE.

"Fake Interview With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Was Satire, Not Hoax, Conservative Pundit Says," reports The Intercept.  Smart people are skeptical for reasons I can understand. The perps are basically bad faith personified, for one thing, and the reaction of the Trumpenproletariat gives the impression  — which may not be quite accurate, and I’ll get to that in a minute — that they’re swallowing it whole:

Before the satire language was added, the video spread throughout Facebook. Presidential candidate Lee Newton Rhodes shared the post, writing, “This is what the liberals democrats would rather offer the voters than me.” It was also shared -- seemingly as if it were real -- in numerous conservative and pro-Trump Facebook pages and groups, with some describing Cortez as “the new face of the Democrats” and saying the footage shows Democrats “are even stupider than I thought.” Commenters on the posts wrote that Ocasio-Cortez is a “stupid bitch,” “Dumbo the clown,” a “complete idiot”, a “dumbazz” and “dumber then (sic) dog poop,” and said she has “been lickin to (sic) many toilet seats”and that her “house play nts probably help her complete crossword puzzles.”

This portrayal by Media Matters' Alex Kaplan suggests these commenters have been hoaxed -- else why would they talk as if the debate were real?

But I don't think so. Certainly the thing from the CRTV network is not satire in any sense that Juvenal, Waugh or Swift or even Harvey Kurtzman would recognize; the fake interview, in which Allie Beth Stuckey says things like "Do you have any knowledge, whatsoever, about how our political system works?" and they cut to Ocasio-Cortez looking stupid, is a form of schoolyard humor similar to Bart making Moe in The Simpsons' "It's a Good Life" parody say "I'm a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt."

That is, it's childish fun for those so inclined, and only something you'd profess to believe authentic if you were either a.) cognitively incapacitated, and thus really fooled by it; b.) an unscrupulous propagandist looking to lead such poor souls into error; or c.) in general indifferent or even slightly hostile toward the truth in certain areas of your life, like a woman who can’t deal with the fact that she’s about to lose her job or a man who’s in denial that his marriage is falling apart.

The thing is, while there may be a certain, even large number of mentally disabled people pimping this thing, and God knows plenty of con artists who might prey on their credulity, life experience tells me that most of the fake’s boosters know it’s fake and simply don’t care, and would consider your attempt to correct the record an unwarranted and unsportsmanlike attack on their good time.

Conservatives have been asked to believe nonsense for a long time -- that tax cuts for the rich trickle down and pay for themselves, that we'll be greeted as liberators, that there's no more racism, etc. These were tough lifts, but they had the help of intellectuals, or magazine writers who passed for them, to give them a line of gab that made these things sound reasonable, at least to themselves.

Recent years have not been kind to these beliefs, and Trumpism kind of blew the whole scene -- not just by being so mind-bendingly, outlandishly at variance with observable reality, but also by  presenting them with unitary Republican control of the government, thus making American politics a perfect playground for their fantasies.

Now instead of using the line of gab, they're just mouthing absurdities. Trump's budget-busting tax cuts have done nothing but damage to the economy yet they insist it's going to lift all boats. His racism is obvious and effective, yet they insist the people who point it out are the real racists. They've dropped the pretense of war as a tool of liberation, and now celebrate it as bloodsport and an electoral stratagem, and insist it's the road to peace. Etc.

It's like the entire George W. Bush administration happened in a couple of months, and no one had time to work on their second thoughts.

Outsiders look at this and think Trump's followers are bamboozled and perhaps brainwashed. But that assumes they really believe this stuff. I think their political philosophy has obliged them to pretend to believe it. When they complain about fake news, they're not saying it's not true; they're saying it's a Bad Thing they can wave away. It's only a very thin membrane of self-respect that prevents them from just saying "So what" instead.

As the title indicates, this has something to do with the Cohen revelation. The brethren seem rather rocked back on their heels about it -- even reliable propagandist Jim Hoft can only chase the headlines -- because it's extremely hard to explain away. I think some sentimental liberals may think this will get Trumpkins to see at last what a monster the guy is and start questioning their support -- like they're hypnotized and this might be the salutary shock that brings them round. But they're not hypnotized, though some of them may pretend to have been in the aftermath. Just give them time. They'll develop a spiel for this. Probably, as with the FBI investigations of Trump, the story will be that a corrupt party is trying to take down our beloved President through nefarious means -- that is, the story Trump's pushing -- and some garbled misapprehension of "fruit of the poisoned tree." Then, back to MAGA until the midterms, when the marshals break down the door.

UPDATE. Here's a good one -- Giuliani says they're actually saying "Boo-urns":

“It’s a little bit hard to hear, but I assure you that we listened to it numerous, numerous times, and the transcript makes it quite clear at the end that President Trump says, quote, ‘Don’t pay with cash,’” Giuliani told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He also countered Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis’ calls to the CNN audience to hear the evidence for themselves. “Go online. Listen to your broadcast… The third time you play it, it’ll become clear,” Giuliani said.

This fits nicely with Trump's insistence -- absurd but accepted by the diehards -- that "I said the word 'would' instead of 'wouldn't'" in his Putin press conference last week. Looks like we're getting closer to that long-anticipated "I was never president" moment.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's Russian adventure, and the wingnut schism between those who feel they have to pretend to give a shit to make it look good and those who believe Trumpism is forever and rush to defend his sellout.

Among the outtakes, we find our old friend PJ Media's Roger L. Simon who, in response to Bernie Sanders' criticism of Trump's Russia maneuvers, counters that Sanders had "picked the Soviet Union for his honeymoon" and John Brennan actually voted for Gus Hall, then rambles on about how horrible the Soviet Union was for several paragraphs before accusing Trump's critics of "Russia Derangement Syndrome" and -- referring to Democrats' alleged love for the USSR back in the day -- "the equivalent of a sex change operation over Russia." Simon, a former screenwriter and novelist, can still turn a phrase; what he can't do is turn it into something that makes sense. (I always knew what conservatives really hated about the Soviets was that they paid lip service to communism, and that every horror the Reds employed would be okay with them once they ix-nayed the arxism-May.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I missed this when it came out in 2014. I heard it sucked. Not so!

• The Federalist having done its part for the "New York, with its record low crime rate and record high population, is collapsing thanks to libs" shtick, National Review sees and raises with Deroy Murdock's and Brett Joshpe's "De Blasio’s Dystopia" -- subtitled, LOL, "This is what a socialist New York looks like." Cue sinister 70s saxophone music! The one thing everyone I know back in the old town is bitching about is the state of the subway, but Murdock and Joshpe don't mention it -- their major concerns are ancient wingnut wouldn't-wanna-live-there tropes from the Lindsay era. For instance, homelessness -- not that the authors are concerned for the welfare of the unhoused, mind; they refer to temporary housing for these poor souls as "homeless-hotel staycations," har har. No, they're worried the bums "can be prone to violence," unlike domiciled criminals, who gently ask to mug you. Then, I swear to God, they complain that they (or somebody -- the authors do not identify a witness; maybe a cab driver told them about it) saw someone shooting up on the street. In broad daylight! I know Murdock's lived in New York a long time, so I assume he lost a bet. As for Joshpe, he appears to be a baby lawyer who doesn't get why his Ivy League education and condo deposit doesn't buy him a blight-free passage down these mean streets. Mamaroneck's calling, buddy!

• Also at National Review, David French has a thing about how Ben Shapiro is the victim of an "online mob" because a lot of people said they don't like him. Regular readers know this is par for the conservative-victimology course, but two things about it are noteworthy. For one thing, in the incident French is describing, the "online mob" yelled at a guy who promoted Shapiro, not Shapiro himself -- apparently conservatives can be Twitter-mobbed in absentia! But more interesting still is the way French kicks off this bad-faith-fest about how progressives are mean to him and his buddies:

I’ve got some questions for my progressive readers. When you think of Colin Kaepernick, do you define him by his quiet kneeling and many thoughtful interviews? Or do you define him by the socks he wore once, dehumanizing cops as pigs? 

When you think of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, do you define him by his hundreds of thousands of eloquent and meticulously researched words? Or do you define him by his call for violence in Baltimore, or his dehumanizing statements about the heroic cops and firefighters who rushed into the World Trade Center on 9/11? 

Is Samantha Bee defined by the time she accused a cancer patient of having “Nazi hair”? Or when she used a vile epithet to describe Ivanka Trump?

The idea is supposed to be that, just as these alleged offenses should not limit our understanding of these liberal icons, so Ben Shapiro "is the sum total of his work. He is not the isolated hot take or tweet" and should not be judged solely by these gotchas. But wait -- all the stories French links to that beat up on Kaepernick, Coates, and Bee are from National Review -- and three of them are written by French. And they're all ridiculous cavils -- like Kaepernick's pig socks -- that led to wingnut shit-fits online. Where's the National Review story -- or even brief blogpost -- by French telling us we shouldn't judge these liberals by these isolated incidents?

THIS LEFT-WING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND.

Following last week's rush of enraged conservative misdirection after Sacha Baron Cohen made a bunch of them look stupid, I thought wingnuts would lay off awhile -- how much mileage can there be in attacking a popular comedian for outwitting you? -- but here's Nancy French at National Review with a new angle: "Sacha Baron Cohen’s Sexual Harassment, in the Me Too Era." Now what, I wondered when I saw that headline,  could she mean?

So I read down through French's introductory huffing and puffing ("Apparently calling sexual harassment 'satire' not only gets you a free pass, it sometimes gets you famous") till I got here:

It’s time for [Cohen] to deal honestly with the filmed sexual harassment of Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul during a 2008 interview. If you didn’t see this scene in his Bruno movie, I can assure you it was hard to watch.

Blink. Blink.

She means this:

French didn't embed the YouTube clip -- not because it's "hard to watch," I'll wager, but because a lot of her readers would play it and laugh, as audiences did when the movie was in theaters, especially when Paul runs out of the room screaming "He's a queer!"

French indignantly compares Cohen to "Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, [and] Kevin Spacey."
Part of me hopes Ron Paul will go along with this -- that he'll call out Cohen as a predator, become a victim advocate and start doing #MeToo tweets rather than his, ah, traditional material. As it stands, it'll be interesting how many conservatives who normally moan about political correctness run amok will pretend to buy this nonsense.

UPDATE. Several commenters remind me that Nancy French was the as-told-to author of a Bristol Palin book; since, as my Voice column notes, Sarah Palin was one of Cohen's more recent targets, I assume French's bad-faith attack is a courtesy vendetta on behalf of, or perhaps part of her ongoing service to, La Famiglia.

One could fill several volumes with examples of conservatives pretending to accept liberal moral paradigms, either as trolling or, as French does here, with a straight face. Here's Toby Young, a disintegrated remnant of the Tory literary tradition, doing the former:

Also you libs love Eloise so much, well she's rich 'cause she lives at the Plaza durr hurr! Young's sally is the rhetorical equivalent of flaming poo left on a doorstep; I suspect French actually hopes to rally troops of pseudo-activists, though so far she's just got the dopes at Free Republic ("Sacha will be yucking it up right until the moment one of his victims clubs him like a baby Harp seal"). 

This seems to be more rightwing Alinskyism; as I showed years ago, conservatives claim liberals regularly use Alinsky's Rules for Radicals as a playbook, yet most liberals have never heard of the guy, while it's usually conservatives who get caught calling the plays. 

THE DEATH OF LIBERAL CITIES -- ANY DAY NOW, JUST YOU WAIT.

You'll never go broke in rightwingworld telling the rubes them there big cities is turrible places just like Mr. Trump says -- and it's even better when you're geographically located in one; the rubes never ask why you and the rest of the staff of your conservative publication don't leave Sodom and come join them in the heaven that is Fritters, Alabama, so you never even have to admit to them that you prefer city living, and can instead just pass yourself off as a kind friend who endures the liberals and lakes of bum poo and other horrors of urban life merely as a selfless journalistic mission.  Ellie Bufkin of The Federalist is one such, and she is here to tell you that

The $15 Minimum Wage Is Wreaking Havoc On New York City Dining

None of my friends back in my old hometown report any such thing, but they have no motivation to put anything over on me; so, though New Yorkers are still and as always paying outrageous prices for entree to hot spots, Bufkin wants you to think it's all up with the place: Coffee Shop, a joint that was long in the tooth when I lived in New York, recently closed and the owner told a reporter, "The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees." Hmmm, skyrocketing rents in downtown Manhattan, or waiters get a few hundred extra bucks a month -- which one do you think is more likely to convince a restauranteur it's time to move on to the next big thing? Bufkin, you won't be stunned to learn, picks the latter, calling Coffee Shop "the most recent victim" of the $15 wage, which she claims "has forced several New York City businesses to shutter their doors and will claim many more victims soon." She gives no citation for that claim -- not even some schnorrer blaming his busted venture on the commies' economic warfare -- but consider her audience: they imagine Boss Smith paying Lame Pete $15/hr to sling hash at Lutiebelle's and think these slickers must be plumb crazy.

In closing Bufkin paints this grim picture:

Eventually, minimum wage laws and other prohibitive regulations will cause the world-renowned restaurant life in cities like New York, DC, and San Francisco to cease to exist. The staff skill levels will drop, the number of servers and bartenders will never be enough, and the only survivors will be fast-casual chains with low overhead and deep pockets. 

New York’s new look will be vacant storefronts between an occasional Pret-a-Manger or the public restroom formerly known as Starbucks. But don’t worry. That charming, downtown studio apartment will still run about $5,000 per month for the privilege of proximity to all that culture.

Bufkin seems too young to remember the 70s, so we probably should forgive her for telling such unconvincing urban blight stories -- she only knows them as a trope from the wingnut propaganda manual. Besides, even smarter conservatives have tried this shit -- like Joe Lhota, who told everyone when Bill de Blasio was running for Mayor in 2013 that de Blasio was going to turn the town back into Death Wish meets Escape from New York. Conservatives all agreed that New York was doomed --  and when, four years later, de Blasio's New York reported record low crime rates, they screamed like scalded cats and slunk away. But as soon as people forget, they'll come back and try it again, because there's always someone in some holler, bluff or junction whose self-respect is tied up in believing it.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Sacha Baron Cohen pranking the wingnuts, and the wingnuts attacking him for it as if he were running a sleazy journalistic sting rather than doing his usual genius thing of getting people to reveal themselves on camera.

This is another example of why conservatives always wind up making culture war into a war on culture -- they don't understand the elemental appeal of comedy as a way of puncturing pretensions, and can only make it comprehensible to themselves by converting it to something their shriveled imaginations can grasp -- in this case, James O'Keefe.

Among the outtakes was one of the smaller fry caught in Cohen's net: "Utah gun rights activist Janalee Tobias," as the Deseret News reported. Interestingly, Tobias seems to be aping the victimization shtick that Sarah Palin pulled on Cohen: What she did on the show, Tobias swears, "goes against everything she stands for when it comes to gun safety and children." She says she only did that stuff -- "held a .22-caliber pistol cloaked in a stuffed toy puppy — the puppy pistol — and fed it bullets shaped like crayons to kill the bad guys," among other things, the News explains -- because Cohen "made me," though Tobias doesn't say how. Also, "I objected the entire time, but I am sure [Cohen] will not show (that)." Not bad, though it lacks the mad poetry of an actual Palin joint.

THE HEALING POWER OF LAUGHTER.

I'm rarely this proud of my fellow countrymen, but it does my heart good to see so few of them inclined to side with snowflakes Sarah Palin and Roy Moore against Sacha Baron Cohen, who got some laughs out of making them look like morons by appealing to their limitless vanity. True, some mainstream dolts are doing the chin-pulling, has-comedy-gone-too-far shtick --"Comedian faces backlash for high-profile pranks" intones ABC News -- but though Joe Walsh, James Woods and other internet rage queens are fanning the "#BoycottShowtime" hashtag on the grounds that a comedian playing a veteran is "stolen valor" -- boy, I'm glad Jim Nabors isn't alive to see this! -- it's not gaining much traction.

Oh, Breitbart does its bit -- they quote an anonymous "source close to Palin" (wow, what a get for Breitbart!) whom they say "thinks this Cohen prank will 'backfire dramatically' because the fake interview was 'the epitome of a contemptuous Hollywood enclave that hates the ordinary working class Americans who swept Donald Trump into office. This is exactly what the American people voted against in 2016.'" Well done -- the stentorian self-importance of spokesmen for has-beens has always defeated comedy in the past! And The Stream's John Zmirak, who has given alicublog readers seconds of pleasure in the past, tries "Just Another Stale Comedian Attacking Safe Targets" -- ho hum, why would you even think of enjoying a popular jokester's TV show when you could be reading trenchant analysis like this:

But by the time of the movie Borat, Baron Cohen largely abandoned his even-handed satire.

I thought Ali G was funny, but when he started making fun of Kazakhstan and bed-and-breakfasts, that's when I knew I'd reached the limits of my tolerance. Oh, and yes, Lord help us, The Federalist has something about it too:

Comedians Use Trump To Excuse Ugly Comedy Like ‘God Bless Abortions’ And Impersonating Disabled Veterans...

Yes, the Left owns comedy. They have for decades.

Well, of course we do -- you keep giving us such choice material.

But even as recently as ten years ago, the bitter partisanship was restrained in comparison to what we have witnessed since Trump announced his candidacy. What is defined as “comedy” by today’s standards isn’t what’s actually humorous, it’s provocative viciousness that’s exclusively targets conservatives.

And you can take it from author Joseph A. Wulfsohn, because he's an expert on how humor-owning liberals aren't funny, but rather treasonous: See his "Hey Jimmy Kimmel, Where’s Your Emotional Monologue on Sexual Harassment in Hollywood?" He even uses the phrase "so-called 'comedy,'" and closes with the last refuge of a conservative, the Appeal to Civility: "Comedy is supposed to connect us as humans. Now it’s tearing us apart." Nobody tell the poor gink about A Modest Proposal or Lazarillo de Tormes or, hell, any great comic work before Life of Riley; comedy has never been for sissies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For conservatives, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Lololololol:

According to [Joe] Arpaio, the production team led him to believe that the host was a Trump supporter. He also noted signing a contract, writing, “I signed some kind of contract before filming, which I have done numerous times, did not read all the info.” 

He said he thought it was unusual that they didn’t offer to powder his face before the interview.

@KrangTNelson has the hot parts ("He said they told him that they were associated with a feature being sold to Showtime and that the show selected him as one of the twenty 'most popular' people in America"), but it's worth reading the whole piece, in which the Breitbart flaktotum seems to have just entirely given up trying to make the loathsome Arpaio seem sympathetic or even to take his grievance seriously. Maybe these people are educable after all!

UPDATE 2. Better and better.

UPDATE 3. Hey, look who let down the side! (Don't worry, nothing unexpected, it's Vox).

Sacha Baron Cohen’s political provocations are exhausting and dangerous

Probably the kind of person who thinks The Simpsons was only good when it had heartwarming conclusions.

On the one hand, all this may seem like the beginning of a glorious sublime parade of politicians owning themselves. But on the other hand, these politicians were tricked into appearing on the record as themselves, in a way that further perpetuates and entrenches not only the cultural ideological divide, but the idea among conservatives that “liberal” media, including entertainment media like Baron Cohen’s production, is a constant and perpetual trap to be distrusted at all costs.

I know they're kinda stupid, but I think even wingnuts know the difference between a comedy show and Meet The Press.

With his old bag of tricks, Cohen is successfully promoting his show not by adding to the conversation, but by gleefully poking at it and watching everyone — politicians and onlookers alike — get upset.

If I'm watching a comedy show, I'm not looking for a "conversation," unless it's something like "'member when that guy fell in a pile of horse poop?" "HA HA HA that was awesome!" God,  can't these fucking nerds ever just relax and have a good time?

JUDGE DREAD.

There are lots of law-smart people making great cases against putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court but to me, a simple lad, the best reason to oppose him is that the worst people on earth want him on there.

First, Donald Trump -- I could rest my case right there. Second, the Federalist Society, not only a creep cluster of committed world-ruiners run by an Opus Dei freak, but also applauded by Jonah Goldberg in his typically lazy late-Goldberg style. First, there's his now-traditional explanation of why as a Trump "skeptic" he applauds this as he does everything else Trump does:

One of the odd things about the triumphalism over the Kavanaugh pick — which is a great pick as far as I’m concerned — is that the wrong people are taking the most credit for it. People seem to forget that the list Trump committed to was a constraint on him.

Get the fuck out of here. Trump's deal with Republicans, as I have said repeatedly, is that he'll give them everything they want so long as they let him grift; they don't serve him as a snaffle and curb or screen and bank but as accomplices. Later Goldberg refers to the Fed Soc guys as "Conservative Legal Beagles" -- much as a 50s movie goon might refer to a priest as "padre" or an intellectual as "professor" -- and says there's "nothing nefarious" about them worming their way onto the court because "liberals have their own vetting process. It’s less formalized than the Right’s, but that’s probably because it can be." Goldberg certainly doesn't know how much he's admitting there, and there's nobody at National Review -- certainly not an editor! -- inclined to tell him.

Elsewhere we have Ross Douthat slo-mo ejaculating over the imminent end of Roe v. Wade; "abortion opponents will have [their] trust vindicated" with Kavanaugh, and the Court will "legislate freely on abortion once again," Douthat declares, stabbing his thigh with a penknife in hopes Jesus will call it square and his emissions will be, in the greater sense, wiped clean.

And leave it to Megan McArdle (* see update) to think of an angle I wasn't expecting -- the possibility that Kavanaugh will make colleges stop trying to bring in more black people, or, as McArdle and her colleagues still call it (in hopes of animating the Louise Day Hicks-era prejudices of their readers), "affirmative action." "The Constitution forbids discriminating by race," McArdle says, as if rehearsing for whatever test case the Becket Fund sends against Brown v. Board of Education;  besides, John McWhorter is black and he doesn't like it either, hmmph!

McArdle throws in just enough references to "trying to right past and present wrongs" and "rectifying the effects of past discrimination" to convince her dumber readers that she's sincere about that stuff, but nonetheless racial preferences have to go because we're living in a "more diverse United States where at least some groups outperform their privileged white neighbors in educational attainment" -- and if you're missing her point, she says, "racial balancing encourages anti-Asian discrimination" and "a broader racial-balancing regime... might put Asian American students at a disadvantage" and "pursuing racial balance zealously" will lead to "continued discrimination against Asian American students." Also, did she mention John McWhorter is black?

Anyway, McArdle says, all this "will leave our new justice with an uneasy choice as the court steers us into an America where race is no longer a simple matter of black and white," though from everything else we've heard about this vat-bred wingnut automaton there'll be nothing uneasy about his choice at all.

Oh, and then there's Kavanaugh's apparent conviction that Presidents (at least since Clinton) can't be indicted. The brethren are pretending he meant no such thing -- and for my money there's no clearer sign that he did than than David French insisting he didn't, and using words like "barmy" in his argument ("he was brainstorming policy proposals, not suggesting future legal rulings" -- can't you people take a joke?). These people see Trump as the promised land for their lunatic ideas, and the extraordinary feebleness of their arguments shows how little they care whether they make it look good.

*UPDATE. McArdle says she's in favor of affirmative action -- her explanation here. You tell me, guys.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the socialist menance conservatives are seeing in the recent primary victory of DSA endorsee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez'. Actually this has been building awhile, with citizens increasingly telling pollsters hell yeah, we want universal health care and while we're at it, capitalism blows, but Ocasio-Cortez' charisma seems to have jolted conservatives into a higher level of awareness and got them trying to answer back, however feebly.

Which reminds me: Back in 2010, some of the brethren were trying to link the DSA (which they called "The Socialist Party of America") to the Democratic Progressive Caucus. There was no evidence that anyone gave a shit then, either; I expect what conservatives actually wanted was to rattle neoliberals and The New York Times so they'd put pressure on the Obama people to move even further back from genuinely progressive policies. (Mission Accomplished!)  But now there's no Obama Administration to pressure -- just powerless old Congressional Dems like Chuck Schumer who have increasingly lost the plot. Conservatives describe this as the party "being destroyed by their millennial base," but I don't recall them saying anything like that about the Tea Party back when they were blasting the RINOs, and millennials have a lot more energy and time to influence their party than the geriatric TP people have to influence theirs.

ALL MOD CONS.

I have yet to hear a convincing explanation why Scott Pruitt was finally egressed. John Fund's at Fox, expectedly, makes the least sense: "pressure rose for Pruitt to step down," he claims, "when his travails shifted from the merely humiliating to potential legal violations." This suggests -- from a normal person's point of view (which, I will explain in a minute, may not be the way to look at it) -- that Trump was aware of a year's worth of "humiliating" events and just shrugged them off, or told Pruitt to stop it and Pruitt said "sure t'ing boss" and got even worse, and Trump only noticed this week.

Fund suggests Pruitt having people falsify his official calendar was the back-breaking straw -- but he doesn't mention that it appears Pruitt fired one of his schedulers for making a stink about his fraud which, call me over-sensitive, I think makes it so much worse. Nor does Fund mention that Pruitt made his employees cover his hotel bills and then failed to pay them back. It's almost like Fund doesn't find it especially noteworthy when a made man in Trumpworld screws his poorer subordinates, which given what conservatives are like these days makes sense.

Anyway, Pruitt's maladministration of the EPA was terrible and will lead to lasting damage to the planet, but his successor will pretty much keep up the planet-killing work with a lower profile -- in the same way that, when high-living HHS Secretary Tom Price finally got too embarrassing to keep, they just slotted in pharmaceutical executive Alex Azar, who yakked about how he and his phrama buddies really wanted to keep drug prices down and who has overseen a bunch of price hikes which, Politico hilariously observes, "cast doubt on whether Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar can pressure manufacturers to voluntarily drop prices without the threat of specific consequences."

Well, bad, even destructive administration is par for the course with this lot, but Pruitt's trail of grifts is the stuff of legend and we should take a moment to marvel at and perhaps learn from it. It has long been my theory that Trump's administration is so overwhelmingly corrupt because a.) no one with anything to lose, reputation-wise, would have anything to do with him in the first place, and b.) there is honor among thieves, and Trump's understanding with them is, if he goes down they're going with him.

I still think that's about right, but the volume, scale, and exoticism of Pruitt's scandals -- his wild impulse purchases, from his cone of silence to his tactical pants; his muscling of business for personal favors; and his aforementioned, vicious exploitation of his employees -- are extraordinary even for this administration. Indeed, his behavior would seem, under normal circumstances, evidence of mental instability -- surely no one sane would go that far in a cabinet post under the full glare of national publicity.

Maybe so, but let us be charitable and imagine that Pruitt was not just greedy, but actually responsive to an existential imperative. Here he was, a man of limited talent of intelligence, not only placed far about his deserts and abilities but set among some of the greatest crooks of his time in the great candy shop of the public fisc. Being a Republican, he was already accustomed, indeed trained, to think of anything in a public Treasury as ransom held by liberal commies and queers that should by right and in the name of Reagan be liberated into the Private Sector, preferably through the medium of one's own pockets (doing good by doing well, haw!). And certainly when one is set about such work shoulder to shoulder with such as Ben Carson and Ryan Zinke, one is encouraged to go hard about it rather than gentle. What if Pruitt had a moment of poetic insight -- for these can happen to all kinds of people -- and saw, in the midst of otherwise quotidian graft, what this implied about life itself. Maybe he saw then that all was madness -- that men die and they are not happy -- and was driven by that insight to buy the tactical pants, to cheat even his own aides, to grift until even the God of grift said, no more. Let us at least accept the possibility that Pruitt was not merely greedy, but touched by the madness of Camus' Caligula.

THE CRAP AND THE ANTHEM.

Don't push too hard, my friend.
Happy Fourth, comrades! It appears Alex Jones had it wrong and we aren't taking over the country today, leaving everyone free to celebrate in their own way.  Since for me every day is already a celebration of America -- that big, gorgeous, clapped-out zombie! -- this Independence Day I sing the Megan McArdle. The Washington Post columnist is really gunning for that Peggy Noonan Chair of Applied Patriotic Bullshit, and yesterday not only published an anti-Roe-v.-Wade column -- further proof that libertarianism is strictly for dudes, and ably dismantled in this Scott Lemieux thread -- but emitted the worst 4th of July hot dog since Ted Cruz took the occasion to tell his constituents that Harvard Law is full of communists.

McArdle's column is about the flag and the National Anthem. Unlike the Harvard Law communists, she's in favor of them. But she laments the struggle over the Anthem, which is the fault of Bothsides, cousin of Notme and Ida Know. Some think kneeling during the Anthem is "a near cousin to treason." Others hold "lengthy debates" over "whether the third verse of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' was racist," the big sillies! Room for Debate, but surely We Can All Agree that that third set of shadowy figures who "suggested that perhaps we should just stop playing the national anthem at sporting events" -- which is the new Abolish ICE -- are definitely N.G. and "rather shockingly naive about what it takes to hold a country together." The non-naive view, apparently, is that we need flags and anthems or Thus Falls The Republic.

“Nationalism” has become a dirty word in the modern era, having become inextricably associated with repression of minorities and imperialist ambition. We’ve forgotten that the nationalists actually did start out in the 19th century with a worthy and difficult project: persuading a large group of people to think of themselves as a single unit.

You may wonder what the hell she's talking about. The country has from the beginning been united by wars and, and when none can be provided, whispers of foreign intrigue. Every general from the War of 1812 onward who distinguished himself in battle has become an automatic Presidential contender -- until the modern era, when our military adventures became so obviously insane that the most hawkish members of the electorate now spit on a war hero and vote in a draft-dodger. If you don't know history, at least think of President Flightsuit and Mission Accomplished.

But wondering what McArdle's talking about is a waste of time -- she doesn't really have arguments, just routines and sub-routines. For the Owning the Libs routine, for example, in this case she says sure, nationalism got a bad rap because of nationalists -- not like that could happen again! -- but liberals who don't like white nationalism are nonetheless constantly and hypocritically  "engaging in nationalist projects" like the welfare state, checkmate! Libs like bread and roses, McArdle's masses like blood and soil -- same diff, really. Plus the "groupish instinct" that transubstantiated into the nation-state "evolved in the African plains" -- see, Africa! And you guys claim to like black people. In conclusion:

If we are to fight our way back from this soft civil war, we will need a muscular patriotism that focuses us on our commonalities instead of our differences.

I wonder if her echo of "muscular Christianity" is conscious?

Of course, such a patriotism must not be either imperialist nor racialized. Which means we desperately need the flag, and the anthem, and all the other common symbols that are light on politics or military fetishism and heavy on symbolism.

Set aside the idea that "the flag, and the anthem" are "light on politics or military fetishism" -- such an absurdity after decades of flag pin patriotism and long, painful hours of Toby Keith that I doubt even McArdle believes what she's saying  -- what would the "other common symbols" be? The game pieces in Monopoly? Fonzie's leather jacket? Manny, Moe and Jack?

We need much more of them, rather than much less — constant reminders that we are groupish, and that our group consists of 328 million fellow Americans with whom we share a country and a creed, a song and a flag, and the deep sense of mutual obligation that all these things imply.

Call me commie, but I don't think the flag and anthem are gonna do it. A good start, though, would be a general acknowledgement that we got this day off because some guys -- some of whose values have, to put it bluntly, not aged well, and which most of us have abandoned --  nonetheless took seriously some Enlightenment ideas of freedom that have indeed worn and do serve us well, and may yet be our bulwark against tyranny, foreign and domestic. Grill and chill to that, my friends, and choose your own anthem; my own's up top here: If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE:

I got mine, don't worry about yours.

WEIRD TALES.

Today Rod Dreher took a break from his customary racist and homophobic material to rage about sex, this time quoting extensively from a Mary Eberstadt Weekly Standard essay that seems -- though it's hard to be sure, for all the froth -- to descry "the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception" as the cause not only of widespread abortion but also child poverty, sexual assault, lonely old age ("Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell”), and other horrors. Even the good news she can't ignore is contaminated by contraception: "Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise." It would seem the only end to this nightmare, if you follow Eberstadt's logic, would be the banning of birth control. (Hey, maybe the new Trumpified court can do it!) But maybe an end to it isn't what she seeks: Maybe all she wants is for us to feel dread and shock and bad about ourselves for daring to get laid without fully committing to childbirth.

Dreher gets right in the spririt: "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags," he cries. "The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."

But shortly before that, Dreher got on an even weirder subject: Was Anthony Bourdain suicided by witchcraft?

Somebody in my Twitter feed last night observed that “the Internet” was making a pretty good case for Anthony Bourdain’s suicide being tied to the occult. Say wha’? Lo, it turns out that his girlfriend Asia Argento is a witch, and not just a casual one either. There’s lots of extreme darkness there, right in the open. She flaunts it. Bourdain, the poor fool, was doomed the day he met her...

This is exactly where we are as a post-Christian culture: we have usurped the powers of binding and loosing from God. The Satanists admit what the rest of us cloak as advanced liberty and self-determination. Here is the line that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be most remembered for. It’s from the 1992 Casey ruling reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion...

This is so loony Dreher eventually took it down (the prior link is actually to its Google cache). But I think it was an instructive post: For all his theological palaver, a lot of Dreher's ravings are rooted in the sort of doomy, scary stories that used to bulk up pulp magazines, lurid 60s tabloids, and comics like House of Mystery; their place has been filled by websites like the crackpot collection where Dreher got this one. Come to think of it, posts like Eberstadt's owe a debt to this genre as well: The world as a nightmarish place to gawk at, with perhaps a little moral uplift at the end to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Well, at least in that sense these guys are observing the verities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I see Dersh is making loads of new friends:

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

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the conservatives who'll tell you Roe v. Wade is kinda-sorta safe from incoming Supreme Court Justice Throckmorton Q. Iwillreverseroevwade, and the conservatives who are already on their third champagne cocktail, singing "Hey hey, goodbye."

Since liberals are not buying this shit, and are beginning to also question the namby-pamby approach of most Democratic electeds, wingnuts from Trump on down are doing the old Briar Patch routine about our incivility. For example, we've got Rich Lowry spinning this antifa supersoldier fanatasy:

We’re going to hear much more of this, especially about “minority rule,” in the coming years. Where it could become truly dangerous is if Trump wins reelection and gets a couple of more Court picks and there is a sustained controversy of the intensity of the recent fight over family separations at the border. Then, you could see the Left convincing itself that we need some version of a color revolution in America or, as Michael wrote in his column, no-kidding resistance by blue states to federal authority. The consensus that undergirds our constitutional system has long been eroding, but it’s not inconceivable now that it could completely break down.

We just had hundreds of thousands of Trump opponents demonstrating peacefully across the country, while if you get more than a few dozen wingnuts together there's mayhem. I don't think this bullshit will fly outside the klaverns. (And yeah, I know he means "color revolution" like the Green Revolution in Iran and other such lost causes, but I bet his readership heard something else.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I love early-60s, button-down, organization-man satire,
especially when I have to sit in a goddamn office on a beautiful day.
• Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' victory in a Queens Democratic primary may or may not rate as a harbinger, but it sure has got the brethren riled up. "Left-wing socialists have infiltrated our nation," says the thick-necked whosis at NRATV -- apparently, in the paranoid universe of the gun nut, winning the votes of one's constituents counts as infiltration. Thickneck rages on that Ocasio-Cortez "openly despises the very system that makes America the greatest country in the world" and seeks to visit upon her unfortunate constituents "housing and job guarantees, abolishing ICE" -- which, like the rest of her platform as portrayed by wingnuts, sounds pretty darn wonderful -- before getting to the muzzle-strokers' money shot: "And say goodbye to your firearms if she gets her way -- no socialist country allows its oppressed people to empower themselves" -- you know, like if that nice fella in Annapolis (who, like Dana Loesch, wanted to send a message to the libtard press) tried to make his point in Sweden, he'd have a much harder time of it. [Pause for the libertarian going "Agg-tually Sweden is technically not socialist" to get his wedgie and his kick in the ass.] I realize there are millions of People of the Gun out there who will vote, and effectively have voted, for Satan himself to maintain their right to fire nine rounds a second whenever they feel grouchy, but I think a lot more people will prefer bread and roses to cordite and spatter.

• Speaking of libertarians, at Reason Peter Suderman tries to compare Ocasio-Cortez' big media moment to the days when "many in the media saw [Dave] Brat's victory [over Eric Cantor] as a sign that the Tea Party was winning—that the crony-corporatist, big-government-loving wing of the Republican Party was losing out to a libertarian insurgency... Even The New York Times thought so." Regular readers will remember this as the alleged "libertarian moment" that won the alicublog prize for Bullshit of the Year in 2014. And now the time gives it proof, as all Republicans, including alleged freemarket cultists, march behind the blood-and-soil banner of Trump, which Suderman seems to think is a big own of Ocasio-Cortez. Except she's offering things like Medicare For All and guaranteed employment, which are either the preference of most Americans or on their way to being it, while Suderman is offering the destruction of Social Security, Medicare, and the minimum wage, and the direct rule of rich bastards, which even morons don't want. Of course the New York Times kvelled over libertarians -- for the same reason they didn't even bother covering Ocasio-Cortez' campaign: Because they suck.