FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•    Like Lorenzo Semple DuBois says in The Producers, they try; man, how they try -- Tim Cavanaugh of National Review:

Vice President of the patriarchy Joe Biden used a common anti-woman epithet to describe the strains of being a second in command during a visit to Harvard University Thursday. The misogynistic slur was treated as a harmless bit of Joe-will-be-Joe japery by local media. 

“Isn’t it a bitch, that Vice President thing?” Biden said after student Sietse Goffard identified himself as student council vice president at Harvard — whose former president Larry Summers famously said in 2005 that women might be underrepresented in science and engineering due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.” (Summers went on to serve on the Obama administration’s economic brain trust but was later beaten by a woman in his quest to become chairperson of the Federal Reserve Bank.) 

In a report on Biden’s use of the term “bitch” — a technical term for a female dog that is frequently used to deny women agency and silence female voices...

The word "bitch" has many meanings: It can also be applied to a person of either gender who whines on and on about insignificant shit.

•   I speak roughly of rightbloggers, but in reflective moments I think: Surely they have some decent qualities. For example, now that there's a visitor to our shores suffering from Ebola virus in a Dallas hospital, they wouldn't use his misfortune to try and drum up panic among the ignorant -- well, okay, maybe some of the stupider ones would, but surely not the big names in the field?

And while I’d like to know more about how this freelancer may have caught it, he’s a westerner, presumably aware of the dangers and how to avoid infection, not treating people with Ebola, and he still got infected. That could happen to anybody, of course, but it makes me wonder if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.

I take it back, they're all scum.

•   Speaking of which, I see that asshole Matthew Continetti has honest-to-God  written something called "The Case for Panic," in which he uses the traditional conservative premise that government can't do anything right to encourage Ebola pants-pissing among his co-delusionists.  He even closes with this:

Know hope? That’s passé.

Know fear.

I have to give him credit -- that's as eloquent a summation of modern conservative philosophy as we're ever likely to see.