FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Bob Luman was a little much, but I've always loved this. Check that piano!

•   Holy shit, in the event Trump gets the needed delegates, conservatives are really up for stealing the nomination from him. I mean, I've thought so all along, but now they're coming close to saying it out loud. At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson (now credited there as NR's "roving" correspondent, which must be a misprint), reminds us for the second time this month that this is a republic not a democracy, and denounces Trumpers who think "'We the People' are getting screwed by 'Them'" as unconservative  -- though this has been conservatism's selling message to the rubes since World War II. And so:

Yes, there are people in power maneuvering to frustrate the will of “We the People” on a dozen different things, ranging from economic and national-defense policy to the specific matter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That is prudence and patriotism, and the constitutional architecture of these United States is designed to prevent democratic passion from prevailing. Have your talk-radio temper tantrum. Have your riots. Our form of government, even in its current distorted state, was designed to handle and absorb your passions. You may dream of a dictator, but you will not have one.

That's telling the rabble, buddy. Also interesting: The despairing John Adams quote Williamson uses here (“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes...") was previously used by him to blast President Obama in an article calling Obama "the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics... For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally... he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law," and other such standard-issue rightwing ObamaHitler crap. Yet in this new article, Williamson says Trump threatens "a presidency a thousand times more imperial" than Obama's. That's some mega-imperialism right there; to come up, I guess Trump will have to revive NASA and colonize the solar system.

•  Meanwhile Williamson's colleague David Harsanyi is even more forthright:

The GOP Should Steal the Nomination from Trump 

...Voters don’t decide the nominations; delegates do — preferably in smoke-filled rooms where rational decisions about the future of a party can be hashed out.

Failing this, Harsanyi would be content to see a True Conservative third party, of which such as Erick Erickson dream, elevate a sacrificial nominee who would "sink Trump and elect Hillary Clinton," on the theory that "electing a weakened and corrupt Democrat that Republicans would unite against in Congress is a far better reality than allowing a charlatan to hollow out a party from within." Republicans united against a Democratic President! That's bound to lead to better results than the love-fest we've got going on now! I begin to wonder if someone (perhaps super-tyrant Trump) is putting something in these guys' drinking water.

•  Tell ya how bad anti-Trump fever has gotten at National Review: Heather Mac Donald is actually complaining that a white guy (Trump) is getting a pass that black guys (Obama, Sharpton) would never get. That's right -- Heather Mac Donald! Don't worry, though -- John Derbyshire's still hanging in for Trump and racism. And I'm sure Mac Donald with go back to her old ways forthwith -- hell, even Marco Rubio wasn't pro-cop/anti-BLM enough for her.

•  Peggy Noonan is trying to talk reason to that bad boy Trump! With a talent like his, why must he resort to hooliganism?

Why does he speak so carelessly and irresponsibly about things such as violence and protests at his rallies? Does he not understand American politics is always potentially a powder keg? 

He has enough imagination to have invented Donald Trump. Why doesn’t he have enough to understand the potential impact of a leader’s remarks? Does he understand the power he would have if he were a person of normal comportment?

After blowing her off Trump will get home and find she managed to tuck her business card into his jacket pocket. Meanwhile Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has gone full Stormtrumper on a David Brooks doll:

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

You'd think Reynolds would be too smart for this guff, but Trump really has him feeling the feeling: In an adjacent post, Reynolds actually revives an Obama "lightworker" gag from 2009. I can imagine him smashing protesters with a club and yelling BOO-YAH! UNDER THE BUS! (On his holodeck, of course.)