FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

This is my favorite Carl Perkins tune. What's yours?
• Listen, I think Trump can still win this thing, and I know just how he can do it: Tour the nation with the Bundy boys and other newly-exonerated Malheur occupiers, taking over federal facilities as they go, looting the gift shops and throwing the booty to their howling mobs ("Here's one case of commemorative mugs Capital City will NEVER see a profit on!"). To further cement relations with the crucial survivalist treehouse demographic, Trump should also start dressing like Junior Samples and using chaw ("I was dipping snuff," he can tell the mob, "but it made me all --" [reads off card] "-- sniffly-like").

• David Brooks admits modern conservatism is fucked because the shitheels sold it for scrap, and for a while I was surprised at him; lines like "It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism" even suggest a capacity for self-awareness. But you know Bobo: no way he was gonna get through a whole column without botching it--

This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old.

Sorry, had to catch my breath. Your big names are senile as well as psycho? How is that a good thing for conservatism?

Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great. It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex. Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).

The reformicons, that nerd sect that was supposed to lead the party to glory before that guy showed up? There's a whole ridiculous story about them in the New Yorker; here's one of my favorite lines:

Trump became the Frankenstein’s monster of Reformicon candidates, taking on the group’s respectable positions—such as skepticism about the economic benefits of immigration—and rendering them into an indefensible state.

How dare the populist spoil our beautiful artisanal policies! They expect a Phoenix to rise from the ashes, but what they're really gonna get is a Smog Monster.