COULDN'T SAY SHIT IF HE HAD A MOUTHFUL.

Sonuvagun -- Jonah Goldberg, whom we just saw groveling for Trump over Comey, has dumbled down:

Courts, Colbert Enabling Trump’s Violations of Democratic Norms

You're not hallucinating -- he means Stephen Colbert.

A great deal has been said about Donald Trump’s violations of “democratic norms.” I agree with much of it.

But the big problem with violating democratic norms — the unwritten customs and practices even political opponents traditionally abide by — is that once you’ve done it, everybody else wants to do it, too. This makes everything worse, because when the people most offended by Trump’s violations respond in kind, they not only contribute to the problem, they create incentives for Trump and his biggest supporters to keep doing it.

"You started it!" isn't working anymore, so the new thing is "Trump started it, but you should know better!" And by "it" Goldberg doesn't mean actual outrages like the grotesque misuse of office Trump has made SOP; he means rudeness. So Trump may be the new Nixon minus the brains, but Stephen Colbert made a swear on the TV:

Suffice it to say that if you want to condemn a president for his incivility, you squander some credibility when you describe the president of the United States in a lewd act with a foreign dictator.

Adding to the fartfulness of declaring a comedian's moral responsibility to outclass the Leader of the Free World is Goldberg trying to belittle Colbert by snorting, "TV is a niche business these days, even at the broadcast networks," as if the exalted shitposts now filling the flagship of National #NeverTrump-#NeverMind were some kind of lofty height from which to look down.

This pearl-clutching is emerging as a popular favorite among wingnuts -- see Noah Rothman's dudgeon over "Shock-Jock Democrats," and the multiple tsks chronicled at the end of my recent Village Voice column. The general idea seems to be that Trump's coarseness is the only problem with him -- they have no problem with his politics, which (I keep saying, because some people don't seem to have gotten it yet) he has adopted and enables only so the Republicans will let him keep up his grift -- so if a liberal is coarse, it's equally bad. The only honorable position, in this view, is to endorse a police state, the further immiseration of the poor, and persecution of minorities -- but daintily.

Oh yeah, there's some gibberish in Goldberg's column about how "judges have taken to acting like pundits" because their decisions on Trump's flagrantly unconstitutional Muslim ban point out that it's flagrantly unconstitutional, but if I pack all of his stupidity into one column my servers might go up in a giant fartcloud.