NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Hurricane Harvey and the political uses to which the brethren seek to put it. One expects this, of course -- liberals have their own angles on it (and very good ones they are too!). But conservatives don't have much to work with here, particularly from an anti-Big-Gummint perspective, and so fall back on the traditional hatred of sissy liberals. I was surprised not to find a Harvey-related defense of Confederate statutes, but maybe that's on the way.

UPDATE. One of the things I couldn't squeeze into the five-pound bag was the wingnut reaction to the widespread puzzlement at the stiletto heels Mrs. Trump wore to what was portrayed as a disaster mission. I am assuming her footwear choice was designed for pissing off liberals, since that is one of the four animating principles of this administration (the other three being looting the treasury, persecuting the underprivileged, and exalting the dark lord Satan), but the payoff in the rightwing press has been frankly subpar. The Blaze made a typical apples-and-oranges error with "While mainstream media scorn Melania’s shoes they’re drooling over Michelle Obama’s skirt"; a legitimate equivalent would be if Mrs. Obama had been photographed holding that "Bring Back Our Girls" sign while wearing a Chance The Rapper hat sideways. And deposed Gruppenführer Sebastian Gorka's tweet was just embarrassing. But the worst was a poetic effort at American Greatness by one Joe Long that puts the "dog" back in doggerel. It begins thus:

So you recall the previous FLOTUS?
Whene’er her biceps she showed us,
How the media gushed and cooed –
Worshipful, their attitude.

Brrr. Brings back nightmare memories of W.H. von Dreele.