NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the wife-beating charges at the White House and the awkward defenses offered -- in the abstract and the specific -- by our conservative brethren.

These things tend to run long so I had to cut a few bits -- like this interesting theory at The Future of Capitalism: after some bullshit about media "narratives," the unnamed author (the site is run by Ira Stoll so it may be him) says,

But there's a third possible narrative that the Porter story might fit into — one that I haven't yet seen written about. That is the story of a too-powerful and potentially abusive FBI at war with a White House that is trying to rein it in.

RECORDSCRATCH

...The Porter domestic violence history or allegations (he was never convicted or charged with any crime, so far as I can tell) surfaced as part of the extensive background investigation that the FBI conducts on anyone seeking classified clearance or a sensitive government job...

By this means the FBI gets "its own files of what the Russians call kompromat," FoC says, so maybe the feds leaked this particular story to the Daily Mail "as the bureau's way of pushing back against the release of the Nunes memo":

In essence, the FBI would have been sending the message to Trump, "okay, you want to air our dirty laundry in public, be careful, Mr. President, because we can play that game, too, and you will wind up getting burned."

It's just a theory. Maybe there's another explanation. But the timing is odd.

"The timing is odd"? This administration has a scandal every couple of days. If they're timing it, we ought to applaud whoever's serving as traffic director. With this bunch, isn't massive mendacity and incompetence the Occam's-Razor alternative?