FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Love this. It's like Cheap Trick reborn as post-punks.
•   Watching the big game this weekend? With no Iggles to make me proud by stomping Tom Brady I doubt I will. I'm not even juiced by the commercials -- that I should live to say such a thing! -- especially the ones with celebs in them; the Sarah Jessica Parker/Jeff Bridges one is so corny I was mortified for both of them, though I think it may move some Stella, on the Evan Llewellyn Evans principle. Anyway, if you're not yet a subscriber to my newsletter (Why not? It's cheap!™), good news, I have unlocked a Super Bowl-related episode of my Oval Office plays. Feast yer eyes!

•   Another Trump interview? The Daily Caller EXCLUSIVE from the other day wasn't enough for him? Maybe he owed Maggie Haberman a favor (har, I know, folks), but here it is in the Times, and you can read a nice précis by Evan Hurst at Wonkette because Hurst brings laughs and really, otherwise who needs it anymore? Even on the Kremlinological level, there is absolutely no reason to read Trump interviews because he's so full of shit you can't tell anything about what he's going to do by anything he says. As for literary content, please. The only reason I bother is to catch vagaries of his self-presentation for character touches in my little Oval Office plays in the newsletter (Cheap!™). Why anyone else would bother I can't guess.

•   It's getting to the point where whenever a prominent rightwinger complains about the "Twitter mob" you can safely assume he richly deserves whatever brief spurt of disapprobation he's comparing to physical assault. The latest: neocon nudnik Max Boot. He starts by defending the Covington Catholic Kids, and claims people who still say they saw what they saw -- the kids giving Nathan Phillips a hard time -- were merely "getting caught up in a rush to judgment online... because that is the nature of social media," according to "experts."

And now Boot -- <Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange>another vic-teem!</PMinACO> -- offers his own sad case:

On Wednesday afternoon, I was the target for a few hours after I published a Post column arguing that, while we can’t win the wars in Afghanistan or Syria, we can lose them by pulling out prematurely.

As part of his January 30 defense of Forever Wars with The Dusky Hordes, it seems Boot had written this:

These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating. Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s). U.S. troops are not undertaking a conventional combat assignment.

One wonders how "unconventional" these long campaigns are if his examples go back over 400 years. Anyway, Boot weeps, people started yelling at him online -- which, as we know from conservative history, is persecution such as the Holy Martyrs suffered. He tweeted to clarify but alas:

Clarifying what I was saying and apologizing for any misunderstanding mollified some of the attackers. But other critics kept popping up who reacted to the original tweet and did not see my follow-up. So about three hours after I posted my first tweet, I decided to delete it, explaining my decision by noting that it was distracting attention from the point of the article — which was to defend the U.S. deployments in Afghanistan and Syria, not the Indian Wars.

Max doesn't approve (necessarily!) of our homegrown genocide, he just wanted to use it as an example to... who knows, to defend our occupation of nations we more recently destroyed without building our own empire on their ruins (yet), is my best guess. Boot, a notorious neocon, has for years defended the worst excesses of Western imperialism -- see his 2006 defense of the Moro Massacre -- and deserves no benefit of the doubt; he would probably have been more belligerent about this current example were he not working the woke-warpig angle for career purposes.  All it needs is a stirring defense by Andrew Sullivan -- another horrible wingnut who briefly affected sanity before returning to his roots -- to make it an official load of bollocks.