HE MAY BE A FOOL, BUT HE'S YOUR FOOL.

Now that the Republican Presidential front-runner has anted up his bigotry, conservatives are trying harder to disown him. But it really cuts against their grain. When Trump proposed keeping Muslims out of the U.S., David French had just put up a post at National Review all about how dangerous Muslims are -- the title, in fact, is "Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth – the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate." Among the choice bits:

...jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting... 

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism... 

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views... 

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy...

Etc. To be fair, he stops short of calling them vermin. If you said something like this about Christians, French would file a hate-crime complaint. You can imagine some goon reading this and thinking Shee-it, them Muslims sound awful, I better vote for Trump an' keep 'em all out!

But today French is trying to distance himself from Trump. Not on the grounds of their mutual beliefs, mind you -- French reiterates that "it’s foolish to admit a class of refugees when we know the world’s leading terror army is attempting to infiltrate the displaced masses or recruit from their ranks." But the ones that are here already, they can stay, French says -- and we can let in a small, select group of "good" Muslims, such as "interpreters who’ve laid down their lives to serve our warriors downrange... members of allied militaries who are training to be the Muslim 'boots on the ground,'" et alia. Everyone else can go die in the sea.

Oh, then he talks about what a menace political correctness is. Which is weird, because he and they are really just waiting to put in a nominee who can be as racist as Trump but keep his mouth shut about it.

UPDATE. As has become his habit of late ("We Didn't Start The Fire: Who Created Trump?"), Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller emerges again to tell us that Trump's strong support among Republicans is bad for Republicans, especially when they were getting so pumped up denouncing Obama after his pro-reason terrorism speech:

Yesterday, the media cycle was focused on radical Islamism and President Obama’s inability to counter it. Today, Donald Trump has changed the subject. But it’s not just that. Yesterday, the view that radical Islamism was a serious threat that President Obama has not taken seriously (polling backs this up) was a persuasive mainstream position that evoked sympathy and agreement. Today, it’s marginally harder to make that argument.

Now when Ralph Peters calls Obama a pussy, people will think we're intemperate! At the end Lewis admits Trump will probably get a boost from his statements -- another case of Republicans being unfairly made to look bad by other Republicans!

UPDATE 2. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

It defies explanation, but I'll try: Everyone thinks Obama's a failure and hates him (never mind showing Domenech polls that suggest otherwise, those are all run by liberals), and "our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics." In other words, if you point out that their argument is wrong, that just makes Republicans more insane and racist -- so it's all your fault! "And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides," Domenech goes on, "offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites." I hope you're proud of yourself, liberals!

Like the rest of our subjects, Domenech basically agrees with Trump; he, too, thinks Muslims are toxic and "elites" are losing the War on Whatchamacallit with their "tolerance" bullshit ("Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and authority of the elites..."). But he got the Trump-bad memo, so he portrays Trump as a menace while embracing his message. Look, it's at The Federalist -- it's not like it has to make sense.

UPDATE 3: You see this shit:

"The author advises Marco Rubio’s campaign for president." Presumably he advises on non-sequential thought, because his column is just the usual rightwing froth crowned with an "if it weren't for Joel Grey singing 'Wilkommen' there'd have never been a Hitler" assertion. And actually that's not new either: Conservative factota have been trying to blame Trump on Obama, or draw parallels between the two men, since Trump became the front-runner, and because they've saturated their little world with this false equivalence, there's no longer any reason to even pretend to back it up with evidence.

UPDATE 3. What have I been telling you people.

WHEN THEY SAY IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY...

You may have noticed the statistical review on white working class mortality covered by the Washington Post:

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

And you might have thought, as I did, well, no wonder: the white working class was doing great for decades after World War II, but in this generation it's seen its jobs offshored, then onshored at much lower wages -- and the jobs that stuck around don't pay so well either. Having excavated everything that can be excavated from the poor and the black, our system has taken to chipping at the lower end of the middle class. Between the economic and the emotional toll of this de-privileging, no wonder so many of these people are killing themselves, quickly or slowly.

National Review's David French read the same story, and of course his conclusion is that liberals are to blame:

While the economic challenges of working-class voters are well documented, the cultural challenges are just as notable. 

You may think  trying to raise kids on twenty grand a year is rough, but your lack of culchah is just as much of a problem -- and cheaper for me, so let's tackle that first!

At every turn, the cultural aristocrats cause harm. Mocking poor whites is among the last acceptable forms of bigotry.

You mean like "Li'l Abner"? Or "South Park"? French is unclear -- I assume purposefully, and that the picture he wishes to paint is of callous urban sophisticates laughing at a meth-addled cracker, rather than of salt-of-the-earth middle Americans laughing at "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Even the white working-class voters struggling with declining wages, declining health, and increasing despair are derided as somehow “privileged.” Those who speak for them are labeled bigots.

Like how they treated this fella. Obviously it was class warfare against white people.

Meanwhile, people keep dying, and families fracture. This is more than just mocking suffering, though — it’s celebrating the disease while rejecting the cure. Self-indulgence is the animating force behind the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is gutting the working class.

If you callous sophisticates hadn't done so much coke and had so many orgies, right out there where people could see it, Cletus and Brandine would never have took to moonshine and sex with their cousins.

As Murray notes in his book, cultural progressives flood the nation with messages celebrating hedonism and sexual experimentation even as they tend to preserve their own wealth and power through remarkably restrained and disciplined personal lives — getting married, remaining faithful, and investing in their children. They don’t practice the hedonism they so loudly preach.

Make that "if you callous sophisticates hadn't etc. etc. and nevertheless managed to live happy productive lives, etc." Why, it's like having to put up with a cheerful atheist -- it sets a bad example for the proles!

On the one hand you have wingnuts like French crying that the middle class is collapsed or collapsing because of Playboy and rap music; on the other you have wingnuts like David Harsanyi who claim that this shit economy is actually "dynamic" and you should all go get Uber jobs and feel the dynamism of a week-by-week struggle to afford a hovel and slop. Pick your confusion; doesn't matter which, so long as millionaires get all the tax breaks and we zero out welfare.

UPDATE. At The Federalist Ben Domenech gets in on it. He implies -- slightly more gently than other benefit cops like Jonah Goldberg -- that the growing ranks of erstwhile workers on disability are swollen with frauds. And natch, it's about the culchah:

As a cultural matter, the picture is even worse. The surrender to the permanent trap of disability payments is a consequence of a loss of a certain American working class stoicism, which grappled with the tragic nature of life with what was essentially a 19th-century mentality.

We were a stronger, more American America when crips were left to forage or beg.

It was hard enough to deal with such a vision before the disintegration of working class marriage in the country – notice the contrast drawn by Charles Murray between the attitudes toward marriage and the experience of divorce in the white working class versus professionals.

When we've finally turned into the neofeudal hellscape of Lang's Metropolis for real, I expect there'll be a statue of Charles Murray in every town square.

UPDATE 2. Some very fine comments here. e.g., Susan of Texas:

What is it about white culture that is destroying white Americans? 

You vote for politicians who outsource your jobs. Your own crap job, when you can get one, is hard on the body and soul- and dignity-crushing. You go to the doctor for pain-killers to ease the bodily pain and take too many to anesthetize the mental pain. You fatally poison yourself with drug and alcohol anesthetics or get a DWI and lose more jobs or drive away your family. (I'm still waiting for someone to tell us how getting married and not having kids will create factories out of thin air.)...

Worth going in and reading in full. I should add that, especially when you get past a certain age, physical labor is hard on you -- which is something you might miss even if you were a waiter at 20 but never a fry-cook at 55. Go to any actual working-class neighborhood and you'll see some people limping or hobbling from the bus to their homes -- and if they stiffen up they tend not to work it out at the yoga studio. I wonder if French and Domenech have ever seen this, or if they think it's really like the Seven Dwarves whistling to and from the mine.

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT, PART 4,287.

I see conservatives are excited for their female Presidential candidate who will never be President because she pimped the Planned Parenthood videos, describing a grisly scene that apparently doesn't actually exist, in hopes that, like misleading movie posters and doctored critics' quotes, it may steer voters to view the bloody images they do have, and get them so grossed out they'll say, "alright already, I'll do it myself with a coathanger and a bottle of Lysol if you'll just shut up."

But just because they're eager to turn stomachs doesn't mean they've given up on winning hearts and minds. At The Federalist A.D.P. Efferson tells us:

Some of my dearest friends are pro-choice, and some of my dearest friends are pro-life. I have known these women and men to varying degrees over the course of my lifetime, and I can say beyond doubt that regardless of their political leanings, none is even remotely a monster.

Despite the incredible popularity on social media of polarizing people according to ideology to punish them, I’ve never felt an urge to maliciously single out my liberal friends to publically castigate them, even though their beliefs stand in radical, stark contrast to mine. Nowhere is this contrast more glaringly evident than in the abortion debate, because there is no suitable compromise on terminating a life. Either the baby lives, or it is aborted. 

I have engaged in numerous thoughtful discussions with pro-choice women about abortion, some very heated ones...

I'll bet.

...but have yet to find common ground on the issue of the rights of a woman superseding the rights of the infant, because ultimately there isn’t any...

We'll just have to agree to disagree, my baby-murdering friends! Meantime let Efferson explain why good people might do such awful things:

Shedding light on this idea is Clay Jones from Biola University, who has spent the last several decades studying the psychology of genocide.

Not even kidding.

His research exploring human depravity attempts to answer the hard questions about humanity, such as: Who are these people who commit mass murders? How do normal citizens slaughter their own countrymen without so much as a second thought?

We'll just cut to the chase: Yes, Efferson actually believes her friends are committing literal genocide, just like they did in Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags. But she doesn't think of them as monsters because... well, she's not clear on that. She does mention that her pro-choice friends "love their kids, they volunteer at schools, they attend church," etc., but she also quotes Jones to this effect: "When you read genocide studies you find that most murderers also did many nice things: walked the family dog, baked cookies, gave gifts..." Maybe what she's saying she'd be pals with Hitler if he was as much fun to hang out with these gals are.

One wonders whether Efferson ran any drafts of this essay by her baby-killer friends. Now those are the secret videos I'd like to see!

IS THERE A WORD IN KLINGON FOR LONELINESS?

Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I'm going to pronounce a few words. They're harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important. Try to understand what they mean:

"How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism."

"This essay appears in the Summer 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books."

5092 words.

You sure you have the guts? Alright, buddy, but once we're in we're not coming back till the mission is over.

The best expression of their spirit was John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, with its proud promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” 

This could have been declaimed by Captain James T. Kirk...

You weasel, get back to your position! Tie him down, Sliverberg; it only gets rougher from here.

Anyway, the author, Timothy Sandefur, tells us in the beginning Gene Roddenberry and his fellow World War II vets hated the Communists -- the Klingons -- and the hippies -- the Organians -- but then, for reasons no one can explain, in "The Apple"* ("Worst episode ever!" the fat guy cries), Spock spoiled everything by going multicultural:

Spock is more indulgent. “There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created,” he tells the captain, “the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres.” Spock insists he does not share their views, yet he secretly admires them, and devotes his considerable scientific skills to helping locate their paradise planet. Later, he tells one of the few survivors of the acid, “It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.” The skeptical, spirited Kirk could never utter such words.

Roddenberry, for some reason, was giving Spock the good lines! Had the Reds gotten to him? It could be that Gene and the crew knew it couldn't all be heroic Kirk speeches (especially after they got a load of Shatner), and needed some yang for his yin... but no, none of these trivial dramatic necessities occur to Sandefur, who ties Spock's moral relativism to "the New Left" (probably represented by some radical key grip who altered the script to follow the Stalinist line on his gold-plated overtime) and teleports his narrative in a huff to 1991,"months after Roddenberry’s death," so that Kenneroddenberry may remain in memory pure while beatniks trash his neoliberal legacy.

The weaker members of the crew scream "Nerrrrrrrrrds" as we pass these flaming rhetorical dung-satellites:

The dungeon in which Kirk is imprisoned in this film is on a par with Stalin’s jails.

[“Star Trek: The Next Generation"] featured false equivalency on a grand scale. The show premiered a year after feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding referred to Newton’s “Principia” as a “rape manual,” and a year before Jesse Jackson led Stanford student protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

The Ba’ku would have nauseated Captain Kirk. Here is a species that lives “The Apple” not as captives but as willing participants. They have given up growth for stagnation, which they have mistaken for life. Yet the audience is expected to admire this.

Etc.  In the end, Sandefur is retucking his shirt furiously, lamenting that “'Star Trek’s' romance with relativism gradually blotted them out until the franchise came to prize feeling over thought, image over substance, and immediate gratification over moral and political responsibility." And at no point does he betray any awareness that people watched the show, not because the Statist Overlords forced them too, but because they enjoyed it, and if there were a market for Star Hayek, someone would have made it. But the laws of capitalism never seem to apply to capitalists, and the way of the world never makes sense to a dork.

UPDATE. Comments are thus:

"Wait until Sandefur finds out that 'Laverne and Shirley' debuted a year after feminist author Susan Brownmiller declared 'pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,'" hoo-boys Jeffrey_Kramer.  Kordo sees my Star Hayek and raises with Burke to the Future. (Except Burke's not really conservative, see, because -- oh, hell, I guess I'm just a different kind of nerd.)

Sarcastr0 digs up a Sandefur guest-post at The Volokh Conspiracy in 2014 (pre-sellout), in which  he says the welfare state is unconstitutional and we should make it constitutional by amending the Constitution if we really want to have it, but psych, libtards -- "a constitutional amendment can itself be unconstitutional," because there's nothing in the Declaration of Independence about food stamps for moochers; also, "to the extent that the U.S. government operates contrary to those principles, its actions, too, are illegitimate acts of usurpation, and deserve to be treated as such." Wonder if the Kim Davis tsimmis has got him refurbishing his treehouse in anticipation of a Natural Law uprising.

*A few readers point out that Sandefur mistakes "The Way to Eden" for "The Apple." Gary Farber seems to think it was incumbent on me to correct him, but honestly, why would I fact-check a Star Trek reference? I wasn't arguing with his interpretation, which would require understanding of the references, but with the whole crackpot idea that old TV shows should be torn up for wrongthink by political operatives. I mean, most of the people who used to talk down the "Leave It To Beaver" view of family life did it as a joke, not as a 5,000-word essay.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Haven't heard it in decades. Built to last, this stuff.

• AlterNet describes this six-minute disinfomercial as "Insane Video Presented by Kim Davis' Law Group at Extremist Christian Campus." We hear that kind of language all the time, but this thing is literally insane, in an instructive way. "Kim Davis' Law Group" is Liberty Counsel, experts at nuisance suits (and just plain nuisances) intended to lay the groundwork for an American theocracy; "Extremist Christian Campus" is Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's outfit. The film is a non-narrative collage of stock art, music, and news clips -- sort of like the indoctrination scene in The Parallax View, except incompetent -- that strains for a concatenation effect that will ready the viewer to do battle for the Lord. Among the "bad" things in the beginning (you know they're bad because they're interspersed with images of suffering, ominous quotes, and transgender rights) is Barack Obama, suggesting in a 2006 speech that the Sermon on the Mount is a better guide to righteous living than the absurd prohibitions of Leviticus. If it seems weird to you that someone would portray this eminently reasonable and Christian POV as an example of evil, remember, first, that this is blackety-black Obama and, second, that this was exactly what conservative Christians were saying about the speech when it was uncovered for the 2008 election (e.g., "WATCH OBAMA MOCK BIBLE IN 2006" -- World Net Daily). Eight years of repudiation by the American public has not sweetened their temperaments, and the film ends by suggesting the earth with be bathed in a cleansing fire, from which true believers will be saved to listen to inspirational music forever. Don't forget, folks: This is what these people really believe.

• Happy Patriot Day. I used to note each anniversary, and track the increasing grumbliness of conservatives as they found they were losing, in the words of Dick Cheney in The Onion, "the satisfaction of telling people to do things and then them doing it -- not because they want to, but because they are afraid to do otherwise." Sure enough, at National Review, Jim Geraghty marks 9/11 XIV and worries, "Is This Date Starting to Become Too Normal a Day?"

I think I’m starting to understand how the Greatest Generation used to feel when December 7 would come and go on the calendar with barely a mention of the date’s significance. On the one hand, life has to go on. We can’t live in fear. Our foes want us paralyzed and overwhelmed by the horrific brutality of their actions. In 2011, the date fell on a Sunday, and the NFL played games.... 

By and large, those worse terrors haven’t arrived – although assorted malevolent forces like the anthrax mailer, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Fort Hood shooter certainly tried. So have we, as a country, been spending the past f14 years waiting for another shoe to drop that never will? Or will it come some day, feeling even worse when it arrives because we let go of that late-2001 dread?

You can't see it at the website, but in the version of this appearing in Geraghty's email newsletter, he then dons the ghost sheet and warns us 9/11 heathens about all the jihadi stuff that's threatening to blow if we don't abandon our Obamaish ways, including Joshua Ryne Goldberg and "these shootings on Arizona’s highways." Seriously, can you prove these acts of vandalism aren't jihad? Maybe all those boys who used to drop rocks onto cars from overpasses were sleeper cells that are just now awakening. Ah-wooooo! Sigh. Even non-religious conservatives resemble a millenarian sect, in that they live in hope of a cataclysmic event (in their case, the resurrection of 9/11) that will restore them to power and glory.

• Jon Stewart's Moment of Zen may be over, but here's a Moment of WTF from (you probably guessed) The Federalist by Rich Cromwell, whose men-should-be-men-and-women-should-be-helpless riff climaxes thus:

For the continuation of the species, the Philips of the world have to be out there getting stupid and threatening to burn the place down. There may be a Bre next door, maybe even back living with mom and dad, but she’ll be waiting to offer a helping hand instead of encouraging him to burn the place down. Life and society may change, but every man remains a potential arsonist, every woman a potential firefighter.

You can read the whole thing if you're into context but I warn you, it won't help. I will tell you that the "arsonist" bit seems to refer to one of his Federalist bros accidentally burning Minute Rice. There's also a Chesterton quote, but I bet you knew that already. (I wish some hacker would break into all the  Catholic-cons' websites and replace the Chesterton and C.S. Lewis quotes with Erma Bombeck.)

BEST IN SHOW.

There are different kinds of conservative reactions to the hilarious phenomenon of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. There are lofty denunciations from rilly smart conservative True Scotsmen like this one from Charles C.W. Cooke: "Trump’s devotees consider themselves to be the rebels at the gates," he sniffs, but "by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuancless drones, as might be found in a novel by Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin" yeah yeah whatever Limey Brainiac hey didja see Trump smack down that fat bitch Rosie O'Donnell?

Others just compare Trump to other things they don't like, or blame him, as conservatives do everything else, on Obama; for example, here's some guy at the Washington Examiner who understandably did not demand attribution, bidding us "imagine America with an older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version of Obama as its president, and you get some idea of what Trump is all about," though he doesn't explain how Trump differs from an "older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version" of, say, Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

And there are outright Trump defenders, generally small fry or once-major wingnuts who no longer have anything left to lose, like Ben Shapiro.

But in a category all by herself is D.C. McAllister from The Federalist. Like Shapiro, she's upset that conservatives are dissing The Donald, but for her it's intensely personal, and by way of explanation she chronicles her own feelings from 2009 to the present. First:

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I felt helpless as I sat in front of the television in the fall of 2008, watching Barack Obama become the 45th president of the United States.

If only we had elections back then! Happily for McAllister, then came the Tea Party, which she characterizes as a response to the "huge government bailout of the housing market," a popular but woefully incomplete rightwing theory that doesn't explain what the Tea Partiers themselves actually yelled at their rallies. Bliss it was to be alive then, but alas, the tricorn rubes were teabagged by Anderson Cooper and stabbed in the back by the Republican Establishment. This taught McAllister that Mitch McConnell was no different from Barack Obama -- they both believed in "Money. Power. Cocktail parties. Media incest." So McAllister did what any patriot would do -- she became a blogger. "I made friends," she tells us, "and I made enemies because I didn’t care about playing politics.... I didn’t have a fancy degree. I didn’t have a fancy fellowship," unlike all us other web writers who went to Breadloaf with Saul Alinsky and swim in Moscow gold.

One of the things she discovered during this journey of personal discovery was that the Republican base was "motivated by fear," an assessment she stands by today:

Some might not want to admit this fact. It sounds weak, maybe even naive. But fear in the proper context is anything but naive. It’s wisdom based on experience and knowledge...

And this, brothers and sister, is where things get weird:

Let me explain a little something about human nature. When someone feels oppressed and controlled and you continue to belittle them and push them against the wall, they get angry. They’re not going to be particularly rational at that point. They’re in a corner and they lash out—that’s human nature. They fight. They get angry. They grab hold of whatever weapon they can find to defend themselves. That’s what you mostly see with Donald Trump. It’s anger, fueled by fear and stoked by insiders who continue to demean the base, who refuse to listen, and who want to maintain the status quo... 

This reminds me of a toxic relationship between a man and a woman in which the man continues to control the woman, keeping her from speaking her mind, calling her stupid whenever she does. She tries to find ways to win her independence, to be heard, to be free, but he keeps pushing her back against the wall, telling her that she’s the problem. Over time, the anger swells within her. She’s afraid. She isn’t free, and she hates it. She’s powerless. Anytime she tries to stand up for herself, she is mocked and slapped down. Her fear resides. Her anger grows. Her hope recedes. One day, she just loses it. She lights a match and burns the whole house to the ground. Give me liberty or give me death takes on a whole new meaning in the context of oppression and abuse.

RINO-abused with John McCain, then with Mitt Romney -- what choice does a true conservative have but to BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! It's a good thing McAllister can afford mental health coverage.

IT'S ALWAYS PROJECTION.

Both at The Federalist -- first:

Farewell To Jon Stewart, The Left’s Donald Trump

and:

But Stewart is no more an honest newsman than, say, Donald Trump is a serious presidential candidate.

Meanwhile:

Jeb: Trump's rhetoric 'reminds me of Barack Obama'

Of course Bush is not smart enough to make this up himself -- earlier:

Marco Rubio Says Obama Is Like Trump

 No round-up of dumbasses would be complete without David Brooks:

...bumper-car politicians thrive. Bernie Sanders is swimming with the tide. He’s a conviction politician comfortable with class conflict...
The times are perfect for Donald Trump...

Over t'England they have a forthright Labour candidate and guess what:

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are two of a kind

The one thing wingnuts can't admit is that Trump is their own id monster, so they have to tell themselves and anyone else who'll listen that he's actually the same thing as other people they also don't like, for reasons that don't make any sense.

If this travesty goes on much longer the name "Donald Trump" will take its place with "9/11" and "political correctness" as terms that used to mean something but, thanks to overuse by conservatives as fake synonyms for "liberal," no longer mean anything at all.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

Trump’s rise is, like that of his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders...

They have so much in common. For one thing, Sanders "once wrote that women dream of gang rape," or at least his writings can be thus willfully misinterpreted. Plus Sanders is "an avowed socialist." Why, it's like they're twins -- no wonder you always see Sanders hanging around at Trump's casinos,  goosing the cocktail waitresses! Further, Reynolds says,

Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential [?-ed] essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation...

Those of you familiar with Codevilla's and Reynolds' schtick will know their standard solution for this is the election of  rightwing Republicans -- a groovy anti-ruling-class revolution that surprising coincides with the goals of the RNC. (The "country party" of true sons of liberty, Codevilla writes, "in the short term at least... has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party." Trust us, comrades, once we cut taxes on the rich it's on to Jerusalem!) The Tea Party act with its knee-breeches and triconers has gotten a bit long in the tooth, though -- maybe this time they should cosplay 60s radicals instead, and march around dressed as members of S.W.I.N.E. What the hell, they're led by a tenured radical.

CONSERVATIVES AND THE DARK ART OF COMEDY.

Politico reports that Jon Stewart visited the White House twice in the Obama era. To you and me and other ordinary citizens, no big; but to the Washington Free Beacon it’s “Jon Stewart Secretly Visited Obama White House Two Times” — that’s two (2!) times, America! — a development “previously unreported in the media.” The story concludes: “Stewart has become infamous for his consistently negative portrayal of Republican lawmakers. He will appear in his final episode as host next Thursday.”

You may be wondering, why the ominous tone? Turns out it’s widespread among the winger brethren. “That’s the clown-nose-on, clown-nose-off issue again with Daily Show and its clones,” seethes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, replicating a ten-year-old wingnut talking point; “they want to be taken seriously as cultural drivers and news disseminators, but don’t want the responsibility for disclosing their biases or their slants.”

One wonders: What “desire to be taken serious” or “responsibility” is Morrissey talking about? The responsibility to look glum and serious like Ben Shapiro? (If Chuck Todd decided to try and be funny, would he be more likely to increase his effectiveness, or to embarrass himself?)

“Secret visits, unprecedented access,” sputters Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection under the title “It’s Official: Jon Stewart is an Obama Shill.” “Comedy is an effective buffer against criticism,” Miller says, carefully sloshing the volatile essence of comedy between two beakers in the pale moonlight, “and now we know that there was a coordinated effort to control which Administration foibles got ha-has, and which were exposed for actual critique. It’s not a particularly shocking revelation, but it does serve as one more layer of slime covering the travesty that is the relationship between liberals and the media.” (You disgusting jokesters! I knew there was a reason why they made you sit at a table far from the paying customers!)

The Politico reporter “never questions the appropriateness of Obama’s private meetings with the liberal comedian,” gasps Newsbusters. "A DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE, MASQUERADING AS A COMEDIAN... Potemkin Village? We’ve got a whole freakin’ Potemkin Culture," crypto-fascizes Ole Perfesser Instapundit (h/t @punditdotcom).

“While President Obama was leaving the money on the nightstand for the rest of the press… he was making waffles and fresh squeezed orange juice for Johnny in the morning,” says alleged comedian Steve Crowder. “…If you ever needed any more proof as to the corrupt relationship of not only the press, but the entertainment industry with the Democratic party… you’re welcome.” In a healthy democracy apparatchiks would encourage the people to laugh at Steve Crowder, not some commie oaf!

“Confirmed: Jon Stewart Was Obama’s Official White House Jester,” snarls Philip Wegmann at The Federalist. His lede is precious:

Molière, the 17th century French playwright, once observed that “comedy alone can correct the vices of men.” Too bad he never watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It turns out that the Comedy Central funnyman was just another flak for the Obama administration.

Whereas Molière was always telling people what a treasonous bastard Louis XIV was. Surely you remember “La comédie de l'acte de naissance”? Wegmann closes,

Comedy probably won’t see another Stewart anytime soon. His comedic genius will be hard to match. But one can’t help but wonder, what if Stewart had really gone after everyone? How many laughs did he lose by telling canned-political jokes? How many vices went uncorrected?

Does it strike you as it does me that these people have never told a joke — I mean, never done so just for the pleasure of making their friends laugh? (Though they may have lab-tested some pieces of ordnance marked “humor” for their loathsome work of correcting vices or whatever, and stood sadly in their lab coats watching them fail, wondering why their creatures never came to life.)

This is sort of the essence of conservatives when they talk about culture. They show not the slightest awareness of the fundamental truth that comedy, like drama and film and music and everything else like it, is animated by something much deeper and more elemental that politics — though artists may become political themselves and be motivated to approach those subjects, particularly when the society they’re born into is as fucked up as ours. Art confuses conservatives, so they despise it, and treat it as some unfair advantage that liberals have. They don’t think artists tend to be liberal because liberal society gives human beings the breathing room to develop their talents — such a thing is impossible for them to grasp; they think it’s because ObamaHitler and his fellow Hitlers have found some community called “Artsilvania” or something where people are temperamentally just like conservatives except talented, and paid them a great deal of money to promote liberal lies (which, in the conservative imagination, they would do happily because money is more important than anything).

I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t working so hard to destroy everything I love.

UPDATE. Angergrams keep coming in. "I’ve always viewed Stewart as Obama’s messenger boy and this pretty much confirms it," says American Spectator's Aaron Goldstein, whose usefulness in any capacity has never been demonstrated. And the New York Post's Kyle Smith calls Stewart a "partisan hack" who "allowed himself to be seduced by power. He sold out. He dined with those he should have been dining upon." Back in 2009, Smith was yelling at Will Ferrell for making fun of newly-evicted POTUS George W. Bush: "Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?" his subhed sputtered. Smith was talking about a bit where Ferrell's Bush interrupted a moment of silence for the war dead to take a phone call. This is an ancient gag (there's an especially funny variation involving Ralph Richardson in O Lucky Man! starting at 6:45 here) but Smith seemed never to have heard of it, and to be mortally offended:

The problem is, during what turned out to be merely a pause to set up the punchline, I actually was thinking about our war dead, and so were a lot of others. Left and right, we all believe, or supposedly do, in honoring the sacrifice of our servicemen and women. 

Here, Hollywood is letting its mask slip...

But is it too much to ask for our war dead to not be ridiculed by wealthy comedians? Maybe those who fly on private jets, live in closely policed communities with surveillance cameras covering every inch of their property and send their kids to private school don’t understand that there is such a thing as public security, and that it isn’t a joke...

Also, how about that bastard George Grosz, painting deformed World War I veterans so disrespectfully instead of promoting kinder, küche, and kirche like a good citizen?  That Smith's talking about anyone else's hackery is rich, but I'll say this for him: What he lacks in talent he makes up for in nerve.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST.

Guess what this story at The Federalist is about:

How to Live in Pagan Society

It turns out that this situation is similar to some classic moral problems that Christians and other philosophers have been considering for some time now. If you’re a Nazi soldier, can you, in good conscience, fight the Allies? Would it be moral to kill Jews? At what point, if any, does “obeying orders” stop working as a valid excuse? On the other hand, do you have to starve and die to keep from being implicated in the Nazi atrocities through taxation? 

Thankfully, an evil empire and moral purity were precisely the concerns of first-century Christians as they wrestled with living in extensively pagan societies with tyrannical militaries. One ethical conundrum of the day was: is it permissible to eat food sacrificed to idols? In 1 Corinthians 10:25-57, Paul lays out the righteous path: “Eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake; for the earth is the Lord’s, and all it contains. If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat anything that is set before you without asking questions for conscience’ sake.” 

Money spent on food sacrificed to idols ended up funding the pagan temple system one way or another. Paul is unfazed. Like Jesus insisting that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and pay our taxes, Paul shows that the evil actions of the other participants do not preclude the narrowly righteous action of the Christian. The reasoning is, buying food is just buying food; buying food isn’t wrong; what people do with the money does not contribute to your sin... 

Give up? The title of this thing, bylined "The Federalist Editors," is

How Christians Can Bake Cakes And Sign Licenses For Gay Weddings

Ain't even kidding. They're meeting you homo-lovers halfway, explaining to their followers how and under what circumstances they can dispense services to the God-accursed SSMers. Here's part of their summation:

So in the case of a cake for a gay wedding or being a witness on a slip of paper, it makes sense to analyze the act itself. It’s not wrong to give people a beautiful cake. It’s wrong to encourage people to do evil things. If you make your views and the company’s views clear, you can feel free to make that cake. If they want it to say “Congratulations Angela and Norma!” you may feel morally free to do as they wish. As long as they know that you are merely serving their own self-congratulations and are not participating in congratulating, your conscience can be clear.

 So, maybe serve the cake while turning your head to one side and retching.

I run into people who think The Federalist is an upscale, intellectual conservative publication. And I suppose it is, grading on the curve.

UPDATE. Comments are, consistent with alicublog tradition, very good. Here's a sample by Rand Careaga:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon discusses the difficulties experienced by the early Christians as they attempted to observe the tenets of their faith without participating in an overwhelmingly pagan society. Money quote (heh, heh): "Even the reverses of the Greek and Roman coins were frequently of an idolatrous nature. Here indeed the scruples of the Christian were suspended by a stronger passion."

AND THEY DRINK THEIR BEER WARM!

The Federalist's Kurt Schlichter went to Europe, but it's hard to guess why, since the way he tells it he  clearly despises the place:

Europe is different from when I first lived there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was not as superficially wealthy then, although this time I rarely wandered far from where the tourists congregate. On the outside, at least, you would hardly see the rot of debt and welfare-state mismanagement even in Italy and Spain. The people were well dressed. The cafés were expensive but still packed. The cars are fairly new and have shockingly little body damage, when you consider the insanity that overtakes Europeans when they slide behind a steering wheel.

But that’s on the surface. Once you get behind the walls and into interior of the homes, the old cramped shabbiness is still there. All their money goes to clothes, food, and drink, because there’s no room in European apartments for the stuff Americans pack into theirs.

Not a McMansion in sight -- what a bunch of losers!

Countless stores will dress women in the latest, most expensive fashions, but few supply the woman who wishes to dress her children. The merchants know their markets, and you need babies to support baby clothes stores. When you walk the streets, you notice the couples with kids—they stand out, and it’s always just one kid.

No Duggars in this socialist hellhole, I tell you what.

Even the cabbies sigh that the birth rate is below replacement level. Children are the ultimate luxury item.

The Friedman cab driver still lives! Man, Schlichter hates this Europe dump worse than Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle. Wonder why?

The blood of the likes of Charles Martel no longer runs in the veins of today’s café-dwelling Europeans. They sip coffee and their (excellent) wine and, in Spain, drink their bizarre cerveza/lemonade and rioja/Coca-Cola combinations, oblivious to what’s coming. Perhaps it’s mere ignorance, perhaps it’s a choice. It will end the same way regardless—in blood. When the time comes to choose between picking up a rifle and dying, we’ll find out if the human instinct for self-preservation has successfully been bred out of the men of Europe. I know where I’m putting my money...

Ukraine will fall. The Baltics will fall. Turkey will fall. The Balkans will fall. Europe will fall.

This is the fiesta before the storm, and Europe is busy partying like it’s 1939. These are the New Wilderness Years, except this time the bad guys are going to win.

Ahh, right, they haven't herded their Mooslims into concentration camps so they're worthless and weak. Schlichter's come a ways since he approved Britain at least for its Windsor obsession in his classic "The Royal Baby Is a Rejection of the Family Chaos Liberalism Feeds Upon" column. Now...

When you go to a restaurant or a store in or around London, you almost certainly won’t be served by a native Englishman. Often, it’s an Eastern European. Our most frustrating language challenges took place in the United Kingdom. The immigrants do the work, while working-class Londoners apparently stay home and collect dole checks.

Even England is full of furriners! All those stupid little countries can go to hell!

He'll get to the same place with America, too, once he gets that bunker built.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

A very nice Richard Thompson tune

and a valuable reminder that Sting is a twat.

•   Charles C.W. Cooke's latest at National Review is about Reddit. Like the full-fedora MRAs who got Ellen Pao fired, Cooke clearly doesn't know what these bitches are bitching about, and he's enraged that Reddit is, with the blessing of the returning founder who's understandably sick of the "white-power racist-sexist neckbeards" who stirred up this whole shitstorm, trying and keep things civil on the site, which Cooke denounces as "censorship" -- i.e., people having different standards for their sites than Cooke would have if he were in charge as God intended. Cooke describes the wonderful State of Nature at Reddit that he would like maintained:

Within the swampier quarters of the site, you will find all sorts of insalubrious offerings. One area features graphic discussions of bestiality. Another hosts a bunch of white supremacists. Elsewhere, there are threads that brim with unreconstructed misogyny — perhaps exhibiting the rare and ugly “rape culture” that we are told is ubiquitous.

And then it hit me: Cooke isn't really complaining at all -- he's just seizing a market opportunity: If Reddit won't have the white supremacists and rape cultists, National Review will. John Derbyshire, expect an apology!

•   As we have seen again and again and again, there are conservatives who are not just anti-abortion but also anti-sex, viscerally repelled by the notion that anyone might want to do it just for fun. At The Federalist, Joy Pullmann is pissed that people want to make a government benefit out of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC).  Pullmann tips her hand early, complaining as she begins her "full-throated defense of the human person as an intrinsically valuable, community-embedded, and wholly sacred being, atop the also-eternal case for limited government" that

taking up the job feels kind of like being the best friend and roommate of a party-hearty girl who upchucks her innards out night after night but just won’t lay off the booze. Okay, I guess I’ll hold your hair and even clean up the vomit sometimes, but I’m also going to start giving you some straight talk, because this is ridiculous. And no way am I paying for your habit.

That ought to reel them in. Pullmann's sisterly chat continues:

We have a leading U.S. publication paternalistically implying that women cannot be trusted to responsibly manage our own bodies, dreams, and impulses, so we poor little impregnated patsies need The Man to come in and preemptively spay us or retroactively destroy our preborn children for what he thinks is our own good? What an empowering worldview! Doesn’t it just make you glad to be a woman? Doesn’t it just make you love your sex daddy? We’re so progressive and advanced in the twenty-first century!

It goes on like this forever, with subheds like "Human Haters Measure Us In Money" and "No One Has a Right to Sex," and lines like "If a baby happens during nonmarital sex, it’s about the only healthy thing going on!" I'm beginning to suspect these folks are not trying to win converts, they're trying to pump donors.

•   At National Review Fred Bauer says "The GOP Needs an Enlightened Populism." He says populism's big these days, mentions Greece. Stop laughing. (He also mentions France, which is a bit more like it.) Yet Trump, popular as he is with the racist halfwits no GOP candidate can win without, won't quite do for reasons Bauer does not articulate. But Bauer does lay out populist strategy. He wants whatever approved candidate runs to come out against "crony capitalism," of course, which is bullshit and which will in any case have to be decoded for those members of the electorate not well-versed in rightwing pundit fads. Also, "Reforming entitlements so that they are sustainable could help assure members of the middle class that, as if they hit hard times, a support system will be there for them" -- in other words, tell voters they have to work till they're 72 for their Social Security, which ought to go over great. Then there's the cultural component -- did you know there's a cultural component to conservative populism? And no, it's not John Wayne killing injuns, it's conservative columnists going on for the fourth decade in a row about political correctness. Bauer:

Attempting to tamp down the new crusade against free expression could be a key component of this enlightened populism. Cultural sophistication has a long pedigree in modern conservatism (see William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol, et al.), and a soupçon of adventurous cosmopolitanism could be an antidote to the aggrieved parochialism of the reigning progressive cultural elite. In countering the outrage Wurlitzer and defending freedom of thought, this cosmopolitanism would help various communities stop feeling themselves the target of an endless cultural assault.

Me, I'm such a fascist I think you shouldn't even be allowed to talk about populism unless you actually have some idea how to talk to people with whom you don't share a masthead. For starters, lose the soupçon.

HERE TO PUMP YOU UP.

Having apparently given up on convincing voters on the issues, The Federalist is working on Arguments from Butchness. There have been a couple of stories in the news lately about Kitty Genovese-style mass indifference to attacks on the D.C. Metro, from which Federalist author Robert Tracinski extrapolates that liberals are pussies:

Ironically, the same people now making excuses for [Metro] cowardice are the kind who engage in exaggerated Kabuki theater displays about how evil slavery was and how terrible the Confederate flag is and how much they furiously oppose them—150 years after it took any courage to do so.

This causal or genetic link between disapproval of Confederate flags and cowardice is not supported by any evidence except, well, D.C., they're all Big Gummint sissies, right? Also, Tracinski saw in the paper that "at a Renaissance festival in Colorado, a 'wench-costumed woman' put a man in a headlock after he stole a jouster’s sword, which gives you some idea of the cultural difference between Colorado and DC." Maybe the Colorado wench was just high. Speaking of which, just in case you were wondering, Tracinski says he's no sissy either:

I know how I would react [to random violence] because I’ve done it. The last time I can recall was many years ago: two drunk guys in a parking lot were attacking a third guy, and I tackled one of the drunks, allowing the victim to safely escape. It was not that big a deal and did not involve much risk on my part, though I didn’t really know that going in. 

Giving Tracinski the benefit of every doubt, including sobriety, good for him but so what? I lived in New York City in the late 1970s; maybe I should have the Croix de Guerre, or at least bring it up when I run out of political ammunition ("Hey, I lived under the Koch Administration, motherfucker! And I say single payer rules!").

I also worked several years as a waiter and a busboy, so I can sympathize somewhat with Traciniski's colleague Peter Cook, who is proud of his experiences in F&B and retail, and I agree with him that "Everyone Should Work at Least One Crap Job." But Cook thinks this is a political distinction, too. He sneers at a few reporters (aka "the national media") who laughed because, after serving barbecue to a crowd, Scott Walker kept his latex gloves on while eating. Well, huffs Cook, "why wouldn’t you after spending that much time around ribs?" I can imagine why you wouldn't (for one thing, it makes you wonder if Walker kept serving up BBQ after slobbering over them), but Cook makes it a crusade:

Yes, gloves. That’s what food service regulations require. These two journalists seem unaware that when you prepare or serve food to other people, you should have clean hands while doing so, and the best way to ensure one’s hands are clean is to wear gloves. Doing so is not a freakish anomaly, but what food-service workers do daily, all around the country.

I was a dishwasher once, too. I wonder if the dishwashers Cook knows eat with their gloves on.

Also, the catchphrase "beta males," familiar to readers of MRA fedora dopes, has caught on at The Federalist: "Tocqueville Identified The Original Beta Males: Europeans," "Behold, The Beta Males Who Feel Good About Watching A Man Die," "while not all men can be alpha males, they can be men," etc. For readers who need a little more help with their masculinity, they have an article by Rebekah Curtis about how her husband made a real Second Amendment woman out of her with guns:

The guy loves guns: he has a lot of them, he’s good at shooting them, and he wanted me to be a part of it. Having my Second Amendment adherence bluff called has been a rough, but worthwhile, experience.

To each her own. I expect this outbreak is really about identity politics. Since gay marriage went nationwide and the Battle Flag came down, what conservative signifiers are left? Being a prick to working people and hatred of Mexicans, which in and of themselves have limited appeal -- but that appeal may be boosted if it's accompanied by a bit of swagger. It's been hard for conservatives to work machismo since that unfortunate Iraq war which all of them cheered and in which few of them served, and it just got worse when the gay rights avalanche made it harder than before to get away with portraying their opponents as sissies. The upside is that the gays, having been recast as fascist overlords, can be ignored, and the brethren can butch up and work on their manly prose physiques with some web sparring matches against accommodating strawmen. Maybe by the time the campaign heats up they'll be sufficiently ripped to call Hillary a bitch out loud and not run away.

I'M ONLY ONE MAN.

Was it really just 10 days ago that National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, attempting to show his range by playing the role of conciliator, claimed that the wiser conservatives understood that the Obergefell "decision is now the law and that it is not going to change" and that sweet reason would prevail? Today at The Federalist, a team effort by Ben Domenech and Robert Tracinski:

Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage -- the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists -- some were...

Ah, some were! Be advised Domenech and Tracinski supply no links to support the following assertions, which should give you some idea of how substantial they are:

....already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs. We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides...

Let's pause here a moment to note that, on that last bit, Domenech and Tracinski are apparently talking about the Harrisburg Patriot-News' decision to treat letters to the editor and op-eds critical of gay marriage the way it would treat "those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic," an arguable position to which the Patriot-News, being a private enterprise, has a perfect right, but which the brethren, whose thousands of web outlets claim and exercise similar rights every day, nonetheless insist is censorship (e.g., "Post-Obergefell, Dissent Is Now The Highest Form Of Bigotry," "FREE SPEECH TOSSED OUT THE WINDOW AS BIG NEWSPAPER BANS OP-EDS AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE"); they may also be talking about BuzzFeed's forthright support for gay marriage, which (since conservatives think every popular media venue, online or off, owes them a platform as a form of wingnut affirmative action) has similarly shivered their timbers (e.g., "EIC BEN SMITH: BUZZFEED IS PRO-GAY MARRIAGE — NEUTRAL ON SHARIAH").

...and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe...

I could ask what they mean by "must" -- has a law been passed? Or do they merely assert a right, undetectable in the Constitution, not to be mocked for their racism?  Indeed,  I could go on through every particular of the whole wretched screed -- for instance, "every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs," to which a reasonable person might respond, first, this kind of thing is certainly not the exclusive province of liberals (e.g., "PIERS MORGAN GOT PWNED ON TWITTER OVER GUN CONTROL"), and second, grow the fuck up.

But you know what? For the first time since I took up this loathsome duty, I feel a bit overmatched.* Because since the Obergefell decision, I perceive that not some but most conservatives, from their elected officials and top pundits down to the bottom feeders, have gone barking mad. I do this alicublog thing in my spare time, you know, and most days I get material for posts desultorily, just by idly rifling through conservative sites. It's been kind of fun peeking into their rooms, detecting which of them has gone a little off his feed, and reporting back. But since gay marriage came in it's like every rightwing door I open reveals a shit-smeared, babbling Bedlam, with nearly every inhabitant shrieking his fool head off about the homosexual apocalypse. I could quit my job and report the atrocities day and night, and still not get the scope of the thing.

And it's not as if all of it's about gay marriage. Take this post by -- oh, look, it's Cooke again, and the title is "Repainting the General Lee Won’t Erase What It Symbolizes from History." No, really, Cooke, a British transplant whose pat-riotism apparently includes a fetish for the cheesiest Americana, is outraged that the impeccably Southern Bubba Watson, owner of the car from The Dukes of Hazzard, is replacing the rebel flag on the roof with the Stars and Stripes. Cooke reacts as if Watson planned to draw tits on Whistler's Mother:

There is a clear and necessary answer to Watson’s rather naïve inquiry, “Why not the American flag?” That answer: Because the General Lee is a piece of America’s cultural history, and civilized people do not vandalize their antiques.

The Dukes of Hazzard. He's talking about The Dukes of Hazzard. I was a teenager when that came out and even I knew it sucked. One searches in vain for signs that Cooke is kidding, or at least ironically inflating his own obsession like a nerd ostentatiously sighing over the set of the original Star Trek, but no, Cooke actually thinks this is important:

It is fashionable in our age to seek unity in all things, but the “General Lee” is not a statehouse, responsive to and reflective of the popular will. It is a historical artifact and cultural totem that sums up a particular moment in time. By amending it to suit contemporary fashions Watson is seeking, in effect, to erase that moment from history. This in my view is extraordinarily dangerous...

Must the owners of Monticello take Wite-Out to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, lest the more egregious passages offend our modern sensibilities?; Must the custodians of vintage Aunt Jemima boxes throw them into the Mississippi to atone for their ugly anachronisms?...

And finally:

Just as to burn an unwanted book is not to kill its author, to paint over the roof of an attitude-laden car is in no way to go back in time and to eradicate that attitude from the record.

If you're wondering why that sentence is even clumsier than we can normally expect from Cooke, my guess is that he really wanted to compare painting over the General Lee with burning books, but something in his soul rebelled and convoluted his sentence structure. Which means there may be hope for him yet.

*UPDATE. Not that I didn't read the whole thing, but I don't recommend it -- it proceeds to a bizarre theory that the Culture War is not just a fucking annoyance for all concerned, but the wellspring of human progress:

The culture wars of the past produced great achievements in art, architecture, literature, and science as the opposing parties strove to demonstrate that they had more to offer and deserved the people’s admiration and loyalty. Those culture wars gave us Michelangelo’s David, Galileo’s science, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment, and the movement for the abolition of slavery.

I look forward to Ben Shapiro's blueprints for Breitbart Tower. It also contains this amazing sentiment:

The Sad Puppies are just the Salon des Refusés with different players...

It's the rightbloggers' world, we just don't live in it. Meanwhile in comments, which are choice, Another Kiwi points out that The General Lee of legend was actually a series of Dodge Chargers, so if Cooke is seriously about preserving Suthun heh'tage, he's in for a long search of collectible car dealerships and junkyards.

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE P.C. COLLEGE AUDIENCES? THEY'RE P.C., YET NONE OF THEM USE P.C.s! THEY USE MACS! AND THE FOOD THEY SERVE...

I love Jerry Seinfeld, but if the kids don't dig him anymore, maybe it's political correctness, maybe it's not, so what? The hippies didn't dig Bob Hope either -- that is, as they say, show business. Bitching about it makes you sound like Lenny Bruce's Comic at the Palladium when the Brits don't laugh -- "well, Freddy boy, I see it's a little squaresville tonight, real squaresville for the first show..."

I notice Aziz Ansari isn't having trouble drawing college crowds. Maybe different audiences just like different things. They're not obligated to like you, and if they don't it's not the same thing as oppression, as conservatives seem to think. The kids have not been "unwittingly drawn into a cult they cannot escape." They are young, they like what they like, and they think old people smell.

UPDATE. Hey, remember that crazy shrink or psycho-sociomologist or whatever she is Stella Morabito from The Federalist? She has another the-PC-end-is-near rant ("Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate," etc. skree), and in it she acknowledges that the peecee people do in fact laugh, but at bad things that it's bad to laugh at:

I think the reason there is so little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon mean-spiritedness? 

Also, the music they listen to these days, you can't even make out the lyrics, and what's with those baggy pants. Increasingly it looks like this whole P.C. boo-hoo is just a weaponized version of Those Were The Days.

UPDATE 2. Enjoy some libertarian Mad Libs from the Fonzie of Freedom at Reason:

To be sure, San Diego State student Anthony Berteaux also insists in his letter that, hey, he likes edgy and funny folks such as Amy Schumer and Louis C.K. and George Carlin and that Seinfeld should "Offend the fuck out of college students. Provoke the fuck out of me. We'll thank you for it later." 

But this doesn't just ignore the chill that is already upon campuses when lefty feminist profs like Laura Kipnis gets dragged into Title IX hearings about sex on campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education...

If you don't laugh at this AARP member's jokes, Laura Kipnis goes to the gas!

...viewings of films as mainstream and honored as American Sniper are replaced by Paddington, and students call for trigger warnings before reading The Great Gatsby.

Regular readers know how sick I am of all the culture-war bullshit, but Fonzie has it exactly backwards. College students saying they don't like your act isn't oppression. If the kids want a different leisure time activity than American Sniper, which made gazillions of dollars without their help, who gives a fuck? You don't have a Constitutional right to student activity board funds. Incursions into the curriculum and the rights of professors, on the other hand, are about the new consumerist approach to education, whereby students are regarded as customers to be satisfied rather than seekers after knowledge; "social justice" is just the MacGuffin.  The bad ideas you should worry about are the ones that created this system, not some teenager's insufficiently deep understanding of racism.

WHY DO ALL THESE TRANSSEXUALS KEEP SUCKING MY ATTENTION?*

Let's see what's going on at one of our favorite rightwing opinion factories, The Federalist:

How The Hypersexual Trans Movement Hurts Feminism

Hmm. That's --

...These carpet-baggers to womanhood are trying to prove to all of us that what it really means to be a woman is to pose in a playboy bunny outfit and make kissy faces at men. They reinforce this idea to teenage girls: go put on the miniskirt, honey, celebrate Jenner’s beauty, and try to exemplify it in your own life.

(Pause.) Let's try another story.

Bruce Jenner’s Transformation Is A Lose-Lose For Liberal Ideology

Huh. How ya figure?

...For years, a major aim of the sexual revolution has been to deconstruct gender differences as being “social constructs"...

This is the ideology that governs liberal sexual philosophy, and it collides head-on with major aspects of the transgender movement. Transgenderism is unavoidably based on a kind of gender essentialism...

Hey, look at the time. Let's see what else:

Bruce Jenner: Selfie Culture Hero

Great! I could use some light reading.

....As he adapted, he still was treating his body not as his own, but like a shiny new midlife crisis vehicle that came with a great rack worth flashing to his son...

Yikes.

Personally, I don’t care either way, and I wish him well, but I’d prefer we identify actions of bravery with real bravery...

Oh, so we're making too much of Caitlin Jenner, huh? The obvious solution is to continue talking about her.

So is the best response to Mother Nature’s cruel visual inequity more surgery for everyone and glam teams ‘til their outsides match their insides? If that is case, Jenner just won another gold medal in the vanity Olympics...

Aw snap.

Who knows, and who cares. That’s some silly discussion...

Come into the light, Federalist author!

...one that will make “Jezebel rain hellfire down on” you. What matters is how it sounds, how it makes you feel, and if it’s attractive. Silence is easier and more attractive when roving bands of social-justice warriors vociferously silence dissent...

Do these guys get bonuses when they work conservative persecution into stories?

Now that we dispensed with critical thinking and an honest debate of ideas, welcome to a world where what matters most is how you look. It’s a brave new superficial world that had no better launching location than the pages of Vanity Fair. We are a society that has fallen in love with its own reflection.

Please, no one ever show her a magazine rack from the past fifty years; she'll run into the street screaming like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Let's move on:

Bruce Jenner is Not Brave

Oh for --

In a few days, we will celebrate the anniversary of D-Day, when men stormed enemy-filled beaches and died by the thousands...

Jesus Christ, aren't there any stories in this conservative magazine that aren't about transsexuals? Okay, one more:

Taylor Swift Flirts With The Feminist Dark Side

I'll take it -- oh wait, it's full of Lena Dunham. Have you got a copy of Field & Stream?

(*Titular reference here.)

HEY, I READ SOMEPLACE LINCOLN WAS GAY.

Remember Stella Morabito, covered here last year for a magnificent column in which she compared advocates of gay marriage to Symbionese Liberation Army members raping and brainwashing Patty Hearst? Sample passage:

If we step back and take this all in, there should be no question that coercive persuasion can happen on a mass scale in America. Those pushing the [gay marriage] agenda first cultivate a climate that creates social punishment for dissent and social rewards for compliance. Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a “hater,” a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

Soon we'll have Pat Buchanan in assless chaps! Well, Morabito is still writing, and still obsessed with guess what and conservative treason to the cause:

LGBT Activists Arm For Further War On Free Speech

Apparently Morabito read a story about some folks who are campaigning for "a major federal nondiscrimination bill that protects people from prejudice based on sexuality and gender identity," and has decided this means homosexualists will ban Americans from saying things like "we don't serve your kind here, faggot." The whole thing's a joy -- Morabito's writing style remains fever-pitched and prone to metaphor metastasis ("There’s so much to unpack here, but if pressed to dissect this vat of worms...") -- but this is my favorite part:

The LGBT lobby has always known that it needs to get Republicans, conservatives, and evangelicals on board—through their leaders—because they still command a wide swath of America, and, worse, some people might not be intimidated enough to refrain from saying things not in line with the lobby’s agenda. 

Hence, there are infiltration efforts like “Log Cabin Republicans,” whose sole purpose has been to promote the LGBT lobby while claiming to be conservative.

The Log Cabin Republicans! Most of us think of them as charmingly ineffectual, but we're apparently just brainwashed by the liberal media, who cover for their true Mattachine machinations. I like to imagine them back at their founding in 1977, no doubt in some tastefully-appointed sex dungeon, rubbing their hands with glee and telling one another, "yessss, it's a long game, but the rewards will be sooooo-cialistically delicious!"

I wonder who's doing more to hurt the anti-gay-marriage campaign: the LCR, or stuff like this? Or maybe Steve Wiles is a double agent. This thing goes deeper than we imagined!