THEIR NEGRO PROBLEM -- AND OURS. I'll be honest with you. I don't think racism is the biggest problem in the country. Of course I'm inclined to feel that way, since I'm white, but I've also made the judgment that it's the manipulation of racism that makes much of the trouble that we attribute to the thing itself.

The provenance of the outrage applied to the Belleville West High School incident is obvious if you've been alive for more than a couple of years. Normal people know that in different situations, black kids will victimize white kids and white kids will victimize black kids, and it's part of the sad but slowly improving situation of the United States. I knew it when I was younger and things were much worse. (I saw a little of both sides, too -- I don't mean figuratively, but with my eyes.)

Normal people work through such resentments as these incidents bestir in them as best they can. A certain type of person tries instead to work them.

To a certain extent, playing with that particular kind of fire doesn't have to come out badly. New York City is a pretty good example. There are lines, albeit thin ones, between solidarity and isolation and between righteous indignation and rage. When it goes wrong, you get the Draft Riots, "Irish confetti," the 60s riots, Crown Heights, etc. When it goes right, you get political clubs and affinity groups, which do business with other clubs and groups and get deals done to their mutual benefit.

One of the reasons conservatives classically hate New York is because we have mostly worked out our ethnic tensions this way, in informal power sharing arrangements. That angers them because it reveals something they don't like to face about racism -- that it has to do with power, and that cooling its tensions may require that grievances be addressed and redressed. Maybe some jobs have to be shoveled toward ethnically distinct neighborhoods that don't have many of them, and maybe the mayor won't always line up with the cops when a member of a minority group is killed under suspicious circumstances.

It ain't always pretty but it more or less works. You may prefer that men be angels and rise above this sort of thing, but that sort of liberal utopianism is beyond me. I do notice that people of different races seem to get along here pretty well -- certainly better than they did 30 years ago -- so maybe the incremental approach, assisted by liberal applications of grease, will get us to Valhalla anyway, albeit slowly.

Members of white majority parties resist this thinking because it suggests that they may have to give something up. So they concentrate on ways in which they can portray white people as victims of some sort of black hegemony, and adopt the prerogatives of grievance themselves. You'll remember that conservatives originally tried to get at ACORN by suggesting that it was redirecting wealth unfairly to black people. (It was only when that failed to inflame the public imagination that they turned to child prostitution stings.) The clear message of the Belleville uproar is that people of color are getting away with something, and simple justice demands that white people hold the line.

Robert Crumb explained this better than I have. I will add that I am in some sympathy with Jimmy Carter's remarks -- is it really so controversial to observe that a lot of people can't accept the idea of a black president? -- but I think he may be missing the angle shot. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that the people who are stirring the shit up at present aren't casual racists at all. (Some of them certainly go out of their way to give the impression that they're cool with black people.) But they know what racism can accomplish with a little help.

UPDATE. I found part two of the Crumb thing, which is also worth your while.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 Sure, insistent bass and jangly guitars, why not, still cool 

Here’s a freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, about the new thing on the right wing, which is GROOMERS -- that is, yelling it at people who oppose anti-gay laws like the Don’t Say Gay mess in Florida, or at Disney for having cartoons with gay characters. 

If you’re a normal person you understand this to be an accusation that the person or company is trying to get children to have sex with adults. This is a very serious charge indeed, and one that normal people would be unlikely to believe without substantial proof -- that is, something considerably more than registration in the Democratic Party and a belief that gay people are normal and what’s actually perverse is acting like their very existence is a threat to children. In fact, normal people would probably find making such charges absent proof to be a repulsive act, and wonder what the hell is wrong with the accuser. 

If, however, you are a QAnon type, as about a quarter of Republicans are, you believe all Democrats are part of the Spirit Cooking Pizzagate Sex Perv Conspiracy, and these accusations will excite you to vote and march and perhaps commit violent crimes. 

This is why you’ve seen conservatives spreading the accusation in weird stories like the Fox News testimonial of one Kristan Hawkins -- a concerned mom and, coincidentally, president of Students for Life of America -- that the cartoon Turning Red, with its symbolic allusion to a girl’s first period and its tween crushes (it's rated PG, for parental guidance), “grooms children for abortions and sexual promiscuity… Disney leadership is actively pushing children out of Neverland and directly into an adult’s sexualized world, where they can be groomed for others enjoyment.”

As you might imagine, Rod Dreher is totally out of control on this -- here are some of his allusions to grooming from just the past week:

Mickey Mouse is a groomer...

Most people are uncomfortable with gender ideology now, but a generation or two raised on woke Disney, and all of woke Disney’s allies in the Cathedral, will likely have been tamed, co-opted, and groomed...

Most Americans do not want their little kids groomed by woke classroom ideologues to embrace a queer identity...

Americans are broadly tolerant of trans people, but they correctly draw the line at grooming children. I hope that the suits at the Walt Disney Company, the leading corporate groomer of children, are soiling their pants over these poll numbers...

If we as a country and as a society cannot protect our children from having their minds colonized by these groomers, what use are we?...

UPDATE: Groomers. They are all groomers...

Etc. Perhaps the most rancid thing about this is the way the slur-throwers insist they’re not really saying what they’re clearly saying and hoping their loony followers will believe -- Dreher, again, in his story (I’m not even kidding) “Democrats: Party of Groomers”:

About the term “groomers”: it’s usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not specifically be to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take on a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm. And it’s working…

The passive locution “it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning” suggests Dreher believes he has Humpty Dumpty power over the general understanding of common English words, which given his ineptitude as a wordsmith is rich. But you don’t have to be particularly skilled to throw shit, though it does help if you can keep people from noticing that your hands are covered with it. 

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER INSTAPUNDIT: I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS!

Behold Glenn Harlan Reynolds' evidentiary standards: At USA Today, he deduces a level of PR damage to the government due to the IRS "scandal" (i.e., the taxmen having the nerve to review Tea Party claims that they weren't political organizations) from the findings of "a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School." Then he speculates that this directly affects how the American People think about the NSA revelations, which apparently would have been perfectly acceptable to them otherwise. (Of course the large number of commentators who switched from pro-surveillance to anti-surveillance around January 20, 2009 would have had nothing to do with it.) Then:

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

Unfortunately there's no way to compare this "significant number of people" to the percentage of the population who believe in flying saucers, but I'll bet it's roughly equivalent.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory.

And to normal people they still are. But normal people are not the Perfesser's audience:

But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

To recap, some people believe crazy shit because Obama has made it believable, and the proof is the crazy shit some people have believed all along. It's a perfect loop of bullshit. Like Salieri with the mediocrities at the end of Amadeus, the Perfesser is absolving the wingnuts.  Did you believe in birtherism? The Whitey Tape? The Hillary Clinton constitutional crisis? That Sarkozy called Obama nuts? That Obama campaign workers beat up Ashley Todd? That Obama apologized for World War II? Wrote a treasonous college thesis? Wanted to make veterans kill themselves? Bill Ayers wrote his book? That he's a Mooslim, or a Muslin? Or a Socialist? And/or a Fascist (indeed, Hitler)? Whatever total nonsense you peddled, it's okay -- because Obama. Now, on to the next wave of hearings over the people the Kenyan Pretender murdered at Benghazi!

WHY SHEEPLE NO LIKE SHELDON?

From Reason magazine:

How to Talk to Nonlibertarians

Take a shower and don't stand so close to them when you talk. Just kidding! Do go on, Sheldon Richman:

If libertarians want to change how nonlibertarians think about government, they will need to understand how nonlibertarians think about government. By "nonlibertarians," I mean the majority of people who spend little if any time pondering political theory or what Murray Rothbard called political ethics. They may focus at times on particular government programs and actions, or on proposals for new programs, but rarely about government as an institution.

You mean normal people?

...So how can libertarians speak to these people in a way they will understand? How do we get them to question deeply held beliefs that may never have been articulated? My basic advice is to start by trying to see government as they see it. This may be distasteful, but if you want to persuade people, what else are you going to do? Without this, you might as well be speaking in a foreign language.

I have to say it's amazing they let this be published someplace non-initiates might see it. (I know, fellas, but at least technically Reason magazine is available to the public.) Richman sounds like an alien in a cheesy sci-fi story trying to figure out what is this "love" the humans speak of?

But he does try: He even acknowledges that people worry about losing their job and having no safety net to help them, which must have been a big step for him. Unfortunately:

...The libertarian job is to convince people that, on two counts, government provision is a bad way to secure a good end. First, it is morally wrong because it requires compulsion — the threat of physical violence — starting with taxation. And second, as a consequence of the first feature, state provision is inferior to private provision because it is outside the free and competitive market — a process that, unlike the political realm, ties rewards to customer service and stimulates entrepreneurial discovery, which makes products and services better and cheaper.

I see the problem here: Richman thinks that the littlebrains don't know that the power of the state is terrible. But we do know it, and nonetheless prefer to deal with the welfare state -- yes, even with police and taxes -- than take a chance on rule by corporations, because we also know that people who pitch us "customer service" and "entrepreneurial discovery" as an alternative to our current means of survival are the sort of well-manicured grifters who try to talk senior citizens into giving up their life savings for a fake stock certificate.

With a little patience Richman might be able to polish his act sufficiently that after ten minutes people won't want to throw garbage at him, but I don't think he has it in him -- really, look at this --

In other words, consumers would be safer without government protection. But that counterintuitive claim must be patiently demonstrated, not merely insisted on. (One disadvantage for libertarians is that most people are ignorant of economics.)

-- and imagine the guy trying to win hearts and minds anywhere but FreedomFest and Koch Industries. We all get tired of glad-handers, but these guys don't even seem to like people. And they certainly don't want to offer them anything except the opportunity to be smug shits like themselves -- and they think that's a great come-on because for libertarians that's the tippity-top of the Maslow pyramid. They'll give out toy guns in Harlem to make a point, and give a speech at Howard to make a point -- but it's not the people of Harlem or Howard they're trying to make their points to -- it's the people who already agree with them, and who'll get the press release and say boy, our guys really showed those people.

It's not a formula for political success. Fortunately for them, their sponsors have deep pockets and can buy politicians who'll just straight up lie to them about what they're trying to do.

A KIND OF GENIUS. Rightbloggers are such a malignant force that they ruin even such perfectly good ideas as they occasionally take up in their greasy mitts. Take the "Higher Education Bubble" stuff promoted by Ole Perfesser Instapundit and others. It's certainly a fine thing when young men and women prefer a career in the manual arts to a college education, and they stand a chance of prospering thus; I know a few carpenters who do alright.

But when kids pick up hammer or hod instead of a college application, it's not usually because they've taken a precocious interest in "soulcraft" -- it's usually because they can't afford to go to college. Like it or not, this has become a paper-pushing society, and the smart bet is on getting a degree. That's why people are preemptively bankrupting themselves to obtain them. Like much else in this country these days, it's a shit deal and a gamble either way.

I would like young folks to be more aware of the odds and better informed in their choices going in. But there I go, plain fellow that I am, reacting to real life, while rightbloggers push their psychopolitical meme: that higher education is a Marxist plot.

In "The College Scam," John Stossel starts by naming several famous people who never got a diploma. This is the sort of hooey with which normal people comfort a lad whose father has drunk up his college fund. Stossel, however, is not here to console, but to attack the educrats and Hitlery:

But today all kids are told: To succeed, you must go to college.

Hillary Clinton tells students: "Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more."

We hear that from people who run colleges. And it's true. But it leaves out some important facts

That's why I say: For many people, college is a scam.

If anyone took this seriously, it would be close to journalistic malfeasance -- "for many people, college is a scam" is as true as "for many people, quitting smoking will not keep them from getting cancer," and as misleading. And get a load of Stossel's "important facts":

"People that go to college are different kind of people ... (more) disciplined ... smarter. They did better in high school."

They would have made more money even if they never went to college.

That's why so many Fortune 500 CEOs never had no book-larnin', and proudly display their high-school equivalency certificates instead of diplomas. Who's Stossel trying to kid? Answer: Fellow conservatarians who hate the professariat, those tenured radicals whose "research is often on obscure topics for journals nobody reads," like Wymyns Studies, amirite? Also Scary Obama, who "plans to increase the number of students getting Pell grants by 50 percent," the evil, dream-crushing bastard.

But what to do? Even Chris Christie is pimping Big College! "We need to wake people up," cries Stossel, leaping on the back of a truck like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and encountering piles of rolled-up diplomas (They're here already! You're next!).

Can't let Stossel go without noting this:

What puzzles is me is why the market doesn't punish colleges that don't serve their customers well.

Maybe the educrats are protected from Supermarket by Keynesian Kryptonite. I think the stuff Stossel uses on his hair has finally seeped through his skull.

Believe it or not, there's someone even worse -- oh wait, it's easy to believe, because it's Michael Walsh, working the pseudo-populist angle at the down-'n'-dirty National Review, founded by Butch Buckley:

But that’s not the way things work in Liberaland, a cargo cult that firmly believes in the totemic value of parchment — preferably, parchment with an Ivy League patrimony. That’s why self-made people like Sarah Palin, with her crummy journalism degree from Dogtooth State Teachers College, drive them crazy: Their only definition of “smart” has to do with school and GPA.

Well, Walsh does know from a kind of "smart" -- he managed to get paid for this suspender-snapping bullshit, didn't he? And in that sense we can give him and all his colleagues honors: it's increasingly difficult to get any kind of a job in this country, yet they've found a way to make money telling people that college is a trap.

Let's enjoy one more Walsh proof-point against Liberalanders:

By their lights, someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber, who dropped out of Oxford after one term in order to become a composer, is a complete failure.

These Liberalanders don't even like Cats -- how elitist can you get? To Walsh, America is an unhappily married mom singing "Memory" as she speeds off to one of her three fast-food jobs. At least she didn't have to study no semiotical whatchamacallit. Freedom!

RETURN TO NORMALCY.

Sometimes it's just good to shut out all the jibber-jabber and look at the situation as if we were all still normal people.

Trump's at one of his stupid events and some sheriff mentions MS-13; Trump, doing the usual stream-of-semiconsciousness slurring he does whenever foreigners of a certain hue are mentioned, says something absurdly offensive. Times being what they are, I have to reproduce the relevant section -- not for the Trumpkins who are deaf to evidence, but just to remind you and me what actually happened:

SHERIFF MIMS: Thank you. There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it. 

THE PRESIDENT: We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

The meaning is not really in dispute. We can't even say that it would be different if someone other than Trump said it, because if someone other than Trump said it and it were pointed out to that person what it sounded like, unless that person were a Nazi or the near equivalent, he or she would attempt to explain themselves and probably be slightly embarrassed that he or she had allowed themselves to be so disgracefully misapprehended.

But instead wingnuts screamed that Trump meant only MS-13, for what else could a sensible person like Trump mean, and in fact the Real Outrage is that liberals are supporting MS-13. The first proposition is asserted by replacement-level douchebags like this --

-- and the even further-out secondary proposition is asserted by Times-endorsed "cool kid philosophers" and Intellectual Dark Websters (you know, morons) like this --

In response the mainsteam media falls all over itself to appease and agree, yes, the President could not possibly have meant what it sounded like he said; and Trump lopes a hammy arm around the neck of the mainstream media and says oh, yeah, right, I meant that other thing.

I'm never a fan of the 11-dimension-chess POV where natural reactions are treated like Machiavellian gambits, notwithstanding this has become everyone's default POV in the Age of This Is Why Trump Won. And in this case, in which you have a million wingnuts screaming not only that Trump would never slander immigrants (when that is self-evidently most of his shtick and his appeal) but also that liberals are in favor of MS-13, I think it makes even more sense to step back and try to imagine: What would a normal person -- of which we have millions more in the country than political obsessives, thank God -- think about this? Would he or she really look at Trump, who's been what he's been, and the Democrats, who've been what they've been, and think: You're right, Trump's just being fair and the Democrats are openly supporting Latin American drug gangs?

If you first reaction is to say that's exactly what they think, that's an understandable mistake -- the mainsteam media is so far up Trump's ass that it daily, unthinkingly disseminates the impression that Trump is normal and all America is one big Trump rally. But neither the vote totals nor the poll numbers support this -- and neither does my, nor your, experience of ordinary people -- and I don't just mean (though I certainly don't exclude) academics and intellectuals and public union employees, but also carpenters and crossing guards and waitresses and landscapers, and other folks who are not included among the caricatures of American voters we read about in the major newspapers that tell us the Real Americans spend all days siting in Pennsyltucky diners telling New York Times reporters how Obama let the Ordinary Diner-Sitting American down -- notwithstanding that Democrats have been flipping dozens of Congressional seats since Trump got in.

In other words, the American People may not agree with you on everything, but that doesn't make them dumb -- and certainly not as dumb as wingnut crackpots want you to believe they are. So don't you believe it. Hold fast, have faith, tell the truth, and shame the devil.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

She had a syndicated afternoon talk show back in the day.
I bet her life's a story.

• Look, I told you guys already, I need more paying customers, not the Love of the People -- I'm like the Democratic Party in election season, except I actually deliver! So there's just one (1) free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue this week. Admittedly, it's a good one about a signal feature of the Dobbs blight: vicious scumbags pretending to be nice in the (I think) mistaken belief that if they talk about how much they love mommies and babies, you'll miss that they're stealing your rights. 

Of course increasingly these people aren't even bothering to pretend, as Akiva Cohen caught this morning in a Josh Hammer column:

Hammer later stealth-edited the quiet-part-out-loud about rewarding friends and punishing enemies, but it's still clear what his idea of justice is. One of my favorite targets, ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, is too stupid to conceal or retract his similar views:

Those of you who are screaming about the Supreme Court this week can, in your words, check your privilege.

(Note the traditional portrayal of liberals "screaming," an old conservative NLP trick, and the use of "check your privilege" as Babylon Bee-grade humor. Also Erickson titles this page "Best Pride Month Ever" for added prickishness, a trait to which outspoken Christians are generally inclined.)

Conservatives have spent over fifty years watching the Supreme Court give you everything you demanded, including a novel right to kill children unheard of in American jurisprudence until 1973. When those of us on the right operated through the nation’s democratic and republican institutions and the elected bodies of our nation, we saw the Supreme Court repeatedly snatch those wins away from us for you...

You people have been able to rub your SCOTUS genie and get court imposed wins that no one could challenge democratically and now you can’t do that anymore. We’ve worked democratically to make sure of it. Now, to win again, you’re going to have to do what we did — change hearts and minds in places as varied as Alabama and Iowa. Why? Because we are a republic and states matter, not just people. We have fifty states and 350 million people. Your coalitions of angry rich white people on MSNBC won’t work anymore.

Set aside the claim that what this Court has produced comes of conservatives "working democratically" -- which is rich because half of the rogue Justices were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and the whole conservative bloc's decisions are highly unpopular in general and in the particular with Americans. "Coalitions of angry rich white people on MSNBC" didn't produce the eight million vote majority Biden won in 2020. (It's amazing what some people will write when they think nobody with any brains will read it.)

But Erickson's main idea, if we can so dignify it, is that liberals got what they wanted for a while and now conservatives should get a turn. This is worse in a way than his fraudulent claim of popular support -- though it also relies on that lie -- because like Josh Hammer thesis it's purely instrumental and anti-democratic, and assumes that the bauble of power is what's important rather than the will and welfare of the people.

I would also say that the Warren-Rehnquist Court decisions conservatives hate mostly furthered unacknowledged rights -- those of arrestees, prisoners, women, LGBTQ people -- while the Roberts But Really Thomas Court decisions are about taking these rights away and then some.  Though abortion rights as such are the big cause and I don't doubt the disapproving majority thinks "put it back, thief" (further polling suggests so), I think the extreme high-handedness of the Court is something of which normal people will also take notice and disapprove. At least I hope so, and that they get the chance to show their disapproval before the Court delivers the coup de grace to democracy with Moore v. Harper. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

People laugh about "yazz flute" but Bobbi Humphrey ain't no joke.

•   I'm releasing another edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for you non-subscribing folks. In this one I imagine a meeting between Tom Perez and his party's major donor, Michael Bloomberg. As I've been saying for years, Bloomberg sucks. Here's me in 2007 when people were also talking about a Bloomberg presidential run:

When we imagine the archetypical Rich Prick, we generally think of vulgarian clowns like Donald Trump, but Bloomberg is a better example of that breed: he doesn't have to even stir himself to sneer. As we saw during the last Mayoral Debate, he effortlessly radiates contempt for anything that is not his will. When he gives press conferences, his manner is bland, because he knows there's nothing to get excited about: he is right, you are wrong, and he will prevail.

As Mayor he has blithely exercised his will, or his whim, on matters ranging from trans-fats to the razing of neighborhoods for private profit. And nearly everyone rolls over for him. All the major dailies endorsed him in his last Mayoral race. (He spent over $75 million on the campaign.)

No wonder he's interested in the Presidency. Experience has taught him that very little is beyond his grasp. So he will patiently go on accumulating power...

Fortunately a lot of people (including Elizabeth Warren, bless her) are pointing out his shortcomings now -- his erstwhile stop-and-friskiness and the transparent insincerity of his apologies for it, his blaming the 2008 financial crisis on black people, etc. He's clearly hoping his billions and free-spending thereof will do the trick like it did back in New York. I couldn't stop the guy back then, but maybe everyone's gotten a little more wised up in the interval.

•   Readers of this site will know I've long suspected authors of "reader email" to Rod Dreher (or as I like to call them, "Letters to Repenthouse") are pulling his chain, and now I suspect they're sending Sacha Baron Cohen in a variety of disguises to prank him. From his latest:

But I have to tell you about something deeply shocking I learned tonight in conversation with one of the conferees [at a Nashville conference]. There’s nothing funny about this at all. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to write a book called Benedict Option II: Head For The Hills.

Gasp! What a come-on. Gather round, Jesus fish!

I spoke with a man who works with victims of human sex trafficking. This is not a world I have paid attention to. He was telling me that it is much, much worse than people imagine, because of the Internet. Online pornography, he said, is destroying the hearts and minds of so many young people. He told me about a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds. She was holding out for Applebees, and wondered if it she was overshooting.

One waits in vain for the rimshot. Apparently Rod is buying this. Emboldened, his interlocutor goes further:

He said that in his line of work, he hears from fertility doctors — not one fertility doctor, but several — that they are having to teach married couples how to have normal sex. Normal, as in penis-in-vagina sex — this, if they want to conceive. These young people have been so saturated in pornography, and have had their imaginations so thoroughly formed by it, that the idea of normal reproductive sex acts are bizarre to them.

“This one doctor told me that she has to prescribe only doing penis-in-vagina sex exclusively for six months, so they can learn to feel normal about it,” he said. He wasn’t joking. He said that the first time a fertility doc told him that, he thought it must be a one-off thing, but he’s heard it from fertility docs from around the country.

I am old and out of it in many, many ways, but I would bet folding money that young people can figure out how to fuck no matter what they see on the internet.

I almost feel sorry for Dreher. Sooner or later his credulousness is going to affect his career trajectory. Imagine him going to some classy conference where someone brings up the declines in teen pregnancy, and Dreher explaining this is because young'uns don't know that the pee-pee goes in the hoo-hoo because porno. Imagine the astonished stares as David Brooks whisks Dreher to a waiting limo!

THE RUSH-HOUR REENACTORS: STILL HERE, STILL DOUCHEBAGS.

Today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie (and there’s plenty more where it came from, and cheap, so subscribe today!) is an update on the Freedom Convoy that’s become a minor nuisance in the city of Washington but major fantasy object for wingnut crackpots across America. 

The convoy is, as I’ve mentioned previously, political cosplay on the order of the Hard Hats, the Tea Party, Duck Dynasty, and Joe the Plumber, meant to make a bunch of well-funded political operatives look like the Voice of the People -- or, rather, of people who are more salt-of-the-earth than you because they dress like Sons of Anarchy extras. 

Normal people don’t seem to be going for it, though, which has led some of the brethren to claim the Deep State killed their spotlight by making Russia invade Ukraine, like this bluecheck clown with 18.5K followers:

This delusional level of self-regard is, as you'll see in the report, general among convoy participants and supporters alike.

It just gets more surreal: In its latest report, the Washington Post talks to a convoy guy who came into town to stroll around the Mall with his granddaughter, who was wearing a Let’s Go Brandon shirt to “spread the word.” That's doing your part, citizen! (The Post mentions that this cowboy "drives a F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup truck" -- you may have missed that the majority of the convoyers are not big rigs at all.)

The Post also had this from the nightly peroration from one of the Head Cosplayers In Charge:

At the group’s evening rally Tuesday night, co-organizer Mike Landis referenced Washington residents in saying the group will “keep going back every day and just annoying the crap out of them.” 

The convoy people really think their hatred of “Washington” as a synecdoche for Big Gummint gives them cause and the right to play “I’m Not Touching You” with normal people going to work and living their lives. If a bunch of art directors camped out in Alabama and went into Mobile every day to “annoy the crap” out of the residents, of course, you’d hear the screams of outrage in Antarctica.  

SHORTER ENTIRE RIGHT-WING BLOGOSPHERE: Obama is sending his coloreds to kill us!

Ace of Spades cites three (3) crimes in which black people attacked white people, and cries, "No national coverage of this racial hate crime pattern in the media." The population of the United States is 311,591,917.

What was it the Crazy Jesus Lady said the other day about aggregating isolated stories? You can get a lot of propaganda value out of that shtick so long as you're only talking to people who are down with your program [play snippet from Theme from "Deliverance" here] and primed to accept that your tiny sample gives an accurate picture of the world. But what does it say about these guys that this is the picture they want to paint?

Worse, in a way: What does it say about the voters they hope to attract with it? Run this racist horseshit by normal people, and the older ones will marvel that anybody still thinks that way and the younger ones will just marvel. But their target consumer will nod ruefully and sigh over the race-treason he's seen going on all around him ever since they started letting those people on American Bandstand. Now, by God, maybe people will see the truth!

Speaking of neo-Confederates, I see Ole Perfesser Instapundit is trying, via a reader write-in, a familiar variation on this hooey:

Don’t be surprised if, as Obama’s fortunes wane, incidents like those of Mobile are insinuated to be a future consequence of his electoral defeat...

Readers may recall that they tried this in the last ditch in 2008 -- telling people that black people were prepared to riot if Obama lost, presumably on the secret orders of the HNIC himself.

Think it'll work this time?

UPDATE. In comments, Mr. Leonard Pierce performs the standard recommended test for such accusations of media "silence" as Ace has made: Put the relevant names into Google News. CBS, ABC, CNN, AP, UPI, Huffington Post, Gawker...  all these Lame Stream Media outlets covered these crimes up by actually reporting them.

There's also some discussion, launched by DocAmazing, of how in the rightwing imagination "Those People can simultaneously be shiftless and well-organized, lazy and filled with violent energy, uneducable and politically savvy..." The Other is mentioned, but I think it has more to do with the logic and characterization standards of WWE and old comic books.

APOCALYPSE NOW.

Orson Scott Card, some of whose ravings were covered here years ago, has recently gotten some attention for his lunatic fantasy that Obama will use black street gangs to keep the presidency in the Obama family by force for years to come. But Card is a well-known sci-fi author; less likely to be noticed, but just as nuts, is longtime conservative author Donald Sensing. After explaining that Obama is running America by fiat, Sensing writes:

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever... 

The president of the United States is now quite literally a dictate-er: he orders what he wishes and implements what he chooses.

Meanwhile a non-discrimination law in San Antonio that would keep the city from doing business with people who discriminate against gay people -- just as the city (and every other city I can think of) would if those people discriminated against blacks -- is portrayed by conservatives as "a disturbing infringement on liberty of conscience."

Try to imagine what a spectacle this presents to normal people: The Loyal Opposition telling them that the President is a dictator, and that non-discrimination laws are the real fascism. Maybe they actually think this is electoral gold. After all, we're all supposed to be libertarians now, right?  And, as we grow weary of repeating, libertarianism is basically conservatism with a brand makeover. At Forbes, Ralph Benko assures us that "Libertarians And Conservatives Must Find Common Ground" to win, and the way he suggests they achieve that is... to turn against gay rights. "Traditional values as vote getter (not just within the party base but with Independents — including ethnics and blue collar workers) violates the meta-narrative of the party elites," he says. "Still, the conclusion that traditional values is a net, and a legitimate, vote getter is almost impossible to avoid."

That'll be news to most people (though maybe Matt Welch will go for it), but conservatives aren't most people, and decreasingly resemble them. Here's Ben Shapiro with his own formula for conservative victory:

Ask anybody who’s ever broken up with a girlfriend, no matter what you say to your girlfriend after you break up with her, she’s going to think you’re a jerk. Right? And the same thing is true with the American people. 

The American people have broken up with conservativism. You’re not going to convince them that conservativism is the way to go by being really nice. The way that you’re going to convince them that conservatism is the way to go is because this is a two-party system, and we can paint the other side as mean and nasty as they are. And they are. They’re mean and nasty and they’re horrible people. I mean, they truly are.

Maybe Shapiro will get a chance to read that from the podium at the 2016 GOP Convention. You know, in my conspiratorial moments, I think these guys are all plants designed to destroy the Republican Party. Crazy, you say? We'll see who's crazy!

UPDATE. I feel compelled to add that another crazy idea of the week, that Fox News has betrayed conservatism and gone pro-gay, has drawn the attention of Rod Dreher.

Ask yourself, Fox viewers: how often do you see religion covered on the network at all, much less the regular inclusion of conservative religious voices in regular news and opinion coverage?

These guys haven't figured out that if you want dolchstoßlegende to work, you can't accuse everyone of stabbing you in the back.

LIBERALS HAVE NAMES LIKE "CARL," AND CONSERVATIVES HAVE NAMES LIKE "LENNY." I think I've figured out the appeal of PJ Lifestyle, the Pajamas Media style section from which I got that bizarre "Hell on Wheels" review last week. It seems to be part of an alternate universe PJM is building, in which conservatives who have renounced the world -- you know, like this guy -- can feel at home. It goes Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood one better -- instead of just interpreting movies and TV shows according to doctrine, its writers apply their Procrustean standards to other leisure and cultural activities as well.

Take Kathy Shaidle's "George Carlin Wasn’t Funny: The Top Five Most Overrated Comedians." Understand first that Shaidle is one of those culture warriors who thinks we're all living in a politically correct pogrom; she wrote in 2010 that since the 1980s, "political correctness has gotten worse, not better. Yes, some of us joke about it, but we do so in whispers around the office coffeemaker, lest we risk our jobs."

Yet, brave soul that she is, she's willing to take on the PC shibboleths of our time, as she announces in her opening:

Yeah, I’m a heretic. I also fell asleep during Star Wars.

Bruce Springsteen? Pompous blowhard.

The Godfather? Long stretches of beige nothingness.

And The Who are better than The Beatles.

(Hell, I prefer The Monkees to The Beatles…)

But here’s the first “pop culture” contrarianism I’m a teensy bit afraid to confess in public:

George Carlin never made me laugh.

Now, if you've been around the internet at all, you know that contrarianism is actually a great way to get attention. Does everyone love "Mad Men"? Write about how it stinks and watch the clicks and quotes roll in!

Shaidle's got as much right to get in on this racket as anyone. But when you read her article, you find that her idea of contrarianism is very narrow -- that is, what she mainly finds unfunny about these allegedly funny people is liberalism.

When Louis CK talks about Tracy Morgan's gay jokes (in an interview!), Shaidle complains that he "sounds like the kind of person a comedian (like Louis CK) is supposed to be making fun of." Then she answers CK with a long Mark Steyn quote, and asks, "isn’t Steyn’s take patently superior? But Mark Steyn votes the wrong way, so no GQ 'Man of the Year' virtual tongue-baths for him."

On and on it goes: The Smothers Brothers were really fired by DEMOCRAT Senator John Pastore and one of them was mean to Penn Jillette -- that's how not-funny they are! Lenny Bruce isn't funny mainly because she says so -- and not that she needs back-up, but professional funnyman Nick Gillespie thinks so too, and Rush Limbaugh is funnier than Jon Stewart, so there. And Carlin's not funny because "like so many old hippies, he just wouldn’t go away." Plus:

And if Carlin was so brave, why didn’t he rail against two other words you REALLY can’t say on the radio and [most of] TV: “n*****” and “f****t”? Because fighting for the right to say them would shock his liberal fans...

Apparently the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" bit isn't funny, but this shit is a riot. (Oh, and I think the words she means here are "nigger" and "faggot." The PC speech police must have put in those stars against her contrarian will. Fight the power, sister!)

In the real world, where normal people might conceivably wander in and read your stuff, articles like this would be incomprehensible. But normal people seldom get to these articles, because they're not the target market -- which would seem to be the people of the Conservative Exodus. Even deranged separatists need something to read at the compound.

UPDATE. But I gotta say, I got a kick out of the one about how Twilight is okay even though it has vampires because it's pro-life. "Will these women follow Bella’s example and protect their unborn child?" asks author Rhonda Robinson. "Perhaps. If this film is as persuasive as its opponents fear." I wonder where the big fights between the Hollyweird lieberals who want to get rich off the Twilight franchise and the Hollyweird lieberals who fear its pro-life message take place. The New Republic, maybe?

BIRTHER -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. We have officially entered the age of the crypto-birther. Andrew McCarthy livens the pages of National Review -- where birtherism was allegedly debunked but, we can see by now, is merely the birthplace of its new cover story -- with new schtick. The first part of McCarthy's con job -- a yap about how Barry wouldn't let us call him Hussein even though he's a big fat Muslim, what a liar -- is almost like a primer for the New Birtherism: it's not the (we're not saying it's a) crime -- it's the cover-up! And then, the literal nut graf:

The editorial desire to put to rest the “Obama was born in Kenya” canard is justifiable. The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office.

Almost certainly! But -- QUESTIONS REMAIN! Later, "This certification is not the same thing as the certificate," etc.

Some of the brethren hear the dog-whistle loud and clear: Marathon Pundit, while affecting distance from the conspiracy ("I believe that Obama was born in Hawaii"), nonetheless is convinced by McCarthy's penetrating analysis to demand, "Okay, Barry, cough it up. Let's see your birth certificate."

See, he's not one of those nuts: he has the good sense to quote the magazine that rebutted the birthers before going birther himself.

You can have the bow-tied twit version from Roger Kimball who, while declaring himself "sick of the Obama birth certificate wheeze," gets quickly to the "and yet, and yet..." His alleged concern is Obama's mendacity -- proven by third-hand accusations that Obama inflated his resume regarding his job at Business International Corporation; why, he was merely a "junior copyeditor"! -- which leads Kimball to assert that Obama has "consistently misled the public about his personal history." I mean, if a man will lie about his first job out of college, what won't he lie about?

I think Doghouse Riley said it well in comments to the last post on this:

"Full of shit" doesn't cover it. The phrase suggests a world in which being full of shit would be contraindicated, where anyone of sound mind would avoid it, in which "shit" would lie in opposition to "gold," or "delicious snack cakes," or, metaphorically, Facts, and where one would try one's damnedest to avoid being filled with shit... That is, it's a real-world phrase, and Real is not the world these people inhabit, and hasn't been for a long time.

They're hard at work on a sort of homemade mind trick that will allow them to simultaneously denounce and disseminate fraudulent information. It's thoroughly transparent to normal people, but at least it will help hold the thicker fellow travelers who are either embarrassed by birtherism or wondering why the White People's League hasn't stormed the White House with a rope.

UPDATE. Someone named Mark Joseph has turned this nonsense into a Zen riddle: "The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate." This is very symmetrical, and suggests the obsessively concentric artworks sometimes created by mental patients. He also claims "most Americans" are "beginning to wonder why the president doesn't put this one to rest once and for all" -- a fond hope, certainly, which regrettably comes without polling data -- and compares Obama to Mark Sanford. Do these guys even know any normal people?

ECONOMICS PROVES GOD MEANT YOU TO BE GROUND UNDER MY HEEL. In the midst of this pro-forma OpinionJournal review of some new pop-economics book, we find these statements:

[The author] calls it an "uncomfortable state of affairs" that in a pure market system whoever pays the most gets to send his children to the best schools. Why is that uncomfortable? Somebody has to send his children to the best schools. Why shouldn't it be the people who pay the most? And he repeats the canard that when American workers are hurt by free-trade agreements a "civilized society" should support and retrain them -- without acknowledging that you can't be hurt by a free-trade agreement unless you're overpaid to begin with.

In context, of course, they are unremarkable, but I bet if you showed these passages to normal people, they might feel less than kindly disposed toward the glib asshole who wrote them. Even a capitalist (or a bystander to capitalism, such as myself) might think them unseemly, like a guy telling a friend who'd lost his job, "Tough shit, and don't expect any help from me -- you must have deserved it."

As the Delphi crisis shows, the entitlement mentality among corporate leaders has reached the status of depravity. I know several people working for a large corporation that just announced it would be downsizing "substantially" -- over a period of months. That means thousands of workers will, like concentration camp prisoners, busily dig graves while wondering whether, or when, the bullet will be fed into their own skulls and their bodies pushed in.

Normal people don't think or behave like this. I wonder why the Democrats don't do a better job of pointing this out?

THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MINORITY. The Ole Perfesser directs us to the long-disregarded maniac Bill Whittle at National Review:

When I first got to college, back in the last few weeks of the Seventies, I finally got a chance to see an ordinary game of Dungeons and Dragons. My immediate inclination was to play as a Paladin...

Normal people will be tempted stop right there, but we'll follow a little while:

I sit with others in darkened rooms, watching films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, and In the Valley of Elah, and see our brave young soldiers depicted as murderers, rapists, broken psychotics or ignorant dupes -- visions foisted upon me by bitter and isolated millionaires such as Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis and all the rest.

Foisted? Good God, man, you have free will! Or are you a captive of the Hollywood smear machine? Blink twice for yes!

No wonder they must be destroyed. Because -- Sarah Palin especially -- presents a mortal threat to these people who have determined over cocktails who the next President should be and who now clearly mean to grind into metal shards the transaxle of their credibility in order to get the result they must have...

Longtime followers of Whittle's insanity may wonder: where's this popular rightwing buffoon been the past year? Last we paid attention, he and his friends were building as of May 2007 a shining city on a hill:

I believe -- utterly -- that this ability for the common person to communicate with other common people, this internet, will allow us to end-run the cycle of civilization. I believe it in my bones.

My friends, Western Civilization is not on its last legs.

Western Civilization is going to the stars. Count on it...

This City-State of Virtue we desire does not exist.

Let’s build one.

And so Whittle did, at least in his all-powerful mind. Comparing his new "City-State" to Disneyland, Whittle declared:

What we are trying to do right now is to get a functional version of Ejectia! up and running as soon as possible. Whatever we have in place on Day One will simply be a starting point for the improvements we are planning on Day Two. Ejectia! -- like every city -- will be built on the foundations of what it was yesterday. It will never be finished.

Then Whittle started publishing pictures of his new Jerusalem:


Whittle then wrote:

Above are some early test renderings I have done to play with some of the overall look of the place. Now here's something interesting: everyone views this City-State differently. Some people would like it to be a collection of Greek buildings in a verdant valley. Some want it on a tropical isle. Some want a Rivendell-esque hidden valley surrounded by waterfalls, and some people even want a medieval village in the middle of a forest.

That was in June 2007. In July Whittle wrote:

The hardcover books are finally -- FINALLY -- dropping into the print queue. They should begin shipping in three to four days... Finally, there has been some speculation -- and I have received a few phone calls -- concerning my reaction to the recent explosion up at the Mojave... I grieve for the loss of friends and family members and for the irreparable hole they have left behind them. But at the same time, I am comforted and encouraged by two points that I think bear mentioning in this or any other case where people die doing the one thing they love more than anything else in the world.

Thence Whittle went off the grid till November, at which point he told his followers:

So while I am sure by this point it comes as a surprise to no one but myself, I have reluctantly put aside any hope of building Ejectia until my financial status changes dramatically, at which point I will no longer care about what it costs.

Since then he has only written a few pages of gibberish before being picked up by the nation's most prominent conservative magazine as a suitable spokesman for the McCain campaign.

I frequently tell you folks that our opponents are totally insane, but rarely does one of them leave so egregious a pixel trail of his psychosis. That the National Review would avail such a crackpot for its purposes is of course no surprise at all.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE EDITION.

Sure, fuck it, let's go back there.

Happy Easter weekend! Here is my favorite Easter joke, which I will render in all caps because it is meant to be told out loud -- proper capitalization rather spoils it. 

Q: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN JESUS WENT TO MOUNT OLIVE?

A: POPEYE BEAT HIM UP.

Years later I’m still laughing. This past week was sort of a march up Calvary itself, but fortunately for you folks and the health of the nation I have a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues to release free to non-subscribers. (I must remind you that I sling this hash FIVE TIMES A WEEK and that a subscription is absurdly cheap, about 35 cents an issue, so you really ought to pony up and not wait around for leavin’s every Friday.)

In the first one, an episode of our political talk show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, treats the Ronna McDaniel née Romney catastrophe obliquely – via an interview between Bolt and yet another high-born Republican who changed his name to show conformity with the new order, Trumpy Killthelibs. Much discussion of liberal unfairness commences, as it did when NBC paid off the former RNC chair to go away after even bothsider simps like Chuck Todd publicly blanched at having an insurrectionist at the news analysis desk. 

Like I could give a shit about any of these people. But even when one of them does something resembling the right thing, the prestige press has to make it into a controversy rather than belated due diligence. The palace gossip angles taken by papers like Politico (“The staff revolt at NBC News underscores how the balance of power has shifted away from management”) is bad enough – some of the big rags were pushing the elderly Liberal Bias line.  “NBC fires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel after internal uproar and blatant anti-GOP bias,” squirts Ingrid Jacques at USA Today, as if there were no difference between a major GOP executive who actively tried to overturn the 2020 Presidential election on behalf of her crooked boss and straight-laced Republican Joes like, say, the Romney relatives McDaniel disowned.  

Neither Jacques nor any other pundit taking this line even acknowledges what was considered so objectionable about McDaniel (“McDaniel's detractors insisted that she was a threat to democracy,” Jacques says, without revealing why), devolving instead into cancelculture crybaby tantrums. I understand why claiming persecution on behalf on rich Republicans who don’t get to be on the network of their choice appeals to the base, who are so addled by their own resentments and grudges they'll sing along with any bitch-and-moaner, but I can’t imagine normal people going for it – which I take as further proof that these people are counting on voter disenfranchisement, ballot tampering, and, when all else fails, January 6 Part II, rather than on the Will of the People, to get back into power.

The second freebie is my essay about the conservative reaction to Baltimore’s Key Bridge disaster – rehearsing some of the batshit conspiracy mongering and racist rants they offered instead of, I noticed, anything like compassion for the victims. Once upon a time they would have at least ginned up some thoughts-and-prayers – but no longer. American conservatives have always been advance men for wealthy interests, and as such they’ve always tried to claw back the gains that less-rich Americans made over the years and redistribute them to their rich donors; but in recent years this meanness has gotten less businesslike and become more like a deep soul sickness – like they’re more excited to see and revel in the suffering of their fellow Americans than they are to grab the cash. I think more than Tubby’s ravings it’s that sickness that makes people worried about them seizing back power.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the new Chick-fil-A, Papa John's. Rightbloggers' worship of asshole CEOs who brag about screwing their employees because Obama Sux is one of their most mystifying traits. It's like they don't want to attract normal people. Maybe normal people make them nervous.

Among the outtakes: PaleoWriter not only rah-rahed Papa John's, but took pictures of sold-out Hostess displays and declared the company's closing was the result of union greed (which you good people know is bullshit). PW's headline was "Hostess Shrugged," which suggests an even more ridiculous version of Atlas Shrugged in which crap snackmakers and venture capitalists say, alright moochers, you don't appreciate us so we're going to allow our brands to be bought by another company and reissued -- then you'll be sorry!

NEW FRONTIERS IN B.S.

Conservatives have been trying all kinds of anti-protest yak to try and counteract America's sudden realization that cops are out of control and black people bear the brunt -- like the traditional Cop Worship thing, the "boo hoo protestors cancelled Gone With the Wind" thing, etc. But I think their big opportunity will be blaming protests for COVID-19 spikes. This is from a mailer I got from National Review today, a "news editors' roundup" -- Jack Crowe cites the Tom Hanks COVID test results and the NBA season cancellation publicized March 11 as what "turned the disease from a media novelty into a visceral reality," then:

Just as it took one day and two relatively trivial developments to awaken Americans to the scale of the threat, it took the events of one day for them to forget. 

Memorial Day, the day George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis Police officer, changed everything. Suddenly, mentions of social distancing and masks, which had dominated news coverage for weeks, disappeared from the big cable shows and the front pages, replaced by coverage of the civil unrest sweeping the country. Gone, too, was the opprobrium meted out to recalcitrant “lockdown protesters,” who selfishly refused to stay home as an act of shared sacrifice. Politicians at the federal and state level, who had been appearing daily to remind their constituents about the importance of social distancing, were suddenly celebrating the open flouting of the rules they had imposed.

Now, normal people reading this might wonder: Didn't something else happen on Memorial Day -- namely, a whole lot of states, many of them red and not really protest hotspots, had opened up bars and beaches for the holiday weekend? Isn't that much more likely to be the cause of COVID spikes -- especially in states (cited in the mailer!) like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina?

You're gonna love Crowe's pitch there:

These case spikes may not be directly attributable to the recent protests. But as the NBA cancellation and Tom Hanks’s announcement demonstrates, the public is fickle, responding to high-profile cues rather than CDC announcements about which phase of reopening their state is in. 

If Americans across the country turned on their televisions in recent weeks, they saw virtually every major city awash in protesters, many of whom didn’t bother to wear masks or had them pulled down. Those protesters were allowed to move about freely, and in many cases encouraged to do so by “public health experts.” All of a sudden, the neighborhood barbecue or pool party didn’t seem so dangerous.

So according to Crowe, Mr. and Mrs. America didn't respond to the call of the ancient holiday weekend when they broke social distancing; no, they saw the protests on the TV and thought, "We were just sitting at home watching TV but, since the kids are giving each other COVID at the protests, I might's well take the family down the shore and eat burgers and drink beers and go swimming with a bunch of people I don't know."

Plenty of others are already working the basic theme, but Crowe takes the cake for creativity. So far.

(I should add that in my own personal experience, and that of others, protestors have a greater tendency to keep their masks on than people at bars and restaurants.)

UPDATE. LOL:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Metro Public Health issued more than a dozen citations to businesses violating COVID-19 Phase Two guidelines this weekend, three of which are bars on Broadway, including Underground and Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk. 

Owners told News 2 it’s a double standard and they’re sick of it. 

“It’s unfair for 5,000 people to march in front of our place yesterday in direct violation of the Phase Two order and then for Mayor Cooper and Dr. Caldwell to come in last night and give us citations,” said Bryan Lewis, attorney for Steve Smith, who owns Kid Rock’s and Honky Tonk Central, both cited this weekend.

Go here to see a picture of the folks crammed in and knockin' 'em back at Kid Rock's. But it's the marches that're making people sick. Well, it's no shock to see motivated reasoning among local merchants who a few months earlier were probably telling the cops "how come you're not out arresting street punks instead of writing me tickets?"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 Locals. They're good.

•    I did a thing for the newsletter (this issue free even to non-subscribers! How can I do it? Low overhead!) about last night's debate. The only way you can paint it as a victory for Tubby is if you grade it solely on yelling, posturing, and other alpha-ape displays of dominance. I certainly don't understand all the people saying, as "Access Maggie" Haberman did, that he "heeded the pleas of his advisers to tone it down." As I observed in the newsletter, that lasted maybe ten minutes. Perhaps Haberman means he sometimes resorted his baby-whisper voice between bellows, but on my TV he was mostly his usual self -- and, as I observed much further back than this, his is not an act that wears well over time, let alone during a pandemic. And who on God's green earth thinks hollering "I'm the least racist person here" over and over again is a winning strategy -- except for total racists, and he's already got them locked up? For the election, I am cautiously optimistic, which is to say frightened rather than despairing. 

•   Speaking of white supremacists, Republican golden boy Madison Cawthorn -- Good looking! Young! Disabled, but charismatically so like Greg Abbott! Running for a safe seat in the South! -- keeps outing himself as a Nazi, and the media keeps outing itself as unable to accept the evidence. Candidate Cawthorn first became famous for his effusions over a visit to "the Fuhrer"'s house in Germany. One could have interpreted his remark charitably, and conservatives did: My very favorite of these attempts is National Review's "Madison Cawthorn Is Not a Nazi." There's a headline that doesn't arouse suspicion! Cawthorn's also been accused of prevaricating about his career and military intention, and of sexual harassment, and of still more fash weirdness:

Cawthorn oddly follows precisely 88 people on Twitter. (88 is white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.”) He posed for a photo wearing a gun holster emblazoned with a Spartan soldier’s helmet, a symbol associated with far-right gun culture in general and the Oath Keepers specifically.

Also he called his no-work company "SPQR."  But, ho ho, maybe he just doesn't know what he's saying! "It would surprise me if Cawthorn knew that these have become alt-right symbols," tut-tutted Reason's Robby Soave, "just as it would surprise most people to learn that making the OK gesture will get them branded as white nationalists by hate-group watchers." (Not if they're paying attention, it wouldn't.) Regular old newsies cut Cawthorn slack, too; even stories that point out more dumb shit he did refer to him affectionately as a "a 25-year-old in a potentially historic bid for Congress."

Anyway, a few months pass, and now we find Cawthorn's website accused a critical reporter of working "for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” (Cawthorn took it down but the internet is forever.) Suddenly all Cawthorn's weird fascist tells look a lot harder to excuse away. Not that the Republicans won't try (Ben Shapiro's already covering for him, posting a Cawthorn op-ed that's light on the Nazism) because they want that seat badly. But the next time they and the press back up one of these guys and say, "I can explain everything," we ought to tell them not to bother.  

•   I see Peggy Noonan's making her late push for a Trump comeback ("Did he? Could he?"), claiming he won the debate and achieved the important goal: 

If you wanted or needed an excuse, an out, to vote for Mr. Trump, if you wanted an argument that justified your decision in a conversation in the office, he probably gave you what you need.

First of all, what's with this persistent rightwing theme that Trump can win by giving his followers an excuse rather than a reason? Isn't that a disqualification rather than a recommendation? Secondly, what would "justify your decision in a conversation in the office"? Sheets and pillows? "Russia Russia Russia"? "ACO plus three"? If you're using this gibberish to excuse your vote to your colleagues, you were voting for him already. No leaner, if such a sad creature exists, was waiting for Trump to yell that he was the least racist person in the room to make the leap.

Mr. Trump’s power, recovered Thursday night, is to speak like normal people, so you can understand him without having to translate what he’s saying in your head. 

"Oh, I get it -- he says Blacks Lives Matter is all about killing cops!" 

Trump supporters believe he will win because of his special magic, Trump foes fear he will win because of his dark magic. Pollsters and pundits stare at the data and wonder how to quantify his unfathomable magic.

Pollsters are looking at polls that overwhelmingly show Trump losing and musing upon his "unfathomable magic"?  If it were anyone else I'd say Noonan was counting on Republican election fraud to make her prediction sensible ex post facto (which it could! So defend your vote, people!), but with her I guess it's the leprechaun telling her to burn her credibility.  

•  Oh, I have one more thing to say about this awful Noonan column:

It’s only a poll, but after Gallup, a New York Times/Siena poll asked the same question, and 49% said they were better off.

What’s interesting, though, is that when Siena asked respondents if the country was better off than it was four years ago, only 39% said yes.

What does this mean? No one knows. If the polling is more or less correct, you wonder: Will people vote on their own circumstances or what they perceive to be the country’s?

This is very, very reminiscent of something longtime rightwing buffoon Jeff Godlstein (old-timers will understand why I spelled it that way) claimed in 2006 as a reason why, despite the "good" economy, "the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public." To Godlstein, it started with Paul Krugman telling them (perniciously!) that some people were suffering, and the American public, which was doing great, taking it too much to heart: 

...the result is Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

That was January 2006. Remember the 2006 midterms? Kinda like the 2018 midterms. Americans are prey to all kinds of bugbears and prejudices, but most of us know when we're being conned. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Pure joy.

Here's the end of yet another week of dumbassery, what with Republicans going to great lengths to sabotage the COVID bill and trying to play off the Capitol attack as harmless patriotic hijinx, and especially with the "cancel culture" guff they're using to make themselves look like victims. (Speaking of that, have some free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues on the subject -- one about a boys' adventure series done in by the woke mob, another revealing the talking points for rightwing news outlets covering such stories.)

Even dumber than the Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss bullshit, for my money, was the scandalette these guys tried to cook up about Biden calling the latest anti-masking crazes -- like Greg Abbott's transparent attempt to distract from his Texas power disaster -- "Neanderthal thinking." Wingnuts raised such a stink about it Biden had to send Jen Psaki out to explain it as if the complaint had been made in good faith rather than as howlingly obvious victimization shtick:

Asked whether it was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals while trying to convince state officials to get on board with the White House public health message, Psaki clarified the president was likening the decision to Neanderthal "behavior." 

"The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear, the behavior of," she said, adding that it was a "reflection of his frustration and exasperation" over some people flouting COVID-19 guidance to help curb the spread of the virus. 

"Whether is was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals" -- get the fuck out of here, less than two months ago your shock-troops were trying to murder Democratic office-holders in the Capitol;  "Neanderthal" is about the most polite thing one could call your cynical and potentially lethal stunts. Yet, at Forbes: 

Then candidate Joe Biden ran on a campaign to bring back civility to politics, and in his inauguration speech called for unity and an end to our nation's "uncivil war." Yet, President Biden's tone and more importantly the words he used on Wednesday were in stark contrast.

Author Peter Suciu then reproduces a series of incredibly stupid rightwing reactors, some of whom even attempt to make "Neanderthal" the new "deplorable," an insult in which they take pride, as if it were the name of their prison gang. If only Biden had called them douchebags! 

The worst of the lot is Noah Rothman at Commentary. He starts out with standard-issue So Much For The Tolerant Left ordnance ("But the president was never the 'good cop' he pretended to be"). Then he tries to defend Abbott's mask-free decree:

It would have been foolish if, for example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told his constituents that “everything’s fine” and Texans should “take off your mask” and “forget” about the pandemic. But that wasn’t what he said, nor is that likely to be the outcome of his state’s policies.

What Abbott announced was that “all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent.” The executive orders put in place during the pandemic, including masking requirements, would be rescinded because “people and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate.” It would have been a premature declaration of victory over the pandemic if Abbott had stopped there. But he didn’t.

Abbott also urged Texans to exercise “personal vigilance.” “Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility,” the governor added. While his orders will foreclose on criminal penalties for people who do not wear masks, businesses can still impose masking requirements on their patrons and deny them service if they do not comply...

I am confident of two things: First, that thanks to COVID-19, most normal people understand (as polls show that they do) that government has to take a major role in combating epidemics; and second, that as soon as the curse is seen to have lifted, conservatives will get busy trying to portray government's role as a total disaster and saying that everything would have been hunky dory in March 2020 if only the Free Market and Trump had been allowed to kill even more people so that the survivors could have instant herd immunity  -- you know, the same way they talk about the New Deal.

In fact the latter half of Rothman's column is devoted to groundwork for such an effort: He cites people who think Abbott's making a big mistake, and shrugs "They might be right, and it would be terrible if they were. But..."

...the way is littered with predictions about how this virus would operate that mercifully failed to materialize. The innumerable “super spreader events” that weren’t and unfounded fears that states without masking mandates, like Florida, would be overrun with pestilence should lead Texas’ critics to be more cautious. Likewise, the suboptimal performance of states with onerous restrictions on individuals and enterprise alike, including New York and California, have led even the most zealous COVID hawks to throw up their hands in confusion. Uncertainty is the lesson here.

How can we really know anything? Like this mask thing -- sure, flu infections are massively down year-over-year, but can you prove it was masks, libs? Maybe Jesus has something to do with it! 

But there is certainty about one thing: Lifting restrictions now undermines what seems to be the Biden administration’s central objective, which is to assume credit for the pandemic’s decline. 

A lifelong public servant actually getting vaccines into people's arms vs. a thuggish grifter getting his own shot and them making a bunch of everyone else's disappear mysteriously -- sure, let's go with door #2. God, if only our education system taught even a little critical thinking.