LETTERS FROM REPENTHOUSE GOES BIG-TIME!

 Here at alicublog we've been having fun for years with Rod Dreher's Letters to Repenthouse -- those too-good-to-be-true anonymous "reader" "letters" Dreher posts that have the same breathless I-never-thought-it-would-happen-to-me vibe that made lonely teenage boys hot and Bob Guccione a fortune. Through this shoddy journalistic device Dreher thrills and chills readers with honest-to-gosh you-bet real scenes of "obviously transgendered" he-shes grooming a child at a Dallas showing of a Captain America movie, "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," etc.  

A classic of the genre is the MAGA Gryphon -- a Liberal who has suddenly decided to turn right-wing, like a Letters to Repenthouse "reader" who said he was "anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest[s] the Republican Party generally" but was now ready to "vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)." JustTheTip Trumpers like Dreher love this bit, as it convinces them they're not alone in wanting those sweet, sweet Handmaid judges without the indignity of owing it to the thuggery of Trump Republicans. 

This has been a niche entertainment for years, but I guess us hipsters couldn't have it to ourselves forever: Bret Stephens is taking it mainstream --

Meet a Secret Trump Voter
‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’

Gotta say, it's a clever twist on a classic formula; Dreher hates gay people, so he's unlikely to use them in his fantasy stories. And it's found money, because there's nothing rightwinger readers love more than a persecution narrative, and the idea that the MAGA Lesbian is forced to "come out again" for Trump (which must be painful, right? I mean we made coming out gay hell on earth!)  must tickle their innards.

Much of Stephens' script, though, is straight out of Dreherville:

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. 

That's like saying the car felt like it was flying before it plummeted to the ground. 

“Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

That last part is great -- I wonder if Stephens went back and asked MAGA Lesbian if "the midpoint of the Obama administration" was what she meant. More:

"...I care about having a job. I care about having health care through my company."

Wow, normally you have to be in a Koch Brothers front-group ad to explicitly insist your health care come "through my company."

"I was out of a job a few years ago. Obamacare priced me out [of private insurance]. It was like, $560 a month. Then Obama’s website blew up. He can’t get the website right?”

How about that website, huh? I'm still thinking about that. And Obama with his Grey Poupon! As always when a conservative sets his scene the Big City, the topic turns to bums and poop: 

What worries her more are the effects of the response to the pandemic in a liberal city like New York. “Crime is in my neighborhood now. There’s a homeless encampment near me that’s growing and growing. They have a living room and a shower curtain and that’s where they go to the bathroom. I have a guy who walks in front of the store every day. In a diaper!"

Yeah, gay New Yorkers are shocked to the tits by this sort of thing. 

I ask Chris whether Trump’s behavior has ever come close to being a deal breaker for her. She asks me to name some of the lowlights.

“Grab ’em by the. …”: “Didn’t bother me at all. For every cad out there, there’s equally a gold digger who will let you do it.”

I imagine Stephens' readers in Fritters, Alabama smiling broadly: "I betcha that Anne Heche was a lesbeen gol'-digger. Whut's a 'cad'?" And they ain't seen nothin' yet:

The media as the enemy of the American people: “These days, yeah. Whenever I read a front-page story and I get to a disparaging adjective, I stop reading.”

Definite city slicker stuff. "I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford for one second," "“The Clintons’ fingerprints are all over this," etc. -- yeesh, at this point I bet even Dreher's going, "Whoa, tone it down, guy." And here comes the piece de Resistance:

You don’t have to agree with Chris on any of these points. You can note some of the inconsistencies in her views, most of all between her support for Sanders...

Stephens has never shown much talent for writing or argument, but I'll say this for him: He's sure got nerve.

HORSE(SHIT)RACE

Back on August 1, Politico came up with story seeming to predict doom for Ilhan Omar, wingnut-scaring Muslim Congresswoman from Minnesota and one of the so-called "squad" of young firebrand Democratic women: "'We don’t need someone distracted with Twitter': Ilhan Omar fights off tough primary challenge," ran the headline over a picture of Omar looking pissy. Lede:

Rep. Ilhan Omar is one of the best-known Democrats from the class of 2018, a lightning-rod member of the Squad whose outspoken liberal politics have made her an enemy of Donald Trump. 

Back home in Minneapolis, however, her polarizing national profile is complicating her bid to win a second term. 

Polarizing! Complicating! The story intimated grave danger for Omar from who-he challenger Antone Melton-Meaux:

Facing a political newcomer who raised a jaw-dropping $3.2 million last quarter — much of it from pro-Israel donors who oppose Omar’s foreign policy stances — Omar suddenly finds herself on the defensive against claims that she’s too divisive to effectively represent the solidly Democratic district.

You had to go MinnPost to find out that Melton-Meaux's backers, who had built his war chest to six times the size of Omar's by mid-July, tended to be not only "pro-Israel" but also rich -- including, MinnPost reported, big cheeses like "2019 Minneapolis mayoral candidate Tom Hoch, former University of Minnesota presidents Bob Bruininks and Eric Kaler, former U.S. attorney in Minnesota Andrew Luger, Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle... Fairview Health Services CEO James Hereford, Ecolab CEO Douglas Baker, Kelly Doran, of Doran Companies, Vance Opperman, and Marilyn Carlson Nelson, the co-CEO of Carlson Holdings."

Three-quarters of Omar's money, on the other hand, came from small donors who don't have to report their contributions, MinnPost reported. This feature of the race Politico alluded to only briefly, via an Omar ally who "criticized Melton-Meaux for receiving 'big special interest money.'"

In pursuit of their "divisiveness" angle, however, Politico was more effusive:

Yet many constituents have been alienated by her comments about Israel. Omar has been accused of anti-Semitism after suggesting support for Israel was popular due to campaign donations, that pro-Israel lawmakers had dual allegiance to both the U.S. and Israel and Israel had “hypnotized the world.” 

“Rep. Omar's past comments invoked age-old anti-Semitic tropes and rhetoric that echoed and brought about the nightmares of persecution,” said Rabbi Avi Olitzky, who leads a congregation in the district.

I realize criticism of Israel means anti-Semitism to wingnut chuckleheads, but news organizations ought to have higher standards. The "donations" bit is apparently about her "all about the Benjamins" comment -- as described in yet another Politico story: "Omar tweeted, 'It's all about the Benjamins baby,' followed by a music emoji, which suggested that [AIPAC] money was calling the tune for [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy." Politico apparently wasn't listening to rap music in 1997. (And boy, saying a political action committee uses money to influence votes -- that's what Hitler did.)

The "dual allegiance" thing seems to refer to this tsimmis in which Omar remarked on (apparently) Republicans who "push for allegiance to a foreign country," which admittedly is a weird way to describe the GOP's Israel policy, which is only corrupt in the ordinary Republican way, and for which she apologized.

Politico kept it up through Monday -- "Ilhan Omar’s career on the line in tough primary" -- even giving the impression that the whole Squad was hanging on by their fingernails:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez survived her primary. Rashida Tlaib did, too. Now it’s Ilhan Omar’s turn on Tuesday — and the Minnesota congresswoman faces the stiffest challenge of any member of the Squad.

"Survived," did they? Let's look at the results -- Tlaib won 66%-34% and AOC won with 75% of the vote. Well, that was a near thing!

Politico continued:

Omar (D-Minn.), one of the group’s four liberal women of color who were first elected in 2018, has drawn national attention with her repeated clashes with President Donald Trump — as well as accusations of using anti-Semitic tropes in articulating her position on Israel.

Punchline: Omar kicked ass in her primary. "Omar led by about 17 points when The Associated Press called the primary for the safe Democratic seat," reported Politico.

We hear a lot about "horserace" political journalism, and how reporters try to make every race look like a photo finish to keep readers fascinated. That's certainly true, but in many cases, and I think this is certainly one, it's an artifact of the conservative noise machine that's been yelling "bias" for decades now, causing nervous news orgs to bend over backwards to portray even their stupidest shit as something to be taken seriously.

So since Republicans scream anti-Semite every time they see a Muslim, and have an extra-special hate-on for the attractive young hijab-wearing Somali-American -- remember their eruption over "some people did something," including Bret Stephens' absurd misreading? --  political journos are compelled to portray the district that elected Omar in the first place as they might Fritters, Alabama, and talk about any race involving outspoken liberals, no matter how well-entrenched, as competitive -- something you never see them do in reboubts where Republicans only run against Even More Republicans. Hell, they hardly gave O'Rourke-Cruz 2018 that kind of play, and Cruz won by less than three percent!

Maybe this will change as more QAnon crackpots win Republican primaries -- though given their track record I imagine this will just shift their Overton Window so that Pizzagate Pedonuts represent Principled Conservatism, currently mainstream Republicans (including the most rabid Trumpkins) are moderates, mainstream Democrats are communists, and people like the barely-"surviving," "polarizing" Squad are just de trop. 

HOMETEAM CROWD.

LOL

The two towns Trump has lived in -- New York and Washington -- both hate his guts. What does that tell you?

I see a remedy: super-creep Senator Josh Hawley's dumb bill to send federal employees to Bumfuck:

Under Hawley’s proposal, 90 percent of the USDA’s workforce would move to Missouri and an additional nine other federal agencies would relocate their headquarters to “economically distressed” areas. 

“It’s such an insular place and people forget that there’s a vast country out there and there’s lots of places in the country that aren’t like D.C. and haven’t seen gobs of money poured in,” Hawley said in an interview on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon... 

Under Hawley’s proposal, several agencies would land in swing states critical to the presidential race. Pennsylvania would become home to the Department of Commerce, the Department of Transportation would relocate to Michigan and Ohio would host the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Interior would migrate to New Mexico. 

The rest of the states in Hawley’s plan are solidly Republican.

Why not include the Presidency? Try to imagine Trump trying to get an in-house around-the-world and a bucket of blow in Fritters, Alabama! (I mean, in the manner to which he is accustomed.) He'd resign in a week.

UPDATE. GUESS WHO'S THE REAL VICTIM HERE! If you guessed "civility," yewww might be a pundit.

In my many happy days and nights at Shea Stadium, the fans often rained boos down on their own team. I begin to wonder if these guys have ever been to a baseball game.

UPDATE 2. The go-to wingnut response is that citizens of Washington, D.C. loved Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, late head of ISIS, and are mad at Trump because U.S. forces killed Baghdadi last weekend. Chrissy Clark at The Federalist:

The timing of the crowd’s reaction was revealing. The crowd booed Trump on the same day he announced his administration and U.S. personnel had taken out the founder and leader of ISIS.

 Yes -- a very adulterous reaction! "If you’re gonna go around whackin’ austere scholars, Washington can be tough," burbles Andrew McCarthy, National Review's impeachment bullshit expert. Oh well, guess the days when a crowd at the ballpark was considered salt-of-the-earth American rather than treasonous are over, Wrasslin's America's sport now!

IMPEACH OR GET OFF THE POT.

As far as I can tell, the argument in favor of impeachment is that Trump told some of his goons to commit crimes for him, and the argument against is that most of the goons were either too smart or too dumb to commit those crimes for him.

Speaking of the latter argument (and "too dumb" in general), Andrew Sullivan:

As for Putin’s deep enmeshment with Trump, I found the following anecdote from the report rather apposite: “As soon as news broke that Trump had been elected President, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new Administration. They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.” More: “Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration. According to Aven, Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect.” I’m afraid this makes speculation that Trump has been a Soviet and Russian asset for decades or those who still insist on a conspiracy … well, not exactly in touch with reality.

The con man got into the White House, and in the chaos Putin couldn't find someone willing to take his "Congratulations on our successful theft of the election!" call -- to Sullivan, this means Trump's in the clear.

That Sullivan proceeds to an incoherent "He's innocent but let's impeach him because he's bad" argument  is typical of him -- his cunning has ever been to grasp that no one would call him on his bullshit; just as that cunning served him well in his career as Pete Buttigieg avant la lettre, it will serve him now because no one will force him to retreat from his facially bold decision by actually impeaching Trump.

Everyone's making speeches about it but to my mind it's just this: Trump is a scumbag whose band of Republican grifters are destroying the country. I understand and to some extent endorse the point that Trump's policy is just Republican policy on steroids, but those steroids are really making it worse, especially since, Trump being who he is, he isn't using them as a professional athlete using non-metaphorical steroids would to improve his performance, but merely to swell himself up and exacerbate his own 'roid rage.  

So we just have to get him out of there and at this point I'm no longer worried about political repercussions -- because what would those be? That if we acted like Republicans, Republicans will get mad? We might lose some votes in Fritters, Alabama? Fuck that. You want votes in the South, give us more Stacey Abrams and less George Wallace.

If the majority of elected Democrats who are acting like dogs confronted with an intriguing but frightening smell -- trying to get their noses as far forward and their tails as far back as possible --  can't understand that, then maybe they'll understand this: Soon enough, even their traditional grift -- roiling and shaking down the base with spooky Trump stories and doing fuck-all about it, then repeating the process -- doesn't work if nobody believes it, and at the moment, trust me, nobody believes it. AOC boycotting Pelosi's incumbency-protection racket is the thin end of the wedge.

Just pretending to fight back isn't going to work. And if you can't get the Senate to go along, so what?  It didn't do George W. Bush any harm. C'mon, earn your fucking paychecks.

BEZOS OFF.

I'm unlocking a newsletter issue today (Subscribe! Cheap!™) showing a possible outcome in Amazon's search for a new HQ2 location, involving a longtime alicublog mainstay, Fritters, Alabama.

It's a response in large part to all the dummies acting as if the oversight New York would have put on Amazon in exchange for billions of dollars in tax breaks, which caused the tycoon Bezos to decamp in a huff, were unspeakable insolence in the face of corporate beneficence -- and the even crazier idea that New York, the economic titan of the nation, would suffer greatly from the loss of this single project.

About the worst of the bunch is, natch, at The Hill, written by Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation -- it's basically a concatenation of ancient rightwing slurs. "The Empire State has to be the most business hostile place in all of North America," Moore snarls, which is why New Yorkers walk around barefoot in patched overalls, as opposed to the wealthy citizens of business-friendly Bumfuck, Mississippi. Like the lower-profile idiots, Moore also cartoonishly portrays the objections to the Amazon deal thus: "They do not want Amazon jobs because Bezos has made so much money. The Ocasio-Cortez followers hate Amazon almost as much as Walmart." (Rendering this even more of a non sequitur, Walmart just opened a Jet.com warehouse in The Bronx.) Also, he claims, the foolish Gothamites demanded "every job be unionized" -- not sure where he's getting that from: Maybe he refers, albeit bullshittily, to the union push at Amazon's existing facility in Staten Island.

Moore declares it a "catastrophic loss for New York," which he no doubt expects his readers out in the sticks to believe, and which inspires my fantasia; go look.

THE DEATH OF LIBERAL CITIES -- ANY DAY NOW, JUST YOU WAIT.

You'll never go broke in rightwingworld telling the rubes them there big cities is turrible places just like Mr. Trump says -- and it's even better when you're geographically located in one; the rubes never ask why you and the rest of the staff of your conservative publication don't leave Sodom and come join them in the heaven that is Fritters, Alabama, so you never even have to admit to them that you prefer city living, and can instead just pass yourself off as a kind friend who endures the liberals and lakes of bum poo and other horrors of urban life merely as a selfless journalistic mission.  Ellie Bufkin of The Federalist is one such, and she is here to tell you that

The $15 Minimum Wage Is Wreaking Havoc On New York City Dining

None of my friends back in my old hometown report any such thing, but they have no motivation to put anything over on me; so, though New Yorkers are still and as always paying outrageous prices for entree to hot spots, Bufkin wants you to think it's all up with the place: Coffee Shop, a joint that was long in the tooth when I lived in New York, recently closed and the owner told a reporter, "The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees." Hmmm, skyrocketing rents in downtown Manhattan, or waiters get a few hundred extra bucks a month -- which one do you think is more likely to convince a restauranteur it's time to move on to the next big thing? Bufkin, you won't be stunned to learn, picks the latter, calling Coffee Shop "the most recent victim" of the $15 wage, which she claims "has forced several New York City businesses to shutter their doors and will claim many more victims soon." She gives no citation for that claim -- not even some schnorrer blaming his busted venture on the commies' economic warfare -- but consider her audience: they imagine Boss Smith paying Lame Pete $15/hr to sling hash at Lutiebelle's and think these slickers must be plumb crazy.

In closing Bufkin paints this grim picture:

Eventually, minimum wage laws and other prohibitive regulations will cause the world-renowned restaurant life in cities like New York, DC, and San Francisco to cease to exist. The staff skill levels will drop, the number of servers and bartenders will never be enough, and the only survivors will be fast-casual chains with low overhead and deep pockets. 

New York’s new look will be vacant storefronts between an occasional Pret-a-Manger or the public restroom formerly known as Starbucks. But don’t worry. That charming, downtown studio apartment will still run about $5,000 per month for the privilege of proximity to all that culture.

Bufkin seems too young to remember the 70s, so we probably should forgive her for telling such unconvincing urban blight stories -- she only knows them as a trope from the wingnut propaganda manual. Besides, even smarter conservatives have tried this shit -- like Joe Lhota, who told everyone when Bill de Blasio was running for Mayor in 2013 that de Blasio was going to turn the town back into Death Wish meets Escape from New York. Conservatives all agreed that New York was doomed --  and when, four years later, de Blasio's New York reported record low crime rates, they screamed like scalded cats and slunk away. But as soon as people forget, they'll come back and try it again, because there's always someone in some holler, bluff or junction whose self-respect is tied up in believing it.

[SOBBING] BUT I HAVE A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO YOUR LOVE!

LOL: It starts out being about how "Maxine Waters does not speak for Democrats or liberals," but then guest columnist for The Hill Alan Dershowitz suddenly snaps and blubbers that his posh friends won't hang with him no more:

I am a liberal Democrat in politics, but a neutral civil libertarian when it comes to the Constitution. 

But that is not good enough for some of my old friends on Martha’s Vineyard. For them, it is enough that what I have said about the Constitution might help Trump. So they are shunning me and trying to ban me from their social life on Martha’s Vineyard. One of them, an academic at a distinguished university, has told people that he would not attend any dinner or party to which I was invited. He and others have demanded “trigger warnings” so that they can be assured of having “safe spaces” --

"Trigger warnings" = "Hate to tell you, but we have to invite that asshole Dershowitz, my wife feels sorry for him," and "safe spaces" = "Don't worry, I told Dershowitz we'll be out of town."

-- in which they will not encounter me or my ideas. Others have said they will discontinue contributions to organizations that sponsor my talks. 

This is all familiar to me, since I lived through McCarthyism in the 1950s...

"I have here in my hand a list of one jagoff I don't want to go golfing with" just doesn't have the same ring. And if I were in a pissier mood I would say the rich and infinitely connected Dersh cheapens the memory of people who actually lost their jobs, not just some fucking dinner invites, because of Joe McCarthy. But the absurdity of this has buoyed my mood, so I will just observe this really is the modern conservative idea of McCarthyism: Not the disadvantaged losing the little they have because of their beliefs -- why, says your average conservative, would anyone care about losers like that! -- but rich fucks being told to fuck off. 

But I see Dersh is making loads of new friends:

This suggest a fish-out-of-water comedy, in which Dershowitz loses his social standing in Martha's Vineyard and is forced to decamp to Fritters, Alabama and do shooters and swap coon jokes with the hoi polloi. "Hain't that squirrelmeat better than them fancy Wellfleet oysters yore sissy friends made ya eat?" asks his host, Festus. Hey, Roseanne says she's ready to come back to TV!

WATERING THE TREE OF LUNACY WITH THE BLOOD OF CHILDREN, PART INFINITY.

Another day, another bunch of dead kids, and Republicans reliably rush to aid and comfort the NRA. At National Review we have yet to hear Charles C.W. Cooke's traditional post-slaughter sermon about how you cahn't ban assault weapons, it's in the cawn-stuh-tyu-shun, but we have had proposed alternative solutions from other staffers such as David French:

Rather than tweet impotently, I’ve armed myself to protect my family and my neighbors; in my past role as a member of a school board, I’ve worked to better secure my kids’ school; and I’ve vowed that if — God forbid — I ever see evidence or warning signs of the darkness of a killer’s heart, I’ll have the courage to seek the intervention that can save lives.

That is to say: He bought more guns, and fantasized about what he'd do if he ever saw someone suspicious. That's usually the beginning of a success story, alright.

French's colleague Robert VerBruggen has a simpler solution: "Arm Teachers." I don't recall him suggesting that we arm preachers after the church shoot-em-up in Sutherland Springs last November, but maybe his condition has only recently advanced to this stage. VerBruggen elaborates:

[Training is] something a teacher could easily accomplish during summer vacation, even if schools insisted on rigorous training.

And why would they? Clearly any gun-wielding amateur marksman will be able to quickly take out a heavily armed mass murderer, and avoid shooting the wrong people or themselves in a panic -- they must be superhuman or else why would we pay them so generously?

If this sounds more like a recipe for Roddy McDowall in Class of 1984 than a sane society, remember that a sane society is the opposite of what they want: This is why they were so enraged to see New York City's crime drop after years of strict gun control, and why they're so eager to inject guns into polities that have benefited from their exclusion -- they want to make every part of America as hair-trigger gun-crazy as Fritters, Alabama, because that's how you breed Republicans.

UPDATE. Regarding French's I'll-know-one-when-I-see-one, Patrick Blanchfield makes a good point:

I wonder who David French and guys like him are likely to pre-cognize as a poison-hearted potential killer?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Charlottesville and Boston, and the hard time rightbloggers are having with their Scary Alt-Left bullshit.

Among the fun sidelights: Susan Wright of Red State explaining what's really so terrible about the Nazi-Confederate comeuppance --

What we’ve seen, as a result of the filth they brought to Charlottesville and the subsequent loss of life, is that any meaningful discussion about the importance of maintaining our nation’s heritage – every part of it – has been lost. 

They gave Antifa and every other leftist group wiggle room to claim the high ground. Anybody who might be thinking about defending some of those time-worn monuments to the southern side of the war between the states will have to wade neck-deep through a cesspool of liberal rage and accusations of racism.

Wait, here's the best part:

Not that anyone not a liberal would ever be given the benefit of the doubt, anyway.

The party of personal responsibility just can't seem to catch a break!

Also, I refer briefly to Peter Ingemi's Boston post in the column, and his obvious frustration at having no juicy alt-left ultra-violence stories to tell. Ingemi was extremely upset by the crowd yelling at two Trump guys, mostly because one of them was holding an Israeli flag, which I guess is supposed to protect you like a St. Christopher medal protects travelers, or an American flag pin protects a Republican politician. Though no harm came to the two men, Ingemi says,

To me this was a turning point, it is a moment that in my opinion will get replayed over and over in states that Trump carried and I can’t think of anything else that would infuriate and energize Trump supporters more.

I'm sure they're very sensitive to criticism of Israel in Fritters, Alabama. Ingemi also tweeted, "Can't imagine any Massachusetts supporter of @realDonaldTrump walking through #BostonCommon today without thinking 'I need to arm myself.'" LOL. What was someone saying about snowflakes?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on, in roundup fashion, Kathy Griffin, the Paris Accord pullout, and the London Bridge attacks. Among the director's-cut bonuses: alt-right dummy Jack Posobiec explaining why terrorists don't bomb Fritters, Alabama:

Yeah, suicide bombers don't go to car races because they're afraid they might get hurt. At this point it's a given that rightwing residents of America's hollers, junctions, falls, bluffs, and whatnot are terrorized by the exceedingly unlikely prospect that jihadis will come to the Father-Daughter Dance and blow them up, while those of who live in actual terror target towns keep calm and carry on. But it's still ridic.

By the way, I hear Wonder Woman broke $100 million at the box office last weekend, despite men being kept out of a few screenings. I notice Stephen Miller, the wingnut who said he was going to force himself on an Alamo Drafthouse all-female showing, hasn't declared victory, but who knows -- maybe he watched through a hole in the wall, like in Porky's.

THE JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE IS BACK IN BUSINESS.

Between the fallout from the fall of Milo Yiannopoulos and Attorney General Boss Hogg's rescission of transgender students' bathroom protections, conservatives are really letting their freak flag fly. There are no pale pastels in their sexual politics now. The betrayal of their former sassy gay friend Milo has sent them fleeing back to the snuggly safety of their old bigotries, and the power play against trans kids has reaffirmed them in their new ones. It's like they can at last be free of even the feeblest pretense at toleration.

(Not so Rod Dreher who, while kvelling over the bathroom ban -- and casting Betsy DeVos, for her brief bullshit feint at protecting trans students, as part of a treasonously tolerant tradition that "surrendered intellectually and in terms of authentic discipleship one or two generations ago" -- yet protests for thousands of words because an Atlantic writer noticed he's obsessed with gays; heavens, no, he doesn't hate them, he says, he just considers them an abomination and an existential threat -- why, he says, "one of my oldest and dearest friends is gay." I wonder if the guy's parents know.) (Which reminds me: There's a Lenny Bruce bit that's apparently not online in which he talks about a friend who's "so queer he's a truck driver"; when Bruce goes to see his clueless yiddishe momme and she says "you wouldn't believe about my son," as Bruce is bracing for it, she says, wonderingly, "he didn't get married yet." Lenny Bruce was the greatest.)

I'll keep my powder dry for the Village Voice column. Suffice to say every wingnut in Christendom is harrumphing like David French does today at National Review: "Not long ago, if school policies purposefully exposed girls to male genitals, they’d be subject to a backbreaking sexual harassment lawsuit," blah blah, as if 1.)  a scared trans pre-teen who's bucking several century-tons of social prejudice to be whom she believes herself to be is the same thing as a grownup child molester, and  2.)  the ladies room were some sort of open-air genital display area.

I find it hard to believe even the dimmest gomer in Fritters, Alabama thinks that's how it is, let alone a fucking Ivy League White Working Class Whisperer like French. Yet still he pretends. Jesus Christ, sometimes I want to just grab these people and tell them what Chris in All My Sons tells his father: Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?

But for now, let's go back to Milo, and not even the Milo-deniers whose sudden knee-weakness is so gutless and amusing, but to D.C. McAllister, one of the dimmer bulbs at The Federalist, whose pro-Milo column actually begins with "Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sex crimes."

OK, thinks I -- I'm not a reactionary, I know Yiannopoulos does not admit to molesting children and claims he was abused as a boy, and I'm open to counterpoint. Alas, McAllister is not interested in defending Milo as a human being, but only as a cudgel to beat liberals:

Yes, he’s provocative, contrarian, outlandish, and offensive, poking his finger in the eye of just about everyone around him. But he also conveys a message that the Left finds unacceptable. His attacks on feminism and identity politics, his fierce defense of free speech on college campuses and freedom of personal choice without being policed by those who are politically correct—all of these ideas offend the Left...

[The Left's] outrage is what it has always been—hatred for anyone who opposes them. And Milo certainly opposes them, often and with flair.

The Left is so bad, I'll even back a flairy against them! But worse is yet to come: McAllister gets into the Liberal Hypocrisy shtick and, after shaking a fist over Roman Polanski -- whose exoneration on rape charges was, I believe, part of the 2016 National Democratic platform -- takes a wrong turn at Albuquerque:

It seems our culture is more apt to defend the sexually immoral than to scorn them—unless they’re outside the liberal cabal, of course. Except that’s not always the case either, something that should make Republicans who are also attacking Milo stop and reflect. Libertarian Camille Paglia often speaks on college campuses, writes for magazines, is often quoted favorably by conservatives, and sells books—all of which Milo has now been denied in one form another. Yet, Paglia unapologetically supports pedophilia.

Wow, okay, I thought at first, good for her, she's willing to own up to Paglia, whose long status as a rightwing nutjob I've written about at length. Little did I know that, after listing a bunch of Paglia's man-boy-love encomiums, McAllister would come to this:

Paglia has given us more than anything Milo has said on the topic, yet he’s run out on the rails. Why? For one thing, Paglia has been around awhile and has cred with many liberals.

??????

As they have always done, they not only ignored her deviant views but embraced them. However, if she were an avid Trump supporter in the same vein as Milo, opposing liberals at every turn and writing those things in this climate, you can be sure the torches would be lit up for her as well. She would be facing opposition greater than any outcry she experienced in the past, which came mostly from conservatives on truly moral grounds.

Wait -- you mean the Camille Paglia of "Feminist Camille Paglia slams ‘disaster’ Hillary Clinton: ‘She is a woman without accomplishment’"? The Camille Paglia of "I was wrong about Donald Trump: Camille Paglia on the GOP front-runner’s refreshing candor (and his impetuousness, too)"? The Camille Paglia of "Camille Paglia: PC feminists misfire again, as fearful elite media can’t touch Donald Trump"? She's getting dissed because she's a liberal?

Sometimes I think I should just show a picture of a florid wingnut and a projector every day and just leave it at that.

KOTKIN AND CARSON: PERFECT TOGETHER.

Joel Kotkin, whose massive hate-on for city living has been examined here before, has posted a Daily Beast essay under the headline “Progressives Have Let Inner Cities Fail for Decades. President Trump Could Change That.” Kotkin approves and apparently shares the cartoon portrayal of cities that Trump barnstormed with during the campaign (“If ya walk down the street, ya get shot”). For one thing, Kotkin reports, there’s more crime in Chicago than in Fritters, Alabama. But Kotkin knows urban crime’s not nearly as bad as it was back in the Archie Bunker era. Trump’s marks, whose idea of urban life is mostly based on Death Wish, neither know nor care to know, but they aren’t reading the Daily Beast; Kotkin clearly wants to sway housebroken neoliberals who are reading his essay but also live or work in big cities and haven’t been raped and/or murdered by Jeff Goldblum and his gang and have no reason to agree that cities suck.

So Kotkin tries gaslight and guilt: the “much ballyhooed ‘back to the city’ movement” is “mindlessly overblown by the national media” but only really “impacts basically the downtown cores” — so if you like living in Brooklyn or Silver Spring, you’re suffering from false consciousness, comrade. See, the grass is greener on the far side of the Walmart: “Roughly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has been in suburbs and exurbs.” Now doesn’t Fritters look good? Come on, you don’t want to be left behind as your peers are driven by economic necessity, I mean flock willingly to Fritters:

And with millennials now entering their thirties in greater numbers, these communities, generally safe and with good schools, seem to be growing in popularity much faster than the inner cities. These are unfortunate facts for Democrats, who have long celebrated, sometimes garishly, cities’ glaring problems—thus helping make Trump’s campaign comments sound that much more reasonable.

Stop garishly celebrating cities’ glaring problems, Democrats! You're just making Real Americans hate you. Oh, and plus you’re the Real Racists too because, unlike small towns and suburbs where the races live together peaceably so long as everybody stays where they're wanted, cities “force poorer, largely minority areas out of areas that, in essence, are considered too valuable for such populations… minorities and working class families are being driven into less desirable areas, often further from work locations” in “a kind of progressive apartheid.”

Don’t get it twisted — this has nothing to do with capitalism, still less with any endemic racism — no, it’s all caused by attitude, as evinced by “hipsters” of the “creative class,” sissy liberals who think they’re not racist but who actually enforce progressive apartheid every time they sip chardonnay and eat Brie (excuse, have to adjust slurs for contemporaneity: sip Kombucha and eat formaggio). Their high-falutin' tastes drive simple Mom and Pop businesses away. If only they could have enjoyed the culture and excitement of the city on a diet of Cheez Whiz, Ritz Crackers, and Michelob, it might have stabilized the local economy! But you know how selfish these people are.

Now, if these sissies worked with their hands and voted for Trump, their voices would certainly be more important than that of the minorities, because ours is The Day of the White Working Class and their judgment cannot be challenged, whereas the opinions of hipsters can be disregarded because they go to subtitled movies and voted for Hitlery Klintoon.

Kotkin admits (though politely, for obvious reasons) that Trump has “hardly built his career in fighting poverty,” and that his HUD Secretary nominee Ben Carson basically has no idea what he’s doing, but yet insists their “outsider” status “may prove something of a blessing” — because maybe that means they’ll go for unorthodox (or nonsensical, depending on your POV) approaches to urban policy. They might even “keep industrial jobs in what’s left of the manufacturing economy,” which would be easier to believe if Trump and Carson had ever given even a clue of a policy that might achieve this. Kotkin’s imagined Trump fixes only get slimmer from there — fewer HB-1 visas (that’ll help local minority software engineers out of the ghettos!), “deregulating some businesses, like in cosmetology” (yes, the famous Yglesias Libertarian Maneuver, back in fashion at last), and of course vouchers, a key grift in any GOP Administration. But it’s okay, hopeful noises will do — not to fix anything allegedly wrong with cities, or even to make them more Republican-friendly, but possibly to get Kotkin a HUD sinecure or at least some higher-profile editorial gigs — for in Trump Times, when consevatives howl that city-slickers’ votes are too contaminated to be counted, there must be opportunities aplenty for a city-hating urbanist. Maybe someday they'll put his name on a workhouse.

FEAR OF A RAD PLANET.

You folks have probably seen some debate over the Electoral College, and how some people say it's a vestige of slavery, and others say Hamilton the musical Founder meant it to save us from people like Trump and now look, etc. Well, Michael Barone has a new angle for you:

Ditching Electoral College Would Allow California to Impose Imperial Rule on a Colonial America

California Über Alles! You can tell he's got a strong thesis from the front-loaded slurs:

They're still counting the votes, going on four weeks after the election, in California. In Brazil, a nation with much more challenging geography, they manage to do it in five hours. 

The seemingly endless dillydallying of California's (presumably union-represented) public employees has obscured two interesting things about this year's presidential election.

I know, you were thinking Little Deuce Coupe and I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but Michael Barone's California is a bureaucratic dystopia where you can't even get votes counted for Chrissakes because the Vote-Counters Union demands a papaya and tantric sex break every couple of hours. Anyway, first "interesting thing" is sure she got a majority but not as big a one as some guy in 1876, and second...

...the most populous state was a political outlier, voting at one extreme in the national political spectrum. 

You can see this easily if you array the states in order of Democratic percentage. At the top, before any state, was the District of Columbia, where 91 percent of voters chose Clinton. Next, some 5,000 miles away, was Hawaii, which went 63 percent for Clinton. Then came giant California, the nation's most populous state. As I am writing this, the latest count has California at 62 percent Democratic.

And the United States, using the same metric, is also more Democratic than Republican. But that doesn't count because California is too Democratic -- not like normal folks who are only Democratic when their parents and pastors aren't looking:

Well, yeah, you might say. California has been called the Left Coast for quite a while. Just about everyone in the Silicon Valley except Peter Thiel and in Hollywood except Pat Sajak supported Clinton. White middle-class families have been pretty much priced out of the state by high taxes and housing costs, and the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have replaced them vote far more Democratic.

The "white middle-class families" have all left, replaced by "Hispanic and Asian immigrants." One wonders why all the rich stars and computer nerds haven't abandoned this Third World hellhole and moved to Fritters, Alabama, where you can open your car elevator and see white people! That alone would make the constant drone of neo-country tolerable.

Barone rolls out some old electoral maps and shows us California and some other big liberal states used not to be that liberal -- they even voted for Reagan! -- so it was okay if they were on the winning side sometimes, but now that they're reliably Democratic -- unlike such famously purple states as Mississippi and Kansas -- if they were on the winning side it'd be tyrannical because they have the unfair advantage in population (unlike Texas) and because, need he remind you, they just ain't normal.

...The case against abolition is one suggested by the Framers' fears that voters in one large but highly atypical state could impose their will on a contrary-minded nation.

You mean like Florida in 2000? Wait, he's got a point -- their will was thwarted!

...California's 21st-century veer to the left makes [the Electoral College] a live issue again. In a popular vote system, the voters of this geographically distant and culturally distinct state, whose contempt for heartland Christians resembles imperial London's disdain for the "lesser breeds" it governed, could impose something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation. Sounds exactly like what the Framers strove to prevent.

Actually that's the current state of the nation under the cruel tyrant Obama, who craftily got Imperial Cali to vote for him twice. For nearly eight years honest crackers have been forced to endure colonics, Mexican food, and wind farms. Some of them, no doubt suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, began treating members of minority groups with respect, and doing yoga. But now, Trump time is a-comin', and these real non-Hispanic-and-Asian-immigrant Americans can go back to hog jowls and hate crimes, like the Founders intended, and inhale the meth fumes of freedom.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightblogger response the Democratic National Convention and its speakers, including the father of Iraq war casualty U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan. At my time of filing Khan had mainly been denounced for his grief by fringe lunatics such as Pamela Geller, but he’s now getting it in some mainstreamier outlets: At The Hill, for example, Charles Hurt claims Khan “was tricked into smearing Donald Trump” by Hillary Clinton, who was only using him to promote her campaign, which Khan could not have possibly known when he accepted an invitation to the Democratic National Convention. The whole thing’s repulsive, but the worst part is Hurt telling Khan’s he’s all upset over nothing:

Despite all efforts by the media to distort Trump’s position about “banning” Muslims, he has made perfectly clear time and again that he does not want to ban all Muslims. He wants to simply perform thorough and complete background checks on all immigrants coming from countries presently in the grips of violent Islamic terrorism.

(Obligatory note that this is bullshit.)

Yes, that means if you are a Muslim who wants to immigrate from Syria or Afghanistan, you are going to get a lot more scrutiny than if you are a Jew trying to immigrate from Canada. That is most unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as innocents getting slaughtered by 10th Century savages killing in the name of Allah.

So you see, Mr. Khan, our Muslim ban — which I’m denying is a Muslim ban because I’m talking to readers of The Hill rather than to a howling mob in Fritters, Alabama — is necessary because when you people aren’t dying for our country, you’re killing for Allah.

SOCIETY'S CHILD.

You may have heard about that imbecilic mope-ed in the New York Observer today by its boy publisher Jared Kushner, also Donald Trump's son-in-law, defending Pa Trump from charges of anti-Semitism. The thing is all kinds of awful, but one part jumped out at me:

In December 1972, a month after Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide, the New Yorker’s great film critic Pauline Kael gave a speech that said “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” I encourage Ms. Schwartz—and all reporters—to get out there and meet some of those people “outside their ken.” One of the reasons the Observer has more than quadrupled its traffic over the last three-plus years is that we’ve been actively broadening our perspective.

Let's lay to one side Kushner's humorous claim that he has the heart of The People because they buy more of his slop than they did before he dumbed down that once-sorta-good newspaper. There are two genuinely interesting things about his editorial. The more mildly interesting thing is that Kushner actually tells the real Pauline Kael story rather than the unflattering fake version -- wingnuts are not usually so scrupulous.

The other, more interesting thing about it is that anyone, especially a New York media mogul, still has the nerve to go out in public and tell liberals that they don't know anything about The People, and that they should go amongst them and learn as Kushner did.

Part of the joke for me is the persistence of the ancient limousine-liberal slur -- that if white people of some means (that is, who can afford to bother to know what the Observer is) believe in social justice and safety nets, it can only be because they never see any poor people or minorities, because they all live on the -- well, it used to be the Upper West Side, and then it was the West Village, and now I guess it must be Davos or some shit -- and that if they ever found themselves amongst darker people they would be disgusted and turn right-wing -- you know, like Rod Dreher did.

But a lot of white people who believe in these things are poor and have lived among other poor people of various shades and hues. I certainly was, and have, for several years, and I ain't exactly rolling in dough now. I've never owned a house or a car, and now, as often, I live in a majority-minority neighborhood. Yet I am invited to feel like some rich snob compared to Trump supporters, who make an average of 72 grand a year, just because I think Trump's bullshit is bullshit, which is allegedly (and despite his inferior poll numbers) elitist.

I see a parallel between Kushner's Rich Pal of the Poor routine and several other recent columns by big-time right-wingers who, while they might not quiiiite endorse Trump themselves, are yet happy to use Trumpism as a cudgel to beat liberals. The clearest example is Ross Douthat, who in his "The Myth of Cosmopolitanism" article ties (as others have) Trump to Brexit to make it seem more inevitable-like:

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens." 

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe.

Sure, I know about tribes. I was raised in a working-class New England Catholic family. (I don't know where Douthat got his wisp-beard Chesterton impersonator shtick, but I'm guessing it isn't from the streets.)  But I got out and found another way of life. And it wasn't as a "global citizen" -- because I don't know what the fuck that means. Maybe some rich people think of themselves that way, but I've never met anyone else who did. I just found a place I liked better and put down roots there. You know -- like Americans were once expected to do.

 I'm guessing what Douthat is trying to do is pierce or at least uncomfortably tickle some soft, white-guilt underbellies from the Times subscriber list. (If yours is black or brown, forget it, he has no reason to bother; from his perpsective you don't count.) If by any chance these assholes have made you feel at all bad about not living in Fritters, Alabama or not going to church or not voting for Trump, let me remind you that this has been their racket since time immemorial: Telling you that you should feel bad because you've turned against your kind. The big difference from the days when they more overtly told you to stick to your own kind is that far, far fewer people are listening to them, and they're desperate to get those numbers up.

HOW YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM? PART 296.

"The New York Times Shows Why the Blue Model Is Doomed," says Walter Russell Mead. The Times ran a story, see, in which some guy left "hot, crowded Austin, Tex., and moved into an apartment on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Me., with a commanding view of Casco Bay only steps away." OK, good for him. So?

This is told as a fantastic story of human empowerment and social transformation, which it is. More and more of us are escaping the tyranny of location; thanks to the telecom revolution we can work where we want and when we want. 

The rise of telecommuting will lead to better, richer lives. Families will be stronger. The environment will benefit from less commuting. All good. 

But it also represents the death of the political philosophy and economic system that the Times is otherwise prepared to defend to the last: the blue social model. If this revolution continues—and it will—fewer and fewer people will be stuck in big, high tax, over-regulated cities. While some will still choose to live there, many, especially those raising children, will not.

Quite apart from the "three's a trend, unless you're on deadline in which case one will do" angle, I have to say I'm amazed that conservatives are still doing this. We live in an era of mass migration to the cities. It's not like New York, San Francisco, Philly, Minneapolis, et alia, are emptying out. In fact rents in most big cities are going up -- and surely conservatives know that when people pay more for something it's because they prefer it.

This is an old routine for the brethren. For years I've been following Joel Kotkin's crusade to make everyone hate urban life and move to the suburbs and exurbs like Real Americans, or to pretend this has already happened, all evidence to the contrary. And Mead's "rise of telecommuting" reminds me of Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds himself pushing hard for telecommuting 11 years ago as an alternative to commie light rail. Reynolds actually proposed as a benefit of telecommuting that unions don't like it "because it's harder to organize workers who aren't all in one place."

Which, incidentally, reminds me of one big reason why people flock to the cities: Because that's where the jobs are. Some of you may remember a few years back when conservatives were trying to send poor people to North Dakota to soak up those big oil boom bucks (or to get a long-haul trucking job -- but that was always an obvious fraud). During that boom, capitalism did what capitalism does and drove housing prices in boom towns sky-high. Michael Warren at the Weekly Standard called these oil-boom immigrants "The New Pioneers" -- "The oil boom that began in 2007 has transformed this area of sleepy ranching communities into America’s new energy powerhouse," Warren gushed, and he said that whether you were young or old, whether you were an able-bodied pipe-fitter or "a receptionist at a man camp, those groupings of dorm-like lodgings for temporary workers that flank the highways of the Bakken," there was a place for you in this bright economic future-land.

Well, fast forward a few economic cycles and things ain't looking so great. Thanks, @jfxgillis, for pointing out this September 2015 Bloomberg story of what happened in the Bakken:

Fracking’s success has created another glut, and crude prices have fallen more than 50 percent in the past year. Now North Dakota’s white-hot economy is slowing. More than 4,000 workers lost their jobs in the first quarter, according to the state’s Labor Market Information Center. Taxable sales in counties at the center of the nation’s second-largest oil region dropped as much as 10 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, data from the Office of the State Tax Commissioner show... 

With the region’s drilling-rig count at a six-year low of 74 and roughnecks coping with cuts in overtime and per-diem pay, the vacancy rates in Williams County man camps are as high as 70 percent. Meanwhile the average occupancy rate of new units in Williston was 65 percent in August, even as 1,347 apartments are under construction or have been approved there.

It's all well and good for Mead to tell people that telecommuting's where the boom is now, sonny! But you actually have to provide the jobs to back that up, and unless I'm missing something there is no boom in internet jobs that pay a living wage.

So why do guys like Mead tell people -- people who probably trust him; they aren't reading his shit for the scintillating prose style -- that cities are over and they should avoid them? That's easy. Look how people in the cities vote. The only hope for wingnuts is to keep their dwindling pool of supporters in the outlands -- cut off from culture, from minorities and foreigners, from the experience of living among crowds without packing heat all the time, from anything that would show them that one could have a pretty good life without fear, isolation, and bigotry. (And if you can't guarantee that your peeps will stay in Fritters, Alabama, at least give them the idea that they can live the dream on the internet, so it doesn't matter whether they relocate by choice or necessity, they'll still be isolated, and you may yet keep them in the fold.)

Then you can keep dangling the Next Big Boom in front of them -- some Eden of free enterprise where they'll be able to shoot off guns and make a living with their hands and no goddamn unions or homos. And they won't know it's a con. How would they? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I was just listening to his "Girls Talk," and realized

some of you good people may never have heard "Trouble Boys."

•   Whoever wrote the dek for Daniel Henninger's latest at the Wall Street Journal -- "Donald Trump is running against two things -- immigration and free trade --that made New York City great again" -- had to have read the whole thing to the end, poor sod, because the column starts very differently, with Henninger pulling on his overalls and pretending to despise the Big City: Ted Cruz "had a point" with his "New York values" slur on New York, says Henninger, "but he blew it by not describing it so that even many New Yorkers would agree." Oh yeah? So what should Cruz have complained about that would touch on what the locals hate about their own home -- scumbag landlords, gentrification, subway delays? No, among the real New Yorker issues Henninger sees is how mean Bernie Sanders has been to rich people:

More revelatory of New York values, though, is Vermonter Bernie Sanders, ranting about “Wall Street” and “bankers.” To be clear: Those people, much mocked of late for living on Park Avenue and such, annually give tens of millions to support charter schools, scholarships to parochial schools, social entrepreneurs, and innumerable nonprofits and arts institutions. Most, Republican and Democrat, would do it without the tax deduction.

Then let's remove the deduction and see what happens! Anyway, why does Henninger even care what New Yorkers think when this is what he thinks of them:

...Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, like Jerry Brown in blue California, stay afloat on public unions and a liberal urban sea of smug, yuppie self-absorption. Donald Trump learned this week that these people don’t even bother to vote. In 2013, New York’s now-unpopular Mayor de Blasio won with 17% of eligible voters (turnout was 24%).

If only the Republican silent majority weren't too busy on Election Day lighting bums on fire to vote for Joe Lhota! Then Henninger has a mood swing (or a phone call from an editor who reminds him this is not the Fritters, Alabama Journal) and starts yelling at Trump for going upstate to appeal to rubes, because his trade policies which so excite the folks in Rome, N.Y. would fuck up New York City. Suddenly Henninger is the self-absorbed yuppies' best friend! But he still doesn't like the way they vote:

Also true, however, is that in 2012, an incredible 71% of Asians voted for Barack Obama because living in Democratic cities like New York, they rarely hear the alternative.

Really? They're unable to read the Wall Street Journal? Plus Charles Murray told me they were all rightwing anyway.

Mr. Trump, an entrepreneur, should be the ideal pitchman to New York’s many Asians, or to the black voters former Texas Gov. Rick Perry appealed to in his remarkable July speech.

You just know Henninger started that last bit with Jack Kemp and his editor said, "you know Kemp's been dead for seven years, right?" and Henninger thought a while and finally said, "hell, why not Rick Perry -- no black people are going to read this anyway."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (HOLY SH*T CHRISTIE EDITION).

That's how the pros do it, folks.

•   Ha ha ha ha ha. First they finally get Rubio to do insult comedy on Trump at the debate -- not well, but at least he was sassy, and that made the people who follow him as the GOP savior feel sassy too -- "This is fight-them-on-the beaches time. This is Agincourt," perorates National Review's imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke. (Yes, this was their finest shower!) Rubio even started to warm (some might say unseasonably warm) to his new role -- and then Chris Christie went and fucked it all up. Some folks are pointing to Jon Ward's "Why Christie Never Went After Donald Trump" for the explanation:

...Rubio was ascending to be the Trump alternative, a spot Christie wanted for himself. With his kneecapping of Rubio, Christie eliminated the Florida senator from the running in New Hampshire, although Rubio’s unimpressive finish there didn’t improve Christie’s standing in the race. And as a result, the non-Trump lane has remained muddled between Rubio and Ted Cruz, while Trump has won three consecutive states with less than 50 percent.

This suggests by cracking Rubio, Christie was doing what he had to do to get to Trump's level -- knocking off the contenders before engaging Mr. Big. It makes some sense. But what's missing is why Christie decided to quit. A large part of Christie's appeal among Republicans is his gift for insult comedy. It's actually sharper than Trump's, but Trump's is currently more popular -- apparently Christie's shtick is a little too intellectual for the GOP proles, who don't want to have to work hard to get the references (i.e. know something about government). So my guess is Christie doesn't expect Trump to win. (In fact it's beginning to look like no top Republicans are expecting their Party to win.) He's decided to embrace the current Sultan of Insult and wait for 2020, when Trump's act will be old and the crowds may have learned to love the Christie variation.

I'll add one more thing. I remember when Ann Coulter said during early days in the 2012 campaign, "if the Republicans don't nominate Christie... then Romney will be the nominee and he will lose." Coulter is now a reliable Trump booster, and her ravings may suggest to some that immigration is the reason for her devotion. But Christie was never focused on immigration. The real unifying factor among these three parties is faith in rage and vituperation as the way to the hearts of the people. In fact, it may be all they believe in.

•   At The Federalist, Mark Hemingway has an online aneurysm some poor editor could only think to call "Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad." It starts with Hillary's emails (or as the Bowery Boys/rightbloggers call it, Routine 12) and thereafter spatters like a rotten tomato across a broad barn door of sub-topics. But you can smell something solid coming at this point:

The odd thing is that people are voting for Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly for kind of the same reason as Trump supporters, in that they don’t want larger economic issues forcing them to change their culture or lifestyle. However, the motivations of Sanders supporters are much less sympathetic.

This is an interesting way to look at the pressing economic issues of the day: Voters aren't worried about money to live on, replace a worn-out car with, save to send a kid to college, etc. -- they're worried that money will "change their culture or lifestyle." What's that even mean, and why are Sanders supporters' concerns worse than those of Trump's? Apparently it has something to do with the Sanders kids wanting to have a job, a good job, one that satisfies their artistic needs; Hemingway is here to tell these puppies they "can’t 'do what they love' without financial realities being such a killjoy." And what does he use as examples of their foolish utopianism? Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn -- the places in America, in other words, where you're most likely to make a living "doing what you love," rich cities that are in fact getting crowded because the market has spoken and youngsters prefer those places to such Republican Valhallas as Topeka, Kanas and Fritters, Alabama. Listen to him:

Portland’s celebrated “artisanal economy” is basically a result of overeducated hipsters who want to live in Oregon because the cost of living is relatively cheap and it’s beautiful, but there are no traditional jobs with opportunities for advancement. 

So they’re all starting craft businesses and restaurants. When you have one food truck for every 1,000 people, as Portland does, that is a result of desperation, not necessarily the kind of enterprise and initiative you want to celebrate.

Whereas they could be churning out rightwing propaganda like a real man! The rest is near-incomprehensible, but it seems Hemingway thinks work is only real when it's difficult and unrewarding and being done by someone besides him.

NOT A DOG IN THE BUNCH.

Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar -- which site I for some reason never had on my blogroll before now -- has done his annual great job of collecting 2015 blog posts chosen by the authors themselves for the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. You should go sample some -- you might find a genius or two you hadn't seen before.

You'll also find one by me there --  that riff I did on Ben Affleck's family tree problems in April. Which reminds me: As much fun as I had with the Village Voice rightblogger round-up last weekend, I believe it was missing something -- namely, shameless self-promotion! To follow are my 10 favorite posts of 2015 by my favorite author, me! If you missed 'em before, it's not too late. Happy New Year, all, and don't drive drunk -- stay home and finish that keg yourselves.

A Week of Shorter Rod Drehers. In which I chart America's favorite Xian drama queen, post by post, for seven days ("4/6/15, 5:35 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 12:05 am: Facebook and the gay drag queens are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 5:08 am: Buy my book...").

It Can't Miss. A memo from the Central Committee to the Brethren on how to handle the Bruce Jenner thing ("The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays").

Have a Miserable National Review Christmas! A look at what America's premier conservative magazine chose to present to its readers on Christmas Eve ("How could we have guessed [Victor Davis] Hanson would spend Christmas bitching about furriners? Guess he never got over the loss of his chainsaw").

My Advice for the Republican Party. What I told them they should do with their first debate, but they didn't listen, the idiots ("just say to hell with decorum entirely and flood the stage with other joke candidates who will distract from [Trump]. Some possibilities: A Howard Stern fan who just says 'Baba Booey, Baba Booey'...").

What to Expect. Speaking of the first GOP debate, I had to miss it, so I just made one up for my readers and I must say from what I heard mine was better ("George Pataki will be found dead, his face pressed against the crack at the bottom of the door of the auditorium like Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer").

Heritage and Hate. An interview with Beauregard T. Dogwhistle, a member of the Fritters, Alabama city council, on the controversy over the Confederate flag ("Whah, suh, there ain’t no moah racism in thet requiahment o’ mah dignity than they is in mah flag, o’ mah unifo’m, o mah collection o’ manacles an’ slave collahs an’ such lahk, no mattah what them statist rapscallions at eBay say about it").

This Used to Be My Playground. Spurred by yet another essay on New York in the 70s, I talked about my own experience of that place and time, and why it was still interesting to people who weren't there ("I don’t think they thrill to it because they desire to be mugged; I think they like it because they suspect that the danger came with something they would want, but can no longer get on any terms. And they're right").

Season 7, Episode 14. The last of my Mad Men recaps ("Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists").

Au Revoir, Niedermeyer. A farewell to Presidential candidate Scott Walker ("I wouldn't say I felt bad for the guy, but it must be something to have pandered your ass off for months and then discover that it wasn't enough to be a bully -- you had to act like a bully, too").

Twenty Minutes Wasted with Goldberg and Murray. In which I did a scorn-language interpretation of a promo interview between two of the worst people in the world, Jonah Goldberg and Charles Murray ("'what [academia] looks like is people making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private sector,' that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only break a sweat during squash or rough sex...").

SISSY FUSS; SHRUG.

Some people are dealing with the age of BlackLivesMatter worse than others. At City Journal, which usually disparages cities only insofar as they allow black people to walk around free, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson of the Mexican-Stolen Chainsaw is allowed to disparage cities in toto because they are filled with sissy liberals, whereas the country, where he lives part-time, is filled with chesty men of noble purpose:

Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.

That's how Jonah Goldberg got so conservative -- harvesting Cheetos in the noonday sun! Hanson seems to hope his message will spread far and wide and reverse a trend, which he notes with alarm, of Americans moving away from red-state garden spots like Fritters, Alabama and into the debauched Democratic cities. But, as Steve Allen altered the old song years ago, how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm? And Hanson doesn't have a lot of tools for the job, alas (perhaps because they were stolen by Mexicans): he is dependent as usual on hoary wingnut tropes, in this case Sandra Fluke, The Life of Julia, and even that most risible of reactionary tropes Pajama Boy to get his story across:

Pajama Boy’s smirk and his message of arrested development and dependence, even if a con, offered a damning portrayal of what millions of urbanites now see as cool: getting up late, staying undressed, and sipping childhood drinks. America’s Marlboro Man he wasn’t.

No childhood drinks for VDH! And apparently no socialistic public water service either -- only pure well water replenishes his precious bodily fluids: "At my house, I worry constantly about whether the well will go dry," he tells us. "I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 PM, I go to the door armed." Guess Mexicans must be after his water, too.

One wonders why he spends half his time in the urban wastelands at all  -- perhaps, like many of the sissies he disparages, for the money? Or maybe it's a psychological issue. Attend this plaintive passage:

Half the week, when I live in downtown Palo Alto, I have no idea who else lives in the high-rise apartments—and no interest in finding out. I could be a felon or a saint and no one on the street knows or cares. That the rest of the time I live in the same house on the same farm where my great-great-grandparents lived is of no interest. I could dye my hair green and pierce my nose and the reaction would be “so what”—not “Old Victor Hanson out there on Mountain View Avenue finally went crazy.”

You can imagine Hanson walking the streets of Palo Alto, the heedless sea of humanity coursing around him, and thinking, "I could dye my hair green, pierce my nose -- no one would say a word!" Who knows what else he could do! That saloon he just passed is full of harlots, with only liberal sissies to keep them company. And in the alley, bums who would not be missed if they wound up in the river. If he can just get to the lamppost and back without succumbing...

Hanson also has one up at National Review inspired by that study of white working-class people in trouble. Of course he blames the "'hands up, don’t shoot,' Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set," and takes care to let us know that black people get all the breaks:

As a professor at California State University, Fresno, over some 21 years, I had hundreds of conversations with working-class white kids from Merced to Bakersfield, who had stellar academic records in the humanities and who wished to go to top law schools or Ph.D. programs. I ended up offering them roughly the following caveat: “I’m afraid the chances of you as a white male from Fresno State being admitted to a top program are almost nil.” I was being neither alarmist nor nihilist, but simply reflecting the experience of my own lobbying efforts for brilliant students to gain admittance to top-ranked graduate programs.

Which is why university faculties and corporate boardrooms are chock-full of black people, while whitey must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Unless he has a sweet half-the-week-in-the-city gig.