THIS YEAR'S GIRLS.

There's always something creepy about Republicans offering what I am accustomed to call Advice From Your Mortal Enemies, but in the wake of the two Democratic Presidential debates this week they've managed to make it creepier with their encomia to weirdos Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard. It's not just the interplay with the rightwing operatives pushing Williamson and Gabbard in online polls, though that's weird enough; it's their passive-aggressive insistence that these fringe candidate could lead the party to sanity and victory if only Democrats weren't such losers.

Since Libertarians Are The Worst let's start with Christian Britschgi at Reason:

While the rest of the candidates at the first Democratic debate tonight have been doing their best to out-socialist each other, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has been trying to keep the country out of war.

Save us from those famous neocon-socialist hawks Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi! Ha, kidding, he maybe means these guys:

Gabbard's position contrasts with the positions of other Democratic candidates on stage. Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) was the lone debate participant to say that he would not automatically re-enter the Iran deal worked out by President Obama, suggesting a better deal could be had. 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) said that, while she favored reentering the deal, she would like to push for stricter terms. Klobuchar also stressed that if a war with Iran were to occur, it would require congressional authorization.

Stricter terms! Better deal! Well, that couldn't possibly be look-tough bullshit for the moderate wing, it has to be socialist bloodlust. But wait -- how do we know Gabbard isn't a socialist? After all, she's standing up there with all those socialists and not wearing a dollar-sign pin nor quoting Ayn Rand. Here's the best Britschgi can do:

That Gabbard was willing to duck a softball, red meat question about raising wages for women to focus on America's war-making abroad was nonetheless a refreshing moment amidst the otherwise dreary, shockingly left-wing rhetoric from the rest of the Democratic field on stage tonight.

Higher wages for women -- that's how Kennedy got us into Vietnam, right?

Meanwhile at The American Conservative, James Antle III, a buffoon, assures that while Bernie Sanders has "mostly failed to recapture his 2016 magic" (cite needed), Gabbard, "perhaps the most interesting Democrat running for president," has the secret sauce:

While reliably progressive, she has occasionally reached across the political divide on issues like religious liberty and Big Tech censorship, a potent combination that could prove more responsive to Trump voters’ concerns than what we’ve heard from her neocon lite interlocutor from Youngstown.

By "religious liberty” I assume Antle means she ragged on Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono for questioning anti-abortion crusader Brian Buescher, now comfortably ensconced on the federal bench, on his Knights of Columbus membership during his Senate hearing, which she called anti-Catholic bigotry; by "Big Tech censorship" I assume he means her lawsuit against Google, a tedious tactic of Republican cry-babies that she has adopted and promoted on Tucker Carlson's show.

Antle affects to believes that Democrats' failure to take Gabbard up is because their party "cares more about wokeness than war." Think of all those Social Justice Warriors who want to abolish ICE and invade Iran!

As for Williamson, well, let's just stick with the always good for a laugh Rod Dreher:

Russian Orthodoxy treasures the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” an ascetic who behaves in ways that seem insane to normal people, but who, in so doing, reveal Christian truth. The New Age guru and Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is not a holy fool according to the usual definition, but I can’t help thinking that to some extent, she’s playing that role. We all love to laugh at her, because she is something of a kook … but she’s onto something important about us. 

In last night’s Democratic debate, Williamson spoke of the “dark psychic force” of “collectivized hatred” that Donald Trump draws up and exploits. Here’s the clip... 

I know: ha ha, what a ding-dong! But she’s not wrong, except in that she pins this entirely on Trump.

In other words, the holy fool is absolutely right about Trump being evil, except she doesn't realize that evil is also Al Sharpton, and since TV commentator Sharpton is, like President Trump, the leader of his party, it's all the same really, just like the Republicans were really just as bad as the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and we should all unite to persecute homosexuals.

Can they get the suckers to lemming after one or both of these new Jill Steins? Once upon a time I would have said God doesn't hate us that much yet, but now I'd say it's a toss-up.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's accusations against Obama, and the unbecoming swiftness with which conservatives went along with them. I literally haven't seen any big-time rightwing guys (besides the ones like Max Boot and David Frum who have already given up on him) waving this one off; it seems everyone's either crossed or paused at the Rubicon, and those who've crossed will go for anything, no matter how nuts.

Lots of outtakes. I have to say I'm impressed with Mike Pence's nerve in demanding an apology from AP for revealing his wife's AOL screen name -- in the story where they revealed Pence botching his email worse than Hillary Clinton ever did.  Thus he managed to make the story about them rather than his own malfeasance -- which just shows that Trump's not the only grade-A shitheel at the highest levels of government. (I'm also impressed with the way Benny Johnson took the opportunity to cement himself to Pence's jock; boy, that's one guy will never miss a meal.)

Admirable too is the message discipline -- to use the polite term -- of the lower-order Trumpkins. Here's a shittweet ("[emoji] Well well well looks like Hillary knew about the wiretap [emoji] she tweeted about it one week prior to the election [emoji]") promulgating a Gateway Pundit item, "Hillary Was Tipped Off On Trump Wiretap – Tweeted About it One Week Prior to Election." If you read that item -- which is more than most people will do, and that includes the ones who will later claim it to be revealed truth -- you will find that Clinton was "tipped off" by... an article at Slate which was actually about computer analysts unconnected to Clinton who found suspicious activity on a Trump server. But it doesn't have to make sense -- it just has to have the right keywords, and smell. Throw in a few unrelated slurs ("TGP reported earlier that the first FISA request came right after AG Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton on the tarmac") and you'll got the political equivalent of a false memory.

That's not even counting the guys who post a headline like "Paul Ryan Confirms Obama Wiretapped Trump Illegally" and then reproduce an interview in which Ryan says the exact opposite. The lack of even rudimentary creativity is the closest thing to an actual abyss I've looked into in some time.

Kudos also to Jonathan S. Tobin for the “advice from your mortal enemies” winner of the week: “If Democrats Aren’t Careful, Russia Could Become Their Benghazi.” Pffft, thanks, pal!

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES.

Offering assistance in his hour of need to Barack Obama is Daniel Pipes.

I wrote an article in NRO three and a half years ago, at a low moment in Obama’s first term, when his ratings tanked and his party had just lost Edward Kennedy’s senate seat to a Republican, that suggested that Obama could “salvage his tottering administration” by taking “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.” He could do well and do good, I offered, by taking out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. 

Well, as the world knows, he did not follow my advice.

And he was convincingly reelected.

But the time has come to crank it out again at a moment when Obama seems close to imploding...

I assume the real purpose of his post is to tell the world, "I still exist and my answer to everything is still 'Kill Arabs.'"

UPDATE. Commenters tell me the punchline should be "Kill Muslims." Quite right, will remember that for the second show.

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. Oh, isn't that nice: Miss Peggy Noonan is offering to write a speech for Hillary Clinton at The Wall Street Journal. It starts:

Look, let's be frank. A lot of politics is spin, for reasons we can all write books about. I'm as guilty as anyone else. But right now I'm in the fight of my life, and right now I'm not winning. I'm up against an opponent who's classy and accomplished and who has captured the public imagination. I've had some trouble doing that...

The column is full of imagined statements and interior monlogues by the former First Lady. I wonder if Noonan keeps a Hillary doll at the table where she takes her morning "tea."

Whenever I feel out of sympathy with Clinton, a Peggy Noonan column can always get me back on her side. If Clinton gets the nomination, I hope the Journal takes Noonan's column daily. It may be the best chance the Democrats will have.

WHAT DO THE DRUMS SAY, JONATHAN? The recent contentiousness of the Democratic race has emboldened conservatives to hope that, should Clinton take the nomination, she will be abandoned in the fall by Obama supporters angry at her gutter tactics. Some of their operatives, though, are working the Obama beat, and to them falls the more difficult task of making that candidate look like a loser without making Clinton look like a winner. Jonathan V. Last of the Weekly Standard gamely suggests that Obama's South Carolina results were a little dark. "Obama received more identity-group solidarity than Clinton did, even among voters who think he may not be electable," he writes. "The Obama camp is desperate not to let this view of the campaign take hold." But Last sees the evidence:

The huge crowd his victory rally cheered wildly when one of the networks broadcast on the loudspeaker that Obama got 25 percent of the white vote. They began chanting "Race doesn't matter! Race doesn't matter!" A few second later, the campaign killed the TV feed and began pumping in gospel music. It's the first time I've heard them do that--normally they play a steady diet of hipster pop, heavy on the U-2 and KT Tunstall.

Ungawa! Later, in an update:

But what is troubling about tonight is that Obama was unwilling to tell people an obvious truth: that while white voters have supported him in great numbers (elsewhere, if not in South Carolina), black voters have so far been unwilling to support his white opponents. Again, that's not his fault; and it may not even mean anything significant.

But it surely means something that Obama was so bent on denying this fact that he turned his victory speech into an attempt to convince voters of something obviously untrue. One of Obama's frequent promises in his stump speech is that he is willing to tell voters hard truths, even if they don't want to hear it. That wasn't the case tonight.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Obama should have told them that. We may put this down under the general heading of More Advice from Your Mortal Enemies. And if Obama gets the nomination, we'll see some form of it resurrected, maybe under the heading Black Ops.

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. Some weeks ago, ferociously anti-"raghead" Gates of Vienna waged white jihad on Keith Ellison, a Muslim and a Democratic candidate for Congress. "Minnesota, weep for your children," said Dymphna. "This candidate is a piece of work." "Mr. Ellison’s fealty does not lie with the U.S. Constitution," said Baron Bodissey. (Yes, these are their names -- they're into Nordic roleplay.) "...his past, plus his present associations, most definitely point in the direction of 'Koran First, Constitution Second.'"

Well, now Piece-of-Work Ellison is Congressman Ellison -- sworn in on a Ko-ran, by Odin's codpiece! -- and Dymphna is offering him advice: take a stand on "the plight of women under sharia law — especially in Iran and Pakistan..."

The cause is commendable, though the utility of a freshman Congressman's denunciations would be in this case probably nil, at best. Still, Dymphna calls for Ellison to speak out, because -- get this -- "your public stance on the predicament of Muslim women is vital to the progress of reforming the view many Americans have of Islam at the moment."

Gates of Vienna (an "Islamophobic and Proud of It" button featured on its sidebar) offering to help Keith Ellison improve the image of Islam in America! By Loki's ampallang, that's a good one.

MORE HELPFUL ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. Our current headline, or some variation of it, has been used here before in posts about Republican Routine 23 -- which is: Tell, in a tone more of sorrow than of anger, how your good, good friends the Traitors have err'd, and how they might be savéd by accepting your well-meant counsel.

The current iteration has to do with New York State's judicial decision against same-sex marriage. Several conservatives are telling gay not-quite-citizens that this defeat is really a victory, as it will someday (don't ask how or when) lead to gay marriage.

John Podhoretz acknowledges that, seen in a short-sighted way, the ruling looks like a loss for his pro-homo opponents -- but he insists that for them it's really "A Lucky Loss." Declaring "I am not a supporter of gay marriage," Podhoretz yet maintains that "supporters of gay marriage should hail yesterday's decision by the state Court of Appeals not to legalize same-sex unions - indeed, perhaps those supporters more than anyone else."

Sounds like something out of an old puzzle-book, like "I'm my own grandpaw. Who am I?" Actually it's the usual malarkey whereby conservatarians claim to have nothing against unlimited abortions and open faggotry so long as they are the will of the people as expressed by laws, and not some black-robed tyrants' idea of a so-called Constitutional Right.

Podhoretz tells gay folk that they shouldn't desire short-term rights from a ruling, because legislation is "the only way to ensure that that gay marriage achieves the status its backers desire." And Podhoretz will be fighting you every step of the way -- but don't be mad, it's not like it's about anything important! See you at the after-party!

So pleased is Podhoretz with this sophistry that he decides to go for politically-incorrect broke in the objective correlative:

Gay-marriage advocates often liken their struggle to the civil-rights movement. Well, consider the following contrast. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court nobly ruled that "separate but equal" education was unconstitutional - a view that did the justices enormous credit. But what happened in its wake? Open revolt in the South. Black schoolchildren assaulted. The National Guard mobilized just to ensure kids could enter the school buildings of Little Rock. Riots in Alabama and Mississippi as their universities were forced to open their doors to all.

No doubt anticipating a "Springtime for Hitler, Scene 1" reaction from readers whose minds had not yet been turned into harmless glue, Podhoretz later says some nicer things about Brown vs. Board of Education. But it's not very convincing. Surprisingly, some people find it harder to be charitable when they're winning.

You can see more of this sort of bullshit from alleged gay marriage supporters all over the web. We have an Althouse cheer (it'll stop the DMA!), and a Gay Patriot huzzah (it'll get our people to work on lobbying!). There's something for everyone here, it seems. Why, you wouldn't know there was any downside at all, were it not for all those gay people mourning (or, as Gay Patriot would have it, "reacting in a juvenile manner" to) the latest reminder that America thinks they're less than human.

I sort of love this idea that homosexuals shouldn't want any rights until they are the sort of rights of which their mortal enemies approve. Reminds me of that old Beyond the Fringe bit in which a politician argues with a condemned man about the death penalty:

"Surely you don't want to be cooped up for the rest of your life."

"Yes, I want to be cooped up for the rest of my life!"

"Come, come, now, you're playing with words."

For the most part, the people pretending that this decision is great news for gay marriage don't actually give a shit about gay marriage. It is interesting that they like to pretend otherwise. If I were a little more of a Pollyanna (okay, a fuck of a lot more of one), I might suspect it meant they were capable of shame. Unfortunately for my faith in my fellow man, I know something about marketing, and how much may be gained by interests who can confer on consumers unjustified, inflated feelings of self-worth.

FRIENDLY ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES, #345,446. Michael Totten explains, "So here's my advice to American liberals: If you want to win elections against the Republicans, strike the Islamists."

Here are a couple of quotes from John Kerry, Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States in 2004: "I believe in being strong and resolute and determined. And I will hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are." "Yes, we have to be steadfast and resolved, and I am. And I will succeed for those troops, now that we're there. We have to succeed. We can't leave a failed Iraq."

Shortly before the election, Kerry also said of Osama Bin Laden, "He's a barbarian, killer, assassin and terrorist. And what he'd better understand is, and what everybody had better understand is, we are united as Americans in our determination to hunt him down and capture and kill him. And that's what we're going to do."

It didn't seem to do him much good with the values voters. Maybe they forgot who Osama Bin Laden is, or were more focused on homosexuals who wish to marry.

Totten also counsels, "as long as the Terror War rages, if you keep lashing out at Republicans they will continue to beat you." There's a novel approach! Can't wait to see how the "Who are we to argue?" approach to political debate works out next election.

Elsewhere in War-on-Whatever Liberal Land, Jeremy Brown makes common cause with "Righties who bitterly reject social Darwinism and the fostering of fascist client states." Unfortunately, but understandably, he provides no names.

For comic relief we have a correspondent quoted by the Ole Perfesser, of the I-didn't-leave-the-Demmycrats-they-left-me stripe (he even invokes Scoop Jackson!), who lays out a Hillary scenario for '08: "If she tells the coastal cultural elites that they are the ones who are out of step with the country, then tones down her socialistic one payer health insurance scheme from 1993-4 and repeats her husband's line about abortion (safe, legal and rare) she could win in 2008."

Of course, the fella adds, "I would not be happy with that outcome, because I wouldn't believe her if she said those things..."

Democrats: remember the scene in Animal House where Otter goes, "Greg, look at my thumb... gee, you're dumb"? Good.

HELLO, SUCKERS. Brendan Miniter's latest is the lowest sort of hackwork -- no surprise there -- offering advice to Democrats from their mortal enemies -- no surprise there either -- which includes adopting Republican policies -- damn, Roy, why you writin' 'bout this shit? Well, friends, because one passage would be very astute indeed if only a few of its words were changed:

It's time to let Democrats in on a little secret. America is a land of perpetual rebirth and reform--always has been. That's why George W. Bush gets a pass on whatever he did before he found Jesus and swore off drinking. And it's why Bill Clinton received the benefit of the doubt over his "youthful indiscretions" in 1992. And it is why John Kerry probably would have been given a pass on his anti-Vietnam War activities, if only he could plausibly claim to have seen the error in calling his fellow veterans war criminals and equating America with communist Vietnam.

The words to be changed, of course, are "perpetual rebirth and reform." If the word "suckers" is used in their place, the whole thing makes much more sense.

Set aside that most of what these guys recommend for the Dems is every bit as helpful as what Tweety Bird might suggest to Sylvester. What should be offensive to any Democrat, even a nominal one such as myself, is the very idea that we crave victory so desperately that any avenue to it, including total refutation of any principle whatsoever, would be attractive to us. That they feel so is obvious, but True Sons of Liberty should deal with their attempts to drag us down to their level as a gentleman might deal with the immoral suggestions of a common bounder: a swift brush-off and a word with the constable.

I'm sure there are people in the Party for whom winning is the only thing, because it is their job, God bless 'em. As previously noted, I am absolved of that responsibility, but, all appearances to the contrary, that doesn't mean that I am totally disinterested, nor that I can't see how more people could be turned toward the light in future elections, even without recourse to the tactics of political plug-uglies and cutpurses.

So my proposal would be that every Democrat go to the hinterlands and spread the gospel of critical thinking. I would suggest that we teach these skills to our children (don't leave it to the schools; they aren't equipped for, or inclined toward, such a program), but as we liberals are always having abortions and whatnot, we are understaffed in that regard, and so must extend the blessings of logical analysis, wide reading, and the entertainment of unfamiliar ideas to those outside our families, covens, polyamorous clusters, etc.

As Miniter's modus shows, idiocy is the Republicans' greatest ally. They have discovered that while, as their last good President said, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough of them to make the effort worthwhile. When we act against them, they simply dangle the appropriate colored ribbons and shiny baubles over the idiot patch, and their voters dance away our hopes. So we must go another way, and diminish their voters' susceptibility to this kind of mind control.

Thus we solve the twin problems of the Party -- an insufficient number of voters, and contempt for the electorate -- at one swoop.

This is missionary work of a sort, but we should pursue it gently and Jesuitically, offering the truth as a gift. Lend a David Sedaris book to an unemployed machinist who thinks his layoff had less to do with multinational malfeasance than with homosexuals. When he asks you why the hell you think that freaky shit is funny, paint a rapturous vision of life with a liberal arts degree. If necessary, mention that literary chicks are easy and someone's always got weed at their parties. He'll come around.

If we all put our shoulders to this wheel, we shall make salons of the TGIFs and Piggy Wigglys, the BPOE chapters will start up book clubs, and Democrats will have a chance even in the reddest of jurisdictions.

If this doesn't work, and the Party and the country wind up not just fucked but ass-fucked thanks to my harebrained idea, at least I'll have established my cred as a political operative and assured myself a spot on CNN News. So long, suckers!

STYLE SHEET. Let me draw your attention to one of the commentators struggling over Jane Galt's now-thoroughly-discredited (by Wampum -- thanks, Atrios, for the tip) article, "Are the Democrats Effectively Discriminating Against Minorities?":

Let me add my impression (and this may just be the result of me sucumbing to lying GOP propoganda, but as a data point it *is* my impression), liberal activists do see to seem to be especially vehement and zealous in their denunciations of conservatives when they are also minorities. My impression is of a desperate desire to maintain a near monopoly of minority official among Democrats, and a visceral hatred of minority conservatives as being an affront to the universe. If this is not just Republican propoganda, then Democrats and liberals need to rethink how they present their arguments...

This follows a phenomenon I've observed before, Friendly Advice from Mortal Enemies: the Right suggesting to the Left ways in which the Left can more effectively get their message across to people.

Sometimes, as here, the idea is to displace responsibility for bad arguments onto one's opponent: I know I haven't proven it , now you disprove it! Nice try, buddy.

More often, though, the gambit is much simpler. The latest variation is to find, or pretend to be (hard to tell which in most cases), a disaffected Democrat, former or inexplicably current, who won't vote for Democrats, and who goes on to explain how the Democrats can become more Republican so he/she can vote for them.

Today Andrew Sullivan has another one of those gee-look-what-I-found letters in which he specializes, beginning thusly: "If any of the Democrats want to win, they will need to get my vote..." This person claims to have voted twice for Clinton and worked for Gore (!), yet now considers him/herself a "September 11 Republican" and believes her former party of "hates the South, the West, anything not New York (I'm from New York, so I can say that) or San Francisco, or anyone who feels proud flying the American flag."

That's quite a turnaround -- practically schizoid. Sullivan's got another one here -- from someone saying he/she is related to a Democrat who now cries (swear to God) "Thank God Gore lost!"

There are plenty of these floating around, but my favorite is this one from PhotoDude's comments. This correspondent seems more reliably genuine than Sullivan's, in the sense that he actually exists, I think, and has a name, Bruce Webster, and a web site (the ultimate proof of authenticity!). But his political gambit is similarly curious. He considers himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat," and it sounds like old Henry is the last Democrat he actually voted for: "I voted for Bush in 2000," he proudly avers. "I’ll vote for him again in 2004." Indeed, he only remains a Democrat "out of stubbornness."

So he seems lost to the fold -- yet he insists on lecturing the Dems as if they were the wayward children: "Sadly, I think it will take a crushing loss to lead the Democratic Party to remake itself, to realize that it has become the party of intolerance and exclusion and special interests, and that the Republican Party is becoming the party of inclusion and tolerance and leadership (sort of)."

This is a little like saying, "I came to believe that the Catholic Church is a tool of Satan, and since 1972 have attended only fundamentalist services. I regularly denounce the Church as the Whore of Babylon. Yet I still belong to Our Lady of Good Counsel parish. I'm just stubborn that way."

Come to think of it, maybe Sullivan wrote this one too.

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser suggests that people think of Democrats as doormats, and counsels that they behave like doormats if they want to win elections.

Does anyone believe this shit? (Pretending to believe it doesn't count. P.S. to Derbyshire: if you schlubs are "the Daddy Party," I hope you have a fucking huge therapy trust fund laid up for the kids.)