FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: BIDEN GETS THE FORMULA EDITION

Absence of Malice!

 I was too busy with work to watch the State of the Union, but from the clips I’ve seen Biden was far from the doddering dotard Republicans and the prestige press (but I repeat myself) have spent years painting him as. Apparently their “pivot” is that Biden was on drugs! 

Given that the Trump White House pharmacy under the leadership of Dr. Ronny “Feelgood” Jackson was throwing around uppers and downers like beads at Mardi Gras, and that Tubby himself is an obvious user, you might say it’s projection, but I begin to think it’s the only explanation they can fathom. For why, in their view, would anyone get so excited about traditional Democratic policies that help less fortunate Americans get ahead? It’s got to be drugs! 

UPDATE. All the rightwing talking heads are getting into the act. Erick Erickson claims Biden's speech was "supplement fuelled." And get this, from the Washington Times:

A psychiatrist who has worked with elderly dementia patients said President Biden exhibited signs of stimulant use to mask cognitive decline in his amped-up, aggressive State of the Union speech on Thursday.

Mr. Biden, 81, often raced through his remarks with the speed of an auctioneer, loudly shouting his words despite having a microphone in front of him.

Speed and volume of speech can be a sign of using Adderall or another amphetamine, said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist based in Beverly Hills, California.

You can find Lieberman elsewhere on the internet calling herself "America's Psychiatrist" and posting gibberish like this:

As Lorenzo Semple DuBois said in The Producers: They try... ok, how they try! 

Readers of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down know that for years I’ve been doing sketches in which “The Formula” – a mix of cocaine, Adderall, ketamine, and Lord knows what – is used by Trump’s handlers to keep him upright. (I’ve even got a few with Biden in them; here’s one I think you might enjoy under the circumstances.)

The cherry on the SOTU Sunday was Senator Tradwife’s rebuttal. As has been pointed out, her delivery is only bizarre if you’re unacquainted with the “fundie baby” voice with which evangelicals project winsomeness to cloak their theocratic intentions. But maybe now that ordinary Americans have gotten a load of it on national TV they’re starting to realize how fucking weird that whole crew is. 

I mentioned Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which is a subscriber service – but as usual on Fridays I have a few free issues for you joy-poppers.  Feast your eyes! 

First, another of my recurring features – political talk show Received Opinion with your host Bolt Upright – in which Bolt asks whether Kyrsten Sinema’s departure from public life (the less-remunerative non-lobbyist part of it, anyway!) is yet another example of the sad death of comity and compromise in Washington, which in Bolt’s view and the view of all network chuckleheads are values to be treasured above democracy, equity, and everything else. 

Also: My annual Oscar predictions! Yes, once again I’m indulging my sick interest in this festival of glamour and hubris!  I’m already getting cold feet about my Adapted Screenplay pick, but by and large I think I’ve got something worth risking $5 in a pool. (That statement implies no responsibility if you lose the house! Wager responsibly!) 

JUST WHAT MAGA V. TAYLOR SWIFT NEEDED: A LITTLE TOUCH OF DREHER!

It can’t last, so let’s all ride this MAGA Declares War on Taylor Swift thing to clicksville while the iron’s hot, shall we? Here’s a rare midweek freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, with a ripped-from-today’s-headlines account of the anti-Swift nerve center at Mar-a-Lago. Strictly for laffs! 

As I repeatedly remind you folks, conservative politicians and political writers have entirely abandoned policies and even normal constituent service in favor of lunatic culture war crap like this. Entertainers most of us think of as That Guy In that Movie or That Girl on Spotify are to them as demons sent to Make Everything Woke. This goes for the rightwing intelli-ma-lectuals like Victor Davis Hanson as well as humble clickbait farmers (“The Top 5 Most Overrated Liberal Comedians”), but also for bigtimers like the New York Times' David French, one of those conservatives who liberals simps think is OK, and author of a hair-raisingly weird Prince obituary (“For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience…”).

I didn’t think this Swift thing could get any nuttier but I hadn’t counted on Rod Dreher. I’d more or less stopped paying attention to him since his nervous breakdown and departure from The American Conservative, but my attention was called to his latest Substack item, “Among the Swifties” – and if you sense a reference of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs there, claim your prize because Dreher does indeed compare the young female fans of Taylor Swift to the soccer hooligans in Buford’s book:

Here is Buford himself, reflecting on what he learned about crowd dynamics by watching a thug leader he calls “Mutton Chops” at work…

This is interesting. It says that we cannot entirely blame Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or any other “leader” who holds sway over a crowd; the crowd’s latent desire for someone to create them manifested in those individual figures being propelled to leadership. Don’t misread Buford here; he’s not absolving crowd leaders of their actions…

Someone should ring Buford and ask him if he absolves Taylor Swift of her crimes. 

To put it in Buford’s terms: there was a huge crowd of young females who shared a common emotional experience (“the collective female unconscious”) that settled on Taylor Swift, a supremely gifted creator of pop songs, as their leader. Taylor Swift played her role, of course, but Buford would say that Swift was summoned by the latency within the crowd that would later become Swifties.

I bet Dreher imagines “Swifties” as rampaging Valkyries doing Wokeness to the innocent. The thing’s full of howlers, with patented Dreherisms like his regret that he cannot experience the “liberating pleasure of ego death” he imagines sports, Swift, and Trump fans enjoy – “The only time I’ve ever had that experience as part of a crowd was at the U2 concert in Baton Rouge…” The jokes just write themselves! Nonetheless I had a go at REBID, if you can use a chuckle, however mordant. 

UPDATE. Finally realizing that maybe this has all been a terrible mistake, some of the conservative Shuck Troopers are trying to turn it around. Washington Times:

We're not nuts, you're nuts! Well, on their readership it could work. Also Erick Erickson is trying his insufficient best:

Never mind that it hurts Donald Trump. Never mind that it makes the Republicans look deeply unserious. Never mind the political fallout. On a day that Cori Bush has been targeted by the Justice Department, a Democrat progressive targeted by Joe Biden's Justice Department, we're all having to talk about the Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce thing because of what these idiots have done online. 

Oh, I'm sure none of them will mind that the Swift Purge is distracting from the fact that the DOJ, which conservatives constantly accuse of being politically weaponized against Republicans just because they did some so-called "crimes," is investigating prominent Democrats like Bush and even charging Democratic Senator Robert Menendez as well. Screening out inconvenient facts is as important to their whole paranoid vision as the manufacture of lunatic fantasies.

UPDATE 2. Lol, I forgot that conservatives have been raging at Swift for at least ten years now. Here's my 2013 post on the Power Line proto-Catturd Hindrocket doing close analysis of Swift wearing a onesie -- is it a comment on Pajama Boy?? And get a load of all the anti-Swift articles at rightweing rat's nest The Federalist: Imagine going to an editor with a pitch like "Taylor Swift’s Disappointing Arc Is Generationally Representative" and having her slam the desk and cry, "THAT'S GOLD, JASHINSKY! GOLD!" Finally, lest we forget: Mark Hemingway's sad boomer review of Swift. Now that's funny! 

THE FIRST SPUTTERS OF INDICTMENT SEASON.

At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I have unlocked a taxonomy of Trump defenses inspired by his latest indictments. There is no need to explicate the brute brayings of guys like Tim Pool, so I confined myself to complainers who try a little spin – not that the spin makes them any more intelligent or convincing; in fact in some ways they’re more pathetic than the dummies yelling “Civil War!” or “Fix!” or “Kill Biden!” because they’re like precocious kids who have just made their first acquaintance with irony and, seeing how favorably some people react to it, try to emulate it without understanding how it works. 

Some of the operatives are already spinning out of control. Erick Erickson has a real lulu. I mention in the REBID item the chronic bothsider reactions of prestige media clucks; well, Erickson, who after all has been employed by CNN, tries his own version of it:

I don’t think Democrats realize how radicalizing it was for Republicans that Barack Obama sued nuns to force them to pay for abortions. Nor do I think Democrats realize how radicalizing it is now for culturally conservative people across races and political parties that they’re pushing transgenderism as hard as they are. They simply do not realize how much of an existential threat they seem to many voters.

They literally sued a bunch of nuns to force them to pay to murder children, which is what abortion is to a great many people.

I don’t think Republicans realize how radicalizing it was for Democrats to see the “character counts” GOP come out for a twice-divorced serial adulterer…

There is blame enough to share, quoth Erickson, between the Trump fans and the baby-murdering nun abusers! Anyway, because he can’t help himself, Erickson repeats the threat popular among his ilk (“Hell is coming for Democrats, most particularly for Joe Biden and members of his family and cabinet. Republicans will pay them back in kind”) and then tries on the Solomon robes and proposes a solution:

The old man on the right must stop trying to get back into the office. And the old man on the left must pardon the old man on the right and bring all pressure to bear on the two state prosecutors, both of whom are Democrats, to stop their prosecutions too.

It’s like a glitchy AI version of The West Wing. Eventually even Erickson stops pretending to believe it could happen and starts raving about Civil War. Once again I must ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

WHO WOULD JESUS STRANGLE?

I have a rare Monday Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie out today, featuring Bible Stories for Conservatives, including the Parable of the Good Samurderer. This is inspired by the recent tendency of conservatives such as Ron DeSantis and the Wall Street Journal editorial board to call Subway Strangler Daniel Perry a “good Samaritan.” 

Many other people have noticed what an insane reversal that is. But it’s to be expected nowadays: First, notwithstanding I know some righteous Christians, the kind you see on TV and in the news – and the many Republican pedophiles chronicled by @antifaoperative and others, and of course holy-rolling propagandists like Erick Erickson – are mostly vicious bastards. When put in a position to be actual Good Samaritans by an influx of immigrants escaping poverty and prosecution, these Christians instead gleefully ship the confused refugees up north and then laugh at the chaos it causes. (At the same time, they constantly holler, over the clatter of their collection plates, that they’re the ones being persecuted.) I tell ya, if I see a crucifix or a Jesus fish on a guy, he’s not getting anywhere near my loved ones or my wallet. 

Also, the prestige press colludes with the idea that killing a guy for yelling on the subway is a rational response – for example, by referring to the Strangler’s actions as “restraining” rather than killing, as if the guy were still alive laughing about how he got away with it like on a cop show. As I’ve said before, many times on the subway I’ve seen tense situations defused by normal common-sense conflict resolution, and none of these ended in death. But for your average suburbanite, who goes from McMansion to SUV to office park and back without ever encountering another human being, let alone a homeless one, it's easy to imagine that the only way to deal with an obstreperous street guy is to kill him. You see these choads online going HE WAS THREATENING and bragging about their gun collections, and you wonder what kind of fucked-up padded existence they live.

UPDATE. Speaking of fake Christians, David French is at the Times to tell us all how dangerous the subway is and how you gotta understand why Penny felt like he had to kill Neely and then EIGHT GRAFS DOWN:

There is no evidence that Neely assaulted anyone...

Nonetheless "The best way to resolve these problems isn’t through jury trials of those, like Penny, who take it upon themselves to intervene" blah blah blah horseshit. These fucking people. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/31/23.

I don't listen to this guy often enough.

Happy Tubby Got Fingered Day! As I mention in today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – released to general population as a commemorative gift – this indictment is no guarantee of justice; we haven’t even seen the full indictment yet, nor do we know what’s coming down the judicial pipe, and one never knows what a jury will do.  But it has shown, in a small way at least, that this alleged untouchable, the princeling of the putzes, is not utterly beyond the law. 

Which of course has the Trumpkins fully flipping out. Along with what you’ll find in the REBID piece, you’ve got U.S. Senator Rand Paul calling for D.A. Alvin Bragg’s arrest, and many other rightwingers, ranging from the Speaker of the House to the lowliest, tiniest-faced propagandists, calling for retaliatory prosecutions with no legal justification. Which just shows how strong their position is! You can find others on the internet crying that this indictment means America is a dictatorship, and soon the True Sons of Liberty will rise up and take down the Dusky Soros Hordes. In other words, Insurrection Attempt II – This Time It’s Hilarious! 

Even worse are the sober-sided Just-the-Tip Trumper types, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who call the indictment “a sad day for America,” sob sob, and insist that in such a case “the evidence should… be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive,” which (though IANAL) seems to be a brand new standard for felony prosecutions. Eventually they get to a slightly more manicured version of the bald threats made by the goon squad:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.

The cheaper the kooks, the gaudier the patter. 

UPDATE. I neglected to mention Erick Erickson's lulu. He advances the same tropes as the rest of them – the indictment “will help Trump immensely,” and “the case is so, so thin that Trump is very likely to get acquitted” (again, the indictment is as yet sealed) – and adds some nonsense of his own: For example, that “independents who don’t care for [Trump] but do not hate him could swing decisively and sympathetically in his direction just as a recession is breaking out. Alvin Bragg could very well have gotten Trump re-elected.” Apparently Erickson had a choice between polling data and his own ass and chose his ass. 

Most remarkably, Erickson also goes out of his way to insult D.A. Alvin Bragg -- and the grand jury: 

Alvin Bragg represents a wing of the Democrat Party that is on the short bus of the party. He’s not very bright. I suspect the grand jurors are just rabid progressives, too, and they are all in the wing of “let’s put the SOB behind bars.” They hate him. They call him vulgarities instead of the President. They just want him in prison, and they’ll do anything to get him there. 

They are not smart enough to consider the ramifications and too blinded by rage against Trump to care.

In a later post Erickson calls Bragg “a dim-witted county district attorney.” I’m sure Erickson’s constituents enjoy hearing the black lawyer and the New York City jurors (whom they probably imagine as the Central Park Five padded out with skels from Death Wish) called stupid, and that's why he's laying it on so thick. I wonder what he’ll do, though, as the wheels of justice slowly grind and he is obliged to up the ante. Maybe he’ll call in the AI that says racial slurs! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/10/23.

I'm a late 20th-Century guy and this is my jam

Omigod it's almost the Oscars! And, as I have been doing for years now, I'm going to try and guess the winners, and as prep have seen nine of the ten Best Picture nominees (I will dutifully see the Tom Cruise thing this weekend and report on it here, though I regard the prospect much as Pee-Wee regarded the snakes in that pet shop fire.)  As a favor to you, my public, I have brought my reviews of those films out from behind the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down paywall so you can read them:  The Fabelmans, Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

As to non-cultural REBID offerings released free of charge for this week, I have just the one, about a National Review author trying to hold aloft that publication’s Conservatives-with-Good-Taste banner while the actual conservatism outside NR’s castle walls grows increasingly vicious and feral. It’s good, of course, but there’s plenty where that came from if you have taste and $7/month (cheap!). 

The week brought more madness in the form of Tucker Carlson’s Selected Shorts from the Jan. 6 Tour-Group Visit to Our Nation’s Capitol. The grift is clear from the lunatic responses to this Dinesh D’Souza tweet: Wingnuts show brief video clips of quiet moments among the mob, then say that proves the hours of mob violence that day – notwithstanding that these are also documented on video – no longer mean anything because “MSM” “lied.”  

If it were an argument it’d be self-refuting -- as it is, it’s just more evidence that conservatism has descended even further: As it has abandoned policy for dumb culture-war stunts, it has also abandoned common sense for magical thinking -- literally looking reality in the face and calling it fantasy, and vice-versa. Which is why our politics now depends on standing up for reason as well as for specific political positions. Fortunately in my case these mostly coincide! 

I did get some encouragement, though, from a new USA Today/IPSOS poll that shows most Americans don’t see what’s so bad about being “woke.” Not sure what other differently-worded or -implemented polls would yield – as we’ve seen from ridiculously loaded polls, like the New York Times one that claimed “some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism” as a sign of rampant cancelculture rather than of ordinary good manners, these things can be rigged or willfully misinterpreted. But it’s nice to know that however many bots and creeps pollute social media with claims that everything from M&Ms to the military is killing us with wokeness, some of us still have our heads on straight.

Another bonus: the poll enraged ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and sent him sputtering to his fanbase with this doozy:

What I find more telling about the country’s true view on the term woke comes from standup comedians who make a living saying out loud what their audience is thinking. From Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Bill Burr to Neal Brennan, almost every progressive comedian is ridiculing woke ideology on progressive platforms like Netflix and Hulu.

Yeah, who cares about a poll of normies when you can get vox populi straight from these rich comedians telling the boomers who paid $200+ a seat to listen to them that something the kids like is bad? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/17/23.

While I produce five days a week of high-quality content at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (go over and have a look, subscribe if you like, it’s mighty good eating for the pennies it costs), productivity at the old alicublog plant has been down a while. I regret it, but between REBID and my other editorial work there’s not much room left for bodily functions, let alone the kind of funsies for which this site became known back in 1953, when “blogs” rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line and, due to their tendency to roll rather than locomote, wound up in the dustbin of history, a short distance down the road to oblivion and turn left. 

But sometimes a red flag can get this old bull to charge. Erick Erickson, a longtime figure of fun in the alicublog rep company, has an even more ridiculous than usual item up today. The headline is:

We Cannot Reject Sabotage On Rail Lines Just Yet

Let us tiptoe past Erickson’s long preliminary yammerings about how Joe Biden is trying to blame everything on Donald Trump (though given Trump’s rollback of rail freight safety features he’s certainly blameworthy) and Biden LIED about the CHINESE BALLOONS (“The Administration that lied repeatedly about the Chinese spy balloon wants us to trust them on it not being sabotage, just Trump”), and cut to the 19th graf:

The reality is these incidents are probably not sabotage. Buttigieg, for all his whining, has a point. There are many train derailments every year. We’re more sensitive to them now because of media exposure.

This is the next best thing to “it was all a dream.” 

So why was Erickson going on about sabotage? 

But the point is that this Administration regularly tries to blame Donald Trump for everything, has lied repeatedly in the past few weeks about the Chinese spy balloon, has done such a bad job dealing with these issues too many Americans now know the Transportation Secretary’s name, and we simply cannot believe them.

And if “we” (Erickson and his tapeworm, who I gotta say has his work cut out for him) can’t trust Joe Biden, maybe we’ll trust Erick Erickson’s self-refuting innuendos. Oh, and if you took the side-bet on “Hunter Biden’s laptop” being in the story? Collect your winnings. 

But the real prize this week is Peggy Noonan, who has been on fire (regrettably not literally) with her rambling silver-alert takes. This week’s starts with snipage at Nikki Haley, who recently launched her Vice-Presidential (whoops, I mean air-quotes Presidential) campaign:

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

1990? How about the 80s, Peggy, when as Ronald Reagan’s handler you filled his mouth with uplifting bullshit and helped engineer spectacles like Nancy waving at Ronnie on the telescreen at the 1984 Republican Convention? That's when propaganda was propaganda, you young punks! 

Speaking of bullshit, this seems to be about the only thing Noonan likes about Haley: 

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

…until said scramblers-over-the-border get driven back over by Greg Abbott’s vigilantes or dragged up north to use as pawns in a cruel culture-war stunt. Honestly, I can’t imagine even her Republican readers don’t immediately think this. 

Then there’s a long grumble about those horrible ads on the teevee during the Super Bowl – they made America look like “a nation of morons” (don’t bother waiting for the penny to drop, guys), whereas back in the day they had Mean Joe Greene being all nice and cuddly for Coke and that was the real America, real Ronnie-and-Nancy koochie-koo kitsch, not this nutty, noisy stuff:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.” 

Sorry, lady, but would you like a new car, soft drink, or diabetes management app? These are the damn ads. I’m convinced Noonan was just turned off by all the rock and rap (“the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance”). It's a miracle the Journal kept her from fulminating on Rihanna. Look, Grandma, they aren’t pitching this shit to me, either, but I know better than to Blame Society.

Oh, but her closing… man; she gets on Will Smith and starts pitching to write his Oscar 2023 speech:

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment…

Two more grafs of this! I give it five barf bags! I doubt Noonan is even expecting the call (though I love imagining her on the phone, pinching her nose, and droning “This is Miss Noonan’s answering service”); I expect the play is to wait for Smith to deliver what promises to be a perfectly anodyne and expected (though less white!) apology-like spew, and then sigh contentedly: “Ahhh, he took my advice!”

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 1/27/23.

The Dean put these Ukrainian guys at #1 on his 2022 List --
Not sure about that, but this one's a kick.

•  Today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – available free now, as a gift to the nation! – is the inaugural column of Hiram P. Galligash at the Washington Post. Hiram is just the latest manifestation of the new direction in the Post’s opinion journalism represented by its recent hire of two National Review alumni, Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Both of them suck, but unlike previous, spectacularly absurd prestige media hires like Megan McArdle at the Post, Jonah Goldberg at CNN, David French at the Times, Kevin D. Williamson (briefly!) at the Atlantic, etc., neither is especially noteworthy except as a milestone in the decline of expensive opinion journalism. Geraghty is a hack whose prose is as impoverished as the ideas it promotes, as in this one about how would-be refugees from countries we blew to smithereens should take it somewhere else:

Geraghty was a Just-the-Tip Trumper pioneer -- “Yes, Donald Trump is a flawed messenger for the case against Hillary Clinton,” he wrote when Trump got the 2016 nomination, “but that doesn’t make the message any less true or compelling.” And like many deskbound rightwingers, he likes to cry about the Crisis of Masculinity -- though to his credit, rather than pretend to be a stevedore he pleads for butchness in the sedentary arts:

Even when guys do something that seems sedentary — video games, chess, board games — they’re often bringing a competitive spirit to it, an eagerness to demonstrate that they stand out at a particular activity. You could even argue that arguing on the Internet is a form of competition.

Tiddly-winks is, too, a sport! And there’s the one from 2021 in which Geraghty tries to get you to sympathize with billionaires because, like you, they could be audited: “This morning it’s pretty clear that your tax return is confidential, as long as no one at the IRS thinks it is newsworthy. But if they do, you’re screwed.” (Kind of like the current “87,000 IRS agents” bullshit – Gergahty’s a prophet of hackdom!)

Dems are the Real Racist beat? Check: “Senate Democrats’ Short-Lived Opposition to All White Biden Nominees.” (And yeah, Geraghty was also one of the conservatives who claimed George Floyd protesters were spreading COVID: “New York City has nearly 379,000 cases. Do you think none of those people attended any of the protests across the city in the past week?”) Speaking of wingnut hack protocols, here’s his October 11, 2022 column, “The Red Wave Gathers.”

Ponnuru is a less clumsy writer than Geraghty, though he is capable of great absurdities when animated by his bugbears – like abortion, the subject of his book The Party of Death (guess who!); when Kansas smacked down an anti-abortion referendum last year, for example, Ponnuru consoled his readers by claiming the land of Sam Brownback and Operation Rescue was “by no means a pro-life state” (similarly, Boston is not a big college town).  

But while Ponnuru has many other terrible opinions, his specialty is wonkish “reformcon” conservatism, of the sort evinced in his inaugural Post column about the debt ceiling that Galligash mentions, and which, as I have told you good people time and time and again, is in the post-coherence Trumpian GOP increasingly irrelevant -- except as cover for editors who wish to portray conservatism as an important intellectual movement rather than an elephant-shaped tarp thrown over American fascism.  

Hiram, in my view, represents a new frontier in conservative opinion – though, come to think of it, is he really any worse than Erick Erickson? Opinions vary! 

•  Also free for y’all (all this can be yours five days a week, the Tempter says, if you will only subscribe!): Scenes from the recent investigation of the Supreme Court Dobbs draft decision leak. Well, I laughed. 

•  Just gonna add a little something here: You remember the news earlier this month about the revision in the Missouri legislature dress code requiring women to cover their shoulders? (This is a state, btw, with some of the strictest anti-abortion legislation in the country.)

When I mentioned it to people back then and some of them said, oh don’t be silly, it’s just a little thing and a woman proposed it so don’t make a big deal of it.

Well, this is new from Florida:

Republican leadership of the Florida House has posted flyers throughout the Capitol showing what to wear — and perhaps more strikingly, what not to wear.

The flyer breaks down a dress code for three different scenarios — when in the chamber, when Members are in the building, and when Members are not in the building. The required attire is, not surprisingly, most formal when in the House chamber.

What sticks out though, is the requirement that women never show their shoulders when House Members are present in the building, whether in the chamber or not. 

I’m sure some people will say this is nothing, really, too. But it’s interesting that, in what under the thuggish wingnut/censor DeSantis has become the most fascism-forward Southern state (and that’s saying something), the Republican legislative leadership is “posting flyers” telling the ladies in the workplace to cover up. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

God save your mad parade.

 (Note: Contrary to custom, the freebie links are at the end.)

Funny, I’m actually susceptible to royal drama. I remember the scenes around Victoria’s death in PBS’ dramatization of The Forsyte Saga – the maid crying out, “it’s the Queen, mum, the poor old Queen – she’s dead!”; the archival footage of the cortege, and the infirm Old Soames tottering to his feet: “Don’t care to be seated when the Queen is passing.” I even felt a little blush of sentiment in Frears’ The Queen when the little girl proffers Liz the flowers and says “they’re for you,” notwithstanding the real meaning of the scene is that foxy Tony’s scheme worked a charm.

But I’m not so depraved that I can’t also enjoy some good Dead Queen jokes, and apart from Irish Twitter the funniest have been unintentional – that is, the puffed-up boo-hoos of reactionaries who halted, as if by reflex, their usual smackdowns and slurs on the poor and underprivileged to blow their noses over Betty Saxe-Coburg and talk about the Passing of the Old Order. For example, Andrew Sullivan:

For my impertinent reply I got a week off Twitter. Worth it! 

Sadly I can’t slap ‘em all. Erick Erickson, for example, glurges that the people cracking wise at the Queen’s death are all snooty liberals. He seems particularly incensed at the black ones, whom he angrily accuses of anger; “undoubtedly,” he fumes, “they also understand their careers are what they are because of white progressive elite head-patters, and it makes them angrier.” Hey, give Erick credit – he learned a variation on “liberal plantation”! But the rest of the shtick is musty as hell – “the left is increasingly cloistered inside a bubble of their own making,” blah blah blah – though nothing in the thing is more sick-making than his attempts at funerary prose: 

Truly, I have no words to add to the hundreds of thousands already written about the death of Elizabeth II. I can only offer my prayers. Her shoes are too big for anyone to fill, so I will also pray all of us can give King Charles the grace to walk in his own shoes in his own way, unshackled from the expectations left by our memories of his predecessor, his mother, the Queen. In the shadow of his mother’s crown for so long, he now comes into the light beneath its weight on his head and its burdens on his shoulders as he and his people mourn Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. What a time.

As their eyes pass over this, I doubt even the people who take Erickson seriously are paying close attention, and it registers merely as a gush of So Sad So Sad God Save & Are Eye Pee. But for those of us who can’t help ourselves, it conjures vision of King Charles III trying out one of his thousands of pairs of shoes with a renewed sense of purpose (and a great fat book on his head, to improve his posture), and Erickson, squeezed into an equerry costume, bawling out the late Queen’s honorifics at a suburban barbecue. 

I’m grateful that old Bess stood up to the Nazis with whom her wicked Uncle liked to party, and can even understand how the durability of her reign gave very old people some sense of continuity and stability, and that it must be rough to lose it. But most of us do not have such a sense, because the world has been getting worse for a long time and dragging our hope and fortunes down with it; and in that light the bejeweled lady hanging in there year after year to greet one horrible knob after another, then bidding them cheerio as they went out to fuck up England and the world some more, doesn’t seem so much a comfort as a cruel joke.

That’s why the jokes are funny. And speaking of jokes, I have a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on the subject – accept it please in the spirit of the occasion (and tell your friends, since, ahem, I can’t tweet the link). And while you’re at it, read and enjoy the previous one about people who think liberal arts degrees are bad because they don’t make you rich.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Holland. Dozier. Holland.

•  Did a little something at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down on that shit-bonkers trend among prestige media clowns of, first, reporting in tones of outrage that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran ads telling Republican primary voters how conservative their most conservative candidates were, and then blaming the DCCC rather than Republican voters when those candidates were nominated.

Megan McArdle is first among equals in mendacity here, dudgeoning that Democrats are willfully making it more likely that the worst Republicans (that is, the ones that are 5% worse than the second-worst) might win if the Democrat loses, and that this shows -- say it with me now -- Both Sides Are The Same ("Democrats can stop asking how Republicans could have sold out their principles and their country in a pathetic grab for some evanescent political advantage. Because now they know"). This will come in handy when McArdle inevitably pimps Yang's Forward Party as the Choice of People Who Want Clean Hands When DeSantis Becomes Dictator.

I complained about this trend a few weeks back when it first rolled out, and noted it then as a clear example of Murc's Law: Only Democrats can have any agency or causal influence over American politics; Republicans are as little children, buffeted hither and thither by Democratic actions, and so cannot be held responsible for anything they do or say. McArdle is apparently a believer:

Which leaves us only with the common deflection: Why blame Democrats instead of the Republican voters who chose a candidate aligned with Trump? I think those voters are grievously mistaken, and should stop supporting the treasonous oaf, or his imitators. But at least they think they’re doing the right thing.

It's like she's chastising Democrats for picking on their slow-witted older brother. The McArdleites on Twitter are even worse, sometimes hilariously so:

Sometimes I feel like Chris in All My Sons. Don't you live in this world? What the hell are you?

•  It's not yet at 8,000 cases but monkeypox is a declared public health emergency in the U.S., which is good because, given how this stupid country has handled COVID, it's clearly going to take all the feds' power to keep idiots from spreading it around. Sadly they can't protect us against weaponized bigotry, which we must expect because of the association of the current outbreak with gay sex. Though monkeypox is mainly spread by physical contact with skin and objects that have come in contact with skin -- like clothing, towels, and furniture -- some assholes are already using it to promote their hoary homo-hate. The loathsome Erick Erickson: 

It really is time to stop trusting the public health establishment.

How could anyone ever trust their claims on vaccine integrity when they lack the integrity to speak truthfully about the spread of monkeypox and demand the necessary actions to stop its spread? They want to bar your kids from school if they don’t take the COVID vaccine with which they’ll still get COVID but could not bring themselves to cancel the kink festival in the actual epicenter of monkeypox for the nation wherein gay hedonists could actually and probably did spread monkeypox. Heck, they even screwed up vaccine distribution for monkeypox.

There follows an absurd misinterpretation of California state senator Scott Wiener's comment on the decision not to close the annual Folsom Street Festival (an ancient rightwing rage-equity), and then:

Wiener, of course, was fine with closing churches, mandating masks, and banning people from going to the beach. He was not fine with people making “their own decisions about their own risk levels” with COVID.

Not being able to abstain from sex for two weeks is a damning indictment of the social order of the left — their pleasure trumps your health and safety. We’re governed by pagans worshipping Moloch and participating in Ashtoreth’s orgies.

Just be ready, because this pox is definitely going to spread faster from this pig-eyed piece of shit to his fellow scumbags than monkeypox. 

HAVE SOME KANSAS COPIUM!

Just a brief look-in to celebrate, not only the voters of Kansas rejecting a Republican-approved referendum that would have enabled an all-out abortion ban, but also the humorous coping strategies of prominent forced-birth advocates. At National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru:

The lopsided result in the referendum is an illustration of first-mover advantage. 

18 points is one hell of a "first-mover advantage."

Kansas (where I grew up) is by no means a pro-life state, but it would probably never have adopted a sweeping abortion-protective constitutional amendment by popular vote. Once the state’s high court effectively amended the state constitution by itself, though, dislodging its mini-Roe by referendum became — as the result suggests – impossible.

Kansas is the home of Operation Rescue and already has heavy abortion restrictions but, to paraphrase Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith on Boston, it’s not a big pro-life state. And the “victory is impossible” tautology is fantastic – why then have the referendum at all? Forced-birthers were very enthusiastic about it, as I recall.

Ponnuru’s colleague Alexandra DeSanctis blames the “confusing” text of the referendum – a gambit employed by Erick Erickson as well – without explaining why the confusion would be all among the putative supporters of the abortion ban rather than the opponents. Is she saying they’re stupid? (Also, she claims opponents were trying to exacerbate this alleged confusion, which is rich considering who was actually caught trying to bamboozle those voters.)

It's not hard. Kansas Republicans wrote the damn referendum question and scheduled the vote to give themselves maximum advantage, and still got wiped out in a heavy-turnout election. Americans don't like what the Supreme Court's rightwing loons did and everywhere they are given a voice in the matter they will say so.

I'll probably have more at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down later but meantime enjoy this bagatelle in which Ben Shapiro decides to do something about this Wet Ass Pussy thing once and for all!  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GUN NUTS ARE NOT SENDING THEIR BEST.

An extremely mild gun control bill is on its way to being further watered down by Republicans and their Blue Dog Democrat enablers in the Senate. That it may pass even in this weakened state is evidence that, post-Uvalde, people who normally wouldn’t challenge gun nuts are convinced that our Business As Usual approach cannot stand.  

So conservative pundit Erick Erickson has rushed to explain that if we pass red flag laws, liberals will be mean to conservatives, and that’s worth any number of shot-up children. He starts with three anecdotes he seems to think will sway his readers, though if you haven’t been soaking in rightwing grievance culture for years you might not be feeling it:

In 2020, while in New York’s Central Park, Amy Cooper called 911 to report an “African-American man” was threatening her. The man, a bird watcher, had asked Ms. Cooper to leash her dog. She refused and called 911. The man, whose last name was also Cooper, recorded the incident, which went viral and cost Amy Cooper her job. She also got charged with a crime, though it was later dismissed at the urging of Mr. Cooper, the bird watcher.

This is an interesting opening, as everyone knows the story and that the woman was clearly trying to sic the cops on the “African-American man” who was not doing anything illegal, for reasons anyone who has lived more than a few years in America will understand. And her firing is not his fault, nor that of Cancelculture Run Amok, but rather an ass-covering move by her employers, empowered by employment laws that no conservative ever challenges.   

Late last week, in Raliegh [sic], NC, Wye Hill, a restaurant and brewery, canceled a reservation for a group of conservative moms who were going to get together at the restaurant. An online progressive activist who calls herself “Katherine 4 Justice” went online to take credit for pressuring the restaurant into canceling the reservation through the use of vague threats.

The “group of conservative moms” is Moms 4 Liberty, an overtly political organization that has been successfully pushing “Don’t Say Gay” laws and book-banning across the country. If Masterpiece Bakery can’t be forced to make a gay wedding cake, I don’t see why a restaurant has to cater to an openly anti-LGBT group. I don’t know what “vague threats” Erickson is referring to but Moms 4 Liberty’s supporters are now calling the restaurant owners and staff “groomers” on Twitter, which given the hair-trigger lunacy of that crowd can be considered an actual threat.

Yesterday, Rep. Eric Swalwell took to Twitter to suggest Ben Shapiro is a lunatic and that a red flag law could be used to stop Shapiro from purchasing a gun.

Swalwell made a very good joke about Half-Pint (“Please tell me this lunatic does not own a gun. Reason 1,578 America needs red flag laws”) that anyone over the age of 12 should understand, but which conservatives, due to misguided political priorities or maybe brain damage, pretend to believe is not a joke but rather an assault on Shapiro’s rights.

The Senate is currently considering red flag laws as part of its measures on gun control…

I am deeply concerned that such laws are going to start being used to attack people because of their political opinions. The left has concluded words are violence. I fear red flag laws will be weaponized by partisans over differences of political opinion.

Given our present politics, people’s willingness to view opponents as enemies, and people’s willingness to use the state, private enterprise, and the mob to exact retribution on those they disagree with, I think we should fundamentally resist a federal red flag law or a federal incentive to embrace red flag laws.

So, to nutshell it: Liberals are so depraved that they will disagree with conservatives, and make jokes about conservatives, and even choose not to voluntarily associate with conservatives, so we should let conservatives of whatever mental state have AR-15s to defend themselves from them.

The NRA must be awfully desperate if this is the shit they’re paying for now.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

We can all feel special on a Saturday night.

I’ve been pretty scrimpy with my free issues of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, since its income is all that’s keeping the Missus and I out of the County Home and I want people to pay for it, not lurk about and wait for me to put some out at the curb like they used to do with day-old bagels at H&H. 

But the Uvulde massacre inspired me to a series of three issues -- one about the immediate and expected declarations that we must do something other than threaten our precious guns, one about an example of our many gun-culture peddlers that feed America’s AR-mania, and one about Don McLean’s withdrawal from the big NRA Uvalde wrap party -- and I say, you know what, as a public service I’ll open them all up. Go soak in my righteous anger! 

Meanwhile the ongoing reaction has been repulsive as usual. The apparently fatally inept response to the shooting by the Uvalde PD has drawn, in addition to genuine and well-warranted righteous indignation, the attention of gun nuts who want to use the cops’ malfeasance as an excuse -- here are a couple of examples that infested my feed. Their message is: It’s not the guns, if we had more civilian Good Guys With Guns (read: even less gun control) the shooter might have killed slightly fewer people (or the good guys with guns might have killed slightly more -- in either case, the guns will be safe, thank God)!

(Though I have to admit it’s funny to see wingnuts throwing their beloved Thin Blue Line under the bus. That’s how much they love their assault weapons!)

After that it’s almost comforting to see the usual rightwingers doing their traditional “Guns don’t kill people, people trying to get rid of guns kill people (or at least my boner)” routine. Erick Erickson: 

Do Democrats want the issue or do they want a solution?  It almost seems that Democrats screaming about Republicans wanting kids to die is projection because Democrats rush in while bodies are still warm to vilify their opponents, attack them for offering thoughts and prayers, and then offer their own empty platitudes and empty solutions.

The bodies are not yet cold, and here come greedy Democrats trying to stop it from happening again, next week and every week as God intended! Don’t they know nothing can be done except stuff that has been done and doesn’t work? 

Using one failure to suggest we should abandon efforts to provide officers at all schools seems foolish.  That could get sixty votes in the Senate.  Providing a well-trained public servant in schools would more likely than not serve as a deterrent.  It might not stop all cases but could stop many.  Why let perfect be the enemy of the good?

… well-armed retired veterans at schools would be better than waiting for the police to show up.

There’s old Gumpy, our 74-year-old school guard -- whoops, shooter took him out first. Guess Gumpy’s not as quick on the draw as he used to be! 

What about fortifying school doors…

Jesus fucking Christ. The hard fact is, the only people who are still listening to these assholes are listening because they want to hear that something, anything is the reason for this never-ending mayhem except their beloved machine guns. I say just get rid of the damn things, and if some pedantic jerkoff says, ”LOL libtards it’s not a ‘machine gun’ it’s actually called a [Gunfetish Nomenclature],” we make a note to specify that shit too when we ban the rest and make the penalties for that one twice as steep.

THEY GOT THEIRS -- DON'T WORRY ABOUT YOURS.

Today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie was inspired by some bullshit, of a sort you may have also been seeing, where some very serious commentators explain that the overturn of Roe v Wade and the end of a presumed Constitutional right to self-determination/control of one’s own body is nbd actually and you libtards are just being dramatic. 

This line of BS is most evident among rightwingers who, no shock, are frightened by the strong negative reaction to the draft ruling and worry that it will affect the midterms. Ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, for example, has been swearing up and down, in such fragments of his newsletter that I can read without giving him the encouragement of payment, that no one cares about this silly old abortion thing (“abortion does nothing to help an economy that is stalling and on the verge of a recession”) -- but he keeps repeating it, more like a mantra than analysis; his recent titles have been “Abortion Meltdown,” “Hysteria Rules the Day,” and (I’m not making this up) “Roe v Wade Ending Really Won't Change Anything. That's Reality, Not Downplaying Dobbs.”  

Erickson is as close to someone just posting the talking points (under the thinnest palimpsest of the shittiest prose) as you can get, so clearly the idea is that the result conservatives have spent decades screaming and salivating for is a matter of no real importance to them (though they usually manage to sneak in somewhere that they are of course happy for the “pre-borns”) and that opposing the upending of this heretofore Constitutionally-protected right is some sort of pique or mania.

This talking point went meta today with the Washington Times headline, “Not there yet: Pro-lifers subdued despite promise of biggest victory in movement’s history.” Reporter Valerie Richardson features anecdotes that suggest the anti-abortion movement is subdued because they have not finished God's work -- for example, in some states and for the moment women will not be forced to bear their rapists’ children. But the obvious intended effect is to back up the Republicans’ “the real outrage is the leak” misdirection -- to make it look as if what is actually happening is not happening.  

But my real inspirators, referenced in the graphic, are Orin Kerr and Megan McArdle, whose glibertarian hand-waving is as annoying as it is expected. The only difference is it usually takes a while for their bullshit to be proven bullshit; in this case, the very horrors they tell us not to worry about -- abortion criminalized in blue states via a national ban, re-criminalization of gay marriage and other rights -- are already being advanced by prominent conservatives who, despite the propaganda to the contrary, are not subdued but emboldened to further immiserate the people they despise. (Which is most of us, BTW.) 

AN UNSAVORY MUSK.

Opinions are like assholes -- everyone has one about Elon Musk! So do I, at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, and I have unlocked it for your delectation. Unlike most of the commentariat, I have a unified theory of Musk which informs the analysis: He wants to be president, and this is his way of transitioning from “unaccountably self-regarding famewhore who blows up rocket ships” to someone we’re all supposed to take seriously. 

Like a lot of other people I was amused by David Rothkopf’s related tweet on the oligarchical pile-up in prestige media, but it also made me think about the different approaches among those oligarchs. Bloomberg, Carlos Slim, and to a great extent Bezos run their media empires in the traditional way -- quietly, without inserting themselves too much into the process. (Bezos, for example, can count on brown-nosers at the Washington Post to fluff him without being ordered to.) Gates, even more old-school, pretty much eschews content and putters with philanthropy like a Morgan or a Rockefeller. 

Zuckerberg is kind of a transitional figure -- he used celebrity and tech cachet to promote his sub-journalistic enterprise, and was wildly successful, but this also increased his need to be at the forefront and he is now condemned to endlessly travel a weary gauntlet of Congressional hearings and virtual-reality shitshows to keep it flying. Musk has inherited the model but you'll never see him performing it like a duty -- alone among these worthies, he inherited rather than hustled his wealth, and sees no reason to actually work at anything. So he just bigfoots like a cartoon villain or Adam Sandler character across the landscape, confident that everything will work out because, being insulated by unimaginable wealth, he has never suffered anything resembling an adverse result, nor hoped to achieve anything more difficult than the self-promotion that daily increases his army of sycophants. There’s a lesson in the fact that Musk is positioned to become the most powerful of them all. 

UPDATE. Along with my brilliant writing this news has spurred some utter shite, including a world-beater from the epochally awful Erick Erickson, whose "The Media's Twitter Problem" begins thus:

Elon Musk is an American success story. Originally from Africa, Musk moved to America and is now the richest man in the world. 

I'm surprised he didn't write, "Originally from Africa, Musk moved to America and, through the magic of free enterprise and his own hard work, inherited an emerald mine."

FREE SPEECH DEFECT.

Here’s a rare midweek release of a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie to the non-members among you, about one conservative’s (and every one’s, really) response to the firing of an NFL coach for years of offensive messages. It is, as they say in the promos, inspired by true events. 

As I always say whenever the cancelculture crybabies rush to defend some big name like Coach Gruden who will almost certainly die rich of old age in his bed despite his “cancellation,” I would happily accept laws that kept such people from being fired, suspended, or otherwise punished for speech so long as the law also applied to the non-rich, such as the trans Netflix employee who, so far as I know, is the only person who has actually suffered for what they've said about the Dave Chapelle special (notwithstanding the fantasies of rightwingers who go “I bet my buddies will get fired for writing a good review of The Closer I bet I bet” -- bitch, show me one!). But conservatives never accept that deal, for some reason. 

Though Erick Erickson is not my model for the REBID item (when he is, I take greater care to ape his awfulness specifically), his own essay on the subject was inspirational. It’s full of nuggets like these:

Gruden said in private what other people might say, including referring to Joe Biden in 2012 as a “nervous clueless pussy.” Whether you like it or not, these conversations happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language.

This was clearly an orchestrated effort to punish Gruden for past comments and drive him out of the NFL. We can speculate on who did it. But we should really focus on the problem here that keeps happening.

There’s so much ugly-stupid in there, but for me the suggestion that Gruden was targeted by the NFL because he said something bad about Joe Biden once, plausibly-deniable chickenshit though it is, doesn’t approach the cowardliness of the “Gruden said in private what other people might say” argument. Erickson can’t even go all the way with the logic of his essay: that it’s so common and understandable to use racist, misogynist, and homophobic slurs on a regular basis that anyone, including himself, might do it. 

I’m not saying Erickson spews like Gruden did; obviously he’s too weaselly to expose himself like that. But if he were more forthright about his assertion, he might be forced to explain why, in his experience, “conversations” that “happen among friends who sometimes use coarse language” (not his friends, surely!) so frequently include these slurs. Or would that be a “critical race theory” question to ask, since it implies American bigotry didn’t die at Appomattox?

Can’t resist adding this bit from Erickson’s essay after this one, about how mandatory vaccination against pandemic viruses is liberal tyranny:

When my father-in-law went for an antibody infusion the other day, the nurse told him the infusions were in short supply. According to the nurse, the Biden Administration was punishing Georgia, Florida, and other states that had no mask or vaccine mandates by withholding antibody infusion doses. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. The point is the nurse believed it and is relaying that to patients. That will have an effect and, in fact, the Biden Administration is withholding antibody doses for reasons that remain nebulous. [Italics added]

I mean, the anonymous authority with an outlandish accusation that the author disseminates is standard procedure with, for example, Rod Dreher, but I don’t think even Dreher would just admit up front that it may be bullshit. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm so past & out of it I didn't even know this was briefly popular, sort of.
Well, I still like it!

•   I only unleashed one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down joint (the one mentioned last post) out of five this week on the GP.  Come on and sign up for the full subscription -- it's cheap! And I'll still be filling in the blanks over here. For instance, I just did an issue digging through what was at the time the latest offense to reason by ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and no sooner did it publish than he posted something at least as dumb. It is facially inspired by Hunter Biden saying "nigga" (aka the soft n-word) to his lawyer.

Erickson claims that a country musician and a high school student (Wallen and Groves, I guess their names are) got in trouble for using that word (which version of the word, alas, is not made clear), but “the major media outlets across the country that condemned Mr. Wallen and Ms. Groves are silent” about Biden fils. 

First of all, I never heard of the musician or the student before Erickson mentioned them. (I should add that Erickson claims “the New York Times wrote approvingly of Mr. Galligan ruin[in]g Groves’ scholarship,” which is a reductive-to-the-point-of-bullshit characterization of the Times’ actual coverage.)  

Second, at this moment if you look up “hunter biden n-word” on Google News you get, no lie, 91,300 hits. The majority of them seem to be from rightwing news sites yelling WHY WON’T LIB MEDIA HUNTER N-WORD BLARGH, true, but that just goes to show that rightwing media is "major media," and indeed the only source of “news” tens of millions of Americans choose to read or watch, notwithstanding that it’s mostly outrageously shoddy propaganda wearing a filmy g-string of journalism. I'm sure vastly more people have heard about Hunter Biden’s n-word than know, for example, that Trump’s AG seized Democratic Congressmen Adam Schiff’s  and Eric Swalwell’s records from Apple for reasons anyone who spent more than a few seconds downwind of the Trump Administration can guess. 

Also, this bears repeating: Who the fuck cares about Hunter Biden? These guys always talk as if he’s a Democratic Senator or something liberals have to defend. (Conversely, Trump’s nitwit, charity-defrauding sons constantly vaunt themselves into the political spotlight by helping their dad lie about the 2020 election.)

But then Erickson gets philosophical about the N-word itself:

The N-word has become the one word, the use of which, can destroy a person’s career. But it is routinely used in popular music that is listened to and enjoyed across racial lines. The word has become weaponized beyond the power any word should have if it can be used to selectively target and destroy.

“How come they can say n***** and we can’t” is a junior-high trope that we must expect, alas, even at the highest levels of conservatism. But it gets worse:

If the double standard cancelations continue, people will begin to use the word more, supposing the double standard is faux outrage at a word so common in parts of popular culture. Put another way, if the press will ignore Hunter Biden for the same sins of Wallen and Groves, many will presume the use of the word is not really a cultural sin and they will be bolder in use of it.

OK, gotta admit: “Liberals are making us say n*****” is a new one. 

•   Late add here but: There's a lot of good in this year's Pulitzers (besides, of course, my not getting one) but the decision to give no editorial cartooning award despite having three genuinely world-class nominees -- Ruben Bolling (Ken Fisher), Sammy Two Bulls, and Lalo Alcaraz -- stinks to high heaven. The Pulitzer committee has been dickish on drama in years past, usually because some old fart couldn't stand the newfangled young turks like Robert Wilson or Edward Albee, and Tom Tomorrow suggests on his Twitter account this year's fiasco could be even worse than that. Anyway, boo to whoever fucked this up.