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. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Sometimes there's nothing for it but the fuzzbox.

•   Here's a freebie from the newsletter (SUBSCRIBE he hollered from the bottom of a well CHEAP!): A couple of New York mayors sitting around talking.

•  Rich Lowry has a book out praising the blood-and-soil conservatism pimped by such noted sons of toil as Tucker Carlson, and today he talks about one of the Ronald Reagan speeches people like him cream over and explains what parts are and are not, er, operational in Trump Time:

So, where does the “Time for Choosing” fall down?

The tax, spending, and debt issues so important to Reagan and to conservatives for decades have taken a back seat today — or at least deficit spending and debt have. President Trump has brought other issues to the fore and pursued a broadly expansionary fiscal policy.

"Expansionary" -- that's a hot one! When Democrats want to spend money on public health they don't call it expansionary, they call it socialism etc.

It turns out that fiscal conservatives didn’t have nearly the clout of social conservatives in the GOP coalition. But the traditional trio of fiscal issues will come back with a vengeance should, say, Elizabeth Warren get elected president.

We were full of shit all along, and we'll go back to being full of shit if Warren gets in. Way to butter 'em up, Rich!

More problematic in [Reagan's] “The Time for Choosing” is the argument — and dire tone — borrowed from Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, asserting that the growth of the state, as such, leads to tyranny, and the tipping point is imminent.

We conservatives don't really believe in financial stewardship, but in our defense, what we really don't believe in is freedom -- at least not funky freedom (guns are okay!):

It is a symptom of our time, though, that even as the government has grown, so has personal liberty, sometimes in deeply unhealthy ways. We have more choices in family structure (or lack thereof), sexual expression, and consumption of entertainment, from the exalted to the low, including a vast amount and variety of pornography. There is less prescription against aberrant behavior, as can be seen in the streets of our major cities such as San Francisco and New York City.

??? Maybe he thinks there's a 24-hour Folsom Street Festival in Central Park? Or that liberals gave us Pizza Rat?

There’s greater leeway to sell and smoke pot.

LOL

We now enjoy the freedom even — in theory at least — to pick our own gender and have institutions of government afford every consideration to our choice.

Sounds awesome so far, Starbursts, what's the beef?

...The deeper current issue is that the chief suppressant of human flourishing may be not our overweening government but our tendency toward toxic individualism — we are now a people largely disconnected from marriage, church, and workplace, and too many American sink into self-destructive behavior and despair.

Obviously, this doesn’t enter into Reagan’s speech because there was no way he could anticipate social trends 50 years in the future.

Yeah, if only Reagan had known we would eventually have throuples and legal weed and porny anime, he wouldn't have pretended to love freedom so much -- because all that talk totally wasn't just a racket to get Americans to vote him and his high-pressure crooks into office. But now conservatives know better, and advocate for big spending Puritanism. Oh, and to replace your porn, the spectacle of military parades and tortured immigrant children!

This is a movement that's going places -- to prison, in many cases.

•  Speaking of that, you all know that, though I give out insults like Trump giving judgeships to assholes, I'm sensitive about wishing punishment on even the worst of my fellow man. For new convict Roger Stone, however...

...I will make an exception. Enjoy prison, you fucking piece of shit.

BARKING. Hur-ray, hur-ray, hur-ray! Step right up and see scenes from the Folsom Street Fair! Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart! Parents, take heed of the content warning! Butt-whippings, cock-sucking, dildo-shoving, and Dem-o-crrrratic advocacy! Just a pitcher from life's other side! You say you saw our Trans March ex-hi-bi-tion. You say you thought you'd seen it all. But you ain't seen nnnnothin' yet, folks! To see all the grrrrrisly details, follow the instructions for unblurring the ex-pli-cit photos. We brrreakin' taboos here, folks! The pictures they don't want you to see! Provided for ed-u-ca-tion-al purposes only! Stay as long as you want, bookmark it for a later date, and remember, if you're outrrrrraged it's not voyeurrrrism!

Ace of Spades is roused to action:

Oh: Reminder, this was largely sponsored by Miller Beer. And Miller Beer representatives did in fact wear leatherboy outfits in their booths.

So, there you go. I drank the beer, but I think I might switch to Coors Light. I'm not big on boycotting but I'm sick of this disgusting double-standard where corporations are allowed to pump money into shit like this but won't pony up a dime for anything tainted with conservatism, because that would be "controversial."

I'm sure if Mr. Spades ran some pictures of him and his butchly-pseudonymed buddies beating each other off, Old Milwaukee would throw them a few bucks.

MY FAVORITE FOLSOM STREET COMMENTER SO FAR. The Folsom Street thing is still going strong. Among the hundreds of chest-thumping Christers expressing their outrage:

"'Gay' activists disingenuously call Christians 'haters' and 'homophobes' for honoring the Bible, but then lash out in this hateful manner toward the very people they accuse.” My own experience with these people led me to conclude that while Christians profess to “love the sinner and hate the sin” the extremists of the Angry Gay Left “love the sin and hate the sinner.” Responsible gay leaders should speak out against the poster, but they will not, fearing the vicious attacks from the hatemongers of their own community.

Before (and after!) he was Jeff Gannon, the author was gay-escort/wingnut/"reporter" James Guckert -- GOP press pool shill by day, "Bulldog" by night! Now he spends a large amount of his time denouncing "homosexual jihad against Republicans," which apparently includes exposing homosexual Republicans:

Larry Craig did not invent the toilet culture for which he has been accused. Gays did. Not only did gays invent anonymous rendezvous –- the practice is a significant part of the homosexual subculture.

Whereas Gannon/Guckert's encounters were the opposite of anonymous -- he got the names and the credit card numbers!

Much as I love the original, isn't it about time someone remade Advise and Consent?

UPDATE. Fixed the faulty proper name of Gannon/Guckert.