FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

What is minimalism?

The case of the raped Ohio child I talked about yesterday very clearly shows one big specific problem with the overturn of Roe (and there's more to it than that, which I'll get to in a minute), That clarity is why conservatives are screaming about it. Several of them follow the example of David Harsanyi of The Federalist, who portrays those of us who were properly horrified by the story when it was revealed -- while conservatives were chortling that it was a "fanciful" fake -- as "gleefully dunking" on those conservatives when the story was amply confirmed, as if we were crouched by ESPN hoping things would break our way and erupted in cheers when it turned out a 10-year-old had indeed been forced to flee for her life because of insane post-Dobbs abortion laws. 

(Harsanyi continues to look for loopholes: "Besides, there are still reasons to be curious about certain aspects of this story. Did the victim really have to go to Indiana to be treated by a nationally known abortion activist? " Jesus, this guy's an even bigger piece of shit than I knew.)

Harsanyi's cynical interpretation notwithstanding, the fact is there is no suspense or element of chance about this: Anyone could have predicted (and in fact many of us have predicted) that atrocities like this would follow because that's what the anti-abortion movement promises. They say abortion is murder, and when you point out the corollaries -- So will women who try to have them be prosecuted and locked down until they give birth? Will they be forced to give birth even if it kills them? -- they phumpher about how they only want to protect women but never answer the question. 

At its silliest this leads to simple logical absurdities like the anti-abortion activist Catherine Glenn Foster telling Congress that an abortion is not an abortion, basically, if it makes anti-abortionists look less insane. At its worst, it causes the Ohio nightmare and many others we can very reasonably expect.  

That's why, as I mentioned before, their strategy has been, at least at first, not to arrest women -- as one would imagine any serious anti-"murder" intervention would require -- but to drive them underground to desperately seek dwindling remedies; that way it just seems like abortions are disappearing rather than that women have been deprived of their basic human rights. But some of these women -- or, in the present case, little girls -- will become visible and reveal the inhuman viciousness of the whole rotten charade. That's why conservatives are freaking out now.

Which brings me to another point: Hard cases like this always get attention, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they're only the most extreme examples of the injury to everyone who can give birth and wants to be in control of whether and when they do. Anti-choicers are hypocrites, but their hypocrisy is purposeful: like Foster, they're willing to deny a few principles if it keeps their real mission on the down-low. Not only every scared kid but also everyone who's denied abortion care because their local politicians made it illegal -- or who is denied even legal abortion care because conservatives scared off the people who could give it to her -- or will soon be prevented by getting that care even in places that want to give it because Republicans, at their own admission, want to prohibit her from crossing borders or make abortion illegal in all 50 states -- is also an atrocity and should not be stood for. 

ALSO, SWIFT DIDN'T REALLY ENDORSE EATING CHILDREN

Back in 1994 Kristen Clarke, now up for assistant U.S. Attorney General for civil rights, co-wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson calling out defenders of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, which famously posits that black people are intellectually inferior to whites using the old It's Just Science routine. Clarke's letter begins: 

In response to those who defend The Bell Curve ("Defending The Bell Curve," Opinion, Oct. 24, 1994), please use the following theories and observations to assist you in your search for truth regarding the genetic differences between Blacks and whites.

One: Dr. Richard King reveals that at the core of the human brain is the "locus coeruleus" which is a structure that is Black because it contains large amounts of (neuro) melanin which is essential for its operation.

Two: Black infants sit, stand, crawl and walk sooner than whites.

Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin--that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcification or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between Blacks and whites.

Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities--something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.

We can readily admit that an abused child is less likely to achieve academically than a child that has grown up in a supportive atmosphere. Black children, whether rich or poor, grow up with an added abuse which white children never have to face. Imagine the message that misguided information like The Bell Curve would send to a Black child who is trying to find her place in school. It's degrading, belittling and outrageously false....

As someone who can read and understand basic irony, even without reading the original Crimson defenses (but having read plenty such like) I can see that Clarke is pitching Murray's racism back at his defenders so they can see how they like it. It's a classic reversal.

Clarke explained this at her Senate hearing (using the term "satire"; "sarcasm" is probably more like it, but close enough) to the moron Senator John Cornyn, and rightwing soreheads like David Harsanyi sputter that it's all lies because they don't recognize it at satire -- which in their world involves Steven Crowder talking in Ebonics or selling "Socialism is for F*gs" t-shirts -- and claim Clarke is a "liar" and a who's-the-real-"racist"-now. I mean, how can Clarke's letter be satire -- she didn't even use an asterisk! 

The fact that object lessons in American racism are in the headlines every day is driving them nuts and, in addition to trying to ban drawing reasonable educational conclusions from it, they're desperate to portray the problem as black people being racist against whites.  But even people who don't read a lot of Juvenal and Swift can see through that.  

AND THE STATESMAN BECAUSE HE'S SO GREAT/ THINKS HIS TRADE AS HONEST AS MINE.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but to me it's genuinely weird to see the President of the United States admitting that he's getting ready to steal the election.  

Oh, I don’t think so. I — we need nine justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam; it’s a hoax. Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else.

So you’re going to need nine justices up there. 

"Hoax" and "scam" being words Trump uses for realities he does not wish his voters to acknowledge, it's clear he expects his shysters to push swing-state vote-rigging suits up to SCOTUS after the election, and he wants Amy Barrett Comey or some other reliable co-conspirator to rig it for him when they do. (Mike Pence has been doing the same thing, though in a less rough-and-tumble manner for the more delicate JustTheTip Trumpers.) (Update: Oh, yeah, there was also Trump's "get rid of the ballots" thing. Classy!)

Thanks to Barton Gellman at The Atlantic, we even have some idea of how they plan to do it:

According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

If you think they wouldn't try such a thing after the Supreme Court's recent ruling against the rights of faithless electors, you underestimate the ingenuity of their evil; anti-democratic efforts work best when they contradict common ideas of fairness, because they break the people's faith in their institutions. 

To prepare for this coup attempt, rightwing factota are already dressing the stage. Democrats have been bitching about the anti-majority nature of our Democracy -- two minority-vote Republican Presidencies since 2000, Dems getting played on the Supreme Court, etc. -- so Republicans are like, nah uh, it's you guys who are anti-democratic. James Antle from the Washington Examiner on 2004:

Literally in an election where some -- admittedly not all, not most, but not a trivial number -- of liberals were hoping Kerry could succeed in challenging Ohio's results, which would have resulted in him becoming president while losing the popular vote.

Who can forget Kerry's "Banana Republic Riot"! As it happened, Democratic objections in Congress to Ohio voting irregularities were dismissed by large bipartisan majorities, but Antle did his little to make it look like vote-stealing is the other guys' game and that's what counts -- to get enough of this stuff in the media bloodstream that Trumpkins can say "Oh yeah well Kerry said he should be president and that's the real fraud."  

And GOP Rep. Jim Jordan is pimping a House Judiciary Committee Republicans report called "HOW DEMOCRATS ARE ATTEMPTING TO SOW UNCERTAINTY, INACCURACY, AND DELAY IN THE 2020 ELECTION" that is utterly full of shit. For one thing, it refers repeatedly to "all-mail balloting" as if those of us in jurisdictions with expanded mail voting options can't vote in person. And it has howlers like this:

All-mail balloting -- not to be confused with time-tested and limited absentee balloting --...

Oh for fuck's sake. 

...raises serious questions about election integrity. To begin, states have notoriously inaccurate voter registration lists—one estimate suggests that voter registration rates exceed 100 percent of the eligible populations in 378 counties across the United States. 

Yeah, people on voter rolls die and don't bother to call the BOE from their deathbeds and ask to be taken off. Not sure what that has to do with voting by mail. 

As the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform found in 2005, voting by mail “remain[s] the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

"Potential"'s doing a lot of work there. That same 2005 report also says, "While there is little evidence of fraud in Oregon where the entire state votes by mail absentee balloting in other states has been one of the major sources of fraud." That would be the same "time-tested and limited absentee balloting" Jordan referred to earlier, and which Trump himself has praised -- a distinction without a difference on which the 2020 report leans heavily: We Republicans are not doing anarchistic mail voting, we're doing good Republican cloth coat absentee voting! 

The report does this kind of thing throughout: For example, it refers to the 2007 King County ACORN registration fraud case ("Prosecutors claimed the defendants submitted more than 1,800 false voter registration forms") without mentioning that none of the registrations the temp workers filled out led to ballots being submitted -- in other words, the system worked like it was supposed to and caught the problem. There's also a lot of guff like this: 

If states can allow violent left-wing extremists to riot and loot in person, then they should allow peaceful Americans to exercise their right to vote in person. If Speaker Pelosi can visit a hair salon without a mask in San Francisco, then Americans in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania can visit their local polling places.

So it's not a scholarly document, to say the least -- it's basically GOP propaganda but with footnotes, so operatives like Byron York at the Examiner can talk about it as if it's -- well, I was going to say the Warren Report, but no one's believed in blue-ribbon reports for years,  so really it's more like Chariots of the Gods? or The Secret, and the rubes will eat it up. As I've said before: Were it not for motivated reasoning, they'd have no reasoning at all. 

UPDATE. They're still dismissing this overt-and-not-subtle threat from the President as something you should just pretend didn't happen. David Harsanyi at National Review:

Not a single journalist or politician in hysterics on the social media right now — most of them having spent four straight years delegitimizing the presidency and the attacking constitutional order — actually believes Trump won’t leave office peacefully if he loses the election. It’s all an act. Trump, of course, gives his opposition endless ammunition to engage in these group fantasies with his reckless answers.

Just because he's "reckless" enough to say he'll do these things doesn't mean he's reckless enough to do them. If only one of these con men had the nerve to say, "look, he keeps saying he'll got a health care plan, too, and he obviously doesn't!"

NO MASKS, PLEASE, WE'RE PATRIOTS.

Even with the departure of Jonah Goldberg, there remain some spectacularly awful writers at National Review like Victor Davis Hanson and David Harsanyi. But in these days of desperate last-ditch Trump defense, the less spectacular, more shoulder-to-the-wheel propagandist Jim Geraghty deserves more attention.

Geraghty had of late been working the popular conservative trope that protests are causing the COVID-19 spread. He may have tumbled that this line isn't working, because earlier this week he seemed to back off, saying protests "may not be the primary factor spreading the virus around the U.S. in recent weeks, but that doesn’t mean they were not a factor at all," an obvious intermediate step to dropping the claim entirely.

Geraghty's got a lulu today. First he plumps what he calls "Maybe the Most Jaw-Droppingly Good Jobs Report in U.S. History" -- a pitch for the hometeam crowd, certainly, since Americans are starting to look at job reports the same way they look at the stock market: "Good news" that does not seem to reflect the reality they're actually living.

Perhaps sensing this, Geraghty gets right to work on bothsidesing the coronavirus catastrophe:

You can point to no shortage of policy mistakes made by President Trump, or governors such as Andrew Cuomo of New York, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

If that doesn't have you convinced that the president who kept telling America the virus was no big deal and stole PPE from the states is no more guilty than three leaders whose COVID curves actually went down (though Michigan's has recently ticked up a little), Geraghty has something else to sell you -- The reason the virus is out of control here is actually America's greatness: 

Some countries may have responded to this virus better than we did, but they are generally smaller, less populous, had experience with a previous serious virus, and/or have populations that are more trusting of their government and more inclined to obey strict rules and to assent to government monitoring of their movements and activities that Americans are unlikely ever to accept.

We're self-centered assholes who know the leaders we elect will screw us -- that's why we can't perform the simple public health measures that are saving the rest of the civilized world! [Pounds chest] We're "a country literally founded by people who violently rejected the existing legal and political authority when they deemed it unjust or draconian," says Geraghty, and that's why we don't need no stinkin' masks, whattaya say to that, Karen?

Having failed to dispel our Springtime-for-Hitler stare, Geraghty changes tack, seeking to convince us that lockdowns killed George Floyd who you liberals say you care about so much:

If the economy had not been shut down in Minnesota, would George Floyd have been out of work? Would he have allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill and then been in that particular place and time where former police officer Derek Chauvin would arrest him and hold his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes?

In fact, there wouldn't be any protests at all, Geraghty seems to say, if the lockdowns didn't have the kids so darned bored:

I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the still -- ongoing protests are, for young people, the only game in town. Just what else is there to do in still-heavily-locked-down America? They can’t go to the movies. They can’t go to a ballgame... 

In a normal summer, how much of young people’s mental energy is spent on enjoyable leisure, from the NBA to pickup games of sports to Marvel movies and other summer blockbusters?... 

Why are we shocked that young people are flocking to house parties and bars at night and protests during the day? What else have we left them to do?

Ah youth -- when summer is one long roundelay of partying in bars and then yelling "all cops are bastards" out in the warm sun! I expect National Review's geriatric subscribers, whose idea of protests haven't much evolved from Students Wildly Indignant about Everything, will buy it. And isn't that the important thing? At this point it's not like conservatives are trying to convince anyone but themselves.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

We had Perry Henzel's No Place Like Home on 

and this cover came up in a club scene:

In a million years I would not have guessed it was Etta James.

•  This fucking guy:

Fuck, next it’ll be Bach Flower Remedies. https://t.co/eBinZQIq2I

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) April 10, 2020

I think we underestimate how much of Trump's bullshit is based on his public speaking style, which is basically cribbed from Home Shopping Network pitchmen and old-fashioned carney barkers, and demands that one never stop talking and never stop pitching, no matter what. There's also his favored "people say" locution, which means he saw it, or maybe something like it, or maybe the opposite of what he's saying it said, or maybe he's just making it up on the spot but the main thing is you can't pin it on him it's what PEOPLE SAY. These days we're very focused on his criminal neglect and cynical manipulation of the crisis and the deaths attributable to it, but another long-term effect will be that if we ever get a coherent president again (Biden doesn't count, unless they lace him up with The Formula), people won't be able to follow what he or she is saying because formal sentence structure will have become an arcane mystery.

•  Speaking of pitchmen, rather than send you to my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I'm going to just pull a relevant section from a recent issue, about David Harsanyi's weird National Review article "The Left’s Ugly Reaction to Hydroxychloroquine," and paste it here:

Harsanyi is talking about liberals noticing that Trump has a small financial interest in the drug — which of course he does, as he has made clear from the beginning that he doesn’t intend to avoid conflicts of interest of any size.

Now, Trump’s direct pharma interest is not the big problem with his hucksterism — which is that MAGA people may be making a run on the stuff, creating a shortage that’s keeping it from the lupus sufferers and others for whom the drug has actually been approved and who need it. In fact some hospitals have been “hoarding” the drug for fear of such a shortage.

But even though big-time MSM outlets such as the Washington Post have been saying that “Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine is almost certainly about politics, not profits,” Harsanyi pretends to be mortally offended not only that liberals would even consider that Trump may have a venal interest, but also that they would question his devotion to the welfare of his subjects:

For one thing, and I realize this might be difficult for some people to comprehend, it’s plausible, even likely, that Trump advocates for chloroquine because he is legitimately optimistic that a therapeutic answer might help Americans. Even if you feel he’s being reckless when speaking about the drug, you can accept that his intentions are good.

I have to admit: the weird weevils of the wingnut demimonde have a lot of crazy ideas, but I doubt any of them seriously believes that the Boss ever does anything out of fellow-feeling.

The funny/saddest thing in Harsanyi’s essay is its conclusion:

You don’t need to send me angry emails detailing all the downsides of championing potential drugs already in use for other diseases. One of my children takes hydroxychloroquine to help mitigate a dangerous autoimmune condition. I’ve already had to work hard to track down hydroxychloroquine because we live in a world with unethical hospitals and doctors who hoard it. Believe it or not, they’d still be doing it if the president hadn’t ever mentioned it, because they believe it holds promise.

See? Despite what you might think, chloroquine is not being hoarded by Trump fans because their God-Emperor has been hawking it like the ShamWow guy at press briefings — it’s because those damn hospitals and doctors have been hoarding it for their so-called patients, just like Trump says states are hoarding the ventilators!

And Harsanyi’s got a kid who needs the stuff. Greater love hath no man! Maybe if the Boss notices how much he’s willing to sacrifice to show fealty to him, he’ll share some his stash with him.

•  Update! Longtime readers especially will appreciate this Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson sighting, by Muriel Volestrangler (not her real name) in comments:

You'll like this, Roy: after an article about a Stanford medical team doing coronavirus antibody testing, Victor Davis Hanson saw it, thought "Stanford - that's me!!!", and found a gullible reporter to whom he became a "Stanford researcher", and fed his "California got the virus last fall!!!" hallucination. 

This was then picked up by media outlets who ought to know better, such as SFGate - but who have since withdrawn it, realising it's an old man with an ancient Greek fixation trying to pass himself off as a researcher in some vaguely relevant discipline.

The SF Gate story has indeed been withdrawn though the Wayback Machine retains a copy. ("'Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet,' said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute," LOL). There's a more thorough examination by Jane Hu at Slate:

Hanson’s recent work, published in National Review, suggests he is eager to reopen the American economy. It would be quite convenient, then, to claim that the virus has already torn through the U.S. and granted us immunity. (In that article, Hanson also claims that “much of the virus modeling is nearly worthless” and refers to it as “science,” in scare quotes.) 

Hanson also (incorrectly) suggests that the virus’s spread in California came from “Chinese nationals” visiting California. Looking more closely at his recent work reveals a potential political motive for that claim; in a recent op-ed for Fox News, he argues that we already have too many Chinese nationals visiting, studying, or collaborating in the U.S., and that post-coronavirus America should “wake up” and make changes.

Hanson's Fox story is headlined, "After coronavirus — will America be a roaring giant or crying baby?" so you see he hasn't lost his sense of style. And he's spreading racist bullshit at a higher level than ever! Maybe Trump sent him a big enough reward to replace the chainsaw the Messicans stole from him.

PERSECUTION ENVY.

The Federalist:

Sri Lanka Attacks Highlight Growing Worldwide Persecution Of Christians

Author Kenny Xu leans hard on a Pew Research Center report -- but does not link directly to it, preferring for some reason the British Church Times, which screams "Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, says Pew report," though even the figures it chooses to pick from Pew aren't as cut and dried as that:

The Centre’s report on religious harassment in 2016 found that Christians were harassed in 144 countries, up from 128 the year before, while Muslims were harassed in 142 countries, up from 125 in 2015.

So it looks like Jesus and Allah are neck-and-neck! (The Pew report is headlined "Global Uptick in Government Restrictions on Religion in 2016," which is not nearly as good Republican ragebait.) After yelling about Muslims a while ("Few groups have suffered as Christian minorities have due to the rise of Islamist political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and ISIS in Libya"), Xu makes the bold leap:

While many European journalists rightly blame mass migration from majority-Muslim countries for these religious persecution issues, migration is not the only factor here. Just as significant is Western Europe’s culture of enforced secularism, a world where religious speech is policed and religious symbols (such as burqas) are not allowed in French public schools or German business settings.

Hundreds murdered in Sri Lanka, dress codes in school -- same diff! Also at The Federalist, David Harsanyi:

Islamic Terrorism Remains The World’s Greatest Threat To Peace

After sputtering over "Islamists" -- a usage I hadn't heard much since the glory days of the Iraq War, but which seems to be coming back -- Harsanyi, too, rages about secularists:

Yet the American left continues to downplay the danger, first by arguing that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, then by lumping every white-skinned person who commits a terrorist act into one imaginary coherent political movement to contrast against it.

Actually, that "imaginary coherent political movement" of white supremacists is America's #1 terror menace, far outstripping Islamic terrorism, and it's spreading around the world. But Harsanyi has an explanation for that: Islamic terror only looks weak because our Middle East wars have been so successful!

It’s true that Americans have been spared much Islamic terror since 2002—a year that, curiously, nearly every graph media uses to measure domestic terrorism starts—but only because we’ve spent billions of dollars each year and immense resources, both in lives and treasure, keeping it out of the country and fighting it abroad.

Perhaps sensing that even the morons and yahoos who constitute most of his readership won't buy this, Harsanyi gets back to a trendier attack on godless libs:

Another reason the majority of Americans might not comprehend Islamic radicalism’s reach is the skewed intensity of the media coverage. Political correctness and a chilling fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” makes it difficult to honestly report on terrorism around the world.

If it weren't for liberals you good people would be shitting your pants in fear of Mohammed at the 7-11 or the pediatric clinic, just like you were in the great Nine-Elevening!  Yet now, despite conservative urging, you still haven't killed Ilhan Omar. This isn't the country Harsanyi once knew.

These guys are catching up with Rod Dreher, who is every bit as nuts as you'd imagine:

A liberal friend of mine was lamenting recently that the left has gotten so good at policing its own thoughts, and never letting itself notice things that contradict its narrative, that it is often being shocked by events in the real world. When things like the Sri Lanka attacks happen, the first thing that many American and British journalists think is, “Oh dear, this is going to cause a spike in Islamophobia.” They cannot imagine sympathizing with Christians. They really can’t. Yes, these dead Sri Lankans may be Catholics living on the other side of the world, and sure, they may have roots in their country going back to the 16th century (or earlier), but deep down, when many journalists imagine these people, they see them wearing MAGA hats, and carrying around invisible knapsacks full of privilege.

If only Dreher would actually fuck off to a Benedict Option survivalist compound where he could tell the kids, "Yes, Rachel Maddow and Kamala Harris used to throw rocks at us Christians and put us in concentration Bible camps!"

Meanwhile at National Review we get more of the same ("Islam remains the fount of the most virulent and violent attacks on Christians worldwide"), and Eli Lake at Bloomberg telling us "White Nationalism Is a Terrorist Threat, but Not Like Radical Islam," because "white nationalists have no territory they control, as Islamic State did until recently. Nor is there evidence of a state supporting white nationalist groups..." LOL, who wants to tell him about America?

American conservatives in the depths of their Trump phase are, like their fearless leader babbling about the unfairness of his dropping Twitter numbers, addicted to victimhood, and so it was only natural that they'd treat the Sri Lanka bombing as an excuse to talk about how persecuted they are. Sure, no one's mass-murdering them -- over here, that seems to only happen to schoolkids and black people and victims of gun fetishists -- but liberals are insufficiently respectful of them, and try to make them bake wedding cakes for homosexuals, which is just as bad. One struggles to imagine them confronted by Jesus as they flee their martyrdom, and declaring, "that's it -- I'll go back to my six-figure job and put up with my kids not going to church and swears on the TV! It'll be rough, but Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!"

UPDATE. Relevant: "Steve King, censured by his colleagues for racist remarks, compares himself to Jesus... 'And when I had to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know, we’ve just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion — and I have a better insight into what He went through for us, partly because of that experience,' he said."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Jazz ain't dead, it don't even smell funny.
• A snippet from a recent Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (TO WHICH YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE, he hollered with one hand to the side of his mouth like a newsboy in a '30s Warner Brothers picture, IT'S CHEEEEAP ™):

For his recent defense of the Electoral College [David French] might be excused, because it’s mostly no better or worse than all the other shitty rightwing defenses shoved, hastily and scarce half made-up into this breathing world by conservatives after Elizabeth Warren called for the EC to be abolished. (David Harsanyi’s “Democrats Want To Kill The Electoral College Because They Fear The Constitution” at The Federalist is my favorite; Jamelle Bouie effectively smacked down all this nonsense on Twitter.)
French does go the extra mile, though, with this: 

And let’s not pretend that a national popular vote elevates every citizen’s vote in a way that the Electoral College does not. Your vote counts in each state, and the fact that your state is overwhelmingly red or blue is no more or less demoralizing than the popular-vote idea that your single vote is thrown into a pool of 130 million others.

So the Republican voting in D.C. (where Clinton won with 90.9% of the vote) presumably feels himself more connected to the result than he would if his vote had a chance of contributing to a winning margin. I don’t think even French believes that.

I bring this up because the aforementioned wave of wingnut Electoral College defenses by Very Serious Commentators, all full of Founder Worship and rEpUbLiC nOt A dEmOcRaCy yak, has been followed (as if so ordained by Morning Memo!) by some dumbed-down (well, more dumbed-down) versions tailored to the Trumpenproletariat in bottom-feeder media such as the Washington Examiner, where David M. Drucker writes under the interesting headline "Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College":

Some Republicans say the problem is Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance. It's an attitude tailor-made for the Electoral College in the current era of regionally Balkanized politics, but anathema to attracting a broad, national coalition that can win the most votes, as past presidents did when seeking re-election amid a booming economy.

"Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance" is "tailor-made for the Electoral College"? I wonder if James Madison had that in mind.

Others argue that neither Trump, nor possibly any Republican, could win the popular vote when most big states are overwhelmingly liberal.

“California, Illinois, and New York, make it very, very difficult for anybody on our side to ever again to win the popular vote,” said David Carney, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire.

Since it's rather giving the game away to say "Most people don't want our candidate to be President," they're arguing that most people is the wrong people -- libruls whut live in fancy states where they have highfalutin' sundries like soap and toothpaste. (Drucker is so grateful for the Trump campaign's help in filling his column that he ends with some bullshit about how the Trumpkins expect to lose the popular vote again but win the Electoral College even bigger in 2020 -- “We look to maintain and expand the Trump map" -- mainly, it would seem, to impress even more crushingly on Americans that the dead hand of the Founders -- manipulated as a cat's-paw by the modern GOP -- doesn't give a shit what they think.)

For a doubly-dumbed-down version see Hannity on Fox, transliterated here:

"You think all those red states would stick around and be in the United States if they kept losing to New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois?” Hannity asked. “I tend to think not.”

The final tantrum is always secession with these people. This time I say let them go, and we can establish generous refugee programs for the non-assholes who will flee the New Confederacy.

ELECTION NIGHT WRAPUP.

As I watch wingnut bête noire Bill De Blasio cruising and Democrats romping in Jersey and Virginia, it is clear that for conservatives hoping to distract from the disastrous reign of Trump, the strategy of hailing the Sutherland Springs massacre as a feel-good story because only 26 people died, and spreading the David Harsanyi gospel of "Bringing A Gun To Church Is A Pretty Good Idea" and the Hans Feine gospel of "When The Saints Of First Baptist Church Were Murdered, God Was Answering Their Prayers," and accusing people who sensibly found that crazy of "making fun of prayer," turned out not to be the game-changer they may have been expecting.

The game show host is losing in the ratings, and the attention of the electorate has been redirected to the traditional rightwing spokespeople, who are clearly nuts. The result could have been predicted.

RACIST WITH AN EXPLANATION: STEVE KING EDITION.

Iowa's Steve King has gotten so obnoxiously and overtly racist -- defending his "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies" tweet by raving about "our stock," predicting race war, and recommending The Camp of the Saints -- that even conservatives have started to inch away from him.

Wait, did I say "inch"? I mean millimeter. I mean micromillimeter. Because in today's conservative movement no one's really racist, at least not in the upper tier -- they're merely Racist With an Explantion.

At The Federalist, David Harsanyi tut-tuts King's "confused and contradictory statements." I don't see any evidence King is confused about nor inconsistent in his racism at all, but Harsanyi detects a cleavage: While King's wrong to talk about "culture as blood," says Harsanyi, he's right about the "clash of cultures" with Islam. Harsanyi, you see, is also down with holy war against the Musselmen (see here, there, and everywhere).

But the real villains in this affair -- the ones Harsanyi devotes most of his column to criticizing -- are liberals:

So King deserves the condemnation he’s been getting for making the immigration debate about people rather than their ideas. Yet most coverage of congressman’s statement also seems to take offense at his defense of “Western civilization.” Once it was merely in poor form to claim our system was better. Now, evidently, it’s racist.

He offers as his sole, shoddy proof a tweet by Rep. Judy Chu that does not in any apparent way denounce Western Civ but says this: "Steve King is wrong: Civilization is threatened by racism & xenophobia that divide us & encourage violence. I condemn hate & welcome all." To you this may seem admirable if anodyne, but Harsanyi doesn't go for Chu's hint that hatred of The Other might be uncool:

Fact is, the modern Left debates immigration using the very same ethnocentric and racial ideas as King, but for entirely different reasons.

Harsanyi loved when Gillespie told Tibbs "Man, you're just like the rest of us, ain't ya?" in In The Heat of the Night, and still thinks it's a winner.

While one side adopts it for exclusionary purposes, the other uses it as a cudgel of relativism.

The cudgel of relativism double-slaps you with one-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand action!

These days, there is precious little difference between ideas and identity on the Left. So we are asked to treat Islam as a racial or ethnic designation rather than a philosophical/religious/ideological one.

See, The Left made Muslims into a race just so they could beat up innocent guys like Steve King! Wait, what were we talking about again?

At National Review Jonathan S. Tobin says what's "dangerous" about King's palaver is that it "undermines American exceptionalism." No, really. The lede is killer:

What is at stake in the long-running battle over illegal immigration? The answer from the overwhelming majority of Americans who worry about it is “the defense of the rule of law.”

I wonder what poll he got that from. Pollster: "Why do you oppose illegal immigration? Pick one. A., It --" Lutiebelle C. Festus: "GODDAMN MESSICANS! I mean, defense of the rule of law!"

Tobin goes on about how it's okay for Geert Wilders to worry about "about how a national identity rooted in a homogeneous ethnic and religious culture can accommodate newcomers" and "whether those who don’t share a common ethnicity and who practice a different faith will transform the nation into a place that isn’t Dutch" -- maybe it sounds racist, but he's in Europe, which is crawling with those "no-go zones" you read about on Breitbart. But here in America, says Tobin, we don't have that problem, even though "The Left is attempting to portray as xenophobic President Trump’s temporary travel ban from six countries that are terrorist hotbeds" -- boy, that The Left is always trying to make us look racist just because we keep trying to keep Muslims out!

 Tobin goes further than Harsanyi, even admitting that

the shift toward a less-white America is already baked into the country’s demographic cake. If conservatives wish to continue governing in the future, they must reject talk about “other people’s babies” and promote their ideas with enough confidence that Hispanics and other minorities will eventually embrace them.

Tobin must have been thinking, "Who cares? By then I'll be dead!" But he really distinguishes himself in the closing:

Modern American conservatism was founded by the willingness of some to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” but William F. Buckley and his colleagues were not seeking to yell stop to Americans who were not white.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no really, he said that.

What these guys are doing is the for-real version of something they're always accusing their enemies of doing: By showing just a pretense of toleration, they're distinguishing themselves against the loud-'n'-proud racism of their comrades (e.g. "As media-spooked GOP piles on, Rep. Steve King stands by his remark") -- in other words, they're virtue signaling.

UPDATE. I have far less reason to doubt the sincerity of Nick Gillespie's anti-racism, but I had to laugh when I read him bragging on his ancestors' immigrant roots:

Mostly, they worked hard as hell and provided for their children under difficult circumstances (prejudice, economic depression, war). The first job my grandfather Nicola Guida had in the promised land of America was chiseling rock with a hammer and sledge somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania (he and his fellow workers were never told exactly where they were to make it harder to run away). He would be so tired that he would piss and shit himself as he slept at night, unable to get up to use the facilities.

Wow, sounds like a libertarian dream! Maybe that's why Gillespie endorses these conditions for today's workers -- nostalgia!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Bill Clinton/Loretta Lynch thing and the Hillary Clinton/FBI thing and (mainly) rightbloggers' hysteria at being foiled by The Clenis and Hitlery once again. Like most Americans I'm kinda bored already by the CLINTONS CAUGHT SPITTING ON THE SIDEWALK (BY WHICH WE MEAN THE CONSTITUTION) stories emanating from Wingnut World. But after nearly a quarter century of this shit, even the brethren seem tired of it, too, and that's what I think I caught in this latest round of Clinton Contra action.

Some bonus material for the real-people late-night crowd: Here's some high-class hackery from Stephanie M. Jason at The Hill:

Given the "Teflon ability" of the Clintons to avoid political fallout from past questionable dealings – Whitewater, Chinagate, Travelgate, Monica-"gate", Clinton Foundation’s "pay-to-play" – Hillary’s karma may be catching up with her now.

Translation: We know The Clenis and Hitlery are guilty of something even if no legal or regulatory body has ever agreed — the law of averages is on our side!

Also I had to watch judicial cosplayer Judge Jeanine explain why Hillary was getting away with it this time: Apparently Boss Obama “knew [Clinton] had a private email server, so he is complicit -- and they will not allow a Constitutional crisis where the President of the United States knew about the risking of the security of the United States… Career prosecutors, FBI guys that I know, they’re pulling their hair out…" Maybe it's time Judge Jeanine and Wild Man Kurt Schlichter  and Allen B. West and all the other secessionists took their act on the road and overthrew another wildlife sanctuary!

UPDATE. Haven't had time (thanks to the inevitable post-holiday work-beating) to really examine the rightwing seethe-fest after Hillary got the fuck off, but now that I've had a look-in, all I can say is, between the armchair re-litigators like Joel B. Pollak of Breitbart.com ("FBI PROVES HILLARY CLINTON COMMITTED PERJURY BEFORE BENGHAZI COMMITTEE") and National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy ("FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook"), and screaming mimis like David Harsanyi at The Federalist ("She is above the law. And there is no one to stop her"), it is to LOL. One obvious thing never occurs to them about the Clintons: if everyone thinks they're corrupt, what does it say that people will still side with them against you?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Bob Luman was a little much, but I've always loved this. Check that piano!

•   Holy shit, in the event Trump gets the needed delegates, conservatives are really up for stealing the nomination from him. I mean, I've thought so all along, but now they're coming close to saying it out loud. At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson (now credited there as NR's "roving" correspondent, which must be a misprint), reminds us for the second time this month that this is a republic not a democracy, and denounces Trumpers who think "'We the People' are getting screwed by 'Them'" as unconservative  -- though this has been conservatism's selling message to the rubes since World War II. And so:

Yes, there are people in power maneuvering to frustrate the will of “We the People” on a dozen different things, ranging from economic and national-defense policy to the specific matter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That is prudence and patriotism, and the constitutional architecture of these United States is designed to prevent democratic passion from prevailing. Have your talk-radio temper tantrum. Have your riots. Our form of government, even in its current distorted state, was designed to handle and absorb your passions. You may dream of a dictator, but you will not have one.

That's telling the rabble, buddy. Also interesting: The despairing John Adams quote Williamson uses here (“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes...") was previously used by him to blast President Obama in an article calling Obama "the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics... For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally... he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law," and other such standard-issue rightwing ObamaHitler crap. Yet in this new article, Williamson says Trump threatens "a presidency a thousand times more imperial" than Obama's. That's some mega-imperialism right there; to come up, I guess Trump will have to revive NASA and colonize the solar system.

•  Meanwhile Williamson's colleague David Harsanyi is even more forthright:

The GOP Should Steal the Nomination from Trump 

...Voters don’t decide the nominations; delegates do — preferably in smoke-filled rooms where rational decisions about the future of a party can be hashed out.

Failing this, Harsanyi would be content to see a True Conservative third party, of which such as Erick Erickson dream, elevate a sacrificial nominee who would "sink Trump and elect Hillary Clinton," on the theory that "electing a weakened and corrupt Democrat that Republicans would unite against in Congress is a far better reality than allowing a charlatan to hollow out a party from within." Republicans united against a Democratic President! That's bound to lead to better results than the love-fest we've got going on now! I begin to wonder if someone (perhaps super-tyrant Trump) is putting something in these guys' drinking water.

•  Tell ya how bad anti-Trump fever has gotten at National Review: Heather Mac Donald is actually complaining that a white guy (Trump) is getting a pass that black guys (Obama, Sharpton) would never get. That's right -- Heather Mac Donald! Don't worry, though -- John Derbyshire's still hanging in for Trump and racism. And I'm sure Mac Donald with go back to her old ways forthwith -- hell, even Marco Rubio wasn't pro-cop/anti-BLM enough for her.

•  Peggy Noonan is trying to talk reason to that bad boy Trump! With a talent like his, why must he resort to hooliganism?

Why does he speak so carelessly and irresponsibly about things such as violence and protests at his rallies? Does he not understand American politics is always potentially a powder keg? 

He has enough imagination to have invented Donald Trump. Why doesn’t he have enough to understand the potential impact of a leader’s remarks? Does he understand the power he would have if he were a person of normal comportment?

After blowing her off Trump will get home and find she managed to tuck her business card into his jacket pocket. Meanwhile Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has gone full Stormtrumper on a David Brooks doll:

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

You'd think Reynolds would be too smart for this guff, but Trump really has him feeling the feeling: In an adjacent post, Reynolds actually revives an Obama "lightworker" gag from 2009. I can imagine him smashing protesters with a club and yelling BOO-YAH! UNDER THE BUS! (On his holodeck, of course.)

"DIVIDE" AND BONKERS.

The other day Obama went to a mosque and made a nice speech, to which Marco Rubio reacted with non-sequiturs:

“Look at today – he gave a speech at a mosque,” Rubio continued. “Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s going to be discrimination in America of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam. And by the way, radical Islam poses a threat to Muslims themselves.” 

“But again, it’s this constant pitting people against each other -- that I can’t stand that. It’s hurting our country badly," Rubio said. "We can disagree on things, right? I’m a Dolphin fan, you’re a Patriot fan."

Rubio is clearly animated by a desire for Muslim-hater votes, and has no need nor perhaps the ability to explain, so it's left for intellectuals like David Harsanyi to tell us why being nice to Americans of all faiths is divisive:

Take this CNN headline: “Obama rebuts anti-Muslim rhetoric in first U.S. mosque visit.” What does it mean? In the piece, we learn that president reacted to “young Muslim parents whose children are worried about being removed from the country.” I know of no Republican candidate — or anyone of note on the Right; or anywhere else for that matter — who has ever suggested any policy resembling this. Not even Donald Trump. 

A president who wanted to bring people together would have dismissed this as a preposterous idea.

A president who wanted to bring people together would look at what Republicans like Trump have actually been saying -- that we need to keep Muslims out of the country because they are special contaminant -- and try to head off the next logical stage of this kind of racism, which our Muslim citizens, who are no dummies, are already worried about. That's why he went to the mosque: To let these Americans know that we are not yet that depraved, and let all Americans know that we need not become that depraved.

One more bit from Harsanyi:

Yesterday, Obama spoke about the evils of Islamophobia to a group that featured women covered, subordinated, and segregated from men. I’m happy he’s open-minded about that sort of thing.

Ha ha.

Well, at least they're not throwing bottles at them anymore. 

I could go on all day like this -- Harsanyi also asks why it's okay for Muslim ladies to be covered but Bob Jones no longer gets tax breaks, for example -- but there's no point: like all his sort, Harsanyi's just vamping with this shit, hoping some Muslim will blow something up between now and Election Day so he can rattle the bins for the GOP's Crusader constituency. There's something else the guys at the mosque have that I can relate to: A constant awareness that your future could be total fucked at any moment by ruthless madmen. 

OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."

WHEN THEY SAY IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY...

You may have noticed the statistical review on white working class mortality covered by the Washington Post:

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

And you might have thought, as I did, well, no wonder: the white working class was doing great for decades after World War II, but in this generation it's seen its jobs offshored, then onshored at much lower wages -- and the jobs that stuck around don't pay so well either. Having excavated everything that can be excavated from the poor and the black, our system has taken to chipping at the lower end of the middle class. Between the economic and the emotional toll of this de-privileging, no wonder so many of these people are killing themselves, quickly or slowly.

National Review's David French read the same story, and of course his conclusion is that liberals are to blame:

While the economic challenges of working-class voters are well documented, the cultural challenges are just as notable. 

You may think  trying to raise kids on twenty grand a year is rough, but your lack of culchah is just as much of a problem -- and cheaper for me, so let's tackle that first!

At every turn, the cultural aristocrats cause harm. Mocking poor whites is among the last acceptable forms of bigotry.

You mean like "Li'l Abner"? Or "South Park"? French is unclear -- I assume purposefully, and that the picture he wishes to paint is of callous urban sophisticates laughing at a meth-addled cracker, rather than of salt-of-the-earth middle Americans laughing at "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Even the white working-class voters struggling with declining wages, declining health, and increasing despair are derided as somehow “privileged.” Those who speak for them are labeled bigots.

Like how they treated this fella. Obviously it was class warfare against white people.

Meanwhile, people keep dying, and families fracture. This is more than just mocking suffering, though — it’s celebrating the disease while rejecting the cure. Self-indulgence is the animating force behind the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is gutting the working class.

If you callous sophisticates hadn't done so much coke and had so many orgies, right out there where people could see it, Cletus and Brandine would never have took to moonshine and sex with their cousins.

As Murray notes in his book, cultural progressives flood the nation with messages celebrating hedonism and sexual experimentation even as they tend to preserve their own wealth and power through remarkably restrained and disciplined personal lives — getting married, remaining faithful, and investing in their children. They don’t practice the hedonism they so loudly preach.

Make that "if you callous sophisticates hadn't etc. etc. and nevertheless managed to live happy productive lives, etc." Why, it's like having to put up with a cheerful atheist -- it sets a bad example for the proles!

On the one hand you have wingnuts like French crying that the middle class is collapsed or collapsing because of Playboy and rap music; on the other you have wingnuts like David Harsanyi who claim that this shit economy is actually "dynamic" and you should all go get Uber jobs and feel the dynamism of a week-by-week struggle to afford a hovel and slop. Pick your confusion; doesn't matter which, so long as millionaires get all the tax breaks and we zero out welfare.

UPDATE. At The Federalist Ben Domenech gets in on it. He implies -- slightly more gently than other benefit cops like Jonah Goldberg -- that the growing ranks of erstwhile workers on disability are swollen with frauds. And natch, it's about the culchah:

As a cultural matter, the picture is even worse. The surrender to the permanent trap of disability payments is a consequence of a loss of a certain American working class stoicism, which grappled with the tragic nature of life with what was essentially a 19th-century mentality.

We were a stronger, more American America when crips were left to forage or beg.

It was hard enough to deal with such a vision before the disintegration of working class marriage in the country – notice the contrast drawn by Charles Murray between the attitudes toward marriage and the experience of divorce in the white working class versus professionals.

When we've finally turned into the neofeudal hellscape of Lang's Metropolis for real, I expect there'll be a statue of Charles Murray in every town square.

UPDATE 2. Some very fine comments here. e.g., Susan of Texas:

What is it about white culture that is destroying white Americans? 

You vote for politicians who outsource your jobs. Your own crap job, when you can get one, is hard on the body and soul- and dignity-crushing. You go to the doctor for pain-killers to ease the bodily pain and take too many to anesthetize the mental pain. You fatally poison yourself with drug and alcohol anesthetics or get a DWI and lose more jobs or drive away your family. (I'm still waiting for someone to tell us how getting married and not having kids will create factories out of thin air.)...

Worth going in and reading in full. I should add that, especially when you get past a certain age, physical labor is hard on you -- which is something you might miss even if you were a waiter at 20 but never a fry-cook at 55. Go to any actual working-class neighborhood and you'll see some people limping or hobbling from the bus to their homes -- and if they stiffen up they tend not to work it out at the yoga studio. I wonder if French and Domenech have ever seen this, or if they think it's really like the Seven Dwarves whistling to and from the mine.

ALL IT LACKS IS A REFERENCE TO LIBERAL ELITISM.

This is the sort of thing you can just see David Harsanyi writing on a bet. "David," says his friend over the brandy and cigars at the Club, "you know how everyone wishes it were still possible to make a good living in this country with your hands and without having degrees out the yin-yang? $1000 says you can't write a column that'll convince them they don't really want that."

Sure thing! says Harsanyi:

For starters, isn’t it a bit archaic to act like assembling a car is more honorable or useful than being a teacher, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, or an engineer; working in finance; or making a living in the service industry? Perhaps there’s something about the tangibility of seeing a widget being put together by a line of workers that offers voters some affirmation that, indeed, things must be going well. But it doesn’t work that way...

Maybe he thinks the folks clamoring for these jobs are all hipsters looking to dabble in manual labor during their gap year.

In the 1950s, these kinds of jobs may have offered the security and pensions that people sought — considering the other options. Today, Americans have easier access to education and far more vocational diversity. There is no need romanticize a far less dynamic time in American history...

You may not be able to afford to send your kid to college or a new car every five years like your grandfather did, but he didn't have dynamism!

When politicians says we’ve outsourced manufacturing jobs, they mean the labor has become too expensive. Most voters probably understand that China, Mexico, Malaysia, “steal” jobs because American workers can’t compete with someone making a dollar an hour...

At least not yet!

Fact: robots are better than humans at assembling things...

It is over, puny humans! Do not struggle!

We have no clue what new industry will emerge a decade from now. The more we innovate, though, the more it seems we need human creativity and ingenuity — at least until the post-scarcity world of singularity.

When they can finally upload my brain into a globe I won't need food and shelter -- too bad for you flesh-and-blood suckers!

I can see Harsanyi handing this to his friend and asking, "Do I win?" and the friend pulling a sheaf of C-notes from petty cash and saying with a gentle smile, "Well, I'm convinced."

THE LIBERTARIAN REACTION TO OBAMA'S SPEECH:

Libertarians are supposed to be socially-liberal beards for conservatives -- you know, "I'm not for gay marriage but my libertarian boyfriend is." When they start talking about Obama like Rush Limbaugh talking about Sandra Fluke, it may be time for the Koch Brothers to consider some new investments. 

UPDATE. You will hear in the days to come many libertarians and conservatives bitching about the Democratic convention's hyperpatriotism -- why look, here's David Harsanyi, who is both, doing so at Reason -- which just goes to show that they don't have a sense of humor. After forty years of star-spangled lawn-order Republicanism, this convention's turnabout was a grand joke. That Obama's warm-up act was Biden, who basically broke the GOP's Neverforget spell with "a noun, a verb, and 9/11," and that the Obamas totally did the Reagan-Mommy thing, only spices the jest. It's not as good as having them all die screaming in a fire, mind, but it's pretty good for a Thursday night. Four stars! 

YOU DIDN'T WANT THAT AMERICAN DREAM ANYWAY. Ack! Remember when Ann Althouse was pretending not to believe that America once had a middle class that included blue collar workers who were able to support their families on a single income? David Harsanyi (surely you remember him -- big libertarian!) goes her one better -- he sort of acknowledges that such a state of affairs existed, but insists it was horrible compared to the dynamic depression we're in now:

Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and -- if you're lucky -- an "occasional" promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you'd want your offspring to escape, tout de suite.

Luckily, in the real world, history tells of a story filled with dynamic movements of people, class climbing, churning innovation, booms and busts, and widespread embrace of risk taking...

...ending in a collapse of the banking system due in large part to "churning innovation" in financial instruments. But that was just the wow finish -- for decades the middle class has self-evidently been squeezed until the entry fee, which had once just been a willingness to (to coin a phrase) work hard and play by the rules, became a college degree, a second income, a willingness to work round the clock and on holidays, and the normalization of the sort of financial manipulations in which, once upon a time, only brokers and con men engaged.

And that's for the lucky ones.

Go ahead, Dave -- go among the unemployed and marginally employed and ask them if they think a steady job is an intolerable oppression that they're fortunate to be rid of. Hell, ask the fully-employed people who're hanging onto solvency by their fingernails if they're enjoying your churningly innovative thrill-ride.

I've always assumed these people were raised in Skinner boxes, but I'm beginning to think they never got out of them.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 499,010. David Harsanyi has an article at Reason -- which, surely you know, is the nation's preeminent libertarian magazine -- about abortion. Synopsis: That guy who killed those babies in Philadelphia was just doing what all abortionists do, there are more late-term abortions than you think, "Does life really begin on the say-so of a single person—even the mother?" Nat Hentoff, Ron Paul, "41 percent of pregnancies in New York City were terminated with the destruction of the nascent human being," etc.

Since this is a libertarian magazine, Harsanyi drops little notes here and there to indicate he's not being pro-life exactly (those people are "folks I generally don't hang with," dude), he's just asking questions, such as "How many Americans instinctively turn to the pro-choice camp because pro-life proponents aggravate their secular sensibilities?" If you're inclined to answer, "Dunno -- how many people turn to the pro-life camp because Jesus told them to?" you're obviously beyond Harsanyi's reach. And that's too bad, because he's just trying to be reasonable:

It's unfortunate that abortion is a social issue, because it is science and reason that can turn the debate...

I'm certainly not under the delusion that every problem has an answer. But if the pro-life movement is going to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the nation, it's not going to need more God. It's going to need more reason.

Reexamine your premises, baby-killers -- like those global warming alarmists, you're the ones flying the face of science!

Reaching to clasp hands from the other side of the conservative-libertarian divide, National Review's chief theocon Kathryn J. Lopez talks about "Abortion as a Tea Party Issue":

Has our financial mess brought us to the brink of getting beyond the culture wars?

It’s a question that we might see play out on Capitol Hill in the coming months as the new majority seeks to make the late pro-life congressman Henry Hyde proud, by defunding Planned Parenthood and prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortion.

Lopez brings in an expert to explain that "forced payment for abortions is not just or even primarily about abortion but about experts in Washington instructing us about how we make decisions about sensitive matters." Yeah yeah, to-may-to, to-mah-to, so long as they can save those fetuses. Later on, there'll be another angle they can apply to abortions that, though privately funded, can still be shown to contradict the wishes of the Founding Fathers -- maybe because they were foisted on an unwilling America by activist judges or the "elites" or "ruling class" or whatever.

Remember all that "Tea Party Avoids Divisive Social Issues" stuff? Psych! All they had to do was remove abortion from the category of "social issues." The effect's still the same, though.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, AND NEVER DID. The idea that Obama is covering for Muslim jihadists in the Times Square unexplosion seems to have been adopted by libertarians. Obama and other statists are defending "fundamentalist Islam," David Harsanyi suggests, in order to persecute libertarians' friends in the tea parties and Israel.

Between this and their traditional commitment to freeing the weed, I think libertarians are a good bet to become the regnant movement of the post-apocalyptic hellscape I'm increasingly worried I won't die soon enough to miss.