FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/21/23.

For me, a good cover makes you hear the original differently.
I never much liked this song before I heard this version.

I’m outta the hospital and back on my bullshit! As proof, have some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. First one’s about how other Republican officials might try to copy Ron “Three Fingers” DeSantis’ B-movie goon act. (I mentioned this a few days ago but what the hell, it’s news if it’s news to you.) I see Fingers has been having a hard week; apparently some donors (and voters!) notice his charmlessness and lunatic policies could be a liability in the general election. There is one super-rich guy pledging, hilariously, he would “go without food” to make this chunkhead President – increasingly this is becoming the age of the single rightwing billionaire patron, as shown by dedicated contributors to such as Rod Dreher and the Marble Freedom Trust – but it looks as if the closer we get to actual vote-counting time, the less people want a candidate who basically acts out neo-Nazi pamphlets in his governance. Once again, it seems Supercrook will be the GOP’s champion in the brief vote-show before the next insurrection attempt.

Speaking of big donors, the second freebie is mostly a monologue delivered by Clarence Thomas’ charming wife, explaining to the rabble why Supreme Court Justices of a certain political inclination aren’t bound by laws and norms to which we may, in our childishness, have expected them to attend. It has been grimly funny to see such frauds as Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Charles Murray and David French all rushing to defend Thomas’ Sugar Nazi as one hell of a guy who, on that basis, should be able to buy whatever unanswerable public official he wants. But they and the recalcitrant Thomas are part of the same imperturbable ruling class ethic: When the going gets tough, just act as if what the peons think doesn’t matter. It’s worked so far! 

Only other thing I really wanted to mention is Elmo’s blue-check purge. As expected, it’s already making it hard to identify real government agencies and public services from fakes. This doesn’t matter to Elmo and his incel army, who continue to portray the mass decertification as some sort of populist victory. But too little attention is paid to the real purpose behind it. 

Once upon a time Twitter was a good place to find, talk to, and sometimes yell at, people whose expertise and experience, attested to by Twitter, were valuable and meaningful. It was as close to a public forum with such people as most of us ever got.

Now it doesn’t matter whether you actually are, for example, an internationally-known forestry expert, or whether you’re just some guy who paid eight dollars so he can pretend he is one. In fact the phony may have an advantage over the real if he’s a Friend of Elmo – that is, the sort of right-wing troll he favors and amplifies. Where once a user’s achievements were significant, now all that matters is volume – how much one’s signal is boosted by the corrupt owner, and how many bots you can afford to muscle-up your tweets. This destroys Twitter as a resource, but promotes it as a propaganda tool – an alternative universe where the worst ideas are promoted, not because so many people even on the platform believe them, but because shitheels can rig it so it seems like they do. If these people lose again in 2024, count on them to say it’s impossible because Catturd2 has more followers than Biden got votes. 

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. 

VOTE, YOU FUCKERS, VOTE.

I could give you guys one of those Resistance pep-talks about how you gotta go out there and vote to save the country, the planet, yourself, etc., but what’s more likely to convince you to storm the ballot box is this essay:

Yes, it’s the Doughy Pantload himself, telling you a dumb ol' election’s nothing to get in a sweat over.

Look, I think my record over the last seven years or so of arguing that politics in general, and right-wing politics in particular, is going in a bad direction is pretty solid. Heck, now that I think about it, my record for arguing that left-wing politics is going in a bad direction is pretty stellar. 

But to listen to a lot of folks, the National Guard should go door to door collecting belts and shoelaces from a vast cross section of the commentariat as well as millions of rank-and-file voters.

Some people just shouldn’t try mordancy. It’s one thing when Lee Marvin, smiling mordantly over his cheroot in a boxcar, tells you “Country’s gone ta hell!” in Emperor of the North (14:13), but when fat-ass legacy pledge Jonah Goldberg puts it on it’s like Jacob Rees-Mogg affecting a gangster lean.   

You want to know what I think will happen if Republicans have a really good night on Tuesday? 

Not much. 

First of all, you'll still have the same friends, family, and job you did the day before the election (not counting a few hundred campaign and congressional staffers and the like). That's important because, as much as partisans have convinced themselves otherwise, politics isn't as important in your daily life as politicians and pundits want you to believe.

‘cept if you’re gay or trans or a refugee or need an abortion or give a shit about anyone besides yourself, in which case sucks to be you, haha, fart.

…Broadly speaking, here's what I think will happen if Republicans gain control of Congress. Things will go very badly for Hunter Biden as the GOP dissects his life down to his DNA (and let's face it, he is a sleazy, corrupt dude, even if he isn't the bogeyman some want him to be). 

Political prosecutions don’t matter if you don’t like the guy.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, will quit rather than face impeachment, or maybe he'll stick around and be impeached. Anthony Fauci will be put through the wringer. But we'll also probably get some needed investigations into the origins of COVID and the debacle in Afghanistan. 

Four hours a day of Rand Paul screaming “ADMIT IT FAUCI, YOU AND XI JINPING MADE CCP VIRUS IN THE LAB WITH A CANDLESTICK,” followed by four hours of that godforsaken occupation’s biggest fans shaking their fists at Biden for ending it – that’s Goldberg’s idea of The Way Things Ought To Be.

And yeah, Republicans will waste a lot of time talking about and maybe actually going through with what will likely be a stupid, pointless, and hypocritical effort to impeach Joe Biden.

See, baseless and obviously political prosecutions of the President and his son aren’t symptoms of fast-track fascism, they’re just “stupid, pointless, and hypocritical,” like when the guys at The Dispatch make lame jokes about Jonah’s Asness Chair. Chillax, dood! 

…The GOP crazy caucus will expand as a few more tinfoil hatters join Marjorie Taylor Greene's treehouse of stupid.

Broadening out, there will be some new bad apples at the state level, and they will say and do terrible things. 

Don’t Say Gay becomes Don’t Hire Them Either, Don’t Let Them Adopt etc. No skin off his nose, though. 

But most of their schemes will fall afoul of both the courts and the court of public opinion.

In the actual courts of actual judicial opinion, however, their schemes will not fall afoul, but rather continue to overtly politicize American justice, which could not possible lead to a poor societal and governmental result. 

The whole thing is nightmarishly bad but I ask you to consider just these two bits:

I take a backseat to no one in my contempt for both the grifters and sincere hysterics on the right who take things like Dinesh D'Souza's 2000 Mules seriously. But even Dinesh's carefully crafted crackpottery works on the assumption that democracy is good. Even putsch-peddlers like Michael Flynn argued for rerunning the election, because in America we believe that elections confer legitimacy for elected positions. 

And, get this:

The January 6 riot proves the point. Most of those goons and buffoons storming the Capitol committed the blunder of believing Donald Trump's lies about the election being stolen. That's the weird irony lost on so many people rightly appalled by that day: Most of those in the mob thought they were fighting for democracy.

Not just high-pressure crooks and propagandists like D’Souza and Flynn are pro-democracy, but so are the guys who stormed the fucking Capitol! I’m shocked Goldberg didn’t include the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi. Hell, I guess if someone assassinated Biden, it’d be because the assassin just loved democracy so much – further proof of how healthy and not-in-danger our Way of Life is.

Anyway, if all the totalitarian plans these fuckers brag about implementing as soon as they get power don’t motivate you, let Goldberg’s flurry of farts propel you to the polls! God bless us, every one. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN,

Dedicated to all the MAGA shitehads out there.

•  Here’s this week’s unlocked Roy Edroso Breaks It Down story – a consideration of conservative attacks against drag queens. It may hardly seem worth mentioning, given the insane hate-on conservatives have for other groups such as trans people (whom, it is worth noting, conservatives are currently trying to chase from society and some are trying to murder). But I think it’s noteworthy for the very weirdness of their jihad. For years it seemed even lunkheads liked drag queens because of the the joy they bring. I guess when bigotry blossoms, it’s important to attack the pleasure centers. See what you think! 

•  I guess the big news now is Biden’s perfectly reasonable speech on how Trump supporters’ attacks on democracy should be resisted, and the ravings of said supporters in response. In a way it’s perfect: Biden said they were dangerous nuts, and here they are acting the part perfectly. Like this:

Prognostication is a mug’s game, but I think we can safely assume independent voters are not gonna look at shit like this and think, yeah these guys are definitely not the violent lunatics they looked like on January 6. 

The weirdest thing, though, has been the argument made by some of conservatism’s finest minds, that since MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, Democrats are against making American great:

That’s like saying “’Arbeit mach frei’” just means ‘work will make you free’ – it’s really a positive message!”

Oh, and for lagniappe: 

If only stupidity made evil people ineffectual, we could count ourselves safe from these losers. But we know they’re going to continue to act out, in violent language and behavior, protesting their innocence all the while. Well, at least the non-idiots know the score. Let's hope my optimistic view that non-idiots represent a majority turns out to be accurate! 

•  Finally, goodbye to Barbara Ehrenreich. I've only read a few of her excellent essays, and ought to take this opportunity to finally get to Nickeled and Dimed. I will mention that she was yet another subject on which Jonah Goldberg showed his utter worthlessness. 

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

Today’s issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, released to the general public, is inspired by the latest hilarious symptom of prestige media’s accelerating degeneracy: Jonah Goldberg hired by CNN. 

Longtime readers will know that I have followed The Man They Call Pantload with interest since 2003, or five short years after his mom and a sploogey blue dress bought him a media career, from his early Bad Boy/Moral Scold act through the publication his magnum opus Liberal Fascism or I Know You Are But What Am I, during years of terrible, terrible columns at National Review, occasionally with fart jokes and catchphrases, and into his half-assed apostasy as he realized his South Park Republican shtick had been rendered useless even among conservatives by the mouthbreathing mobs of Trumperdom. 

Over this period I have come to consider Goldberg not merely a bad writer and worse thinker, but also one of my great literary creations -- an overfed momma’s boy who, thrust (still dribbling Cheetos) onto the public stage, tries to charm his audience with horseplay and, failing that, claps a mortarboard on his head and proceeds to launch ludicrous syllogisms, fretfully farting as they range out of control.  Seeing him rise to CNN, I feel a little as I imagine Jaroslav Hašek would have felt seeing his Good Soldier Schweik elected to the Austrian parliament. 

When Goldberg noisily left Fox News I figured he'd join the New York Times' stable of rightwing gasbags; it would be easy to pretend people who know how to read can abide him. Putting his sputtering ass on TV seems like a mistake -- like when 60 Minutes created a pundit bank of P.J. O'Rourke, Molly Ivins, and Stanley Crouch, and viewers begged them to desist.  Well, it's their money! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

An old favorite.

•   Good news if you’ve been on the fence about subscribing to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down: I’m holding a Black Friday sale! Go to https://edroso.substack.com/AFFILIATE10 by tomorrow and get monthly or yearly subscription at 15% off!  That means your annual sub price goes from the already absurd $70 to, ludicrously, less than $60, and the monthly from $7 to $6. It’s almost criminal negligence not to subscribe at these fantasyland rates.

Here’s a little taste up front: A free-to-the-general-public item on a weird Matt Taibbi Thanksgiving column, in which he complains not everyone loves the holiday the way he does -- that is, as a boo-yah in-your-face sack dance over wokesters. He’s not ignorant of the genocidal backstory, he just doesn’t care, or rather makes a strenuous pretense of not caring because it Owns The Libs. 

•   At least Taibbi’s approach reveals something interesting about conservatives who basically concede liberal points but want to make them not matter. Most of these guys are far too lazy to go beyond “Happy Thanksgiving to everybody but you Biden rad libs.”  This Washington Examiner Thanksgiving thumbsucker runs the “House Divided” play:

There is no civil war today as there was when Lincoln first set a national day of thanks, and thank goodness for that. But the nation is clearly divided to an extent perhaps not seen since then.   

An insurrectionist rump trying to delegitimize the government because they no longer control it isn’t exactly a House Divided scenario -- it's more of House Stormed by Shitheels scenario -- but maybe that’s just me. (Republicans love the civil-war theme because, as I’ve said elsewhere, they yearn for a rerun of Civil War I in which their side finally wins, and also because it makes them look more powerful than they are because they’re the ones making the war faces.)

If that part of the WashEx essay hasn’t broken your bullshit meter, get the gaffer’s tape ready for the very next line:

Woke police have so captured higher education and corporate America that most people are now scared to speak their minds in the classroom and at work.

People have been “scared to speak their minds in the classroom and at work” for decades, if by “scared to speak their minds” you mean aware that if they started dishing out slurs and insulting their colleagues and fellow students they’d suffer consequences. And as their silence when the “free speech” issue is school boards banning books shows, their own personal right to call Sue from Accounting a tranny is all that term means to them. 

•   Hey look, a new COVID variant is on its way! Let me take this opportunity to remind you that back in early days of COVID vaccinations, conservatives were yelling that people who still wore masks in public -- whom they presumed to be liberals, because public health measures are liberalism now -- were actually making COVID worse by discouraging vaccination, because masklessness was a benefit of vaccination and, since Americans could not be expected to do anything that doesn't result in immediate gratification, they wouldn't get the shot unless it meant they could rip off the "face diaper" and dive head-first into a ballpit of virus, and masked-and-vaccinated people were making them feel like they couldn't. I will also remind you there have been little revivals of this rightwing anti-mask thing ever since, including recently, after the spread of booster shots, as shown by this Noah Millman column at The Week ("the pressure for continued restrictions is itself an expression of lack of confidence in vaccines... It thereby contributes to the anti-vaccine sentiment that is the primary cause of America's continuing high death toll from COVID"). Millman compares attempts by the fascist CDC to get us to observe these measures to the unheeded commands of decaying despotic regimes, and suggests that requiring masks in schools helped elect Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. If a new COVID wave, enabled by the recalcitrance of red states to masks and vaccination, sweeps the country, I predict neither Millman nor any of his fellow yahoos will reconsider, and will instead blame it on the 6.2% inflation rate. 

•   Tell you what, here’s another freebie for REBID non-subscribers who remember the good old days of Liberal Fascism: The inevitable next step for Jonah Goldberg, whom we may expect to try and cash in on his post-Fox-News cred. Lots of low humor! 

JONAH GOLDBERG: SECOND TIME AS FARTS.

I guess it’s time to remind people about the Doughy Pantload, aka the Flatulator. From an otherwise estimable Greg Sargent column about Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg quitting whatever it was they were getting paid for by Fox News over Tucker Carlson’s pro-insurrection TV special:

Some liberals have scoffed that Hayes and Goldberg are unreliable allies who should have recognized Fox’s toxicity long ago and have taken other unforgivable positions over the years. But liberals should want the existence of a center-right that is fundamentally for the baseline of respecting democratic outcomes and institutions, for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere, even if we disagree with them about everything else.

In the story linked from his “for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere," Sargent acknowledges that people like Hayes and Goldberg aren’t exactly democracy’s best friends, but they are more likely to defend it in a pinch than are the true Trumpkins:

On CNN, [Trump apostate Miles] Taylor said: “The one place we are united with Democrats right now is in defending our democracy.” Unfortunately, when it comes to center-right voices willing to say this, right now we don’t have the option of being particularly choosy.

But we only have their say-so on that -- what’s the proof they’ll “defend democracy”? Taylor was revealed to be the author of the hilarious 2018 “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” op-ed in the New York Times, in which he claimed to be one of “many Trump appointees [who] have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” But what’d he actually do, besides wait until just before the 2020 election to out himself? 

Taylor's anonymous op-ed suggests he and his buddies just tried to keep the mentally unstable Trump from fucking up Republican policy too much. Even the many “oh yeah, Trump was nuts but I couldn’t tell you at the time because I needed it for my upcoming book” reports out there don’t show Taylor or anyone like him stopping Trump from declaring martial law or anything. (I will add that I take the stories about Pence resisting Trump because of James Madison, rather than because he was ascared he’d get in trouble, with a megagrain of salt.) 

As I wrote when the op-ed came out:

…it's taken me more than a year to acknowledge that Max Boot, for example, is sincere about opposing [Trump]. Boot remains a war-mongering monster, of course, but he's not pretending to be anything else -- he even admits that he can't approve of Trump's saber-rattling, not because Boot has turned pacifist, but because he thinks Trump lacks the belly (figuratively speaking) to follow through with the civilizational slaughter Boot's approval would require.

So when Boot says he's hoping the Democrats take over to teach Republicans a lesson, I believe he means it, because he's not trying to snow me about why he wants it. Thus, if he and his comrades of convenience get rid of Trump and eventually install President Mattis, I won't be stuck with my thumb up my ass blubbering "B-b-b-but I thought we was pals" as America blows up half the Middle East and Boot orgasms voluptuously.

More likely Taylor et alia were just looking for a more comfortable niche in the rightwing universe with some staying power for after Trump sharts himself to death. Taylor is currently working something called the Renew America Movement, pitched by -- red alert! -- the Niskanen Center. These guys are less likely to save democracy than to save their own asses.

Now Sargent and others think Hayes and Goldberg are part of some post-Resistance. Hayes ran the Weekly Standard, the wingnut mag that went anti-Trump, thus driving away its rich rightwing funders -- at which, LOL, on many levels, not least because Megan McArdle thought the demise of this sinecure meant there was a “civil war shattering the [conservative] movement,” notwithstanding “some of the movement’s stalwarts did turn into Trump boosters, if only half-hearted ones.” Har de har har. Pick up a copy of National Review sometime and tell me how anti-Trump they are. 

As to Goldberg: Since his emergence as his mom’s backup in the Lewinsky affair, he’s been a public nuisance -- my alicublog archives return hundreds of entries on his awfulness, despite my getting bored with him over the past couple of years. The most recent phase of Goldberg’s failsonry is his quasi-demi-hemi-anti-Trumpism, by which he heretofore hoped to straddle Trumpworld and NeverTrumpworld -- here, for example, he sputters that he’s not technically a “Never Trump” conservative, but more of a “Trump skeptic.” Whatever you call his aposta-half-assy, he has mainly expressed it by sneaking snide remarks in between pats of the Former Guy’s back:

Goldberg actually lists several columns where he's been "criticizing Trump." Let's take one at random -- "The False Prophecy of the Presidential Pivot” -- and look at the lede:

It was just last week that Donald Trump had the finest moment of his short presidency — his address to a joint session of Congress. Even many of his harshest critics praised his speech or reluctantly conceded that it was “presidential.”

Really lets him have it, huh? Actually Goldberg does get to criticizing eventually, but it's mainly criticism of Trump's intemperate Tweeting…

The great irony here is, Goldberg’s intellectual cred is largely based on his book Liberal Fascism -- a book about, unsurprisingly, how liberalism is fascism. (Goldberg, sneaky little shit that he is, claimed the book wasn’t about that when hawking it in the prestige media, and mostly got away with it, though not with Jon Stewart.) Now Goldberg finds himself chased out of the top tier of conservatism by the actual fascists in his own movement. Don’t worry about him, though -- he still has his phony-baloney job at The Dispatch as well as his Asness Chair (snerk) at AEI. And eventually you’re see him again in some place of unaccountable prominence, admitting that while the Proud Boys sometimes go too far, they’re a welcome change from the protestors they’ve put in the hospital. FarrRRt. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Sure, I like pop-punk. Even when it's new! Thanks to Alan Scherstuhl for this.

•   OK, for you deadbeats who are not regular subscribers to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- and why aren't you? It's cheap, it's superb, and it offers a great opportunity to contribute to the (already in progress!) death of journalism without having to expose yourself to the cancelculture sob-stories of Substack's marquee dweebs  -- here are a couple of freebies: First, my tribute to ham-faced Erick Erickson and his much-remarked-upon plan to solve America's armed mass murder problem by literally giving everyone a gun. And let's not sleep on his prose style! Here's the lede from Erickson's latest atrocity:

Every year, I spend time on Good Friday on radio focusing on that weekend. Regardless of whether one is a believer or not, most academic and secular historians list the death of Jesus of Nazareth as one of the top five most important events in human history. Quite frequently, it is number one on those lists.

Again, regardless of the theology, when we are dealing with a day considered the most important event in human history by people who do not even believe in Christ’s resurrection, we should probably pause and not just explore it, but explore the world around us as it exists right now in relation to that event.

He makes Jonah Goldberg look like Nabokov. Also, enjoy this bagatelle about two old Republican hands confronted by the New Breed. 

•   Speaking of old alicublog recurring characters -- well, first, check out this recent scene from Sesame Street where Elmo asks Russell why his skin is brown and Russell says it's melanin and Russell's dad says, "The color of our skin is an important part of who we are, but we should all know that we all look different... many people call this race, but even though we look different, we're all part of the human race."

Sounds simple enough, even corny -- something you'd think would be non-controversial, right? Well, here's what Rod Dreher thinks, in a post called (I'm not even kidding) "Segregating Sesame Street": 

I hadn’t realized how deeply the new progressive racial obsession bothered me until I saw that clip above, and realized that woke Sesame Street is now setting out to undo all the work that had been accomplished in the generations the show catechized. You know who taught my generation of children to see color? White people who longed for segregation’s return, and black people who lived in fear of white people who longed for segregation’s return.

Now kids can get that from Sesame Street. Good job, progressives; you are the most regressive force in American society today. I guess somebody has to teach the kids why it’s good to have segregated college graduations... 

 If you're thinking, how the fuck did Dreher get that from this video? the obvious answer is he only absorbs outside stimuli after it's bounced off the fascist funhouse mirror in his skull a few times, and he thinks everything would be hunky-dory if only black people would stop making a stink. But I should note also Dreher's alleged love of earlier Sesame Street, back before all the woke-SJW "we're all part of the human race" stuff:

I was born in 1967. Sesame Street was born two years later. I don’t remember a time before Sesame Street. It was my window into a world beyond the rural South. In 1999, when my wife and I moved to brownstone Brooklyn, I remember thinking, “I live on Sesame Street” — this, because the streets there reminded me of what I had grown up with. 

Aww, that's nice. Wanna know why Dreher left Brooklyn? As early as 2001 he was lamenting that his young son "won't have taken in the smell of tobacco, bourbon and dried gumbo mud flaking off hunting boots that is my father's aroma," and would instead grow up in "an urban culture dominated--indeed, in my social and professional milieu, overrun--by men without chests" and "a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build." Guess he found out Sesame Street was populated by he-shes, Black Panthers and moral relativists! Then he wrote at National Review in 2003, after he had split:

...all it takes is riding the NYC subway daily, and having to live with fear and loathing of the violent, profane and altogether anti-social teenagers who make public spaces here their playpens, to understand why middle-class people get fed up and move the hell out of town to raise their kids.

Now Dreher's blubbering that the TV show version of New York he claims he thought he was living in when he briefly career-moved there has been spoiled by a couple of African-American puppets. Yeesh, what a freak. 

ROD DREHER FASCISM WATCH CONT.

The great volume of work required by my God Damn Job and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (a classic, only Substack newsletter not devoted to cancelculture blubbering, subscribe!) is part of what keeps me from following Rod Dreher as closely as I used to. But most of it is just fatigue and disgust. As with another of my longtime figures of fun, Jonah Goldberg, their idiocies that once tickled me have palled; neither Dreher nor Goldberg ever improves or even becomes memorably worse, and all they seem to learn are new scholarly references to stick to their same old, shitty ideas. 

Dreher is mainly noteworthy for the increasing obviousness of his fascist beliefs.  Last week I mentioned his latest expression of fondness for Generalissimo Franco (one in a series). This week, as you may expect, he has been disgusted that the awful man whose manners he excoriates (but who he nonetheless had hoped would be reelected) spurred the mob to violence, but did you know the attempted coup was actually "The Left’s Reichstag Fire"? No, he's not saying the Left actually did the attempted coup (at least not yet) but that they stand to benefit from it -- that is, sure, Trump's goons tried to murder Congress, but now liberals will treat this "as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people." Which is so much worse! 

Then, in another post, Dreher goes further: 

Anyway, I anticipate that rightist radicals will now begin to undertake campaigns of low-level violent actions — bombings and other forms of domestic terrorism. It won’t amount to anything, but it will give the Establishment (= not just the state, but corporations too) even more excuses to crack down. 

So "rightist radicals" are going to do "bombings" and "other forms of domestic terrorism" but "it won’t amount to anything" -- besides, I guess, the murder of a bunch of people, but Rod's not really concerned about them because really, what's some dead terror victims that probably don't go to his church compared with cancel culture victims? You may have lost your life but I got a 12-hour Twitter time-out! And my beloved horrible president [sniff] lost his Twitter entirely! ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL!    

Guy's a fascist.

LATEST DREHER CATACLYSM.

Gotta thank Christopher Hooks for pointing this one out: Holy Rod Dreher hears from a data scientist that "roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT" and flips:

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration...

As you may have guessed, Dreher didn't realize "B" means bisexual, and when it is pointed out to him he emits a can't-miss 2020 Jonah Goldberg Central To My Point winner:

This is probably true, but it doesn’t really change much. I’m not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? 

Blink. Blink.

So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because “bisexual” could cover “open to sex with both sexes”....

Might could, huh. 

...but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.

If it makes Rod feel bad it's bad for America/Christianitythe babbys. 

But let's go back to his blather about how non-het women are "anti-natalist." Set aside that not only bi but also gay women can have babies (and trans people too -- which Dreher should know because he frequently screams about it); why would it be anti-natalist if a lot of women (including straight women) didn't want to have babies? That doesn't mean they're against childbirth -- that just means they don't want to do it themselves, just like my lack of interest in downhill racing makes me anti-skiing. The difference, I guess, is that Dreher thinks it's these women's duty -- every woman's duty, it would seem -- to make themselves available for childbearing whether they want to or not. 

PS. In case you were wondering where Dreher, the prototypical JustTheTip Trumper, had come down after months of "I'm not Trump fan BUT" pee-dancing: In a separate full-body-fit over an Associated Press story that accurately portrays Amy Coney Barrett's support for anti-LGBTQ policies, he's taken a quintessentially Dreheresque route -- he probably won't sully himself with a vote for that Bad Man with the Good Judges, but he definitely wants other people to do it for him:

I have pretty much decided to vote third party for president (American Solidarity Party). Trump has my state locked up anyway, so I’m thinking that I would like to cast a vote in favor of a party whose platform I really believe in, as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils, and choosing between the evil of two lessers. 

BUT:

Reading this AP story this morning, though, has reminded me again of the contempt the left has for people like me, and our institutions... I hope you Christian readers — especially those in swing states — will too. Though my vote really doesn’t matter in my state, this issue might move it to Trump anyway, given the quality of his judicial appointments. If I were in a swing state, this AP story, and what it symbolizes, would seal the deal for me.

There's an old gag about how if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament, but if men could get pregnant Dreher would just find some other bullshit reason to get other humans to do the job for him. 

UPDATE. Just want to note for the historical record (I'm old-fashioned that way) that Dreher has updated again from his famous "reader" "mailbag." The alleged correspondent is a "Gen Z female reader" who says girls are saying they're gay or gayishe because of "increasing self-aggrandizement" among today's Fallen Youth "that surrounds this idea of identifying as any type of LGBTQ. It’s a social marker that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd. It makes you cool, it makes you one of the crowd." It's Queer Pressure! 

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hey, who finally told me abut The Beths?

I want to thank them.

•  David Brooks blubbers again! This week it's about how the mean elitist liberals oppress ruff-tuff conservative he-men such as himself and his buddies.

First, to get it out of the way fast so no one can say he ignored it:

Like other realms, American intellectual life has been marked by a series of exclusions. The oldest and vastest was the exclusion of people of color from the commanding institutions of our culture.

[To be heard in an extremely bored voice and Brooks doing the jerk-off motion.]

Today, there’s the exclusion of conservatives from academic life. Then there’s the exclusion of working-class voices from mainstream media.

Brooks always conflates conservatives with the working class because he came up in an era in which hardhat-and-lunchbucket Joes loved pampered movie star Ronald Reagan, and he thinks it's the natural order of things. (Donald Trump even more preposterously pulling the same hardhat bullshit seems not to have enlightened him as to this racket.) Hence, Brooks' comical 2018 dialogue between "Urban Guy," who sounded like David Brooks pretending to be a snooty liberal, and "Flyover Man," who sounded like David Brooks after a few cocktails and a Glenn Ford movie.

Our profession didn’t used to be all coastal yuppies, but now it mostly is. Then there’s the marginalization of those with radical critiques — from say, the Marxist left and the theological right.

Tell me with a straight face Brooks is sad there are no Marxists on the editorial pages of the Times or the Washington Post. (As for the "theological right," there is no point in running editorials for people who only read the Holy Bible and Chick tracts and think compound sentences are tools of the Devil.) In a truly diverse editorial environment, Brooks would have been crushed into gravel like a five-year-old blundering into a rugby scrum.

And here we get to the real crime in Brooks' eyes: Because they were denied their rightful place in the cultural firmament, conservatives decided they would rather reign in Hell than be cancelled in Heaven:

Conservatives were told their voices didn’t matter, and many reacted in a childish way that seemed to justify that exclusion. A corrosive spirit of resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex.

For many on the right the purpose of thinking changed. Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging. Right-wing talk radio is the endless repetition off familiar mantras to reassure listeners that they are all on the same team. Thinking was for conquest: Those liberals think they’re better than us, but we own the libs.

I feel like crying, really -- how could we do this to poor, neglected Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh? They must be rehabilitated with even more attention and riches!

Coddled liberals, on the other hand, are in Brooks' view "blindsided by reality" -- LOL Trump won get over it libs! -- and are all about "fragility," "conformity," and "predictability." Shoot a few rounds of tear gas at middle-aged female protesters and they all act like it's some big thing! [Eyeroll] So expected.

Everyone's focused on this howler:

Christopher Hitchens was one of the great essayists in America. He would be unemployable today because there was no set of priors he wasn’t willing to offend.

Hitchens of course was promoted from Very Limited Use Mortifier of Rightwing Idiots to Major Media Sensation when he decided Bush was right and the wogs needed a damned sound thrashing. That's what made him Mr, Contrarian! I guarantee you that, if Trump announces an October Surprise War on Iran, some other climber will get that same gig. I hear Brooks has been rehearsing his Flyover Man voice in quarantine! (I warn you now, if Thomas Chatterton Williams gets the role expect a lot of Brooks columns on affirmative action.)

But the really funny stuff, to me, is, number one, his examples of brave intellectuals on Substack -- he ignores me, naturally, as well as the actual great journalists like Judd Legum and Luke O'Neil on Substack and focuses on rightwing journos who are bringing their followings to the platform, including Andrew Sullivan and, get this, Jonah Goldberg. (Oh, and he throws in Matt Taibbi for roughage. Maybe he can be the new Hitchens!) And there's this truly extraordinary button:

I’m hoping the definition of a pundit changes — not a foot soldier out for power, but a person who argues in order to come closer to understanding.

This would be funny coming from anyone but from a Times conservative legacy hire who got his job in the interests of perceived bothsider "balance" it's fucking hilarious.

•  And as long as we're talking about the newsletter, here's some access for non-subscribers to a few recent editions: This one about why conservatives are so committed to making everything worse, and this one depicting a meeting of America's top cancel-cultists. Enjoy!

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.

LET'S GET RE-FARTED IN HERE.

I have reduced the pace of production here at the old plant, not out of laziness but because between my God Damn Job and my daily efforts on the subscription newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!), I'm very short of time anymore. Thus some of the many rightwing writers who have become stock characters in the Droll Satire of Contemporary Mores that is this site go unspanked.

One of the ones that got away is Jonah Goldberg, who has mostly retreated from his much-befouled perch at National Review to occupy the Assness Chair ("No, Asness! Asness!" Potato, potahto) in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute, and to contribute to The Dispatch, a redoubt for JustTheTip- and Never-Trumpers of the old school which is mostly subscription and thus beyond the reach of my self-punishment budget (though I did have a look-in at an early issue, which showed the Old Gasster in good form).

But someone has tipped me to a recent Goldberg white paper from the Ass Chair, and I must report, first, that it is about 4,000 words long -- not as hard a slog as his terrible books, but for readers accustomed to his short NatRev columns that he only made SEEM long an ordeal nonetheless.

It carries the Mark of Goldberg from the very start, with a quote from DeTocqueville (whom conservatives were ruining well before they ruined Orwell) followed by this...

Few students today — or their parents — saw the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger when it premiered. Like many old Bond films, it violates some modern norms, particularly of the #MeToo variety.

Neophytes would already be wondering if it's some sort of joke. But hang in there, aficionados, because Goldberg's about to uncork:

But in one respect, it remains very relevant. Its eponymous villain, Auric Goldfinger, loves only gold. The story climaxes at Fort Knox, the famous gold depository, though Goldfinger's plan is not to steal the treasure there but to irradiate it, making it unusable.This will increase the value of Goldfinger’s hoard of gold. Naturally, because it's a James Bond movie and Goldfinger is the villain, he fails. But his plot is akin to something happening in modern education and our culture, where the largely well intentioned villains are mostly succeeding in irradiating the historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative.

I assume AEI rejected Goldberg's Star Trek-themed first draft, "The Trouble with Libbles."

Thence proceeds a long, long recounting of one of the rightwing foundation myths: How earlier Bond-villain liberals like Dr. NoNukes and Ernst RainbloParty taught everyone Wrong History. See, kids today don't know their Parson Weems, as is revealed in the latest of several million polls given on the subject since the 1960s, and this is why kids like socialism and speech codes.

Why do kids today cotton to these things when they didn't in the 1980s, when they were also dumb? Because they're all politically correct snowflakes, thanks to "certain social obsessions—physical safety, college admittance, antibullying, self esteem, and so on" -- not like the intellectual hand-to-hand combat on which ruff-tuff contrarians like Jonah Goldberg were raised.

Perhaps sensing this by itself won't do for a think-tank thing, Goldberg lards in more wingnut history: How John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson made "a cultural movement that began to reject America's past" and a New Class of pointy-heads who believed "that they as a class should rule," which begat the G.I. Bill, which "created a mass market for discontent that exploded in the 1960s."

These Baby Boomers, Goldberg goes on, "turned inward to remake society," leading to Howard Zinn turning American history into "the story of victims" in which "the heroes of previous ages become villains, their ideals villainous," which foul libel on American Exceptionalism has been taken up by their wimpy kids via the New Class, which "now controls American education."

For some reason Goldberg doesn't offer as evidence of this Victim History the most obvious, pertinent and widely-known example -- namely, the toppling of Confederate statues that so distresses his Southron colleagues and neo-Nazis. Of such status anxieties are NeverTrumpers made!

Instead Goldberg gingerly pleads for some still-more-dead victims of revisionism -- "It is fine to argue that Christopher Columbus was terrible, but is that all there is to him?" -- before turning to the last refuge of a rightwing scoundrel, famous black people:

Students could learn much from [Frederick] Douglass's righteous anger. But his anger is not what is most instructive. Its righteousness matters more. For despite America's sins, Frederick Douglass did not seek its destruction. He focused on America's "hypocrisy," demanding that we live up to our ideals, not abandon them.

A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke similarly. Like Douglass, King's anger was righteous...

To the trained ear, this strikes a familiar, wounded and baffled Goldbergian chord -- how is supporting the grievances of King and Douglass a retort to the kids who are also "focused on America's 'hypocrisy'"? And even if this is just an evasive rhetorical maneuver -- admitting an opponent's point to gain an advantage -- what would the advantage be? With Goldberg, we know what the result of such a gambit will be 99 times out of 100, and sure enough:

It would have been better if the founders had never been hypocrites. But we should feel deeply grateful for that hypocrisy, because it was the irritant that created the pearl.

FARRRRRRRT The pearl is FREEDOM you stupid liberals FARRRRRT stop laughing if it weren't for slavery how could you even HAVE the Emancipation Proclamation FARRRRRRRRRT

There's the old Goldberg! You just have to dig for it. Whether it's worth digging for is an open question.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I've loved this song since I first heard it.

It's a classic specimen of getting to the universal by way of the specific.

Jonah Goldberg has still got that newsletter thing going and it's no Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, lemme tell ya. But he keeps a hand in at National Review, and today has something called

Opponents of ‘Unfettered Capitalism’ Are Fighting a Phantom

It's a big deal because not only Democrats and Socialists but also rightwing assholes Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley are bitching about capitalism and Jonah's here to even the odds (fart).

The simple version: There are lots of reguatory agencies, what are you guys talking about, "unfettered capitalism"? Goldberg does not address what happens when the regualtory mechanisms are put in the hands of, for example, a Ryan Zinke or a Wilbur Ross, who take said mechanisms to a bridge and throw them into the river. Also Republicans tend to deregulate processes they think don't need oversight -- like food safety.

My frustration stems from the fact that we “fetter” the market constantly. And whenever the fetters yield an undesirable result — such as, say, the financial crisis of 2008 — the blame always lands on eternally unfettered capitalism.

Overregulation is an interesting diagnosis of the financial crisis, given that the many of the financial instruments that pumped hot gas into the bubble suffered no regulation at all. I assume Goldberg referred only to an index card that read "Blck ppl got houses no fair BIG GOVERMENT."

Closing farts:

Just to be clear: I’m not an advocate for unfettered capitalism.

[querulous balloon-fondling noise]

But I am sick and tired of hearing people advocate unfettered government to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist.

[SUDDENLY-UNCLOGGED-GEOTHERMAL-VENT NOISE, SIZZLE OF FLAMING METHANE GEYSER] 

In conclusion, Jonah declares himself against this non-existent thing, and further stipulates that he has smelt it, but most assuredly has not dealt it.

WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR MUSEUM AND NOBODY CAME?

He has stiff competition -- Kevin D. Williamson! David French! Jonah Goldberg for crying out loud! -- but on Any Given Weekday Jim Geraghty can be the absolute worst person at National Review and brother does he manage today:

I shit you not. Geraghty was in Canada and visited Casa Loma, whose owner did some fighting in the 19th Century, and his regiment in modern times did some fighting in Afghanistan. How's that for a segue?

The museum display on Afghanistan is just a small corner of a room covering the regiment’s more recent deployments, which included Kosovo and Sudan. But the display got me wondering: is it time to start thinking about a National Museum of the Afghanistan War? And should the U.S. have a separate or conjoined museum for the Iraq War? (Would the name “National Museum of Post-9/11 Wars” be too awkward?)

How about "The Foreverwar Museum: A Work in Progress"? After some research-assistant padding about current U.S. war/service museums, Geraghty preemptively pooh-poohs the naysayers:

Inevitably, someone out there is going to cluck about the irony of building a museum for a military operation that is still ongoing, and while U.S. troops are still deployed in those operations.

Well, sure. Don't your visitors want to know how it comes out? A World War II museum built in 1943 would have seemed kinda anticlimactic.

But if you wait until the operation is completely done to begin even thinking about preserving a record to tell the story to future generations . . . you’ll be waiting probably, at minimum, another half-decade.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL. Then more padding, about the great work our G.I. Joes are doing in undeclared wars across the planet, Geraghty assures us he's just asking questions:

If building a national museum about our post-9/11 wars is a good idea, then it is a good idea whether or not we still have troops deployed in these countries. And if it’s not a good idea, then it’s not a good idea regardless of the circumstances of the ongoing deployment.

Resolved: It stinks! Let's all go home! But here's where Geraghty goes into overdrive:

A strange thing happened in our national life as the Vietnam War receded into the rear-view mirror. One of the most bitterly divisive issues in our country’s history calmed, and gradually — some might say, far too gradually — shifted into a broad-based respect and appreciation for the men who fought in it and women who tried to keep them in one piece in the Army Nurse Corps.

(Gotta get the ladies in there!) Prior to that, see, we were all just spitting on soldiers:

Even the most fervent war opponents could recognize that this country treated its returning veterans terribly back in the 1960s and 1970s, and I wonder if our current much broader cultural appreciation of veterans stems from a sense of guilt over that dishonorable not-so-distant history.

I assume, given his audience and that he's Jim Geraghty, he means the myth of mean hippies rather than, say, the fight to deny vets coverage for the effects of PTSD and Agent Orange or anything else that men in suits rather than punks in love-beads may have done to them.

You can think the war was a terrible mistake and still feel a sense of gratitude, awe, and appreciation for those who served in it — and a determination to see that those who served are treated right, in areas ranging from veterans benefits to health care options to post-military careers to naturalization for those born overseas.

"Naturalization for those born overseas" -- did this motherfucker really just fucking say that?

Sen. Tammy Duckworth Spends Veterans Day in Mexico to Be With Veterans Deported by Trump Administration https://t.co/jri1lO3ffV

— #TuckFrump (@realTuckFrumper) November 12, 2019

You know what, I'm too pissed to even address the rest of his stupidity ("if the U.S. had known the true limits of the Iraqi WMD program," ha ha, yeah if only). Geraghty can jam this museum up his ass.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's a zeitgeist thing. Perhaps you can relate! 

•   I've unleashed another issue of my newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, for which subscribers pay big money (well, money anyway) but which you lot can have free 'cause I'm socialistic. It's my vision of how Mick Mulvaney and Trump post-mortemed Mulvaney's insane press conference over a nice bowl of Dr. Bornstein's formula. (I don't believe the obviously planted story that Trump was angry with Mulvaney's presser and made him go back and fix it -- I assume he wanted Mulvaney to be as belligerent about his criminality as he was, as part of his longtime process of numbing the public to his grifts. If anything Mulvaney probably pushed to have his second version on the public record in case some law enforcement agency finally gets the drop on this mob.)

•   After yesterday's fuckfest of Trump corruption -- more evidence of quid pro quo with Ukraine, selling out the Kurds, Trump awarding his own hotel a nice fat G7 contract, Rick Perry (recently implicated in the Ukraine mess) resigning, etc. -- what does Jim Geraghty have for his National Review roundup?

- How conservatives should love Mark Zuckerberg for refusing to vet his ads, which would be totalitarian ("Mark Zuckerberg Refuses to Bend the Knee");

- How Trump's "Impeachment Trial Could Come at the Worst Time" for the Democrats in the Senate (no speculation as to how Trump's impeachment trial, however, would affect Trump);

- "Amazon Decides It’s Had Enough Socialism in Seattle Politics" and is flooding the local city council races with money for corporatist candidates, which is totally not the "crony capitalism" Geraghty normally bitches about.

And in an addendum Geraghty applauds a former head of Planned Parenthood for

recognizing moral complexities and moral discomfort, at a time when the Democratic party and her previous employer are increasingly adamant that the issue isn’t complicated, and that any limitation under any circumstances represents a draconian patriarchal injustice. Wen sounds like the kind of pro-choice advocate that a pro-lifer could have a good conversation with, and in this era, that’s a small miracle.

and that conversation would start with "here's why you're a babykiller" and the pro-lifer throwing a jar of festuses at her.

•   Here, have another treat from the newsletter jar! This one's about what that rumored new conservative network might look like.

•   It's pretty axiomatic that you can judge someone by how they treat people who are serving them. Well:

Now, it's no shock that Fox News people would be total dicks, but I would take it further and say that -- while there are some nice people with conservative views -- as conservatism disintegrates as an ideology and becomes ever more clearly the "series of irritable mental gestures" Lionel Trilling described, it seems just being a specific kind of asshole is nearly all that conservatism demands. I mean, what do they believe in? Good stewardship of the public fisc? Come the fuck on. This quote from Yuval Levin in Jonah Goldberg's newsletter The Dispatch shows, I assume inadvertently, how ridiculous that is:

“The most conservative—fiscally conservative and otherwise—Republican members had a sense that they were there on behalf of a certain kind of voter, and then it turned out that it was their voters who were the first to go for Trump. And Trump talked about none of the things that they thought those voters cared a lot about,” Levin said. “They’re very insecure about their understanding of the political circumstances that they’re living through right now. And part of what that insecurity means is they just don’t bring up stuff that they’re not sure about.”

LOL. Imagine goons like Louie Gohmert and Susan Collins wandering the halls of Congress and having the existential crisis described here. "My voters don't care if we tax-cut our Treasury into the Grand Canyon so long as none of the gains go to black people? My whole life has been a lie!" And what else are they supposed to believe in? Freedom for the Kurds? "All men are created equal"? Who among them could even say it with a straight face? No, the jig is up and the grift is everything. And who's going to attracted to such a cause? Greedy, self-centered assholes. Hell, I wouldn't be shocked if Trump drops a bit into his roadshow about how servers don't deserve tips -- knowing that, unlike his idiot fans, he never has to worry about his next cup of coffee coming with a saliva infusion, because for the modern conservative even one's colleagues are just there to be conned.

JUST LIKE FARTING OVER.

Hark -- Jonah Goldberg, lately detached from his sinecure at National Review with full pension, has a new syndicated column. Surely now that he's out from under the infantilizing influence of the wingnut-welfare gravy train, he'll produce more mature and intellectually ambitious material. Let's have a look:

Now before you get all worked up, hear me out. I’m not defending the president against the charge of racism. The [Trump go-back-where-you-came-from] tweets were racist, as well as xenophobic and nativist. 

I asked if he intended to make a racist jab, not whether the jab itself was racist.

bhf[opp[pw[ef p[...

Here’s a less-than-startling insight: Trump often doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and not just on matters of race. This is the guy who said not long ago that windmills cause cancer. In 2017 he told the British prime minister, “You’re our largest trading partner. A lot of people don’t know that. I was surprised.” Our largest trading partner is China. 

He also has a long history of not knowing his history.

So... Trump can't be racist because he's stupid?

So when Trump tells four women of color that they should go back where they came from, it’s possible he had no clue that he was tapping into a rich vein of racist and nativist rhetoric.

Yeah, "go back where you came from" is a pretty obscure reference.

Indeed, it’s possible he didn’t know that three of the women weren’t immigrants at all. The fact that he seemed initially surprised by the controversy bolsters my theory. He just thought he was trolling Democrats.

Which excuses everything, really. That n-word thing? Just a joke, man! Lighten up!

This seems to be lost on a lot of his critics. They cite his attacks on women, blacks, Muslims, while excluding his attacks on white male Christians...

???

...and connect the dots to make the case that he’s a bigot.

Wait for it...

That’s certainly fair, given his record.

This endless Hadron Collider fart proves that even the free market cannot rescue Goldberg's column from being the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else. Selah!