FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 

Never a bad time for this. 
(Really missing the old town today.)

 •   Unlocked today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue for the general public; it's the first-person narrative of a Concerned Citizen who realizes Trump is destroying the country but doesn't know about this Biden guy. As a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 and 2020 I yield to no one in my contempt of weakshit trimmer libs, but like Sanders (and Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky) I also realize that the current administration is a gang of vandals that has to be stopped and our ballot is the only puny weapon we have with any hope of succeeding against them.

My bagatelle is inspired by a recent wave of similar first-person narratives that are, apparently and amazingly, not meant as jokes. Take S.E. Cupp's "My vote for Biden hinges on his veep pick," which actually contains the line, "we’d be remiss not to consider that whomever [Biden] chooses could be running the country without being elected to do so." I know civics education in this country is terrible, but I do recall seeing the names of vice-presidential candidates on presidential ballots, and suspect that awareness of presidential succession law is pretty near universal. Cupp, whom I first saw doing a Tea Party event in Manhattan in 2009 (before she adopted the Google Blonde Conservative Glasses look to get on TV), describes herself as a "staunch conservative" and also as a "moderate," which will give you a pretty good idea of her sincerity here, and claims "I wish there were an actual conservative to vote for — someone who respects the Constitution, the rule of law, fiscal responsibility, national security interests, free speech and a free press," rather than the communist wrecker Joe Biden and whatever scary lady he hires to be the brains of the outfit. (Cupp says she'd be fine with Kamala Harris, and I predict she'd start with the ooga-booga about three days after Harris is announced.) 

Also on the fake reasonableness tip is, who else, Matt Lewis, who announces himself an "outspoken Never Trump conservative" which is in Roget's under "full of shit." (Longtime alicublog readers will already know this about Lewis.) He claims to have entertained voting for Biden, but decided against it: 

Let’s start with my visible (if only in an ultrasound) reason: the unborn child...

Now you, me, and everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that serious anti-abortion people -- especially those who, like Lewis, say things like "call it a fetus if you like" and "abortion, though, is a moral issue" that "cannot be easily brushed away or bargained over as a lesser-of-two-evils decision" -- are extremely unlikely to vote for any Democrat. But Biden's been pro-Roe since 2007 at least -- why was Lewis even pretending to consider voting for this baby-killer? Apparently his NeverTrumpism made it worthwhile to him -- until he learned Biden had changed his mind on the Hyde Amendment! It was okay that he was a baby killer, but letting poor women kill their babies is a bridge too far! Plus which:

This brings us to the other (unseen) reason Biden’s newfound abortion stance matters: the notion that Biden is susceptible to being pushed leftward.

Not just a baby-killer, but a someone who might move left! On what, Lewis doesn't say; the only issues besides abortion he mentions are fracking and taxes, and he basically says he doesn't care that much about them. So, the big story is "pro-lifer won't vote for Democrat." But with a marquee byline! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See, I do so like new(ish) music.
I should like to extend my remarks on a subject I treated briefly in the newsletter, the sudden elevation of Tucker Carlson from rightwing TV rageclown to serious conservative intellectual. (Before I go on, PLUG FOR MY NEWSLETTER: It's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, it comes out five days a week, it's absurdly cheap and the money goes to support a good cause i.e. the continued shabby-genteel survival of me and the missus.) The Carlson speech over which many wingnut dummies have swooned is, to quote from myself,

...the usual Tucker Carlson bullshit, but with Big Ideas substituted for the usual dogwhistles. 

For example, Carlson wants to know, after people like him are gone, “What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter." Normally this is where he starts foaming about the dusky hordes, but on this occasion he lashes out instead at... materialism. “Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy?” he cries. 

As longtime followers of conservative intelligentsia will have figured out, here Carlson is doing a Values thing; the bad conservatives only care about the market, but noble Tucker cares about the poor — now that authors like J.D. Vance have hipped him that a lot of those poor are white and living in red states...

Carlson’s yak is not any kind of an argument, it’s just shtick — leaning toward one group of rightwing intellectuals (the Values Klan) against another (the Free-Market Country Club). It may be very important to pencil-necks who imagine their debates and flame wars are deeply meaningful — like the “Reformicons” who pretended they had a hand in Republican policy just before Trump came in and blew them away with one of his farts — but to the conservative hoi polloi it means less than nothing...

If you're wondering why one of the leading conservative racists is trying to class up his act (and, say this for him, he sure knew how to get the suckers to bite), I suggest it's because he sees that, while white supremacy sells pretty good now, November's blue wave suggests limited growth opportunities for his franchise -- he's not going to break out of the Fox News ghetto into which Jon Stewart more or less shoved him by going on and on about dirty Messicans. Hence, the grand manner: He adopts an anti-crony-capitalist angle, and suddenly he's not just another shitbird, he's a Big Thinker, and when Trump implodes he'll be well-positioned to climb as a Voice of the Respectable Right.

Others among the brethren are sensing that a shift is necessary -- that's why they're all of a sudden running away from their old buddy Steve King, whose recent comments made his white nationalism too obvious to ignore. But they're not as smart about it as Carlson. At The Daily Beast, Matt Lewis tries to get "The Left" with a bank shot and winds up sending the cueball crashing through the poolroom window:

How Steve King’s Idiotic and Odious Words Help the Left Destroy Western Civilization

In his comments to the Times, King equated Western civilization, which belongs to all of us, with white people only. And that’s just what the hard left wants people to think.

Oh, you say authors don't write their own heds and subheds? Okay, from the body copy:

Men like Steve King see whiteness as a fundamental ingredient of Western civilization and, ultimately, of the United States of America. This is, by definition, a “racist” view. Moreover, it puts King is on the same level with radical leftists who agree that “Western civ” is a dog whistle for racism.

The racists and the people who notice they're racists -- both part of the same pathology!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been in my head all week, is why.
•  The Pennsylvania Catholic Church abuse scandal is grim indeed, though when I read Rod Dreher on the subject, portraying it as a sort of Day The Music Died ("my friend, a tough-guy lawyer, wrote to tell me that he wept in his office. He said, 'I am at the end'"), I have to ask: In the brief time he spent as a Catholic, did he not read any Church history? The stateside sex abuse has been a live story for decades, but the One Holy & Apostolic has been corrupt as hell for centuries. If you believe in the Church, it must be because God called you to it, not because you think the depravity of Man ceases once he crosses the threshold of a cathedral. Anyway, the silver lining is some of the worst writing Megan McArdle has ever done. Here's a sample, and I hope you have your Bad Analogy filter on:

According to news reports, the church hierarchy in Pennsylvania and beyond has already denied Christ’s gospel three times: once when it sheltered predators in silence; once when it failed to remove everyone who was involved in covering up any crime; and again when two of the six dioceses involved tried to shut down the grand jury investigation that produced the report. Now they face the same choice Peter did.

I should say the comparison with child molesters is a bit hard on Peter, who only let a bit of social anxiety run away with him after a rough night.

They can offer the full record of faithlessness in abject penitence, witnessing for repentance and redemption even at risk of martyrdom. Or they can deny Him a fourth time by minimizing the past and protecting those who helped maintain that grisly silence. Which is to say, they can choose to be a millstone around the neck of the faithful — or the rock on which the church can be rebuilt.

Aaaagh! And people think folk masses are corny.

•  You may have already seen what I expect will become a legendary column by Matt K. Lewis, "Did I Join a Movement That Naturally Attracts Extremists and Kooks?" This soggier-than-most I've Made a Huge Mistake, Trump regrets dreamboard is funny for many reasons: First, because Lewis is a tool in general; second,  because up till recently Lewis was writing columns like "Amy Coney Barrett, the Trump Supreme Court Pick Who’ll Troll Liberals the Hardest" ("Jurisprudence, schmuriprudence. She’s under 50, devoutly Catholic, has seven kids, and she’ll make the libs crazy. Good enough for me"). He's like a dumb hood who, having been cheerfully knocking over liquor stores and joyriding in stolen cars for months, discovers immediately upon arrest that he's been misled by false friends.  But third and most hilariously, get this:

I grew up with (and signed on for) Reagan’s version of conservatism. In recent years, I have become disenchanted—not with the intellectual philosophy of Edmund Burke or the governing philosophy of Ronald Reagan—but with what passes for conservatism today.

I wonder what Lewis would say if you asked him what conservative principles Burke supported -- probably either "He didn't like the French Revolution" or "Jonah Goldberg says he's conservative." As for Reagan, it may be asking a lot of Lewis to connect the Gipper's trickle-down bullshit with the reign of the 1%, but if he's going to pretend to convert he might at least look at the prayerbook. As it stands, his act is like any other NeverTrumper's: to repurpose an aging joke, he and they say they never dreamed the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party would eat anyone's face, and it must be the fault of all the Face-Eating Leopards who inexplicably showed up.

•  Speaking of hot takes on the Church scandal, here's Michael Walsh at American Greatness:

I cannot say for certain when the rot set in, but I can say when my disillusionment first set in: with Vatican II and the papal reigns of John XXIII and Paul VI... some of the outward changes [John] and Paul instituted in the Church -- the abandonment of the Latin rite was one that most affected this altar boy -- seemed arbitrary and superfluous; we would have called them “virtue signaling” today.

The author of Humanae Vitae as a limousine liberal! I can imagine an ancestor of Walsh sighing that it all really went downhill when the Church stopped torturing heretics. Also:

...the French Revolution’s violent destruction of the ancient regime was as much directed against the Church as it was against the monarchy. To this day, laïcité is one of the French Republic’s guiding principles, and it’s no accident that into the Gallic spiritual void left by ostracized Christianity has rushed recrudescent Islam. Satan, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

To help fight off the pervs and Satanic Muslims, Walsh calls for "a restoration of the Latin rite," which I'm sure goes down a treat with American Greatness' Throne and Altar readership, though I expect the younger set who are abandoning churchgoing in general will find it more evidence they've made the right choice.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the trend among conservatives of calling investigations of Trump a "coup." You may recall I mentioned this subject last week but even since then, as the investigations have heated up so have the paranoid delusions.

This seems to effect even wimpy establishment conservatives like Matt Lewis:

Attorney Harvey Silvergate argues that every professional in America inadvertently commits three felonies a day. I’m assuming that this number is much higher for a casino magnate who operates in, say, Atlantic City. My point here is that it’s entirely possible that Donald Trump never colluded with Russians, yet may have taken some liberties that a grand jury with unlimited time and resources—not to mention subpoena power!—might discover.

Why, it could happen to any of us -- an overzealous prosecutor looking for a quick score might snoop in your life, or mine, and find that we've claimed a bogus deduction worth a couple of hundred dollars. And that's why we should sympathize with Trump if it turns out he's sent bales of cash to the Russian mob.

Think of it. A special prosecutors’ raison d’etre is to find something. That’s how an Arkansas land deal leads to a blue dress—which, in turn, led Kenneth Starr to perjury.

OK, I gotta admit: That bit took nerve.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the President's press jihad and how it excites the brethren, who see new life breathed into their ancient, endless Blar Har Liberal Media memes. I gotta say that American Thinker/Patricia McCarthy thing was a find. It's not even 800 words long but it's so mindlessly vituperative that it sounds like one of Castro's seven-hour speeches. (People like that fascinate me. They're not even just bad writers; they hardly seem to have the capacity for linear thought -- they just generate trite insults like some kind of denunciation diffuser.)

For reasons of space and clarity I had to cut a reference to Matthew Boyle's attempt at Breitbart to amplify the propaganda power of the CNN tsimmis by blaming it on a couple of popular rightwing hate objects:

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats find themselves on the hot seat as insiders point to leftist staff for members like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) as being responsible for the thinly-sourced hit piece. Staff for Harris deny any involvement, but Warren staff have not responded.

I bet if this all happened a few months ago, before she started rocketing up the hatewank charts, Harris' place in the conspiracy would have been taken by Hillary Clinton. "Insiders point to leftist staff of" is absurdly weak, but by the time this bullshit devolves to even less scrupulous wingnuts like Pat Dollard it becomes a bald assertion -- "Democrat Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren Behind Debunked CNN Trump Hit Piece" -- and thousands, maybe millions of dummies come to know to a certainty -- without ever seeing any proof -- that Warren and Harris were caught on film by James O'Keefe whispering fake news to Jeff Zucker while double-teaming his cock. (I probably shouldn't even joke about such a thing, as by next week some of the boys will be claiming it as the true facts.)

Special mention goes to Matt K. Lewis, a world-class both-siderist, for his festival of risible tweets claiming that Obama caused Trump by destroying "norms."   Among the highlights: "1) Obama *was* divisive, 2) I didn't vote for Trump, & 3) you are being divisive by insinuating that I'm a racist." I could give you the context but, really, at this point do you even need it?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Luscious Jackson got in my head this week and hasn't left.
Not complaining.
•   The New York Times has a story on Vladimir Putin's drive to make the Russian Orthodox Church into, as one observer puts it, "an instrument of the Russian state." The Church's shock troops are medieval in outlook -- one of its bishops "warned worshipers that new biometric passports, required by the European Union in return for visa-free access to Europe, were 'satanic' because they contained a 13-digit number" -- and of course favor the persecution of homosexuals, as Putin does. This gives Rod Dreher yet another opportunity to tell us how he really feels about secularism and its inferiority to the Every Knee Shall Bend model of governance. While he claims "it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy," nonetheless...

...as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars... 

The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model? 

Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions...

I understand why Glenn Greenwald et alia object to what they see as the revival of a Red Scare in this country, but come on: At least people who sympathized with the old USSR thought they were trying to advance human liberation. Dreher sympathizes with today's Russia for the opposite reason.

•   Donald Trump recently attacked the Food & Drug Administration as the "food police." Who knows why he does what he does anymore, but it gave us a chance to hear some straight-up bull-goose looney libertarianism from Nick Gillespie of Reason:

You get rid of "official" food inspectors and you know what will happen? To the extent that customers demand any sort of certification beyond public reputation, private-sector and nonprofit groups will be created to provide this or that level of inspection. We see that already with kosher and halal food prep, of course, not to mention other sorts of watchdog groups (think Fair Trade coffee and the like). Yelp or some other rating system would likely add some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-style process as well.

The yelpification of food poisoning! I can't put it any better than Kia on Twitter: "I would have given these diet pills one star but I am dead."

• Jonah Goldberg complains about the obstreperous black guy who is interfering with his mild interest in football ("entertainment more than passion," Jesus Christ is everything about this guy terrible?). His premise is that "particularly among men, sports talk is a kind of safe space and common tongue all at once" and politics isn't supposed to interfere. He quotes and comments on a 2003 E.J. Dionne column:

And then [Dionne] added: “Politicizing everything from literature to music to painting and sports was once a habit of the left. The Communist Party’s now-defunct newspaper once had a sports column called ‘Out in Left Field.’ Now, it’s the turn of the right to politicize everything.”

I’m not sure that was entirely true then, but it’s definitely not true now.

Oh yeah? We need not get into the wider world of wingnut culture war here -- just remember that from 2011 until someone wised up, National Review ran a sports blog called "Right Field." This is from the inaugural post:

The facts of life are conservative, and in no sphere is that truism more manifest than in the world of sport. In the games we play, the same rules are meant to apply to all — and we are outraged at the injustice when they are not. There are winners and losers, and we don’t agonize over the self-esteem of those who do not prevail: We expect them to learn from defeat and improve...

Yuk. To this day we have conservatives like Matt K. Lewis claiming that sports blogs are "dominated by liberals" because no one wants to hear wingnuts snarling about political correctness instead of keeping their eye on the ball. (Yes, like every other thinking person in America I know about today's David Brooks column and his strange conviction that black people will be moved to reconsider their sports protests because they might make bigots mad and his Thanksgivings harder to enjoy, but by claiming conservatives don't go in for this sort of thing, Goldberg has effectively out-stupided even him. There can be only one!)

NO RIGHT BUT THE RIGHT TO LIFE.

Establishment conservatives (that is, the ones blessed with phony-baloney jobs at National Review and elsewhere) were outraged yesterday when Donald Trump (briefly) asserted that once abortion is made illegal -- the fervent hope of all wingnuts -- women who have them will have to be "punished." Cuz duh it's murder, as they keep telling us, right? Some of the brethren were honest enough to admit they were outraged because Trump was spoiling their traditional line of bullshit -- like Matt K. Lewis, who probably isn't smart enough to know that's what he was doing:

In truth, like the notion that there should be exceptions for rape and incest, the notion that only the abortion doctor (not the woman having the abortion) should face penalties, is inconsistent with the notion that “abortion is murder.” 

Yet these political compromises are necessary in order to cobble together a palatable and defensible (if admittedly inconsistent) public policy position that might someday actually be able to win the argument in mainstream America. 

Part of the goal is to remove the ability for pro-choicers to demagogue the issue by scaring vulnerable women. Now, thanks to Trump, that’s back on the table.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Donald! To win back whatever credibility they had with female voters, conservatives rushed to assure them that they love women and consider them too dumb to share culpability in what, from their perspective, is a hit job on an innocent and autonomous fetus. At the New York Daily News, Charles Camosy says women are not the victims of politicians who would strip them of reproductive rights, but of abortion mongers like Hugh Hefner and the men of the Supreme Court who inflicted Roe upon an unwilling womankind:

Someone who is coerced into having an abortion as a means of having social equality should not be put in jail. Women, like their prenatal children, are victims of our horrific abortion policy.

[Pause to let that comparison sink in.] 

Instead, physicians who profit from the violence of abortion ought to be punished. Philadelphia’s Dr. Kermit Gosnell...

When they start waving the bloody fetal-parts, you know they've got nothin'. Most of the brethren just stick with the pre-arranged story, which is basically "we would never say such a thing about our beloved broodmares."

Meanwhile out there in Jesusland these lovers of women, frustrated in their attempts to flatly ban abortion, keep themselves busy thinking up new ways to fuck with women who have them, and even with women who have miscarriages, I guess as a demented way to emphasize the superior rights of fetuses over those of their incubators; in the latest such exercise, Indiana passed a bunch of bizarre restrictions, including these:

Provides that a person who knowingly transports an aborted fetus into, or out of, Indiana commits a Class A misdemeanor, unless the aborted fetus is transported for the sole purpose of final disposition. Provides that a miscarried or aborted fetus must be interred or cremated by a facility having possession of the remains. Requires a person or facility having possession of a miscarried or aborted fetus to ensure that the miscarried fetus or aborted fetus is preserved until final disposition occurs.

These people are nuts, and their loving-caretaker routine won't last long once they return to federal power.

ANNALS OF THE AGE OF TRUMP.

The long sad march of rightwing writers through the Slough of Donald continues. At National Review Jim Geraghty takes offense at something Bill O'Reilly said:

Last night, Bill O’Reilly offered an odd defense of the GOP frontrunner: “The reason I think Trump won in Florida is because he comes across as more authoritarian. Not authoritative, authoritarian"... 

There is nothing less American than authoritarianism. This nation was not founded on blind submission to authority. If we wanted a “concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people” we would have remained a colony of the British crown.

The people do not get to elect an authoritarian who will ignore the Constitution. An authoritarian is never the right solution.

Somewhere in hell, Jeane Kirkpatrick is laughing her ass off.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg interviews sad sack Matt K. Lewis. He has a whither-conservatism book out, and seems even under friendly prompting to grope blindly for a solution. Inevitably he comes to that last refuge of a scoundrel, The Culchah:

I think, as I wrote in the book, I would really encourage conservative donors to take the money they’re giving politicians and find a way to sponsor talented people who have a conservative worldview who want to engage in the arts. And maybe that’s sending them to college, maybe that’s sending them to art school, whatever.

You know, whatever those artsy types do -- put on a leotard, paint their faces white, go to the park and pretend to walk against the wind, whatever. Come on, Koch Brothers, pretend you have a thousand sons who don't want to go into the family business and own a '57 Strat they don't know how to play! Eventually Lewis has to come up with a more concrete idea of what these artsy conservatives would get into:

If you follow food blogging or the sports world, all of these sorts of niche audiences — I say niche, there are millions of people who are foodies, who follow it very closely. And they’re really dominated by liberals, like heavily so. And of course, thankfully, they don’t spend all their time on politics, but it has an impact.

Countering Commie sportswriters does not seem an urgent task -- National Review's "Right Field" went down swinging after four years, probably because no one could tell the difference between that and a thousand other sports blogs. But food bloggers, that's a different story -- they were the thin end of the wedge on immigration, weakening our resolve against Aztlan by addicting Americans to chipotle and chorizos, and if they get us on garmi and sardi, thus falls the Republic!

Finally, over at Commentary, Matthew Continetti has a new argument with which to woo wingnut readers away from Trump:

What would Donald Trump’s most devoted supporters do if they learned that ultra-rich liberals living in New York City are behind his campaign?

Continetti buried the lede -- what if they find out Trump's a rich New Yorker himself? Then the scales will really fall from their eyes.

...It’s a virtuous cycle for Trump and the press barons. Trump benefits from earned media. The networks benefit from high ratings, which allow them to charge more for advertising. And all of the campaign ads and Super PAC and issue-advocacy spots desperately trying to stop Trump guarantee additional revenue...

Here’s the good liberal [CBS chairman Les] Moonves boosting the candidacy of a man whose politics and character repulse him, even as he acknowledges that what he is doing is bad for the country. And why? Profit.

That's capitalism, comrade. Maybe you'd like to phonebank for Bernie?

THE GOP DELUSION.

Donald "Big Pussy" Trump won by a landslide in New Hampshire and sensible people aren't the only ones disconfited --  long-term wingnut-welfare recipients are as well, but for different reasons (briefly: Trump jumped the line, cannot be relied on to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and by fear-mongering straight-up without recourse to traditional dog whistles has shattered the notion that Republican positions on minorities and immigrants have any more courtly or civilized basis than an appeal to naked animal hatred).

They express this discomfiture in a number of ways. First and foremost: Denial. "Marco's Moment Is Now," insists Michael Graham of The Weekly Standard. "No, not Saturday night’s debate: This is Marco's moment." (I am put in mind of  Max Bialystock getting Lorenzo St. DuBois to audition for Springtime for Hitler: "Wait, wait, this is Boomerang! This is Boomerang!")

Getting knocked-down in New Hampshire does not have to be the end of Rubio's run for the GOP nomination. It could be the real beginning. It's all up to the junior senator from Florida.

Graham may just be covering for his boss, who bet long on the thirsty childman. At National Review, Eliana Johnson speaks of "Marco Rubio’s New Challenges" rather than Marco Rubio's Collapse. There are other candidates for anti-Trump savior: At National Review, Jeremy Carl calls NH "Armageddon for the Establishment," because of Trump and the "less obvious" winner... third-place finisher Ted Cruz -- whom I guess you could say the Republican "establishment" doesn't like, if only because no one likes Ted Cruz. "Ted Cruz Might Be The Real Winner In New Hampshire" says Matt K. Lewis. "...The primaries are about to head South, which is Cruz country." Wow, a Republican who can carry the South! Now all he has to do is get people in the rest of the country to embrace Opus Dei crackpots.

For laughs there's "Jeb Bush Gains Some Steam After New Hampshire" (WSJ) and, my favorite, "Why Can't Kasich Win?" by Jay Cost ("Isn't the Kasich case at least as persuasive [as] the Bush case?" Now that I can believe!).

I don't like Trump either, and I am convinced someone other than he will be nominated. But with me, one has nothing to do with the other -- America has disappointed me many times and I'm sure will disappoint me again, so I don't think we're too good for nominee (or, God forbid, President) Trump -- I just think Trump will fall because the GOP has too much invested in getting one of their made men on the ticket, and they control the means of production. These conservative columnists, on the other hand, are writing rotisserie league campaign speeches; they write as if they believe their columns and blog posts, despite being read entirely by people who already agree with them, can actually affect the race. That's what makes them pathetic: They're putting on brave faces for a mirror.

UPDATE. Comments are (as is traditional here at alicublog) glorious, and I have to call attention to a burst of song from Ellis Weiner:

You’re standing onstage one night
While running for POTUS
Debating your foes because
It’s part of the gig.
Then Monday they take a vote
You’re handed your hat and coat
But this could be the start of something big.

It goes on below the fold.

HE MAY BE A FOOL, BUT HE'S YOUR FOOL.

Now that the Republican Presidential front-runner has anted up his bigotry, conservatives are trying harder to disown him. But it really cuts against their grain. When Trump proposed keeping Muslims out of the U.S., David French had just put up a post at National Review all about how dangerous Muslims are -- the title, in fact, is "Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth – the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate." Among the choice bits:

...jihadists represent the natural and inevitable outgrowth of a faith that is given over to hate on a massive scale, with hundreds of millions of believers holding views that Americans would rightly find revolting... 

To understand the Muslim edifice of hate, imagine it as a pyramid — with broadly-shared bigotry at the bottom, followed by stair steps of escalating radicalism... 

The base of the pyramid, the most broadly held hatred in the Islamic world, is anti-Semitism, with staggering numbers of Muslims expressing anti-Jewish views... 

The next level of the pyramid is Muslim commitment to deadly Islamic supremacy. In multiple Muslim nations, overwhelming majorities of Muslims support the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy...

Etc. To be fair, he stops short of calling them vermin. If you said something like this about Christians, French would file a hate-crime complaint. You can imagine some goon reading this and thinking Shee-it, them Muslims sound awful, I better vote for Trump an' keep 'em all out!

But today French is trying to distance himself from Trump. Not on the grounds of their mutual beliefs, mind you -- French reiterates that "it’s foolish to admit a class of refugees when we know the world’s leading terror army is attempting to infiltrate the displaced masses or recruit from their ranks." But the ones that are here already, they can stay, French says -- and we can let in a small, select group of "good" Muslims, such as "interpreters who’ve laid down their lives to serve our warriors downrange... members of allied militaries who are training to be the Muslim 'boots on the ground,'" et alia. Everyone else can go die in the sea.

Oh, then he talks about what a menace political correctness is. Which is weird, because he and they are really just waiting to put in a nominee who can be as racist as Trump but keep his mouth shut about it.

UPDATE. As has become his habit of late ("We Didn't Start The Fire: Who Created Trump?"), Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller emerges again to tell us that Trump's strong support among Republicans is bad for Republicans, especially when they were getting so pumped up denouncing Obama after his pro-reason terrorism speech:

Yesterday, the media cycle was focused on radical Islamism and President Obama’s inability to counter it. Today, Donald Trump has changed the subject. But it’s not just that. Yesterday, the view that radical Islamism was a serious threat that President Obama has not taken seriously (polling backs this up) was a persuasive mainstream position that evoked sympathy and agreement. Today, it’s marginally harder to make that argument.

Now when Ralph Peters calls Obama a pussy, people will think we're intemperate! At the end Lewis admits Trump will probably get a boost from his statements -- another case of Republicans being unfairly made to look bad by other Republicans!

UPDATE 2. At The Federalist, Ben Domenech:

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

It defies explanation, but I'll try: Everyone thinks Obama's a failure and hates him (never mind showing Domenech polls that suggest otherwise, those are all run by liberals), and "our modern elites respond to that rational distrust by smearing it as vile hatred, which further divides and toxifies our politics." In other words, if you point out that their argument is wrong, that just makes Republicans more insane and racist -- so it's all your fault! "And Trump is a perfect personality to exploit these divides," Domenech goes on, "offering the promise of an authoritarian who represents the people in place of an authoritarian who represented the elites." I hope you're proud of yourself, liberals!

Like the rest of our subjects, Domenech basically agrees with Trump; he, too, thinks Muslims are toxic and "elites" are losing the War on Whatchamacallit with their "tolerance" bullshit ("Republicans have spent much of the past three years wringing their hands over how to win the white working class – Donald Trump is showing them how: by confronting and rejecting the values and authority of the elites..."). But he got the Trump-bad memo, so he portrays Trump as a menace while embracing his message. Look, it's at The Federalist -- it's not like it has to make sense.

UPDATE 3: You see this shit:

"The author advises Marco Rubio’s campaign for president." Presumably he advises on non-sequential thought, because his column is just the usual rightwing froth crowned with an "if it weren't for Joel Grey singing 'Wilkommen' there'd have never been a Hitler" assertion. And actually that's not new either: Conservative factota have been trying to blame Trump on Obama, or draw parallels between the two men, since Trump became the front-runner, and because they've saturated their little world with this false equivalence, there's no longer any reason to even pretend to back it up with evidence.

UPDATE 3. What have I been telling you people.

RISIBLE DENIABILITY.

Here's the pitch from Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

We Didn’t Start The Fire: So Who Created Trump?

You can't blame conservatism for anything these days -- not the mess in the Middle East, not anti-abortion terrorists, not racism -- and, Lewis is here to tell you, certainly not the jingoistic, pro-torture, pro-bombing blowhard Archie Bunker/Reggie Van Dough hybrid who's been leading Republican Presidential polls for three months. Why not?

Trump is not a conservative, although his perverted version of conservatism currently represents a very vocal minority of the GOP base. Historically, America’s Right and Left have both had moments when strains of nativism and populism were more or less prominent. This is one of those times.

Both sides do it -- populism, that is. Don't you remember Henry Wallace hollering that we had to torture people and steal oil from the Middle East?

Today, for a variety of reasons (none of which indict conservatism as a philosophy) the environment is ripe for a master demagogue to exploit... 

...the liberal media and President Obama’s disastrous presidency are part of the story. Liberals aren’t responsible for the Republican base’s decisions, but if the goal is to understand this phenomenon, it’s fair to point out some of what we are witnessing is a backlash. This is a scary time, both domestically and internationally, and people want to find a strongman to fix the chaos that weak men have created.

This reminds me of how  back in the day Moral Majority types would tell you the Weimar Republic caused Hitler -- by which they did not mean hyperinflation and instability were among the forces that led to his rise, but that there were a lot of homosexuals in Cabaret so God punished the world with Nazis. And by the way, the late Obama Administration ain't Weimar; a 46% approval rating isn't great but it's not Helter-Skelter-she's-coming-down -fast either. Maybe Lewis is thinking of the previous President? Or Congress?

We are also undergoing a continued cultural revolution that began in the 1960s. This might have begun on the Left, but the degradation of traditional family values is now ubiquitous. We once prized virtues like humility, wisdom, experience, and prudence. Now, we value celebrities.

If it weren't for Woodstock we wouldn't have Trump.

But I want to get back to where we began, which is with the notion that Trump-ism is somehow the inexorable denouement of conservatism’s historical arc. If liberals can get this notion to stick, then they will have discredited the Reagan era, which brought us an unparalleled time of peace and prosperity.

Well, there's the real reason Trump can't reflect badly on conservatism -- liberals would benefit if he did! But don't worry, Matt...

Some of the people pushing this narrative have ulterior motives; others are frankly just sincerely (mis)guided by a liberal worldview. This is one of the reasons why the subtitle of my book—“How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots)”—is significant.

...however the party does next year, you'll still be able to work the crowd for shekels -- and if the book doesn't work out, you can always sell them gold and survivalist supplies.

THE DEFEAT OF THE MOOPS.

Don't drink all the King v. Burwell tears, you'll get a stomach ache. However, please enjoy responsibly Wayne Root from Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

Is the idea implausible that this same Obama administration that orders IRS attacks, then orders destruction of key evidence, would stop at nothing to save Obama’s signature achievement? Is it impossible to believe that Obama and his socialist cabal that learned from Saul Alinsky that “the ends justify the means” would hold something over a Supreme Court justice’s head?... 

Just blackmail one or two key conservative leaders to stop the GOP from blocking Obama’s agenda. Just find out the weak link of a key opposition leader or government official and hold it over their heads. It’s that simple... 

Am I being too cynical? Really? Did anyone suspect former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was a child molester who commited crimes with underage boys?

No, no, I'm stuffed, positively stuffed...

Still hasn't had actual sex yet, I see. (Yeah, but would you rather believe he had, and still wrote that tweet?) As a digestif, how about some more-sorrow-than-anger nonsense from Matt Lewis:

The upsetting thing is that Roberts was essentially the poster child for what a conservative nominee was supposed to be — that is, if we were to avoid another stealth nominee (like Souter) or a failed one (like Robert Bork). Conservatives invested a lot of effort into creating the infrastructure that would incubate a young John Roberts — and then actually get him confirmed. His end of the bargain? Simply being the kind of justice who honors the rule of law and doesn’t legislate from the bench… And now this happens.

We raised him, incubated him to be impartial -- yet he ruled for someone other than us! That's it, next time we're using a Skinner Box. Also: To be fair, I haven't read the entire opinion, but I'm guessing Flopping Aces' hed "The Roberts Court renders all laws meaningless as written" is figurative.

This has all made me a bit light-headed; maybe I should steady myself with something dry and dull, like crackers, or this press release:

ObamaCare Decision Raises Issues Of Justices' Impeachment, Explains Larry Klayman

Well, that's it for me.

....Freedom Watch has grown especially concerned about the independence of the Supreme Court due to reports from a whistleblower that private information about Chief Justice John Roberts, and other judges and justices, were "harvested' illegally by the U.S. Government. Although it is illegal for the Central Intelligence Agency to operate within the domestic United States, a contractor whose company was hired to perform the "harvesting" for the CIA has come forward to blow the whistle. He claims to have proof that the CIA harvested personal and private information about Roberts and other federal judges and may be intimidating or subtly threatening the U.S. Supreme Court with the fear of personal attacks...

Hear that, Wayne? You've got some backup! Now we just need Sarah Palin or a backwoods preacher to step up and that'll make three, and we'll have a legit "questions remain" for Meet The Press.

LOVELESS.

Ever notice that while nearly every publication in the Western World sees Valentine's Day as a chance to indulge is some harmless romanticism, wingnuts take it as an opportunity to tell you love's just a scam and you should just get down to the miserable business of breeding?  Get a load of the cold open on Susan Patton's V-Day downer at the Wall Street Journal :

Another Valentine's Day. Another night spent ordering in sushi for one and mooning over "Downton Abbey" reruns. Smarten up, ladies. Despite all of the focus on professional advancement, for most of you the cornerstone of your future happiness will be the man you marry...

Apparently Patton is afraid some of her female readers (I know but look, anything's possible) have no mothers to call and tell them if they want ever to get hitched they better forget this "love" horseshit:

An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.

So does Patton wants schoolly ladiez to date down? That'd be too easy:

Could you marry a man who isn't your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can't keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won't find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing...

You're probably beginning to catch on, from this oooh look at you with your stupid "education" you dateless hag schtick that Patton isn't here so much to help as to hector.

So what's a smart girl to do? Start looking early and stop wasting time dating men who aren't good for you: bad boys, crazy guys and married men. College is the best place to look for your mate...

Because by the time he sobers up it'll be too late. Also, Patton nags her lady readers that "men won't buy the cow if the milk is free," which I assume means you shouldn't indulge his lacto-porn urges till he puts a ring on it.

Not all women want marriage or motherhood, but if you do, you have to start listening to your gut and avoid falling for the P.C. feminist line that has misled so many young women for years.

Yeah, happy Valentines to you too, Miss Manners. Next, Matt K. Lewis at The Week --

Valentine's Day somehow manages to turn voluntary acts of kindness and warmth into perfunctory gestures, and romantic candlelight dinners into onerous burdens — all in the name of "love" (read: commercialism).

Lewis must have sensed that his readers might at this point mistake his POV as anti-capitalist and write stern letters to the editor, so he goes for sure-fire conservative signaling devices -- first, whining about Our Degraded Culture:

Just as Valentine's Day seems utterly harmless, much of the "wholesome" music we grew up listening to fostered this pernicious worldview. 

The Righteous Brothers, for example, sang: "Without you baby, what good am I?"

 Then, C.S. Lewis and Jesus! Finally, he tells us,

And if you do marry, forget about all that love at first sight nonsense. Find someone you'd be willing to go into battle with — or, at least, go into business with. That's not romantic, but it's wise.

Celebrate your exclusive rights tender with some coffee and donuts in the break room and then back to work! Does anything about Valentines Day bring joy or at least non-misery to these people? Well...

Obama's Valentine's Day gift to himself; dinner with royalty without Michelle

...no, actually. Nothing does. It's like even the specter of normal positive human feelings either gives them a sad or fills them with rage. I like to think of them as human beings, but I'm beginning to believe with Charlie Pierce that they are in fact the Mole People.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM.

Quin Hillyer, whose buffoonery at the American Spectator helps fill my Voice columns, declares himself a victim because Jonathan Chait almost sorta-kinda called him a racist. (Chait suggests Hillyer's weird obsession with Obama's alleged "haughtiness" comports with  classic "uppity" characterizations of blacks who are thought to get above themselves.)

Hillyer thinks Chait has provided him such a large opening that he can muscle his fellow conservatives through it into racial absolution. Here are his talking points, removed from the weak broth of his prose:

Hillyer is no racist
Hillyer resisted the campaigns of racist David Duke. (Chait acknowledged this; Hillyer pretends not to notice.) He also turned on Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond when everyone else did, and has said some nice things about black people.
Hillyer does not believe blacks are "inherently racist or ill-motivated," but merely "unprepared" for the advantages of white life "when race-based government edicts stack the deck in education or access to employment."
Hillyer's father applauded Brown v. Board of Education and loved Louis Armstrong.

Liberals are the real racists
"It is leftists, not conservatives, who are obsessed with race."
Liberals pick on definitely not-racist conservatives like Jeff Sessions just because some things he said and did may look racist to the untrained eye.
Liberals think it's racist when conservatives make "Obamaphones" their new T-bone/Cadillac/welfare queen shtick (notwithstanding that the program dates back to the Bush era*), so obviously they don't know what racism is.
Liberals are in fact racist against whites because they are racist for blacks and  "see and hear no evil from their favored groups or policies even when the evils are blindingly obvious." As to what those blindingly obvious evils are, see below:

Blacks are also the real racists
Blacks vote for black people. They are arrested for most of the "hate crimes" in the United States. "At least some polls" show blacks think they're racist too, so who's the racist now?

In other words, Hillyer advances ancient arguments that will be accepted by everyone who already believes such horseshit, like Matt K. Lewis at The Daily Caller. Lewis too has some killer talking points -- like, how can conservatives be racist when they also smear white people? ("Conservatives were happy to accuse Bill Clinton off all sorts of things — of dodging the draft and [for some, at least] of having Vince Foster murdered. Was race the cause of all of that?") Oh, and Lewis is also a victim of racist liberal smears -- a black guy accused him of "deploy[ing] the very principles of white privilege" once! Him, Matt K. Lewis, who has "spoken out" against racism! It's like when hyperleftist Dave Weigel suggested resistance to gay marriage had something to do with bigotry against gays. Where do these liberals get that stuff?

Bottom line, it's 2013 and white people are still the ones who suffer the most, or at least the most publicly, from racism.

*UPDATE. Some commenters remind me that these phones come out of the Lifeline program established in the Reagan era. I'd forgotten this point has frequently been brought up to counter the racist gibberings of Obamaphone obsessives -- and missed this awesome bad-faithfest in response by W.A. Beatty at American Thinker:

The only defense offered by Lifeline Program supporters is that it was begun during Ronald Reagan's term, and expanded to include cell phones during George W. Bush's term. But so what? Circumstances change -- even Democrats are not immune. The Jeffersonian Republicans-Democrats represented those who visualized an agrarian future. Then, as the 20th century began, progressives with socialist-Marxist doctrine began to infest the Democrat Party. The result is what we have today.

Which is an elevated way of saying that when a Democrat gives you a phone it's intrinsically bad because Democrat. The whole thing is so poorly reasoned, I feel a duty to preserve it so those who come after will understand why were so easier conquered and enslaved by sentient pigs.

PANDERING.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

This summer, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith about her book Men on Strike...

I know, off to a bad start already. But wait, as the kids say, it gets better:

Her premise is simple: More and more American men are making the conscious decision to avoid the drama and heartache that comes with relationships. It’s just not worth it, they say. 

The Japanese word for this is “Mendokusai.” How do I know? It turns out this same phenomenon is taking place amongst young people of both sexes in Japan. Not only are many forgoing marriage, they are also skipping... sex. It’s just not worth it, they say.

Number one, there's a huge gap between "I don't want a relationship" and "I don't want to have sex." Number two, the Japan study to which he refers is mostly bogus. But when you're dealing with American conservatives, facts are the least of it. Lewis laments:

Could there be a connection between what Dr. Helen is documenting here and what’s happening in Japan? Japanese culture and American culture are, of course, a world apart, but technology has made that world smaller. And, in fact, technology might just be the common denominator... 

Interestingly, in her book, Dr. Helen also argues that online porn is replacing the need for American women.

Oh well then: A reference to technology, and an assertion by Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. What more do you need? The angst extrudes -- Erstwhile sex scold Rod Dreher:

How can an entire country lose the will to reproduce itself, which is to say, the will to live?

Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

WILL THIS NATION’S ‘CELIBACY SYNDROME’ CAUSE IT TO ‘PERISH INTO EXTINCTION’?

At Legal Insurrection, neo-neocon:

When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum.

Speak for yourself, honey. But let's not miss the big picture here: Conservatives are beginning to reverse their usual pattern, and are complaining about other people not having sex instead of other people having it. It's kind of a breakthrough!

Alas, there are holdouts. From the Patriot Action Network:

The latest 'trend' that has been called for this is that young men and woman are not having meaningless sex, premarital sex or leading the value of sex being the key to their lives... 

The news is saying this is a bad thing...but in the big picture, is that the truth? 

What isn't being reported, is the transformation that is happening with the young... Many are becoming Christians.

Eventually someone from the central office is going to have to come around and hip this guy to the new realities. I predict conservatives will shift over time from nagging paupers to get married to nagging them to have sex. It'll give them something positive to offer voters. I mean, it's not like they can offer them clean air or water.

UPDATE. Comments are always the best part of alicublog but in this case our gloss squad have outdone themselves. Some are understandable bemused by professional slut-shamer Rod Dreher turning into a sex cheerleader. "When Crunchy Rod is asking us to fornicate, the End Times are upon us," observes DocAmazing. But philadelphialawyer rightly points out that Dreher and his colleagues at The American Conservative are addicted to gloomy "the death of" stories -- and that their prescriptions are, for people who profess a concern for our humanity, weirdly inhuman:

For example, folks should have children not because they want to, not because they enjoy children, or because they think they would be good parents, or because society is accommodating to child raising, but because society, particularly Western society, oh screw it, let's just tell it like it is, because the Great White Race needs them to... 

In other words, people should make highly personal decisions which directly impact their life for the good of the collective... And yet they will turn around and accuse "the left" of suborning the individual to the mass, of being purely utilitarian, of running roughshod over individual conscience, and so on.

Or as Spaghetti Lee puts it, "Fuck like your country depends on it!" Meanwhile trex delineates Matt Lewis' logic model:

I like to call this fallacy "The Transitive Property of Cryptids" or "The Six Degrees of Loch Ness Monster:" 

1. Dr. Helen says men are avoiding relationships.
2. Kids in Japan are avoiding sex.
3. Technology exists in both cultures
4. Women use technology look at porn
5. People look for other forbidden things with technology
6. Loch Ness Monster

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the alleged end of the culture war. Both rightwingers and leftwingers have suggested it's done, but I say this is America, where no grift stops until it runs out of suckers -- and this one's not even close to running out.

I should mention that the white-flag-waver with whom I started the column, Matt K. Lewis, has in a follow-up hedged on his original claim that "The culture war is over, and conservatives lost." Now he thinks there's a chance. Among his proof points:

The good news for cultural conservatives is that a new generation, aided by new technology, might finally conspire to change things. Young conservatives like R.J. Moeller — the man who brought comedian Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager together — are dedicating their lives to ideas and culture, not overt partisanship.

Apart from creating the headline lounge act in Hell, this is what Moeller's about.  I'm sure he can get people to pay him for it, but it hardly seems like a way to win hearts and minds.

UPDATE. In comments Spaghetti Lee has an angle:

I think the overtly churchy, you're-going-to-hell culture warriors are going to fade out, honestly. Who the hell is going to replace Pat Robertson or Maggie Gallagher when they bite the big one? I think we're going to see/are already seeing a rise in its more insidious cousin, the libertarian conservatives who are too hip and cool and with it for things like making sure 90% of the country actually has livable incomes and that the air and water supplies aren't full of poison...

He numbers among them the Randroid priest who can talk to kids.

FROM THEIR WARM, STICKY HANDS. I trawl other blogs' comments sections but rarely, and almost never to approve. Others are less selective. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, who has reached the throw-the-gun-at-the-pursuer stage in the current gun control debate but can't bear to part with his weapon, holds this Althouse comment up for commendation:

In the olden days, when leftists wished to argue against gun owners, they claimed that guns were phallic symbols and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality. Keep oiling and loading that pisstool, big boy. We know what you’re really doing….Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia. They don’t want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.

To which the Perfesser adds:

Well, phallophobia, anyway. Which seems about right.

Looks like these guys are taking that "man card" thing a mite serious. Don't worry, fellas; as a person of the "gun" myself, I will defend to the death your right to bear that thang.

UPDATE. The Althouse post to which the comment is attached is ridiculous, too, but it does raise the fascinating possibility that Justice Scalia and Matt K. Lewis are only kidding which, if I could only believe it, would greatly elevate my faith in humanity.

IN THE REMAKE, IT'LL BE AMANDA MARCOTTE. Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

As you probably know, The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin is out with a new book, called “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.” 

Rosin and I recently chatted about the book, and we, of course, discussed all the usual topics (including how a “war on women” can be plausible when they are clearly winning the future). 

But toward the end of our conversation, talk turned to sex.

Never have I been more grateful to learn that this was merely a journalistic convention. But not for long! Rosin tells Lewis about this unemployed guy with a well-employed wife who got into rough sex with the missus because "he needed to work out some of his lost dominance... he used to feel entitled to certain things at home because he was the breadwinner. And the truth was, [now] he wasn’t."

Lewis turns thoughtful, or at least looks offscreen, dreamy-eyed, as the shot turns hazy:

Could it be that two recent and successful literary trends — the amazingly popular S&M-themed “50 Shades” series — and the plethora of new books on the rise of women (see my recent interview with “Manning Up” author Kay Hymowitz) — are the product of a similar development?

Whatever gratitude I had for the earlier sex joke was totally dispelled by the conflation of kinky sex and Kay Hymowitz.

I swear to God he ends with this:

Could synergy be at work here? Just as History’s “American Pickers” arguably helps create more of A&E’s “Hoarders” (there is a fine line between a “collector” and a hoarder!), isn’t it possible the same phenomenon that Rosin and Hymowitz are chronicling might also be feeding sales of the “50 Shades of Grey” series?

This reminds me of a scene from the magnificent D.A. Pennebaker doc Town Bloody Hall chronicling Norman Mailer's disastrous feminism debate in that New York venue in 1971. At one point Anatole Broyard hectors Germaine Greer, asking what women want. "Listen," says Greer, "you may as well relax because whatever they're asking for, honey, it isn't you."

A RIGHTWING PUNDIT WHO CAN TALK TO KIDS.

A scene in the “21 Jump Street” movie taps into a recent generational change I’ve been noticing among Millenials.

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late -- Matt K. Lewis of the Daily Caller is trendspotting.

“He’s trying, he’s actually trying,” Tatum’s character says (pointing at some kid who seems to be minding his own business). “Look at the nerd!” When the nerd takes umbrage at this, Tatum’s character punches him and says: “Turn that gay-ass music off.”

Surprisingly, the crowd sides with the nerd, and one of the cool kids says, “That is really insensitive.”

Was this in the trailer? I seem to remember that with a record scratch and a rad little kid with a fauxhawk yelling "Fish out of water!" Here's Lewis with the thumbsucking:

The premise of this scene illustrates an interesting new phenomenon. Today’s “cool” kids no longer think “trying” makes one a nerd. (Nor do they condone casual gay-bashing.) Times have changed. And since they turned this generational shift into the plot point of a movie (ironically, Jonah Hill’s character becomes the popular kind in this new paradigm), I’m guessing others will notice.

Maybe they will, as soon as they finish snarling over the Muppets boycotting Chik-Fil-A.

Indeed, they have. Speaking at the July 2012 Portland/CreativeMornings, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz...

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late, again. I gotta work on my explosive strength.

...observed the same phenomenon. Regarding today’s young people, he notes, “[T]hey’re all incredibly nice. They’re all…polite, well-spoken, pleasant, moderate, earnest.”

At all the college classes I teach and the lectures I give, kids are constantly kissing my ass. They're so nice!

Comparing today’s rock idols to the musicians of yore — who trashed hotel rooms and talked about how many groupies they slept with (think Channing Tatum’s character’s fantasy) — Deresiewicz argues that today’s bands are “all like low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, very earnest, very eco-friendly sort of presentation.”

In other words, they suck.

Deresiewicz also observes that “trying” and being entrepreneurial is actually considered “cool” these days. “It’s like every artistic or moral aspiration is now expressed in terms of starting your own business, whether it’s food or music or good works,” he says.

This, of course, is dramatically different from the way things used to be.

Yeah, remember the 1980s and that radical firebrand Alex P. Keaton? You don't? Good, you're just the kind of sucker who'll swallow this bullshit whole without flinching. Who else would? Maybe a couple of culture-war wingnuts who know better will at least pretend the kids were a shaggy librul menace until Jonah Hill taught them to care because it sounds like a promising Romney-era meme, but at the end of the day they'll trudge down to their panic rooms with the Poverty Sucks and Ghostbusters posters on the wall, watch old videos of teen heartthrob Dan Quayle, and weep.

After considering some other idiotic theories, Matt K. Lewis comes up with this:

First, economic incentives work. When blue collar kids could slide through high school and still get a job paying $19 an hour in a factory, school could legitimately be seen as a joke — a waste of time. That trend has obviously come to an end. (It probably ended in the 1970s, but it might have taken a generation or so to become clear.)

WHEN THE FUCK WAS THIS? Every factory job I had in the 70s paid in the single digits. Maybe Lewis' old man owns a factory?

The rest is just as bad, but here are the bad-good bits:

“It’s uncool if you don’t try,” one young co-worker told me.

Intern at Daily Caller = Voice of a generation. There's also a "one young person told me" quote, hundreds of words long, that begins, I shit you not: "I see the entrepreneur spirit in a lot musicians, especially electronic musicians..."

Ultimately, I think technology and the internet are the most important reason for this generational shift...

That's when, bleeding from the eyes, I gave up, but I had a reading robot crawl the page and when it came back, smoke streaming from its apertures, it croaked, "There is a lot to this, and clearly something interesting is afoot" before self-destructing.

I predict the young people of today will outlive us, the poor bastards.

WINGNUT COLLOQUY. Here's the sentence that set him off:

At first their outrage was attracted by an on-air report by ABC News' Brian Ross on the shooter's identity after his name, but no details, had been revealed. Ross said this: "There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado."

Then ensued:

To recap: The guy misapprehended the sentence and called me a liar; when his error was pointed out to him,  he pretended not to be able to read.

I stopped talking to him at this point, but I should never have started.  (I even went out of my way to be civil, which you all know is a great effort for me.) My problem was, I tried to figure out how he came to his misunderstanding. Maybe he thought the clause pertained to "attracted" rather than "report" -- but then, why would I have inserted immediately thereafter the very details Ross revealed?

But his responses revealed what I should have known from jump -- that he's just a yelling bot, and has no premises at all. He exists to denounce liberals and trawl the attention of big-name conservatives. He isn't there to listen, except for the sound of his own name.

The internet's full of people like this. They make outrageous statements and when they're called on them pretend not to know what's going on. And a lot of them mistake what they're doing for actual argument. It's like "Firing Line" with dialogue from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

And it seems this style is bubbling up to the big-name guys, too. I saw a clip recently of James Taranto on the Lou Dobbs show, and though when I met Taranto years ago he was mild-mannered and easy to talk to, on the show he was bellowing like a Fox News clown. Matt Lewis used to be a relatively sensible conservative writer, and now at The Daily Caller he's writing boob bait like this "guns don't kill people, movies do" thumbsucker.

It's getting to the point where you can't talk to them at all, and that's a real bad point.

UPDATE. Dyer has apologized to me, which is gracious of him. (I wasn't fishing for it, because in my experience people who demand and exult in apologies are assholes, and only mention it to credit him.) He still thinks I misunderstand him, and who knows, maybe I do. Anyway I welcome to opportunity to stop seething at him. Everyone else, however...