A LITTLE FASCISM, AS A TREAT.

I don't always unlock my Monday edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down to the general public, but I felt it my duty as an American to make sure everybody got the recent rightwing talking point that sure, Trump keeps imitating Adolf Hitler but that doesn't mean he actually intends to keep it up if he gets elected -- you know the old saying, campaign in Hitler, govern in Mitt Romney! 

My own version is preferable, but among the multiple National Review don't-worry-about-fash-Trump stories on which it's based I especially like this bit from Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke:

To make this case is not to “defend Trump,” but to profess confidence in the American model of government against those who would undermine it. We have already seen this work, back in 2021, when Trump tried to stay in office despite having lost the election. That he tried was a disgrace. That he failed spectacularly was a testament to the strength of our founding documents, the habits of our people, and the enduring relevance of the observation that the best way of checking ambition is with ambition itself.

Sure, Hitler tried to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, but he failed, didn't he? And then we never heard from him again. 

It's all the funnier/more terrifying when you see the prestige press picking up these demurrers -- today their flagship, the New York Times, has Matthew Schmitz saying, "Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate." The stuff about vermin immigrants polluting American blood and Trump throwing his opponents in jail is just lagniappe -- come for the high-earner tax cuts, stay for the concentration camps!

Anyway read the thing, it's good. 

THE RETURN OF JUST-THE-TIP.

 You know, in addition to my five-day-a-week gig at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!) I also follow and comment on daily events at Twitter (Follow! Gratis!), which is fun but somewhat saps the strength I would need for more longform observations of life's passing parade. But here's something I noticed that I really wanted to make a point of. 

At National Review, Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke is one among many wingnuts enraged by last night's Met Gala. But while most of them are (as usual) obsessed with hatewank object Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez ("Twitter erupts over Ocasio-Cortez's 'Tax The Rich' dress at Met Gala: 'Hypocrisy of our ruling class,'" ejaculates Fox News), Cooke is mad that the help was masked:

The photographs from last night’s event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City show a host of celebrities — including New York Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Carolyn Maloney — enjoying themselves without masks while the staff that are waiting on them are all masked up.

Why?

Guests at the event were obliged to be vaccinated. But so, per New York City rules, were the staff...

Never rule out willful obtuseness, but most people in big cities know that staff -- for example, waiters at restaurants -- are typically masked, while guests often are not -- for example, when they're eating food served by the masked servers. At the Gala, the guests were basically doing a photo shoot (what other purpose does the event serve?), hence their masklessness. 

As for the staff, it may be they're cool with being masked because it helps protect them from assholes who don't follow the rules, which service workers know allll about. 

You get some idea why Cooke is making this absurd stretch in his finale:

Is the science different for famous people, perhaps?...

If, as the president claims, unvaccinated people pose a risk to vaccinated people, then the Met chose to put its guests at risk — and those guests, by declining to mask up, went along with it.

"As the president claims." 

See, this is a variation on what I used to call Just-The-Tip Trumpers -- which, come to think of it, has always been overrepresented at National Review. Many, many conservatives have gone over entirely to COVID-hoax horse-dewormer madness, but the manicured magazine types like Cooke need to preserve their credibility with donors, newspaper editors, and Sunday morning talk show bookers. So they instead go the Just-The-Tip route -- for example, they may assure you they personally believe vaccines and masks work, maybe possibly, but liberals who say they do are big hypocrites, which they show either by failing to wear a mask or by wearing masks too much or by failing to acknowledge it's really black people making us all sick --  so, really, when you think about it, it's the MAGA people refusing treatment and getting hospitalized who have the better part of the argument. 

And the Met Gala is perfect for this routine. Look, liberals wearing fancy clothes -- they're for the "working man" so they're supposed to dress like extras in a Pudovkin movie! They think they's sumpin' better'n you, but them Hollyweird sissies are as barefaced as Cousin Cyrus at a Kid Rock concert! So tie their inappropriate glamour to COVID, and presto -- you've done your bit for the Cause without having to get down in the manure with the Base.

UPDATE: They just can't quit her -- National Review has a story headlined "Conservative Watchdog Files Ethics Complaint against AOC over Met Gala Attendance," which sounds very very serious but -- well, let alicublog commenter mortimer2000 tell it:

[National Review says] The American Accountability Foundation has filed an ethics complaint calling for a probe into whether Ocasio-Cortez accepted an “impermissible gift” to attend the gala or violated any campaign finance laws, according to Fox News.... “Without prompt investigation and enforcement of Congressional Rules, the American people are likely to lose faith in the ability of Congress to police its members,” the complaint says.

You will be shocked to learn that The American Accountability Foundation consists of two deeply not-just-the-tip Republican operatives -- veterans of the Trump administration, the Cruz for President oppo program, and Ron Johnson's staff, among other swamps.

Keep up the good work, AOC! They're obsessed with you.

Heh, indeed, get it. 

A NEW LOW, PART 1,254,090.

Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at the conservative flagship magazine National Review:

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading the many responses to Tucker Carlson’s now-famous monologue. We’ve had contributions from David French, Kyle Smith, Kevin Williamson, Yuval Levin, David Bahnsen, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Mike Lee, Ben Shapiro, Mona Charen, Jonah Goldberg, David French again, Kevin Williamson again, David Bahnsen again, Jonah Goldberg again, and more. And that’s just on the website. The question has also been discussed at length on many of NR’s podcasts, and, of course, on Twitter....

Forget the rest of Cooke's post; forget anything else written about Carlson's allegedly inspirational speech -- except what I wrote about it in my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!) and quoted in a previous alicublog post. Instead contemplate that Cooke has cited the deep thoughts of no fewer than 11 major conservative thinkers on a dumb TV speech by a racist Fox News bowtie buffoon.

It seems like for the past week every conservative bigwig in the country has weighed in on what is essentially standard-issue You Snobs Care About Foreigners Well What About The Poor Hillbillies on Opioids gush as restated by the heir to the Swanson TV Dinners fortune. I knew Trump had gutted their movement, but this is like an Evelyn Waugh parody, like a sub-basement of a nadir of intellectual decay -- it's as if Cooke had an even lower opinion of his own karass than I do, and set out to make conservatism look stupid. It's too bad we can't have a reliable accounting of who finances this crap, because I really suspect it's mostly supported by rich wastrels as a joke to see how many among the dummies who still support this movement will catch on.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about that Mike Pence sexual self-segregation thing that was going the rounds last week. Among the outtakes, Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke defending Pence's unwillingness to eat alone with women to whom he's not married with an analogy:

I am fairly sure that I could smoke a large number of cigarettes before I became addicted, and, indeed, that I could indulge in them casually without ramping up my habit. As such, I’m not averse to having the occasional smoke. But suppose I were averse to that. Suppose, instead, that I was unwilling to embark on even the first step of that journey. Suppose that, in defense of my health and my wallet, I drew a much harsher line in the sand. Well, why the hell would that matter? What possible failing could that be held to imply? Caution is no vice when the end is so undesirable.

So, women are like cigarettes: Some people just can’t handle them, and by “people” I of course mean men.

BLAHBLAHCARE.

You smart folks have probably noticed that the GOP's American Health Care Act that's supposed to repeal and replace Obamacare neither repeals not replaces it, but keeps it dead-alive as a horrible zombie to kill as many Americans as possible.

You may have noticed, too, that having to finally show their cards after eight years of bullshitting -- the political equivalent of locking yourself in the studio for years working on your double-album masterpiece, and emerging with a boombox tape of bathtub farts -- seems to have deranged top Republicans. They're saying all kinds of crazy shit, and I mean crazier than usual, like bugfuck crazy. There's HHS Secretary Tom Price's back-asswards "Medicaid is a program that by and large has decreased the ability for folks to gain access to care." There's Jason Chaffetz's suggestion to Americans greedily lamenting the loss of their coverage that "maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care" (for which he delivered a classic non-apology after people got mad).  There's the steady stream of breath-cooled butter turds emerging from the mouth of Paul Ryan, etc.

Normally in situations like this the politicians say anodyne nothings and leave it up to the propagandists to embarrass themselves. Mind you, those rightbloggers who did find the courage to emerge from their spider holes, or were pushed, did bucket-foot it: take Dan MacLaughlin, who at National Review is forced to admit the bill has to be a mess because people won't like having their coverage wrenched away and their fingers have to be broken one at a time before they'll let go:

A total and immediately effective repeal with no backup plan would create losers who would be angry and sympathetic. A lot of the distortion in the intra-Republican healthcare debate – including the Rube Goldberg nature of the already-being-rewritten House plan and the demands by Senate moderates to protect people covered by Medicaid expansion - is driven not by a desire to produce the best plan for the country’s future, but rather by a desire to address the difficulty of transitioning out of the bind created by Obamacare’s entrenchment over the past four years. That’s understandable and necessary – conservatives take the world as it already is...

One imagines the American people saying, "Um, I'm right here."  (Oh, and if you want to see even worse, check out his colleague Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke arguing that what's really needed is a better communications strategy. Remember when that was supposed to be Trump's genius?)

This general derangement has, I'm afraid, a simple explanation. Everyone involved knows the bill is garbage. The Leader continues to yammer how great, so great, you'll love it, etc., but no one believes him -- except for that relatively small core of living Twitter eggs who were called deplorables back before it was decided This Is Why Trump Won so we better let them wreck the country in peace.

Because anyone else they talk to either laughs at them or tells them to get fucked, the GOP have to focus on these guys. So that's who they talk to. And to them they talk the political equivalent of baby talk -- angry, vicious baby talk. That's what Price and Chaffetz and Ryan and all of them (including I guess Cooke, who I doubt is dumb enough to believe that a bill with several non-financial aspects can actually be passed in "reconciliation") are doing. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to keep Junior happy. That's why this ridiculous bill actual devotes several pages to how the government will take money back from Medicaid recipients if they win the lottery. To you it seems crazy, a non sequitur, but to the eggs, it's hell no, you ain't givin' mah money to no lottery winners, they don't need it! If they could have gotten away with a No Medicaid Fer Muslims Nor Coloreds section, believe me, they would have, so they did the closest thing they could manage.

And nothing else they do is going make any more sense than that. Hell, the final bill may be written in actual gibberish, or pictograms, or assembled from images cut out of magazines like a dream board. Reason has never been their friend, and now they've learned to embrace its opposite.

UPDATE. See the title of this thing? I rest my case.

WHATEVERTRUMP.

Jonathan Chait has noticed (as I have) that a lot of the old NeverTrump guys have rolled on their backs and peed in submission to The Leader. National Review writers in particular were, back in the day, writing columns like "Is Trump a Double Agent for the Left?" and filling entire issues with demands that he be stopped, but even before the election began extending feelers ("He is a demagogue, but he might be our demagogue") and are now wholly bought in.

Some of the NR guys are crabbing about it. Kevin D. Williamson complains that Chait tied their movement to Ayn Rand, which is absurd because Rand's for babies -- mature wingnuts go for Charles Murray. Also, God: "Actual conservatives are more likely to be found in church, where, among other things, they exercise the philanthropic impulse in community." (Trump goes to church too, and even tried to drop money in the collection plate at least once, so I guess he's as philanthropic as Wilbur Ross and Kevin D. Williamson. Also, doesn't he have some sort of foundation?) Williamson does not otherwise describe the intellectual pedigree of modern conservatism, but judging from the insults with which he peppers his essay he might have named Don Rickles.

Better still is Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke, who has apparently been working on his House Englishman routine:

Here’s a fun theory, courtesy of New York magazine’s resident apparatchik, Jonathan Chait: Because they are devotees of the work of Ayn Rand, Donald Trump’s critics have begun to shut up.

I shan’t attempt to explain how ineluctability silly is this contention...

Oh, you shan't, shan't you? He goes on toffee-nosing like this ("I have seen it expressed elsewhere and think it needs nipping in the bud") for some time, but eventually has to get down to the real bullshit:

In order to answer these questions, one has to reiterate what exactly the Never Trump position entailed, as well as remember that it was never a pledge to reject conservatism or to join the Left on the barricades. Rather, it was a description that was applied to those rightward-leaning figures who believed that Donald Trump was a poor choice as the GOP’s nominee, and that he was an unfit candidate for president. Although I rarely used the term myself, it did apply to me as a practical matter: Throughout the primaries and the general election, I argued that Donald Trump was (a) an immoral man, ill-suited to the office of the presidency; (b) a political opportunist, likely to pursue policies that would seriously damage conservatism in the long run; and (c) a wannabe authoritarian who shouldn’t be trusted with power. As a result, I both opposed his nomination during the primaries and concluded during the general that I could not back somebody so manifestly unsuited to his coveted role.

Quite obviously, Trump’s victory rendered much of this moot — not, of course, because his victory has altered his character or because his success has impelled reconciliation, but because the role of Trump’s critics has by necessity been changed...

Go read the rest if you like, but it comes down to this: NeverTrump didn't mean NeverTrump, it meant UnlessHeWinsTrump, in which case he's like any other Republican, which is to say mostly dandy.

You may compare this posture to the conduct of Evan McMullin -- who was sufficiently NeverTrump to mount an insurgent campaign against him and, unlike many of his fans from that time, continues to kick both Trump and the Trumpified Republican Party in the ass. McMullin seems to have a different idea of NeverTrump than Cooke, based on principle and the plain meaning of words.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Saw Television at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday; they were in pretty good shape.  But they didn't play anything from Adventure, which I love. So here's some of that.
•   Matt Lauer is getting pounded from several directions for aggressively questioning Hillary Clinton while failing to impede Trump's river of bullshit.  One such complaint comes from Jonathan Chait, who says that the problem is Lauer's false equivalence: "television personalities like Lauer... are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian..." At National Review Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke leaps on this; Chait has written against political correctness before, he informs us, and that the entertainment industry is full of liberals! Yyyeah, A. Normal Person might respond, so? What's that got to do with a lame journalist letting Donald Trump steamroll him? Because Matt Lauer is more widely seen than your average New Republic writer, says Cooke; hence he is pop culture, and since pop culture is you liberals' fault so is Matt Lauer:

Or, to put it another way: Most people aren’t reading “elite print news sources,” they’re watching mainstream television and going to the movies, and these sources are both teaching them what to think in ways that political-opinion magazines never will. 

Today, Chait is less “may or may not be unfair” and more “horrified.” Why? Well, because now he believes that pop culture — which is just as shallow and dumb as it’s always been; Lauer is no anomaly — is hurting him and his party. And we can’t have that!

Welcome to the club, comrade. 

Because Cooke has a British accent, some people may assume him cultivated, yet he lumps journalism in with "mainstream television" (as opposed to edgy, fringe television like The Five, I guess) and movies, just like your average dumbass culture warrior who takes it on faith that Field Marshall Chomsky Cloward-Piven Alinsky is conducting everything that appears before the public (except some brave truth-tellers like the staff of National Review) in one grand symphony of socialism, and that if one Liberal Cultural Agent does something that fails to advance the cause, all libtarddom is thrown into a tizzy, or at least will be when Charles TMI Cooke calls them out. How a grown man can get through life without apparently meeting an artist and understanding why he does what he does (hint: it's not on orders from Moscow), I can't guess; more evidence, I suppose, that these changelings are raised in vats and educated in Skinner Boxes before being sluiced into their editorial pens and wingnut sinecures.


• To some sad specimens of humanity, everything is politics. At The Federalist Rachel Lu gushes at first over the Minnesota State Fair, where she had the opportunity to display her vegetables, which make her proud if not eloquent ("My tomatillos were bursting with freshness, still wet with morning dew, and packed with the trademark tomatillo tang" -- sounds like a cigarette ad from the 50s) as well as some ornamental gourds, which won her a prize. But then, after the ceremonies, Lu is told that they throw away the exhibits and she can't have hers back. She has an extended fit, and finally reveals that this condition appeared in the rules of the competition, presented to her ahead of time; since she is a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility, this naturally cuts no ice with her:

I had read the rule book. My eyes had passed over those words. If I had back-checked all the numbers, I could have deduced that my display would be peremptorily confiscated against my will. I just made the ridiculous mistake of assuming the rules would make some sort of sense.

When it comes to entitlement, Lu makes Megan McArdle look like Albert Schweizer. But the best part is the inevitable connection of Lu's personal inconvenience with sociamalism:

As a conservative, I do feel a little foolish for having learned the hard way that bureaucratic rules are unreasonable. Hadn’t I read about the Sacketts and their fight with the Environmental Protection Agency? Did I need a personal one-on-one with Clive Bundy to get this?...

It could have been worse. I lost eight beautiful gourds that I grew with my own hands, and gained a salutary reminder that nothing lovely should voluntarily be delivered into the clutches of the state. When bureaucrats are involved, the rules will trump beauty, truth, and human feeling every time. Even at the Minnesota State Fair.

Maybe next year she'll start her own, privatized state fair, safe from the clutches of the collectivist Minnesota State Agricultural Society. The entry fees might be a little higher -- nothing good happens without a profit motive! -- but it'll be worth it because you won't have to follow rules that don't make sense (to Rachel Lu, anyway).

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See, I like new music. Well, new-ish.  Well, and it has to sound like Heaven 17 or something else I recognize from my youth.  Fuck, don't listen to it then if that's how you feel.
• Anti-gun-control conservatives like to portray themselves as the rational, cool-headed ones: Look, I am not flustered by this mass shooting that has you libtards all worked up for some reason! (I think they roll right past the preliminary "of course this is a terrible tragedy" bit anymore because they think it weakens their argument.) But you read something like this, from Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at National Review, where he tells his readers the Orlando massacre shows nightclubs would be safer if you let people bring loaded guns to them, and you have to wonder:

I must say, I find this way of thinking somewhat bizarre. Certainly, one could argue that there would be more accidents/shootings/suicides if more people carried in general (although this isn’t borne out by the data). Likewise, one could argue that nightclubs are bad venues for concealed- or open-carriers because they are dark and loud, and because people tend to drink a lot and/or take drugs while inside them. But those are aggregate, not specific arguments. When one gets to the specifics, can one really say with a straight face that the victims at Pulse wouldn’t have been better placed had one or more of them had been armed?

"One could argue" that loaded guns at the disco on a Saturday night is a bad idea! Motherfucker, talk to a bartender! Ask him or her if it's a bad idea. And "those are aggregate, not specific arguments" is the last act of a desperate man. I bet Cooke has a flowchart showing drunks in a bar turn into "polite society" if you give them loaded weapons. (Though, under a "Bring your guns, ladies drink free" policy I suppose the Mateen shooting might have been prevented by Pulse being shut down long beforehand, due to its frequent dance-floor gun battles.) While I am on the whole glad that our immigration laws are as yet sufficiently relaxed that we still allow even Thatcherite twats to become citizens of this country, I wish the authorities had first taught Cooke some of our folk wisdom.

• I keep saying on Twitter that I have a new funny thing at The Sherman Oaks Review of Books but Twitter obviously is over because my item has not blown up. So go have a look why don't you, and then stick around to look at the other stuff at the Review which is also funny. It's a humor site. We're humorists. And we mean that in the old-fashioned sense of producing laughter, if that's the sort of thing you go for.

• Remember when a couple of posters of Obama as The Joker in 2009 meant Obama was washed up? Well, they work this same routine every so often, and it currently is being worked with a clutch of rainbow-flag "Shoot Back" posters in West Hollywood. Gay folks in the neighborhood don't seem to appreciate the sentiment, per the L.A. Times, but the artist, Sabo, interviewed by PJ Media, tries strenuously to counteract that impression; "it's important that people know that this image came out of the gay community," he says, meaning out of him. This reminds me of the post-Orlando Red Alert Politics story (amplified by the ridiculous Washington Examiner), "Gays rally around Trump after Orlando attacks," based on the testimony of... four allegedly gay guys on Reddit, and two allegedly gay guys on Twitter ("'I am a gay man and this disgusting incident has persuaded me to join the Trump train!' Snowduckling wrote"). It's like they want to co-opt the gay vote but know it's useless and so aren't even putting the usual effort into their propaganda. Maybe they should get a high-ranking Trump surrogate to go on air and talk about how he loves cock.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM.

Among the National Review new breed Kevin D. Williamson and Charles C.W. Cooke are pretty far out there, but don't sleep on David French, who despite lacking his colleagues' hipsterish affectations (peculiar hair balance, two middle initials) is more than a match for them twaddle-wise and seems to drift further from earth's orbit with each passing column. The title of his latest:

Are Encounters with the Police Really More Dangerous for Black Men?

If you guessed "Nah, son!" you've been paying attention. French starts with a story about how as a lad he himself was roughed up by the constabulary, but generously offers further evidence:

The results so far for 2015 show much higher numbers of police killings than previous FBI reports. They also, at first glance, seem to prove the #BlackLivesMatter thesis that police target black men. 

As of July 27, the Guardian claims, American police have killed 657 people in 2015. The large majority, 492, were armed. Some 316 victims were white, 172 black, and 96 Hispanic. (The rest were of other or unknown ethnicities.) Whites constitute a majority of the population, however, and police kill black Americans at a greater rate than whites — with 4.12 black victims per million versus 1.59 white victims per million. 

So case closed, right? Not so fast. Comparing police shootings by race with crime statistics by race tells an entirely different story: It may in fact be the case that white Americans are ever-so-slightly more likely than blacks to die in any given encounter with a police officer. After all, blacks commit homicide at eight times the combined white/Hispanic rate, and, despite their constituting roughly 13 percent of the population, represent a majority of homicide and robbery arrests. Indeed, the disproportionate share of arrests exists across all categories of violent crime — at a rate that often exceeds the racial difference in police shootings. Thus, blacks are seriously overrepresented in the most dangerous police encounters of all — encounters with violent suspects.

Go ahead, read it again. He really is saying it: That while in raw numbers blacks do get killed by cops more often than whites, you have to grade on the curve because blacks are so criminal.

The rest is also gibberish, though some of it is prime:

It’s just sheer fiction that white men enjoy some sort of shield of immunity, engaging in disrespect and defiance at will. After all, police kill white men almost twice per day.

This is where I'm supposed to lament how far National Review has fallen, but except for its arts and letters coverage it always sucked; all that's interesting about the new Review is that they've found people who are willing to say absolutely anything to keep their jobs.

UPDATE. Comments are as ever prime, and include a link to a few good explanations, as if they were needed, as to why French is full of shit: montag2 offers Jacobin's "The Making of the American Police State"; Robert M. offers, in response to an industrious troll, the insight that French's "principal error is conflating 'encounters with police' with the incidence of crime, and the incidence of crime with arrest rates" -- assuming, perhaps over-generously, that this was not deliberate.

ZHDANOV NEVER LEFT.

This pops up in the middle of a Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke rant about how PC is intimidating professors and you liberals who think Ted Cruz looks like Joseph McCarthy are actually The Real Joseph McCarthy:

But the truth is that if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair.

It seems never to have occurred to Cooke that if his analogy is sound, then The Crucible is already about speech codes etc. -- because it's not a news report but a work of art, which pertains to the universal, and resonates with anyone who has experienced mass hysteria and its attendant repression in whatever form. Other people know that; that's why the play is always getting revived. Audiences get the connection. Cooke might get a theater company together to alterna-stage The Crucible to look like Oleanna if he likes.

I suspect that Cooke's not interested in universals, though: What he wants is an already-famous property that's about how college students are oppressing conservatism -- or, failing that, to get people to believe that the dead author of the famous property was really a rightwinger and just didn't know it. You know, like they do with George Orwell and many others, to avoid the hard work of making (or even seriously engaging with) any art themselves.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg tells his colleague: You say McCarthyism like it's a bad thing.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Tom T. Hall sure writes a lot of songs about musicians.
This one really needs an uptempo rock cover.

•     Stephen F. Hayes of Bill Kristol's Get Your War On thinks the Iran Letter was a masterstroke:

A final point: The Cotton letter has already achieved its goal. We are, finally, engaged in a serious national debate about the threat from Iran. That is something the Obama administration has avoided for six years. No more.

"We have engaged a serious debate" is press-agent for "people think we're idiots." Also, Hayes hauls out the customary oh-yeah-what-about-traitor-Dems-and-the-Russians examples, apparently just because he can't help himself, as these examples certainly don't help his cause:

Of course, the past behavior of Democrats doesn’t justify the Republican letter on Iran.

[Vaporlock vaporlock quick give me the index cards...]

The letter needs no justification.

[Dammit, shoulda pulled the fire alarm instead!]

...Unlike, say, John Kerry or Ted Kennedy, and unlike David Bonior and Nancy Pelosi, these senators gave no succor to dictators and despots.

Of course not -- when we blow up this Middle Eastern country, somebody good will take over! Isn't that how it always works?

•     In a grand act of slur reclamation, Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke of National Review pimps his "Conservatarian Manifesto," in which the sort of thing we use the word to make fun of -- i.e., bullshit libertarianism -- is claimed as the Future. In Kang and Kodos terms, it's "Miniature American flags for some, abortions for nobody." As with anything associated with the Future these days, there's a Kids & Tech angle:

The first thing is that young people are just used to customizing their lives. They are used to Facebook. They are used to their cell phones. They are used to building their own computers. Yet they are routinely asked to vote for the DMV. They haven’t rebelled against that, but there will come a point where that sort of homogenization starts to irk them.

Surely der kinder will rise up against Net Neutrality -- that's just an FCC "power grab"!  -- and prepare to go overseas and fight ISIS, cognizant that "in 1945, the British, overnight, handed the baton to the United States," etc. I can see this going over big with the MySpace generation.