JONAH GOLDBERG: SECOND TIME AS FARTS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I wrote when the op-ed came out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Just in the mood.

•   Weird what whets the wingnuts these days: They're cheering Putin's challenge to Biden, exultant that Biden tripped on some stairs, and their new intellectual excitement is a Republican judge's dissent in a defamation case, in which he says New York Times v. Sullivan (the "absence of malice" case*) and other protections of the freedom of the press should be done away with. From Slate:

[U.S. District Court Judge Laurence] Silberman accused the American media of “bias against the Republican Party,” calling the putative phenomenon “a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s.” He continued:

Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.

Silberman also explicitly condemned “Candy Crowley’s debate moderation” of the second debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on CNN, which took place nine years ago...

On and on the Reagan-appointee goes, bringing in Hunter Biden's laptop and other such wingnut totems. 

To me the most interesting part of the thing is Silberman's moan over the alleged embattled isolation of the American conservative press in the person of one non-American man:

To be sure, there are a few notable exceptions to Democratic Party ideological control [of the media]: Fox News, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son. Will a lone holdout remain in what is otherwise a frighteningly orthodox media culture? After all, there are serious efforts to muzzle Fox News. And although upstart (mainly online)] conservative networks have emerged in recent years, their visibility has been decidedly curtailed by Social Media, either by direct bans or content-based censorship...

The woe-is-me blubbering that is now common among the Right aside, this is remarkable in that it suggests that conservative ideas have no intrinsic value that would be recognized and promoted by the American people unless they were propagandized specifically by Rupert Murdoch and his major properties. Silberman claims the "upstart (mainly online) conservative networks" cannot pick up the standard from Murdoch because they're suppressed by "censorship," but that's obvious nonsense -- the almost exclusively conservative makeup of Facebook's weekly top ten stories and the gigantic Twitter followings of people like Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro are some of the evidence against that claim.  

If we may impute any instinct to Silberman beyond a desire to rile up the rightwing press  -- and he sure has done that, with celebratory coverage seen at Glenn Beck's The Blaze ("In incredible dissent, federal judge launches broadside attack on SCOTUS precedent protecting left-wing press") and the Washington Times ("Judge calls on Supreme Court to revoke news media protections," of which I was informed in an email "news alert") already coming over the transom -- it may be that he realizes the traditional conservative strategy of flooding the media with old-fashioned look-out-here-come-the-minorities boob bait, as practiced for decades by Murdoch, is no longer moving the needle the way it used to, and that the alternative is not to pump the new breed of conservative outlets -- which for some reason ("censorship"? LOL, c'mon) isn't as effective -- but to cry "bias" and call on Republican legislators and the reliably rightwing Supreme Court to fix it for them by silencing the opposition. 

This is, I keep telling you, what's always at the back of their "cancel culture" bullshit: they want the road leveled and paved for themselves, and you under it. 

•  BTW WTF:

VIRTUAL EVENT: The Crown Under Fire: Why the Left’s Campaign to Cancel the Monarchy and Undermine a Cornerstone of Western Democracy Will Fail

Please join the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Simon Center for American Studies for an insightful discussion about defending conservative institutions and uniting to preserve the special UK-US Relationship.

Sponsored by the Heritage Foundation! With a link to an article by (I believe the expression is) limey cunt Niles Gardiner, "Meghan Markle Oprah Interview an Insult to the Queen and the British People." which is so entirely royalty-fan gossip ("Alas, the fairy-tale wedding of 2018 in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle is now a distant memory...") I'm actually embarrassed for them. National Review also carries the message that the ingrate prince and his non-white strumpet are part of a liberal conspiracy to destroy that great American institution, the British Monarchy, in several articles including this one by (I believe the expression is) jammy twat Joseph Loconte: 

The radical Left has seized upon Oprah Winfrey’s televised spectacle with Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in a crusade to invalidate one of the most consequential conservative institutions on the world stage.

Accusations of racism within the royal family are not the point. The aim of modern liberalism can be symbolically discerned in William Walcutt’s painting,Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green, July 9, 1776. It is to tear down everything the monarchy represents: tradition, authority, virtue, duty, love of country, and biblical religion.

LOL, go drink some tea, bitch.

*Update: Originally had this as the Pentagon Papers case, which was actually New York Times Company v. United States. Duh, me stoopid. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Joe Pass had monster chops, but like all the greats

he knew when to lean on a good melody.

These are rough times, let's let that theme ride.

Same goes for vocalists.

•   It is to laugh:

The Age of Coddling Is Over
Learning what hardship has to teach us.

...by -- get this! -- David Brooks! Yes, he actually typed with his soft, manicured fingers (or maybe someone does that for him now) that "over the past decades, a tide of 'safetyism' has crept over American society," a tide that led to (or was caused by, kinda hard to tell) "a wave of overprotective parenting," and this -- not an economy that grinds up and disposes of an increasing percentage of its young citizens -- is what causes their rising depression diagnosis and suicide rates.

But not everyone's a suicidal sissy! In previous incarnations one would have expected Brooks to nominate as America's Toughest Avatar his laughably poorly-drawn "Flyover Guy," but the times demand a new model why-can't-you-be-more-like object: The American Healthcare Provider!

But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.

While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60 percent of pre-meds never make it through their major.

While you liberal-arts pussies are going bankrupt paying loans on your postwar feminist bullshit, these students are getting their asses toughened up by drill-sergeant grading curves! And that's why they're staying at work now even though they can't get proper protective equipment and are dying at alarming rates -- because they're macho enough to cover for our inept government! Look at them, not the idiots who put them in harm's way! Ain't it heroic?

But have a care -- the limp-wristed ways of the West threaten tough-guy med-school culture:

Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training...

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard. 

You gotta get your kids to man up if you want great things from them. Take it from Brooks, who built his intellectual muscles forging sociological insights in the smithies of the University of Chicago and The Weekly Standard; can you imagine Bobos in Paradise and The Third Mountain, with all their tensile strength, emerging from some Oberlin pink-tea? The moral is, if you want heroes, you have to grade tough, so the weak drop out, which means they deserve their banishment into debt slavery, and the winners can take their place on the front lines of medicine and everything else, to be mowed down by whatever gets unleashed on them by the inspired leadership of such statesman as Brooks endorses. Don't change the system, harden the proles!

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE CHICK-FIL-A DOWN.

I'm opening to the general public (that's you guys!) the latest issue of my newsletter, about Rod Dreher's extended shitfit over Chick-fil-A's disinvestments. Longtime readers may recall my writing at the Village Voice in 2012 about how a couple of colleges booted the fast food chain for its president's homophobic sentiments and conservatives went nuts, making special "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" trips (or saying they did) to gorge on waffle fries and show the gays and gay-lovers that nobody out-grievances the Right. Sample:

“Tastes Like Liberty,” said Doug Ross. “Tasted like freedom,” said Mollie Hemingway. They must have changed the formula since we ate there. 

“80% of the folks at the tables [at the food court] were sporting Chick-fil-A bags. Taco Bell and Sbarro’s shared the rest of the tables, it seemed, with Five Guys, a very popular Washington area burger chain,” reported Robert Morrison of the Family Research Council. “‘I’ve had enough of those ‘gaystapo tactics,’ we heard one diner say.” 

“The Chick-fil-A controversy has no doubt been polarizing in some corners of the country,” said Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, “but the undeniable success of yesterday’s nationwide rally to support the fast food chain means we’re likely to remember August 1, 2012 as Silent Majority Day.” 

It was a watershed (or a Diet-Mr.-Pibbshed) for late-stage homo-haters, and the news that CfA had removed some investments in gay-averse charities hit several of them hard, though few as hard as Rod.

Astonishingly, Dreher is not the author of the stupidest thing written on the subject. This is from John Hinderaker of Power Line:

I won’t stop eating at Chick-fil-A on account of this retreat, but I won’t do it with the same enthusiasm, either.

And some people think John McCain was a hero!

UPDATE. Yikes, Dreher's got a third Chick-fil-A post:

About Chick-fil-A, I know you liberals are laughing at us, drawing comparisons between Thomas More and a chicken shack.

Yep! Bye!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Gone too soon!
I have to say I'm pleased by the synchronicity of it all. I was just talking about the Washington Examiner's attempt to fuck up Muslim-Jewish relations with sensational, groundless charges against Congresswomen Ohar Ilhan and Rashida Tlaib. The rightwing rag is also mentioned in a similar context in my latest newsletter issue, which I am releasing to the general population for free (think about subscribing!), for its execrable Tiana Lowe story, "Democrats don’t want to hear Rashida Tlaib’s anti-Semitic dog whistle." And now they're getting attention because Trump has tweeted the gist of their bullshit border-menace story, which includes allegations that "prayer rugs" (hint Mooslim hint) -- a routine the paper apparently ran in 2014 as well. You may recall the Examiner is where rightwing investors re-sluiced the funds that were keeping the Weekly Standard alive, and it was generally felt that they did so because they wanted less anti-Trump talk and more pro-Trump rock. It appears the Examiner editorial staff got the message. Don't get me wrong, they've always sucked -- as my archives indicate -- but lately they seem to be really stepping up. Inept strongman leader, regular explosions of racism, an increasingly forced-into-line propaganda press -- all signs of a healthy political movement!

+ + +

Oh, and don't sleep on the Washington Times, either -- dig this "news alert" I got on Suborn Perjury Day:

Soon every one of their rags, from the New York Post on down to the pennysavers, will just be Adams, James Woods, Kevin Sorbo et alia interpreting current events. And Benghazi!

THE NEVERTRUMP REVIVAL.

Going back to find out what Megan McArdle has been up to is always an unpleasant duty, like checking on an incontinent dog you haven't seen for several hours, and it's exaxctly the shitshow you'd expect. The latest has McArdle, who has opposed Obamacare with hot fury for years and resorted to poignant affirmations to temper her sorrow when the Supreme Court upheld it, now telling Republicans that they better get used to Obamacare. She does not mention that 20 million more Americans are insured since the ACA took effect, but does say it was "fewer people than expected." (Another phrase missing from her column: "pre-existing conditions.")

Apparently McArdle has sniffed the wind and feels she must be part of an imaginary anti-Trump conservative consensus. Hell, some days ago she even worked this angle when writing about the demise of the anti-Trump conservative Weekly Standard, and emitted this concatenation bomb of delusion:

Some of the movement’s stalwarts did turn into Trump boosters, if only half-hearted ones. What was stunning was how many refused, including those at the Weekly Standard.

!

...Another acknowledgment is also due: The past two years have given the lie to many of the nastiest accusations the left levels against conservative intellectuals — that conservative ideas are little more than veils for personal greed, that conservative institutions are nothing but a grift racket, selling self-justification to the richest bidder.

!!

If that were true, there would be no civil war shattering the movement, and there would certainly be no #NeverTrump conservatives holding firm. I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone in the movement has stood fast against the Trump incursion. What’s impressive is how many did.

!!!!! A civil war shattering the movement! Let's get in the Wayback Machine and see what was going on with conservatives all the way back in... October, when Brett Kavanaugh was before the Senate. Didn't see a lot of breakage with Trump, there. It was all hands on dick!

Let's also take a quick look at National Review, flagship pub of the conservative movement, to see how they've abandoned Trump. There's Kevin Williamson saying "there is not going to be a coast-to-coast [border] wall, nor would such a thing be desirable," but that's okay because Trump sent billions to Mexico so they could beef up enforcement on their *southern* border:

It’s fine to sneer at U.S. foreign aid, much of which is simply a money-laundering operation for U.S.-based military contractors and other politically connected businesses. But progress in Mexico and in Central America is of real, immediate, and lasting interest to the United States: economically, politically, and socially.

In other words, like any good wingnut Williamson disapproves of foreign aid -- it's foreign, and even worse it's aid! -- but when Trump does it, it's bound to work. Wonder how he got that past the NeverTrump NR editors!

(Ha, kidding -- EIC Rich Lowry, onetime NeverTrumper and post-election author of "The NeverTrump Delusion," is represented today at Politico by "The Insufferable James Comey," and if you think he speaks on Hillary's behalf you must be new here -- his defense of Flynn and the President against Comey [who he says, get this, "bent over backward to get to the conclusion that President Barack Obama and his Justice department wanted in the Hillary Clinton email investigation"] would get Rudy Giuliani thinking "ugh, what a suck-up." To keep up the Sorry-Charlie affect of independence, though, he does stick in comments like "A lot of people have been diminished by the Trump years," which I like to think is a rueful reference to himself.)

Meanwhile for readers who are not cool with Williamsonian subtext, there's full-on Trumpkin Victor Davis Hanson, who tells us

Sheer numbers have radically changed electoral politics. Take California. One out of every four residents in California is foreign-born. Not since 2006 has any California Republican been elected to statewide office... 

Salad-bowl multiculturalism, growing tribalism and large numbers of unassimilated immigrants added up to politically advantageous demography for Democrats in the long run... 

Latin American governments and Democratic operatives assume that lax border enforcement facilitates the outflow of billions of dollars in remittances sent south of the border and helps flip red states blue.

In other words, the Democrats are importing Messicans to vote for them, and the only way to thwart their race-treason is a wall, which "would radically change the optics of illegal immigration" and "remind the world that undocumented immigrants are not always noble victims but often selfish young adult males..."

These days, with Mueller seeming to close in, one does see prominent conservatives hedging their bets a la McArdle. But all that's meant to accomplish is the possible preservation of their jobs once people start hunting Trumpkins down like dogs: Trump correctly assesses that the actual policy danger of pseudo-outrage from Sorry-Charlie Conservatives With Good Taste is meaningless, which is why he just followed his mood-swing and announced America was leaving Syria. I'm for pulling the U.S. out of everywhere, but I must admit I'm almost as pleased by the resulting homina-homina of dopes like Jeff Flake whose Brave Sir Robin act has been spoiled by this. It's one thing to pretend to want to save citizens' health care, but by God this is the permanent war Trump's fucking with! These people have always been useless, and now everyone knows it -- which it why they're running for cover.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Some singers, trying to stay on beat, sound like they're rushing this lyric.  Not her. 25 years old and totally in charge. RIP.
•  The idea of Jared Kushner as a potential Chief of Staff is so hilarious to me that I am moved to release to non-subscribers two of my recent newsletter issues that feature the big cluck in dramatic colloquy with the President:

"Disappointed Office Seeker": From last week, in which Jared is in distress because Dad sent that blond chick with big tits to the U.N. instead of him; 

"A CoS Line": From today! Jared auditions for the newly vacant role.

I'm prejudiced, but I think these little playlets are pretty funny, plus they have swears. (P.S. If you're stuck for Xmas ideas, my newsletter is cheap and easy to gift!)

•  If you're in the business, you're not supposed to cheer when a magazine closes, and I'm not such a prick that I would laugh at the loss of jobs or even the silencing of the Weekly Standard writers whom I unfailingly found to be idiots* -- even though I have to say now-former Standard film critic John Podhoretz makes it hard not to laugh with his j'accuse against the management, which actually contains the line "That sounds pompous, and I hate sounding pompous, but it’s true." Also funny:

This approach was an immediate success. The Standard was the only successful high-end magazine launch of its time and, I believe, the last important print magazine created in America before the Internet began its search-and-destroy mission against those things published on the pulp products of dead trees.

To be sure, it has never made money.

Maybe you have to have spent your entire life in the for-profit capitalist rat race, as I and most Americans have done, to get the joke. Oh, and Podhoretz's l'envoi as a critic is pretty awful too, but provokes more wuts that lolwuts. Sample: "Out of Africa was perhaps the ur-version of The Beautifully Constructed Big-Budget Middlebrow Picture Made by a Major Studio That Takes on Serious Topics." Podhoretz is the only Jewish cinephile who has never heard of Gentleman's Agreement, apparently. The rest is even worse. So I wouldn't say good riddance -- the worst of this lot will certainly be picked up by other wingnut welfare makework projects anyway; I will instead say thanks for the gift of laughter.

*Addendum: I just realized that Terry Teachout wrote for the Standard, too -- so they weren't all idiots. Here's his last piece for the magazine, like everything he writes thoughtful, well-said and worth your time. He still has his regular gig at the Wall Street Journal if you want to keep up with him.

JUST BLOW ME.

I suppose you guys have seen the sad stories of saps snipping their swatches over the Nike ad with the Bad Man in it -- which subject is treated at greater length in my subscription newsletter *--  but in future, when I look back on this week's outrage, I shall always first recall, not the reaction of President Trump, but how it was handled by the Conservative Pets twitter account:

Doggos and ressentiment -- it can't miss! Except Nike seems not to be suffering from the wingnut tantrums over Kaepernick, so this one joins previous conservative blubber-boycotts against French wine, the Dixie Chicks, Germany, Starbucks, Kellogg's, et alia, that went nowhere, but over which wingnuts beat their chests. And, as with those failed boycotts, conservatives are still declaring victory, confident that their followers don't actually follow the market or read the papers and won't realize that their oafish opposition doesn't mean shit to a company that markets to young people rather than to aging rednecks who only buy athletic gear to burn in YouTube videos. 

You can tell how badly the boycotts are doing by the Wall Street Journal, which engaged Adam Kirsch to lament "The Destructive Politics of Pseudo-Boycotts," taking care to remind us that it's a bothsides problem because, while rednecks burned their shorts without hurting Nike sales, liberals boycotted The New Yorker's festival because white nationalist Steve Bannon was headlining -- and got Bannon disinvited, which just goes to show how awful boycotts are. There's even a paragraph about the Montgomery bus boycott in the thing, which suggests to me Kirsch was prepared to file a more favorable column until the sales figures came in.

But the top propagandists are still throwing Hail Marys. I went above and beyond by watching a Ben Shapiro video on the subject -- or at least as much as I could stand. Within the first 10 seconds I heard this: "Nike in a viral piece of marketing decided it was deeply necessary to reward Colin Kaepernick." Whatever they're paying his ghostwriters should have gone instead to ESL classes. Shapiro also knocked Kaepernick's athleticism -- "He was a garbage quarterback, he's one of the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL," quoth "Crossfit guy" Shapiro -- and reported Kaepernick was protesting "police brutality or some such nonsense." By the one-minute mark, when Shapiro brought up that hardy wingnut perennial, Kaepernick's pigs-as-cops socks -- "there's legitimately pictures of pigs with cop hats on them!" --  his adenoidal, mosquito-on-meth burble was giving me a migraine and I had to bail. I guess that's the secret weapon with which Shapiro DESTROYS liberals. 

The clearest sign that it this is all bullshit is conservatives like Thom Loverro of the Washington Times, Jim Geraghty of National Review, Stupidest Man On The Internet Jim Hoft et alia pretending they care about Nike running sweatshops. I mean, even Trumpkin Reddit forum r/The_Donald has a page called "MUST WATCH. Very Powerful NIKE Sweatshop Documentary" -- previously these guys were only interested in sweatshops as a source for mail-order brides. When you find wingnuts agitating for workers' rights, you know you've hit rock bottom. 

Meantime, I see conservatives have taken up another sports issue -- Serena Williams getting docked a game at the U.S. Open for arguing with an umpire -- and are uniformly siding with the ump. Think it's because they're astute connoisseurs of tennis? Here's a hint: "Whining Serena Williams is tennis’s Hillary Clinton," says rightwing pencilneck Roger Kimball. "Funny How Serena Has Trouble With Referees Only When She's Losing," says Adam Rubenstein at The Weekly Standard. And if you want a good look at the conservative id, check the responses to this MAGA choad's Serena Williams tweet (sample: "I do not take anything Williams says seriously. Her own sister was murdered by the Crips street gang... yet she did the Crips Walk after winning a tournament"). I can see all of these assholes holding an old loving cup like the Coach in That Championship Season and moaning "basketball is no longer the white man's game." 

* that's right, folks, now that the Village Voice is dead I must bring my begging bowl to the web, and offer you premium content wholly distinct from my alicublog stuff for just seven bucks and month and seventy bucks for a year via my newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Apply within. 

WEIRD TALES.

Today Rod Dreher took a break from his customary racist and homophobic material to rage about sex, this time quoting extensively from a Mary Eberstadt Weekly Standard essay that seems -- though it's hard to be sure, for all the froth -- to descry "the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception" as the cause not only of widespread abortion but also child poverty, sexual assault, lonely old age ("Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell”), and other horrors. Even the good news she can't ignore is contaminated by contraception: "Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise." It would seem the only end to this nightmare, if you follow Eberstadt's logic, would be the banning of birth control. (Hey, maybe the new Trumpified court can do it!) But maybe an end to it isn't what she seeks: Maybe all she wants is for us to feel dread and shock and bad about ourselves for daring to get laid without fully committing to childbirth.

Dreher gets right in the spririt: "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags," he cries. "The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."

But shortly before that, Dreher got on an even weirder subject: Was Anthony Bourdain suicided by witchcraft?

Somebody in my Twitter feed last night observed that “the Internet” was making a pretty good case for Anthony Bourdain’s suicide being tied to the occult. Say wha’? Lo, it turns out that his girlfriend Asia Argento is a witch, and not just a casual one either. There’s lots of extreme darkness there, right in the open. She flaunts it. Bourdain, the poor fool, was doomed the day he met her...

This is exactly where we are as a post-Christian culture: we have usurped the powers of binding and loosing from God. The Satanists admit what the rest of us cloak as advanced liberty and self-determination. Here is the line that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be most remembered for. It’s from the 1992 Casey ruling reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion...

This is so loony Dreher eventually took it down (the prior link is actually to its Google cache). But I think it was an instructive post: For all his theological palaver, a lot of Dreher's ravings are rooted in the sort of doomy, scary stories that used to bulk up pulp magazines, lurid 60s tabloids, and comics like House of Mystery; their place has been filled by websites like the crackpot collection where Dreher got this one. Come to think of it, posts like Eberstadt's owe a debt to this genre as well: The world as a nightmarish place to gawk at, with perhaps a little moral uplift at the end to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Well, at least in that sense these guys are observing the verities.

PUBLISH MY THESIS, LIBS!

This essay is short by Kevin Williamson standards, but let me boil it down still further for those of you who wish to limit their contact (and I'll keep it short because I'm sick of writing about this asshole):

Williamson, famously fired by The Atlantic for telling its editor he did indeed believe, as he had previously averred, that women who have abortions should be executed, later got space in the Wall Street Journal to declare The Atlantic and everyone else who got mad at him a "mob" and to suggest this his abortion prescription was just rhetorical shtick, though he coyly refrained from saying what his real prescription was.

Ed Kilgore of New York magazine asked Williamson what his real prescription was, and Williamson responded with evasions and, when Kilgore insisted on an answer, insults.

Today at The Weekly Standard, Williamson reveals that he offered New York a full column (free!) in which he would finally give The Full Monty on how he would really deal with abortion sluts, and (he claims) New York's editor told him a few sentences was "as much on the subject of your views on this matter as we want to publish." Williamson denounces New York, calls Kilgore more names, sputters about the "prevention of discourse," etc. But he still doesn’t reveal his view on abortion and execution.

I suppose this crybaby is even now stalking more liberal magazines, demanding they publish his work at length lest he insult them in the rightwing press, then running to the rightwing press to insult them. I suggest he try the Village Voice. There is precedent, after all, and I bet my editor will love his rates.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Al Franken imbroglio, as well as the attempts of some liberals to reexamine the Clinton impeachment, and the ways in which conservatives have attempted to weaponize these events for their own ends. I hope you won't think me ungenerous in saying that these guys are not interested in advancing the Believe Women movement. They're just trying to take the post-Weinstein moment, in which abused women are getting a little more attention and credence than usual, and exploit it. You can see it especially clearly in the pissy oh-yeah-you-libs-are-supposed-to-be-feminists routines from conservatives like Laura K Potter at RedState:

We’d at least expect former presidential candidate, Mrs. Hillary Clinton to express some sort of support for Ms. Leeann Tweeden, as a fellow woman and believer of all those who come forward, right?...

Nope. Nothing. Third wave feminism is showing, once again, that women deserve to be heard and respected if they hold they correct (read: progressive) viewpoints.

If you'e thinking, wait a minute, Clinton did make a measured and reasonable statement about Franken -- well, yes, but not at the moment when Potter was looking at her Twitter feed, and when you write for RedState there's no point in updating. (Potter's only subsequent article at this writing is, awesomely, "International Men’s Day Spotlight On Male Suicides.")

The culture warriors got into it, too: You saw here last week how Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard took a journey through the past and ranted about the drugs these damn hippies were using on Saturday Night Live and the soiled honor of Spiro T. Agnew. President Trump himself brought up a sketch Franken and other SNL writers worked on, in drafts of which multiple celebrities get raped by Andy Rooney, as if it proved anything except SNL writers took a lot of drugs -- and, for the millionth time, that conservatives don’t understand the difference between fiction and reality.

But Rod Dreher, as usual, outstripped them all in Fallen World paranoia with a froth of outrage over one of the last really funny things SNL did, the 40-year-old "Uncle Roy" sketch with Buck Henry. What's that got to do with Franken? Get a load:

I tried to find out if Al Franken wrote that skit, but my research indicates it was his frequent writing partner, the late Tom Davis. I was wrong — as two readers who watched the Henry interview till the end point out, it was two women: Rosie Shuster and Ann Beatts. Anyway, the reader sends in this more recent clip of Buck Henry defending the integrity of laughing at pedophilia...

And here's a clip of W.C. Fields laughing at blindness! And what about Mel Brooks laughing at Nazis? All these Hollyweirdos are corrupt!

Again: Al Franken did not write the Uncle Roy skit, though he was part of the team that aired it. I’m not saying that Al Franken is soft of pedophilia! I am saying, however, that the 1970s and those who were at the leading edge of pop culture’s evolution back then are probably going to have a lot to answer for as more and more people come out about being sexually harassed or assaulted. I’m wondering if this purgatory spasm we’re living through is going to consume way more famous Baby Boomer males than we can even imagine.

The whole thing's a pisser but what's most amazing, or what would be amazing if we weren't so used to Dreher shattering the limits of ridic, is that he kept going even after admitting his whole premise was wrong.

Finally, to Andrew Sullivan: Dude, let it go.

UPDATE. One other thing that's struck me is the way the brethren deal with the lack of contact between Franken’s hands and Tweeden’s breasts in the famous photograph. Like Peter Hasson at the Daily Caller: “Franken’s defenders in the media have also given him credit for, they say, not fully groping Tweeden.”  I guess in sexual assault close counts, like in horseshoes. (I should add it's not only rightbloggers -- MSM types have fallen into it, too, like Nate Silver, who said the photo "appeared to show Franken groping Tweeden’s breasts while she was sleeping — not providing a lot of room for 'if true' statements about Franken’s conduct." If you're not watching that three-card-monte of a sentence closely, you'll come away thinking he's feeling her up.)

Also, thanks for Yastreblyansky and Sentient Al from the Future in comments for pointing out that the Menendez underage claims  to which Nolte alluded never panned out; I had something about that in the original but didn't feel the column would bear the time it would take to explain -- which is, come to think of it, how a lot of their shit gets over.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Cranky old David Thomas totally bailed emotionally when the band did this last Thursday in D.C., but fortunately we have the artifact.
It may be that I am insufficiently woke, but the story of Al Franken kissing a woman who wasn't into it seems more sad than monstrous to me; as for Franken pretending to grope her, we'll just have to agree to disagree whether that's a criminal matter. I do notice that numerous liberals have rushed to demand Franken's resignation and some Democratic Senate colleagues (and Franken himself) have demanded he be formally investigated. Rightwingers, meanwhile, either accused liberals of covering up for him or laughed at them for being stupid enough to fall for their feigned outrage ("Can you imagine how the left must be twisting up as they are turning on one of their own? Al Franken has been thrown under the bus"). The worst response so far, however, comes from Jonathan V. Last of the Weekly Standard, whose headline, "Al Franken: Even Worse Than You Think," should be actionable under Truth in Advertising laws. Last opens by quoting Franken about his time at Saturday Night Live:

There was not as much cocaine as you would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble. But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up. There was a very undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and laughing at stuff. People used to ask me about this and I'd always say, "No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were doing and do drugs." And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell. Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was impossible to do the show without the drugs.

Here is how Last responds to this mild it-was-the-70s anecdote:

So Franken liked to tell funny lies about not using drugs when he wasn’t writing a book castigating Republicans which was titled -- this is so great -- Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Maybe now when he says that he “doesn’t remember” his encounter with Tweenden the way she describes it, this is a funny lie, too.

He also suggests that Franken was guilty of "distributing" drugs because John Belushi did some of his blow. The "funny lies" bit is perfect enraged-dorkspeak -- sputter, you took drugs and yet didn't turn yourself in, now John Belushi is dead and it's all your fault, so what else are you lying about Mr. Funny Liar??? Speaking of your high school guidance counselor, Last is also mad that Franken slurred Spiro Agnew:

I mean, sure, Agnew fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded a Bronze Star. And yeah, I guess it’s true that as governor of Maryland, Agnew repealed the state’s laws against interracial marriage. But you know, he was a double-plus bad Republican and Franken was a coked-up, 20-something comedian in New York. So he really showed that guy.

You are more likely to know Agnew as a guy who pleaded out of a kickbacks charge and had to resign the Vice-Presidency, but that's probably because you're a damn cokehead.

INTRODUCING THE PANTLOADOWN.

Don’t look now but Jonah Goldberg has a podcast. The debut is here and no, no fucking way guys; last November I actually listened to a Reason podcast with Nick Gillespie and I still wake up shaking in the middle of the night. But I did read Goldberg’s stupid “G-file” letter on it (no link — it’s for fans!), and I can report that it’s full of the shitty goofy-image-Mad-Libs Goldberg considers jokes, and some director’s-cut insights into his working method:

I’m the first to admit that, like Flamenco Dancing or buffalo taxidermy, solo podcasting doesn’t come naturally to me.

What’d I tell you.

I don’t want to be an “interviewer.” Conversation good, Q&A boring. So I went into this with no notes and nothing prepared.

What a shock. Goldberg is so lazy I’m told when he wants to eat, he has one intern pack his maw with Cheetos and another intern put the belt from an old-fashioned reducing machine under his chin and turn it on high.

…In my imagination, I want [the podcast] to be like being stuck in an airport bar with a relatively sober Hunter S. Thompson, a tipsy William F. Buckley and a few entertaining strangers in the mix.

Yeeeahh that sounds great. Anyway why listen to the actual atrocity when we can enter the World of Pure Imagination:

GOLDBERG: Heidi ho, National Review interns, American Enterprise Institute interns, Heritage Foundation interns, and friends of my mother, it’s the Jonah Goldberg Podcast. I want to thank 3 Doors Down for that righteous musical intro aaaand I’ve just been handed a note, whoa, really nice stationery, “Arent and Fox” it says on the letterhead… okay, that was the last time we’re going to play that particular tune and I just want to say one of the worst things Obama did to this country was make people uptight about copyright laws. I mean think what if National Review was copyrighted. Copywritten. Whatever. I mean, who would have ever heard of William F. Buckley Jr. Or me! Something to think about. But I’m being rude to my guest, Megan McArdle, a columnist for the, uh, Weekly Standard, and I understand she’s working on a book about Puerto Rico and Hurricane Whatshername, isn’t that so?

MCARDLE: Literally none of that is true.

GOLDBERG: Hey, lighten up there, Megan! I’m just flying by the seat of my pants here, no prep, no notes, cuz “facts” and “proper attribution,” I mean boring, right? [tries to do Homer Simpson voice] Bo-ring! Did you recognize that? That’s, that’s, that’s the guy on The Simpsons.

MCARDLE: I’m a proud Bloomberg View columnist and I’m not writing a book about Puerto Rico — though I suppose I could, because I was surrounded by those people growing up in New York, and the fact that they’re still there filling up perfectly good East Village property with their housing developments despite their lack of economic dynamism is one of the worst things about the de Blasio Administration —

GOLDBERG: De Blasio, he’s the worst! You folks can’t see it but I’m giving him a big thumbs-down. And that goes double for Ma-Mumia-something-something whatshername the Puerto Rican.

MCARDLE: I mean God, the Italians, Italian-Americans I should say, they gave us all this gorgeous food that I enjoyed so much when I went to Italy. And what have the Puerto Ricans ever given us, culinarily? I mean guacamole, right? And what else? Refried beans. Yuck. It’s poor people food.

GOLDBERG: Yeah. Pretty ghetto. Pret-ty ghet-to. It’s the internet, we don’t have to be politically correct.

MCARDLE: Is there a gas leak in here?

GOLDBERG: Cheese, that’s cheese. I had a cheese. Have a cheese sandwich. In my pants. Pants pocket. [squeaking noise] That was the wind, a mouse. [rustles papers] Homina, homina. Please go on.

MCARDLE: But anyway, what I am interested in is the inevitable, like it’s so predictable, all these people after Las Vegas, talking about and it’s of course a terrible tragedy but they want to just get rid of the guns, like you could do that, and it’s like, haven’t you been paying attention, I mean like Marine Todd, well I mean not Todd he’s fake okay [laughs], but this other Marine, I saw him on CNN, this man took out an armed robber in a store because the robber did. Not. Know. He was a Marine. And those people? In Las Vegas? I mean maybe they were brainwashed by all those gun-control movies like, I don’t know, tsk, I’m sure you know what I mean, like —

GOLDBERG: Like Stop-Loss and Lions for Lambs.

MCARDLE: Uhhh, pretty sure they’re about Iraq.

GOLDBERG: Uhhhh, pretty sure not.

MCARDLE: Whatever, but these people in Las Vegas who just did what was expected of them and just ran and ducked and died, what they didn’t realize was that the sniper — he didn’t know whether they were Marines or not. Right? I mean, people gave me a hard time after Sandy Hook when I said rush the shooter. But what they didn’t know, and what just occurred to me now, is if the shooter thinks you’re a Marine, and you run toward him, then that shooter is going to hesitate and that’s when you get him, when he’s off his guard! Or if you can’t get to him because, and omigod I just realized this [laughs], he’s like twenty stories up in a hotel window, then you can go [in a deep voice] “Ooo-rah!” Like really loud. “Ooo-rah!” And that gives the police time to get him, because he’s intimidated because he thinks you're all Marines. Now, would it work? Would people do it? How should I know? But it certainly makes more sense than gun control. [Pause] Hello?

GOLDBERG: YES! Got the high score, BITCH! [Sound of chair tilting back and falling, GOLDBERG hitting the ground; GOLDBERG’S voice, slightly off-mike] OWWW! OMIGOD! SHOOT! That’s all we have time for! Oww! I wanna thank whatshername for coming on the podcast. [Loud farting sound] Sorry guys, I said I wouldn't but I had to activate the “gas cushion.” I hurt my bummy-bum real bad! [Cries; Three Stooges closing music]

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Ladies and gentlemen, Wayne Kramer tripping balls.
•  The people who keep asking when Republicans are going to get patriotic and act against Trump are missing the point. As I say repeatedly, the deal is that he signs their bills and they let him grift. It would be fair to point out, however, that Republicans have yet to present him with a bill, and also that Trump tends to cheat people he makes deals with. But Trump has cleverly made some good faith down payments to keep them on the line: first, by issuing the sort of monstrous executive orders and decisions that Republicans think about when they masturbate -- the latest being the Block That Ballot Box commission, which I half expect to recommend both literacy and paper bag tests -- and, perhaps as importantly, by hiring prominent GOP ghouls for important jobs. What else explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders as DepPressSec? She has no discernible skills and, given Trump's vicious sexism, it would seem amazing he chose to be represented by a woman who doesn't look like a Fox female news anchor. But she represents an important interest group -- namely the Huckabee crime family and the many hayseeds who think they represent Christ on Earth. Besides, Sanders proved her value to The Leader by humiliating herself with that FBI bullshit. So this hiring is like the advantageous marriages among royal houses in old Europe; it's another way to buy peace. Trump could break into the National Archives, steal the Constitution and wipe his ass with it, and powerful conservatives would just pronounce it "troubling" and go back to dreaming about investigating That Bitch Hillary and doing it right this time.

• It's one of the most reliable principles going that intellectuals should just lay off pop culture. It's always embarrassing when they try to talk about it; even Gabriel Garcia Marquez rhapsodizing Shakira is just ick. And that goes double for bowtie wingnut dweebs going on about how awful they find this dross that mesmerizes the masses who should be forced by the Culture Police to read Tom Wolfe thousand-pagers about political correctness till they start wearing hats to work again and not ironically, dammit! Most of Joseph Epstein's review at The Weekly Standard of a book about the concept of "cool" is strictly Shut Up Gramps, but it hits a low point here:

No rapper I know of qualifies as cool, including the fellow who calls himself LL Cool J.

Picture Joseph Epstein sifting through the Hot 100, sniffing "MEE-goes? Chicken with blue cheese? Hmmph, I find nothing cool in this." Shoot me if I get like that.

IT STARTS WHEN YOU'RE ALWAYS AFRAID.

If you saw Trump in his Fox and Friends interview saying that Obama is sabotaging him --

"...Do you believe President Obama is behind it and if he is, is that a violation of the so-called unsaid presidents' code?" Trump was asked.

"No, I think he is behind it. I also think it is politics, that's the way it is," Trump replied.

Trump then discussed the leaks that have disrupted his first month in office.

"You never know what's exactly happening behind the scenes. You know, you're probably right or possibly right, but you never know," Trump said in the interview, a clip of which was released Monday night. "No, I think that President Obama is behind it because his people are certainly behind it. And some of the leaks possibly come from that group, which are really serious because they are very bad in terms of national security. But I also understand that is politics. In terms of him being behind things, that's politics. And it will probably continue."

-- and you were wondering, "what the fuck is wrong with this fucktard's brain?" it might help to look at the site that was till recently managed by his chief strategist, where they run stories like "SEVEN WAYS OBAMA IS TRYING TO SABOTAGE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION," with such compelling proof points as "Let’s not forget Obama’s acts of rhetorical sabotage, such as describing Trump’s presidential campaign as a crime against American class and racial harmony, or his wife wailing that all hope was lost for America’s children." Or at another, longer-lived propaganda mill, the New York Post, Paul Sperry, explaining "How Obama is scheming to sabotage Trump’s presidency." Apparently the former President told supporters to “move forward to protect what we’ve accomplished" and Eric Holder is trying to stop "what he and Obama call GOP 'gerrymandering' of congressional districts." Why, in an enlightened modern state like Russia that'd get you thrown in jail.

Also, two government employees who served under Obama's communications advisor Ben Rhodes have quit since Trump got in, and written about why they quit in magazines. To most of you that's "no shit," but to Kristinn Taylor it's "Obama Scheme to Sabotage Trump Admin With High Profile Moles Exposed?" Her report, largely cribbed from The Weekly Standard, contains such bombshells as "Smith also reports sources said Ahmed did not actually work all her eight days at the Trump administration, that she took off several days and only worked four days." Taylor also calls on Congress to "investigate Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes and others in this unprecedented abuse of power to sabotage national security and the Trump administration."

So it may well be that Trump is paranoid, but paranoia is also part of the plan. These hobgoblin stories may only affect the most deranged, inbred, hate-crazed citizens, but you have to remember: they're his base.

HAPPY LOST PRODUCTIVITY DAY!

My Village Voice column, usually seen on Mondays, is delayed a day for the federal Labor Day holiday. As I have observed in the past, conservatives used to let this official recognition of the labor movement pass quietly, or with a grudging show of respect -- hell, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post used to print the lyrics to movement anthems like "Pie in the Sky" on its editorial page!  But in recent years they've gotten tetchy about it. Today's Post ed page concentrates instead on demonizing gay people -- in other words, it's just another day! And elsewhere in the alternative rightwing universe, the brethren dream of getting rid of Labor Day, or at least the reason for it.

At Front Page magazine, Matthew Vadum rejoices that Grover Cleveland's institution of Labor Day diverted attention from the redder May Day. (Vadum also rejoices that during the Pullman strike Cleveland "deployed U.S. troops to Chicago to preserve property rights," i.e. to mow down strikers.) He seems to think the holiday's inception helped bring down labor unions, which would make it very slow-acting poison indeed; but mostly he's just glad that nobody knows anymore what the IWW is:

Americans don’t care about the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them. They don’t care that the movement is dying, and in most cases aren’t even aware it’s in rough shape. And that too is a good thing.

Too bad he didn't follow his logic all the way out, and call for citizens to celebrate Labor Day by going to work -- then we'd really know they'd gotten the message!

At Conservative Review, Nate Madden is closer to the mark with "INSTEAD OF LABOR DAY, WHY NOT MAKE CONSTITUTION DAY THE NEW NATIONAL HOLIDAY?" "Innovation" and "market forces" have made unions obsolete, he declares: "Thanks to modern technology and market innovation, workers are better equipped to look out for their own rights, make their own hours, and negotiate their income than ever before in human history." Get with the gig economy, comrades, and maximize your pre-dawn hours driving for Uber instead of parasitically sleeping! In place of labor, Madden says, we should celebrate the Constitution, or rather the rightwing talking points with which such as he always frame it, e.g., "We have a federal administrative state that usurps power from the several states at every turn..." Hell, maybe he can convince citizens that unions and the Civil War were both huge mistakes!

Trey Sanchez of Truth Revolt, alas, cannot bring himself to dream big like that, and mainly grumbles that the Kenyan Pretender went on and on about "workers" and "labor" in his holiday address: "He left no time to thank capitalism, the free market, American entrepreneurs, innovators, or risk-takers. Just himself and organized labor," Sanchez sulks. Don't worry, guy -- when Trump gets in, the Presidential Labor Day Address will be replaced by a sale flyer.

At the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer presents us with "A Labor Day Conundrum: What Happened to American Productivity?" U.S. productivity has been climbing for decades, even as wages have stagnated, but Stelzer sees it dropping off a little and says it won't do:

The economy has created more than a million jobs so far this year, but it hasn't increased its output of stuff very much. If millions more workers can only manage to produce the same amount of goods and services, output per worker— productivity—is declining. Think of it as a 12-inch pizza that once required two chefs to produce, but now has three on the job, perhaps because the oven is old and prone to break down (or the chefs are busy taking selfies, but that's another story for another day).  

Goddamn lazy pizza makers! Two on a pizza, so they have plenty of time to goof off and take selfies -- hmmph, must be millennials too! Anyway, they'll get theirs, because "the two original chefs now have to share their pie with another worker because their productivity has declined." And don't come crying to Paul Ryan for calzone benefits!

Leave it to National Review to find the heartstring-tugging angle:

I was Forced to Join a Union

Now it can be told! Ripped from today's headlines!  “As a condition of my employment as a professor at George Washington University, I must pay the SEIU every month,” wails Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who apparently couldn't find employment at some right-to-work college like Liberty University and so was forced to accept the onerous terms of a top-tier D.C. university.

“Of course, the SEIU will say that I am not forced to join the union and pay the $36 monthly dues,” she laments. “Instead, I can pay a monthly agency fee of $29.38. But I have to do one or the other.” How will Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a lowly former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, make ends meet? Maybe she should ask the SEIU-repped security guards and nursing home aides (from whom you never hear these kinds of complaints, doubtless due to censorship) how they do it.

The SEIU might also say that in return for the dues or agency fees, they bargain on my behalf with George Washington University. I have no need for anyone to represent me. I can represent myself. If GW does not offer me enough to make it worthwhile for me to teach, I can look elsewhere or find other employment.

If Diana Furchtgott-Roth can do it, so can the bedpan-cleaners and watchmen. But whatever they do, they absolutely shouldn't band together to increase their bargaining power -- because, as Furchtgott-Roth's case proves, that only leads to unfairness.

HOW YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM? PART 296.

"The New York Times Shows Why the Blue Model Is Doomed," says Walter Russell Mead. The Times ran a story, see, in which some guy left "hot, crowded Austin, Tex., and moved into an apartment on Munjoy Hill in Portland, Me., with a commanding view of Casco Bay only steps away." OK, good for him. So?

This is told as a fantastic story of human empowerment and social transformation, which it is. More and more of us are escaping the tyranny of location; thanks to the telecom revolution we can work where we want and when we want. 

The rise of telecommuting will lead to better, richer lives. Families will be stronger. The environment will benefit from less commuting. All good. 

But it also represents the death of the political philosophy and economic system that the Times is otherwise prepared to defend to the last: the blue social model. If this revolution continues—and it will—fewer and fewer people will be stuck in big, high tax, over-regulated cities. While some will still choose to live there, many, especially those raising children, will not.

Quite apart from the "three's a trend, unless you're on deadline in which case one will do" angle, I have to say I'm amazed that conservatives are still doing this. We live in an era of mass migration to the cities. It's not like New York, San Francisco, Philly, Minneapolis, et alia, are emptying out. In fact rents in most big cities are going up -- and surely conservatives know that when people pay more for something it's because they prefer it.

This is an old routine for the brethren. For years I've been following Joel Kotkin's crusade to make everyone hate urban life and move to the suburbs and exurbs like Real Americans, or to pretend this has already happened, all evidence to the contrary. And Mead's "rise of telecommuting" reminds me of Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds himself pushing hard for telecommuting 11 years ago as an alternative to commie light rail. Reynolds actually proposed as a benefit of telecommuting that unions don't like it "because it's harder to organize workers who aren't all in one place."

Which, incidentally, reminds me of one big reason why people flock to the cities: Because that's where the jobs are. Some of you may remember a few years back when conservatives were trying to send poor people to North Dakota to soak up those big oil boom bucks (or to get a long-haul trucking job -- but that was always an obvious fraud). During that boom, capitalism did what capitalism does and drove housing prices in boom towns sky-high. Michael Warren at the Weekly Standard called these oil-boom immigrants "The New Pioneers" -- "The oil boom that began in 2007 has transformed this area of sleepy ranching communities into America’s new energy powerhouse," Warren gushed, and he said that whether you were young or old, whether you were an able-bodied pipe-fitter or "a receptionist at a man camp, those groupings of dorm-like lodgings for temporary workers that flank the highways of the Bakken," there was a place for you in this bright economic future-land.

Well, fast forward a few economic cycles and things ain't looking so great. Thanks, @jfxgillis, for pointing out this September 2015 Bloomberg story of what happened in the Bakken:

Fracking’s success has created another glut, and crude prices have fallen more than 50 percent in the past year. Now North Dakota’s white-hot economy is slowing. More than 4,000 workers lost their jobs in the first quarter, according to the state’s Labor Market Information Center. Taxable sales in counties at the center of the nation’s second-largest oil region dropped as much as 10 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, data from the Office of the State Tax Commissioner show... 

With the region’s drilling-rig count at a six-year low of 74 and roughnecks coping with cuts in overtime and per-diem pay, the vacancy rates in Williams County man camps are as high as 70 percent. Meanwhile the average occupancy rate of new units in Williston was 65 percent in August, even as 1,347 apartments are under construction or have been approved there.

It's all well and good for Mead to tell people that telecommuting's where the boom is now, sonny! But you actually have to provide the jobs to back that up, and unless I'm missing something there is no boom in internet jobs that pay a living wage.

So why do guys like Mead tell people -- people who probably trust him; they aren't reading his shit for the scintillating prose style -- that cities are over and they should avoid them? That's easy. Look how people in the cities vote. The only hope for wingnuts is to keep their dwindling pool of supporters in the outlands -- cut off from culture, from minorities and foreigners, from the experience of living among crowds without packing heat all the time, from anything that would show them that one could have a pretty good life without fear, isolation, and bigotry. (And if you can't guarantee that your peeps will stay in Fritters, Alabama, at least give them the idea that they can live the dream on the internet, so it doesn't matter whether they relocate by choice or necessity, they'll still be isolated, and you may yet keep them in the fold.)

Then you can keep dangling the Next Big Boom in front of them -- some Eden of free enterprise where they'll be able to shoot off guns and make a living with their hands and no goddamn unions or homos. And they won't know it's a con. How would they? 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump, Christie, and the Kübler-Ross clusterfuck of the rightbloggers, who seem to be experiencing all the stages of grief at once.

One of the weirder aspects of last week's events was the brethren's call for Cruz and Rubio to employ the dark art of humor as a weapon against Trump. As I've observed before, these guys don't really understand humor. They don't think of it as balm to the human spirit -- they think of it as ordnance, something Saul Alinsky taught Hollyweird Liberals to use against them, and they stay up nights studying files marked "set-up" and "punch line," trying to crack the code. "Cruz and Rubio Unveil Plan to Mock and Dismantle Frontrunner," announced Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard, as if "mock and dismantle" were a military operation. When Rubio managed to get in some jokes at the debate, they were delighted, but seemed not to know or care whether the jokes were funny. They issued reviews like "Rubio mocked and belittled Trump in the humorous, mocking and highly effective manner that Trump used to make Jeb look small" (William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection) and "Obviously this strategy, of diminishing Trump as a clown by clowning on him relentlessly, is worth trying... we can sit here and spitball the strategic virtues of the 'mock Trump' strategy all day long — it shows Rubio’s not a beta male who’s afraid of Trump..." (Allahpundit, Hot Air). Sounds like fun, huh? Zhdanovism's a tough gig.

Anyway, I've got some jokes in my column, but they're the funny/keep-from-crying kind.

UPDATE. Speaking of ugh, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist:

Call it the 1980s Underdog Movie Theory of the Republican Primaries. This was practically its own genre. It was not just “The Karate Kid.” It was a theme in “Back to the Future”.. and in “Top Gun.” (Though that’s a better analogy for the Rubio-Cruz relationship, with Cruz as Iceman.)

And Megyn Kelly as Charlie. After more like this ("Rubio certainly found the 'Eye of the Tiger'") we get the konservetcult comedy angle:

Actually, this is a darker variation of the narrative in which the hero has to learn to fight the villain on his level. So the guy with a command of policy whose brand is his positive, optimistic style has had to learn how to win by using his opponent’s weapon of ridicule. 

So that's why Rubio was talking about Trump pissing himself.

You know what last week was? It was that moment in “The Untouchables” when Sean Connery says to Kevin Costner, “What are you prepared to do?” And he eventually realizes he needs to fight the Chicago way: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue.”

With Trump creeping ever upward in the polls, it's clearly time for Rubio to escalate. Prepare the joy buzzer and the fart cushion!

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.