LOST IN AMERICA.

In what sounds like a reboot of the 2009 tale of financial woe from New York Times econ reporter Edmund L. Andrews ("Granted, the beach house was an embarrassing mistake"), well-known writer Neal Gabler reports in the Atlantic that he does not have $400 on hand for emergencies, nor indeed a pot to piss in, and it's his own  fault because he never learned to balance a checkbook. Gabler's hook is that he's actually middle-class, though his is the exalted idea of "middle-class" popular among his type -- which leads to some hilarious sections, like the story of how he had to carry two mortgages because "the co‑op board kept rejecting the buyers," and "my wife had been out of the workforce so long that she couldn’t get back into her old career, and her skills as a film executive limited her options."

Still, I feel for the poor bastard. So does Rod Dreher, which is great because he's the one guy who can make Gabler's story even funnier. Dreher focuses on Gabler's revelation that "I made choices without thinking through the financial implications," and the fact that those choices included living in New York and being a writer. At first, as you would expect, Dreher condemns this as a symptom of our godless, willful times:

He felt that he deserved the life he had, and could not choose otherwise without betraying himself. I think this must be an extraordinary thing, in terms of history: people who spend recklessly to give themselves the lives they think they deserve. If you think about it, though, our culture, which valorizes Authenticity, encourages this.

That's what causes overspending -- the search for Authenticity! (If only Gabler knew he could get it much more easily at one of Dreher's Walker Percy Weekends.) Plus Dreher knows a landscaper who says people are lazy and don't want to work, blah blah. But eventually Dreher has to face the fact that he, too, is just an ink-stained wretch and in time the financial reaper may come for him, too. He muses:

If for some reason the market for my writing dried up, and I had to take a job doing something else to support my family, I would do it. But I would probably resist it for as long as I could, because it’s very hard for me to separate my sense of identity from my writing. Still, bills have to be paid, and I would hope that I didn’t hold out for long.

Now, I ask you -- who could read that and not imagine Rod, at some future date when the Benedict Option racket has collapsed and nobody wants 5,000-word essays on how transsexuals are destroying the Republic anymore, in a variety of alternative professions:

Customer: Hello, I'd like to order a cake please. 

Dreher: Would this cake solemnify a homosexual union?

Customer: It's for a gay marriage anniversary party, but we don't want anything written on the cake.

Dreher: Hmm, that one's on the line. Would you mind praying over it with me?

Boss: DREHER YOU'RE FIRED

Customer: Hello, three tickets for Zootopia please.

Dreher: You're bringing children to this?

Customer: Yes. It's rated G.

Dreher: But it promotes anthropomorphic miscgenation. Have you read Robert Putnam? Well, I mean Steve Sailer on Robert Putnam -- Putnam doesn't know the importance of his own words.

Boss: DREHER YOU'RE FIRED

Furniture mover: Why you sit down? Only on job fifteen minute.

Dreher: I have mononucleosis. I have to rest frequently. 

Furniture mover: Why you take job you sick? 

Dreher: Because that's what a man does! You think they'll mind if I just lay down on the sofa that's still in the truck?

Furniture: Boss catch you he fire.

Dreher: Well, of course -- I'm white.

Boss: DREHER YOU FIRE

Oh, I could do this all day.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the week in Ted Cruz, and rightbloggers' strained attempts to promote him. "Lion Ted Cruz" strikes me as the saddest, but there's enough cringebait to go around. If they weren't actively trying to destroy the country I'd feel sorry for them.

UPDATE. I also recommend you have a look at The Sherman Oaks Review of Books, a funny internet thing with which I am associated. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I was just listening to his "Girls Talk," and realized

some of you good people may never have heard "Trouble Boys."

•   Whoever wrote the dek for Daniel Henninger's latest at the Wall Street Journal -- "Donald Trump is running against two things -- immigration and free trade --that made New York City great again" -- had to have read the whole thing to the end, poor sod, because the column starts very differently, with Henninger pulling on his overalls and pretending to despise the Big City: Ted Cruz "had a point" with his "New York values" slur on New York, says Henninger, "but he blew it by not describing it so that even many New Yorkers would agree." Oh yeah? So what should Cruz have complained about that would touch on what the locals hate about their own home -- scumbag landlords, gentrification, subway delays? No, among the real New Yorker issues Henninger sees is how mean Bernie Sanders has been to rich people:

More revelatory of New York values, though, is Vermonter Bernie Sanders, ranting about “Wall Street” and “bankers.” To be clear: Those people, much mocked of late for living on Park Avenue and such, annually give tens of millions to support charter schools, scholarships to parochial schools, social entrepreneurs, and innumerable nonprofits and arts institutions. Most, Republican and Democrat, would do it without the tax deduction.

Then let's remove the deduction and see what happens! Anyway, why does Henninger even care what New Yorkers think when this is what he thinks of them:

...Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, like Jerry Brown in blue California, stay afloat on public unions and a liberal urban sea of smug, yuppie self-absorption. Donald Trump learned this week that these people don’t even bother to vote. In 2013, New York’s now-unpopular Mayor de Blasio won with 17% of eligible voters (turnout was 24%).

If only the Republican silent majority weren't too busy on Election Day lighting bums on fire to vote for Joe Lhota! Then Henninger has a mood swing (or a phone call from an editor who reminds him this is not the Fritters, Alabama Journal) and starts yelling at Trump for going upstate to appeal to rubes, because his trade policies which so excite the folks in Rome, N.Y. would fuck up New York City. Suddenly Henninger is the self-absorbed yuppies' best friend! But he still doesn't like the way they vote:

Also true, however, is that in 2012, an incredible 71% of Asians voted for Barack Obama because living in Democratic cities like New York, they rarely hear the alternative.

Really? They're unable to read the Wall Street Journal? Plus Charles Murray told me they were all rightwing anyway.

Mr. Trump, an entrepreneur, should be the ideal pitchman to New York’s many Asians, or to the black voters former Texas Gov. Rick Perry appealed to in his remarkable July speech.

You just know Henninger started that last bit with Jack Kemp and his editor said, "you know Kemp's been dead for seven years, right?" and Henninger thought a while and finally said, "hell, why not Rick Perry -- no black people are going to read this anyway."

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN.

National Review God-botherer-in-residence David French tells us corporations are people -- and a buncha dang liberal people at that! He knew this even while at Harvard Law:

...my classmates were recruited not just by top law firms but also by top consulting firms and multinational corporations. Very few of them were conservative. Barely any of them were social conservatives.

French was at Harvard in the early 90s. Why weren't these left-wing corporations pushing for gay marriage, a living wage, and trans bathroom rights back then? Musta been Newt Gingrich holding back the red-and-grey-flannel tide. Plus which,

Back when I still did commercial litigation, my larger corporate clients were almost uniformly left of center, and the few Republicans on staff were stereotypical “Wall Street” conservatives.  They may have been fiscal hawks, but they positively loathed the religious Right. 

They don't hate homos so they don't count. 

My small-business clients were far more mixed. Conservative communities tend to spawn conservatives.

Jesus, to hear French tell it, liberals have been totally running American big business for decades, with only a small rump of Mom-and-Pops holding the line. Chamber of Commerce meetings must be total drug orgies by now! 

Progressives mock the notion that corporations can have “values” when those values are religious or conservative, but then they endlessly obsess over the progressive culture and values of their favorite companies. 

Yeah, I seem to remember the other day Bernie Sanders was talking about how corporations are our buddies. Anyway, French proposes his comrades reverse "the Left's long march through America’s most significant religious, cultural, and economic institutions" thus:

Conservatives must do the hard work of institution-building and institution-joining — of reshaping the notion that the “best” conservatives are those who become activists or politicians. Board members and CEOs can have far more cultural impact than governors or legislators. A single, high-level conservative academic program can place top talent in every major industry.

So French proposes conservatives seize power by... going into business.

Conservative persecution mania is really getting out of hand. If they're not in business -- nor, per French's "long march" statement, in the arts, nor academia, nor the churches -- then where the hell are they? In the military, it would seem, and in think-tanks and wingnut sinecures like French's at National Review. If so, maybe they're not losing because they're blocked by nefarious libs -- maybe they're losing because there just aren't enough of them.

GIRL TALK.

The Federalist is going in heavy for I-don't-need-feminims stories today. For starters there's this amazing headline:

Nicole Russell tells us:

Over the past few decades, more women than men are going to college and getting higher degrees. Then they’re purchasing homes and putting off marriage and babies. Guess what: They’re miserable. (As Donald Trump would say, “Sad!”)

How does she know they're miserable?

In an interview with Maclean’s Camilla Paglia confirmed this...

Good enough for me! Now that we have statistical confirmation, why are these independent women miserable?

Problem is, the kind of men feminist padawans tend to attract are -- how do I say this politely? -- not really men. Studies even show contraception users are attracted to more passive, feminine men.

Whereas real burly men will gitcha pregnint -- and then probably not marry you, but that's for the "Marriage Makes You Rich" scold-story, not this one.

Then Russell tells us about these two ladies she knows: One married "a softer, but more romantic man who would do whatever she wanted at the drop of a hat." The other married "a more direct, straightforward man, however demanding and borderline-misogynist he was... guess which one is happier?" Surprise, it's the misogynist's wife! At least she says she's happy, but what's with all those notes she keeps trying to pass me when her husband's not looking?

That's basically it, theme-wise, but there are many mangoes along the way, e.g.:

Many men who encounter a true feminist basically cower, act indifferent, shrug, butter up, charm, demean, ignore, or attempt to flirt.

I feel this should be in a poster like the Heimlich Maneuver. "That man is saying 'you come here often?' and shrugging -- must be a feminist in here somewhere!"

Deep down in the confines of her soul where she hasn’t even bothered to look, much less understand, a woman wants a man who exudes masculinity, who remains a steady rock in her current-filled stream of emotions and hormones. Instead of a man who says he’ll eat at the restaurant of her choice for the fifteenth time that month, she wants a man who cooks a meal she’s never tried before.

"Here, bitch, I used milk with the cheese powder instead of water. Now suck my cock." Swoon!

Elsewhere at The Federalist, Joy Pullman tells us how the secret of "mind-blowing sex" is marriage -- and a thousand Rodney Dangerfield jokes pummeled her back into the sea where she belongs. Kidding. Pullman warms us up by informing us that "a higher number of sex partners correlates with psychological and health problems" and if that doesn't make you want to drop the walk of shame for the walk down the aisle, she also has studies that show "two in five will orgasm during a hookup, but four in five will with a committed lover" -- but if you're thinking of just living together with your committed lover to redeem those orgasms, Pullman will have you know that "cohabitation reduces sex frequency and increases relationship conflict" -- whereas if your lover is "committed" by marriage, he can't run away!

If you're happy for Pullman but want to stay single anyway, be warned that she wants to share this gift with everyone, preferably before they get too educated to know better: society, she says, must "rethink the life script that requires young people to wait a decade or two between puberty and marriage." Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher -- I mean, to have mind-blowing sex!

Rule of three demands we consider D.C. McAllister's "Why Girls Still Play Dumb To Get Guys," and it turns out that, duh, the mens like it:

While they want equal partners, there is a natural disposition in men to want to be dominant, to be the strong leader, and to be the protector. I’ll go ahead and use the antiquated term: most men, deep down, appreciate a woman who is submissive. They don’t want to be constantly challenged. They value deference.

At last! I thought. Someone at The Federalist was coming out for consensual roleplay! But for McAllister, it's not a kink, nor even a lifestyle, but just the way things ought to be -- for everyone. Today's men "don’t stand up for a woman when she leaves the table, open a car door, or show her the respect she deserves" because "our feminized culture has told him he shouldn’t." In fact, those feminims are just a buncha bull-dykes trying to spoil your submission:

These are the feminists who think a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. She doesn’t need him. If anything, she should dominate him....

Likewise, ladies, you don’t need to be a dominant bullish Amazon woman to prove your worth, either. If a man likes that, then so be it. I wish him well in finding his man parts at some point in his life.

Man, these red-pill chicks have very specific ideas of gender roles. And that's cool! America's a big, beautiful rainbow flag of sexual choice. But I have a nagging feeling that they wouldn't agree it's a choice.

A SAD CASE.

Victor Davis Hanson has delivered his most incoherent column yet, starting with the title, "White versus White America." It's just buzzwords and catchphrases floating in rage. Analysis is impossible, so let's just ladle out some specimens:

"Does a Kim Kardashian suddenly stop flashing her boobs on YouTube in worry over what others might think?" (Reference to Trump, elitism; not sure why she can't worry while flashing, but okay; also, first recorded Hanson use of "boobs")

"...convicted child-assaulter Jeffrey Epstein..." (Reference to Clintons as font of all evil; only such reference that is not about them being rich, which suggests someone pointed out the irony to Hanson)

"For an angry Arizonan, ridiculing 'low energy' Jeb is not as crude as Jeb’s own crude 'act of love' description of illegal immigration. An act of love for exactly whom?" (First time I've heard that Bush bit called "crude" -- maybe Hanson imagines an explicitly sexual meaning, which sort of makes sense if you hear it in a Will Ferrell as Roger Klarvin voice)

"Our popular culture is one of Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and the whiny, nasal-toned young metrosexual with high-water pants above his ankles and horn-rimmed glasses who 'analyzes' on cable news." (Reference to depraved youngs, unmanly/unwomanly as case may be but still fornicating on Hanson's lawn)

"Is it any wonder that millions sympathized with the heroism of Benghazi’s middle-class defenders rather than with the contortions of the far better-educated, smoother, more sensitive, and wealthier Rhodes scholar Susan Rice, novelist Ben Rhodes, or former First Lady Hillary Clinton?" (Reference to God knows what; no poll results linked to demonstrate relative popularity of Hillary's peeps vs. "Benghazi’s middle-class defenders," which sounds like an abandoned PR trope found in a shredder with "Benghazi's ruggedly handsome defenders" and "Trey Gowdy, watch him bite the head off a chicken")

"Whom do these sometimes incoherent Trump supporters likely despise? I would wager anyone who has never been sideswiped in a hit-and-run by an illegal-alien driver but lectures others on why 'illegal alien' is a racist term... anyone who freely uses the word 'white' in a way and context that he would never use 'black' or 'Latino'..." (Fight the real enemy, fellow honkeys! Full paragraph goes on to characterize Trump's anathema as rich liberals, as if Trumpkins don't worship all rich guys except Judge Smalls from Caddyshack)

"In an age of La Raza ('The Race') and (only) Black Lives Matter, how exactly did the Republican establishment think the white working classes would eventually react to the new hyphenated America? With a week’s escape to Provincetown or commiseration at a B-list D.C. party? Tribalism for thee, but not for me?" (Cabbages, knickers, it's not got a beak!)

"There are two characteristics common to popular uses of the term 'white': It is almost always used pejoratively, and it is mostly voiced by elites of all backgrounds..." (Mostly voiced by elites? Ol' Vic doesn't get around much)

"As is true of most revolutionary movements, the aggrieved are not as angry at their perceived opponents as they are contemptuous at the enablers of them." (Holy shit my metaphor makes no sense and I've already written a thousand words, better "explain" it with a mangled sentence that might throw them off the scent, and hope no one asks me what "enablers" the American Revolutionaries were angrier at than the British -- you think they'll buy "the Dutch East India Company"?)

Hanson's closing:

Given his cruelty, obnoxiousness, and buffoonery, Trump should have been a three-month flash in the pan, exactly as most of his critics had prophesied and dreamed. I hope he will still fade, as he should. But the fact that he has persisted this long may be because the hatred our elites so passionately claimed was aimed at the Other was actually directed at themselves.

To sum up, The Elites, a gang made up of rich liberals and Darkskins,  bamboozled the white working class into hating themselves, but Trump (while still objectionable! This is National Review!) taught them better, and now the scales have fallen from their eyes and they'll vote for Ted Cruz as soon as we gank this convention. Good night!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the return of Andrew Sullivan to our telescreens, and what's changed between his heyday and today. When I started on this, I was surprised by how little his work had stuck with me; I could hardly remember what I had against him, besides the fifth-column thing. But as I got into it, all the nauseating rage came back. Experience it with me, won't you?

THIS FALLEN WORLD.

David French seems to have taken over National Review's Rod Dreher Chair for Manic Street Preaching. Today French tells us that some observers believe young men should be kept away from porn because it warps their sexuality. This French dismisses as "progressive morality":

When sexual liberation in one area leads to less sexual pleasure in another, no one on the left knows quite what to do. After all, the new anti-porn activists “are all at pains to make it clear that they are not anti-sex.” Well, that’s a relief...

Lost intimacy, however, is but one piece of the puzzle. Step-by-step, pornography decays moral character, and when character decays, so does culture...

Yet our nation builds morality around consent, not character, and it is strangely puzzled when the result is an ocean of heartache.

Don't eschew porn because you want a healthy sex life -- eschew it for the "culture," which from all I can tell means a world where no one laughs when David French yells from a soapbox through a bullhorn, and all the balls are blue.

Rare is the person who lives the libertine life but suddenly becomes responsible the very moment they "fall in love."

If you've been impure, you are rendered incapable of falling in love except in scare-quotes. But here's the bestworst part:

There’s a reason why so many romantic comedies end mere minutes after the promiscuous jerk vows to change his ways and runs through the rain to carry his “true love” to the world of happily-ever-after. Keep the camera running for six months, and you’ll find that same guy alone in a dark room watching celebrity sex tapes on his iPad before flipping through his Tinder options.

Oh God, wouldn't you like to see those Director's Cuts? Like, I don't know, Silver Linings Playbook -- six months after the dance contest, Bradley Cooper's back up in his attic bedroom whacking it to hentai and Jennifer Lawrence has joined a convent in despair. "That's a crap ending," says some kid in the audience; "No better than you deserve," says Feargod French, taking down the kid's name. "Wait'll you see what we've done with Bridget Jones."

THE SITUATIONAL ETHICS OF ROD DREHER.

Back in 2012, Jesus people were fighting the Battle of Chick-fil-A, changing their purchase decisions to make a statement  -- and Rod Dreher was right in there with them:

Last night I took my two younger kids to see a movie. Afterwards, they asked if we could eat at Chick-fil-A, which is one of their favorite restaurants. I’m more of a Raising Cane’s guy when it comes to fried chicken products, but with the example of the most recent View From Your Table in mind, I said sure. It felt like the right thing to do, given all the crap the company has had to take this week from gay activists over its Christian president’s opposition to gay marriage... 

I don’t for one minute begrudge anybody getting ticked off at a corporate leader for things he or she believes, says, does, or pays for. And if you want to withhold your trade from that person and their company, you certainly have that right.

Well, recently a number of companies have decided to take their business elsewhere than North Carolina in light of the state's recent transgender-in-restrooms legislation, and guess how Brother Rod feels about that:

Can’t you see this kind of thing coalescing into a national movement of activists, sympathetic politicians, and corporations, to bully any state that passes any RFRA, no matter how mild, into backing down? This movement is premised on the idea that orthodox Christianity is so evil that a state that makes a law showing any respect whatsoever for one of its now-controversial teachings must be treated like a pariah, and made to suffer culturally and economically. I told you they would do this kind of thing. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility: It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you bigots are going to deserve it...

I don't know why so many of his posts are thousands of words long -- his philosophy really isn't that complex. Any toddler can show it with a tantrum.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's abortion gaffe and the rightblogger reaction to it.  Trump was wrong to say pro-lifers want to "punish" women, the bethren insisted, when all they want to do is strip them of their reproductive rights. 

They weren't all passive aggressive like that -- some were just straight-up aggressive. Gina Loudon at WorldNetDaily:

I have been a post-abortive counselor, and what Mr. Trump may not know is that many women are victimized by abortion, because the abortion industry spends millions of taxpayer dollars teaching little girls that pregnancies are just a bunch of tissue. Their $9 billion per year, taxpayer-funded industry depends on vulnerable women believing that lie. 

But there are women who are older, wiser, repeat aborters who definitely know better.

You can spot these hard cases in a line-up: Slouching, cigarette dangling from their lips, "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt.

Is there a pro-lifer out there that doesn’t think that in a perfect world – where we agreed abortion was, for example, illegal after the first trimester – that the woman could, if working with full knowledge, be held accountable for her complicity in the abortion? Shouldn’t this, like any law that is broken, be considered in a case-by-case manner?

So let the judge decide, case-by-case: the aborter-with-a-heart-of-gold, a good kid led astray by her bull dyke roommate and Society, gets probation, reporting twice a week to the judge's place in the country for "chores," while the hardened hussies get prison. Ain't that what justice meant before the ACLU got hold of it?

But this was a minority opinion: Most of our subjects were able to conceal their hatred of autonomous women for propaganda purposes, though they sometimes had to go to ridiculous lengths to keep up the act. Have a look at the column and you'll see.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fuck it, this is still great.

•     In the wake of Donald Trump's brief advocacy of "punishing" women who have abortions, there have been several stories published asserting these women are already being punished by absurd restrictions in several states. In Texas, for example, you have to get a medically-unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound, a shaming lecture, and a 24-hour waiting period. Soon, in Indiana, you'll have to give your fetus a funeral. Many states make it so tough to open a clinic that they have only one abortion provider; Kansas has three, down from four when Dr. George Tiller was murdered in 2009. (And some states make women go to the clinic twice for one abortion.) Meanwhile conservatives are always trying to make it worse: last year North Dakota tried to make abortion illegal after six weeks, and was only blocked because they got a good judge -- who knows what future graduates of the Scalia School of Law will do. But don't tell this to National Review's David French, who thinks abortions in America are like a sweet trip on the good ship Lollipop:

These writers aren’t making a serious argument. They’re simply following the standard leftist playbook by redefining words in service of shrieking hyperbole. To “punish” typically means to make “someone suffer for a crime or for bad behavior.” But if it serves a woman’s right to kill her unborn child, the Left will happily stretch “punishment” to include any minor inconvenience... 

...Yes, some women are inconvenienced in their quest for an abortion, but not so inconvenienced as to prevent abortionists from plying their deadly trade more than 700,000 times per year. No, women are not punished, and neither are their unborn children. To argue otherwise is to imply that an aborted fetus is guilty of some transgression, when in fact it’s the opposite: the innocent fetus is simply killed.

That last part is merely Jesus-gibberish, but note the similarity of "it serves a woman’s right" to "it serves a woman right" -- composition can be psychologically revealing. Their current shtick is to pretend they'd never, ever punish women who want abortions; it's just their accomplices who'd get the chair. But, as is proven by the crazy laws they've managed to pass, they'll torment women who defy them any way they can.

•     It's hard to pick a Wingnut Whine of the Week as all their weeks are whiny these days, but I'm short of time so I'll just say they're all winners/whiners and leave you with this one by Steve Berman at The Resurgent, in which he gets a load of all the youngsters going for Bernie Sanders and commences to sputter:

The word “socialism” has lost its boogeyman quality to these young people who grew up with No Child Left Behind, Hope scholarships, Obama phones, and heathcare as a right. Basically, they see daddy-nanny-government as the way things should be, and the left is happy to hand them even more goodies. 

Even Trump likes to play candyman (“nobody will die in the street”).

"Nobody will die in the street"! God, way to encourage the moochers, Donny!

....We (me being among the last of the baby boomers) have screwed them and they know it. Sanders’ appeal is just the beginning of the trend, if conservatives can’t force-feed a government grown fat and comfortable some very bitter medicine.

"Force-feed"! It's the revenge of the Down Our Throaters! Yeah, expect to see this guy with his head shaved and crying for a Golden Dawn next election cycle.

NO RIGHT BUT THE RIGHT TO LIFE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Pause to let that comparison sink in.] 

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

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

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

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

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

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALISM.

I hate to do such a quick reprise of the "My Frontrunner is Your Fault" theme, but I can't let this Erick Erickson thing at The Resurgent pass without remark:

In other words, the one group to blame for Donald Trump is everybody.
Opportunity Lives and the Koch Brothers deserve blame.
The conservative movement deserves blame.
Republican leaders and the actual Republican establishment deserve blame.
Democrats deserve blame.
The media deserves blame.
I deserve blame.

It sounds like a suicide note, but alas! I'm pretty sure it's just Erickson trying to reassure his base, who (it's a safe bet) are suffering similar spasms of existential dread over Trump,  that the whole world's gone crazy and it's not just them. There are some blind-squirrel-nut moments like this:

Conservatives too, myself included, deserve blame. We have fought awfully hard against the establishment, but often decided we wanted to fight more than we wanted to solve the problem.

This from the architect of Operation Leper! It'd be even funnier if he meant it. Oh, and this:

Another perfect example of the one group to blame for Donald Trump is Barack Obama and his Democratic coalition. In 2007, Obama heaped scorn on white, blue collar workers in Pennsylvania bitterly clinging to their guns and religion. He went to war with them, dividing classes and races and putting a lot of blue collar workers in the energy industry on the unemployment line.

If only Democrats were actually serious about the needs of the white working class, they could have had those votes instead of Trump -- because, Erickson's argument clearly implies, his own party is totally shit at meeting those needs.

You know who else thinks Trump voters have been "left behind by liberalism" and #NeverTrump conservatives are missing a trick? The Federalist's Mytheos Holt, who starts by telling us about this straight-up White Nationalist chick, "Sylvia," who he was able to turn, guys (high five!). He came to her at first "in the company of another friend, who had made it his personal mission to deconvert her from her ideology, a task with which I agreed to help" (sexy already, right?), but then on his own:

I continued to send out feelers... so I could probe her ideology... After a while, she got used to me... she began to open up about her more risqué beliefs. So, this time with more gentle prodding, I started to make her doubt what she’d been taught.

Things got even hotter when Holt revealed to her that he's Jewish: "my ethnic revelation actually made her open up more to me rather than less."

After that revelation, gently poking holes in her worldview was out of the question, as I’d just metaphorically sent a cannonball straight through its foundation.

Boom! So, Holt reasons, if he can shoot his cannon of understanding into this racist chick, why can't other conservatives appeal to her co-racists? After all, they're not bad people, just misguided:

Ultimately, the biggest reason the pain that drove Sylvia’s family and so many like them into the arms of white nationalism is unfair is a pain that I, as a Jew, can empathize with. After all, once many Jews turned to communism as a way of trying to get political rights they didn’t think they could get any other way, and as a way of lashing out at a society that unfairly disdained them and their culture.

Even though this ideological shift made many people hate Jews more, at least the communists were trying to do something. Only that kind of desperation can make a radical ideology like white nationalism attractive.

Be sure to catch Holt's version of Fiddler on the Roof, in which Perchik turns into Norman Podhoretz.

On and on it goes, so let's wrap it up: Holt thinks conservatives don't complain enough about social justice warriors (I know! And at The Federalist! He's got nerve, I'll give him that), causing white proles to turn to Trump, so you squishes better drop the "Kemp-and-W-style 'bleeding heart conservatism'" and start Trumping it up --

Otherwise, the people damaged by multicultural, leftist attacks on Western civilization will be thoroughly justified in sneering at us as proverbial “cuckservatives” forever mentally masturbating with our own empty universalism while barbarism rapes Lady Liberty.

Maybe Holt should drop the politics stuff and devote his considerable talents to specialty porn. (In a way, isn't he doing that already?)

MY FRONT-RUNNER IS YOUR FAULT.

Every time the flames from the Trump garbage fire rage another ten feet higher (just like that wall Il Douche keeps promising!), we get another round of "Trump is the Fault of Everyone Except the People Who Keep Voting For Him" stories. At the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens tells us "Trump is Obama Squared." Obama and Trump, he says, are "two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken." Imagine, seeing America as fundamentally broken! By the way, earlier this month Stephens wrote a column called "The Return of the 1930s: Donald Trump’s demagoguery may be a foretaste of what’s to come." At the top of that column appeared a photo of Mussolini.

As for the narcissism, Stephens hauls out the whole "cult-of-personality" thing Republicans tried on Obama in 2008, which looks pretty played out after eight years unless you're a propaganda junkie confident that one more twist of the  rag will yield a fresh dose. Also, Obama doesn't want to be the world's policeman and neither does Trump. They're practically twins, or maybe triplets with Scott Walker.

Even worse is a thing at The Intercept called "THE CULTURE THAT CREATED DONALD TRUMP WAS LIBERAL, NOT CONSERVATIVE." The idea here seems to be that rich liberals run the liberal media and they put Trump on TV and in the papers, so they're responsible for him ("He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo"). I'm reminded of Reagan celebrity TV specials and all those Nancy Reagan magazine covers -- and, come to think of it, wasn't Ronnie himself in the movies? So maybe the liberal media is responsible for Reagan, too. Wheels within wheels!

But there's nothing that can't be made worse by National Review's Jim Geraghty, who nods energetically at the Liberal Trump shtick: "If he’s so self-evidently unsuited for the presidency… why has the national media spent a full year dissecting his every move?" he asks. Actually they've only been covering him obsessively for eight months, because for eight months Trump has been THE REPUBLICAN FRONT-RUNNER FOR PRESIDENT; also, their coverage has been, shall we say, less than kind. But believe it or don't, this isn't the dumbest thing in Geraghty's column. He notices that The Intercept listed Spy among the media outlets responsible for Trump, and responds, quite reasonably, that Spy was Trump's glossy-print nemesis. But then:

There was one glaring flaw in the magazine’s approach: the sarcastic cynicism of Spy more or less targeted everyone – including National Review and William F. Buckley at least once — meaning that there was no good in their perspective, few if any examples of people worth emulating. Rereading Spy today is fascinating, but after enough issues, it begins to feel like comedic nihilism – everybody’s terrible, everybody’s shameless and out for themselves, everybody’s the worst ever. And if everybody’s the worst ever, nobody stands out as particularly bad – and there’s no point in expecting anything better.

I should have expected that no National Review columnist would have the slightest idea what satire is, nor understand that it implies values every time it mocks that which contradicts them; but even after all this time it still amazes me how eager these guys are to volunteer their ignorance.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers on Brussels, Obama's travels, and the T*d Cr*z S*x Sc*nd*l. This one's kind of impressionistic because, as I mention at the top of the column, the madness is running at spaceship speed; one minute it's VIOLENCE and ISLAMORADICAL WHATCHAMACALLIT, the next it's FROSTBACK SEX LIES and all along TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP. I fear the pace and ADHD will only get worse, and by June these columns will read like late Céline, with violence, depravity, and disgust exploding along ellipses like firecrackers on a string.

And there were things I had to leave out! For example, Da Tech Guy's encomium to Muslim-hating rage-queen Pamela Geller, whom he calls "The Prophet from New York":

As I watch the image of Barack Obama in Cuba celebrating one of the worst dictatorships in the history of the Western Hemisphere as they demand the return of Gitmo and attack the United States it would seem Pam Geller was understating the issue. We have not seen an American President so committed to the defeat of the United States since Jefferson Davis.

I've seen some awkward comparisons of Obama but this one takes the shoo-fly pie. I assume the Obama-as-Jeb-Davis thing will be cited in future The-Real-Racist ^TM arguments; no one will remember how it started, but it had to be something Real-Racist!

...I predict if our republic does not fall, 50 years from now after I’m dead and gone, people will look back at Pam Geller and speak about her the same way we now speak about William Lloyd Garrison.

I agree: Most of them will say, "Who?"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hey now.

•    Just a few months ago Garry Shandling was horsing around with Jerry Seinfeld about Robin Williams' suicide, and he made a joke: "‘63 is so young’ is a phrase you never hear relative to anything but death." Now that Shandling's dead, the New York Daily News calls the coincidence "chilling," but to me it's almost the opposite. Like all the classic jests on the big sleep, it's slightly discomfiting, especially if you're anywhere near the target, but overall it's reassuring, because it shows that someone else (as well as, hopefully, a number of people laughing all around you) understands that we're all in the same boat, and this makes death a slightly easier thing to live with. At its best, comedy does what seems like a cruel and selfish thing -- takes an individual and literally "makes fun of" him -- but produces a generous result: the shared recognition that we all have to occasionally make fools of ourselves, or fart, or sublimate, or die, and that's what being human is. Here's a pretty good Shandling monologue transcript (including the great "'I'm hot, I'm on fire' -- me, me, me!" gag), but we all know Shandling's great achievement was The Larry Sanders Show, in which Shandling's trademark insecurity not only spawned a great extended joke about the dysfunction that attends power -- I think The Thick of It and Veep actually owe a lot to Larry Sanders -- but one of the greatest comic characters since Moliere, Jeffrey Tambor's Hank Kingsley. A few names quickly come to mind when we think about the American comedians who ascended into artistry; some of them I'm sure we'd fight over. But for Larry Sanders alone I think we have to agree on Shandling.

•    Meanwhile in culture war woo-hoo, here's an essay from (naturally) The Federalist by the unfortunately-named Maureen Mullarkey entitled "What Vintage Pulp Fiction Covers Say About Today’s Vices." In short: The luridness of these old covers may be humorous to you sinners but it accurately portrays the wages of SIN ("However much titillation accompanies it, judgment is inexorable. And unsmiling"). Here's a choice excerpt:

Ignoble Layne made sexual bargains of all kinds to get ahead in the music and film industries. Alas, his infidelities brought on a lethal end. Was it AIDS before there was a name for it? Or did he run into the wrong guy? 

Either way, in 1965 even gay porn acknowledged the ancient insight that promiscuity comes with consequences. They were born too soon, Layne and Carrie. Today they could down antibiotic cocktails or protease inhibitors while they checked the hook-up apps on their iPhones.

Somewhere deep in a deep red state, a bright young fellow is inspired by Mullarkey to prepare a scholarly defense for when his mom finds his bondage porn stash.

WHY THEY HATE HIM.

Is it just me, or is the hatred a lot of conservatives have turned on John Kasich kind of weird? I don't like the guy myself; as we have been repeatedly reminded, Kasich is just another rightwing monster. But it would never occur to me to say he had no right to stay in the race -- politics is about power, and if he has some leverage with the GOP why would he sell it cheap?

Yet this week at National Review there's an article by Jeremy Carl called "The Insane Campaign of John Kasich" containing such nuggets as "The campaign of John Kasich is a joke, and not a particularly funny one," "Not for nothing did National Review’s own Rich Lowry recently say that 'Kasich is playing a selfish and delusional role,'" "Kasich has zero grassroots support," "Kasich's delusional campaign," etc.

There are of course Trump fans or crypto-fans who beat up on Kasich -- like Rush Limbaugh going on about "Republican establishment types promoting John Kasich" -- but you expect them to seethe and spit about anyone who opposes them. From the anti-Trump conservative establishment guys, though, the level of anger is just strange.

I mean, RedState calls him a "sanctimonious butt-boil" (elsewhere at the site: "Everyone Hates John Kasich," "How Many Delegates Will John Kasich win for Trump Today?" "John Kasich Enshrined In The G.O.P. Hall of Shame," etc). "John Kasich appears to have tapped into a special kind of madness," says Conservative Review in an article called "John Kasich: Agent of Chaos." "Delusional Kasich Came In 4th In 3 Man Race," headlines The Lonely Conservative. ("Delusional" appears a lot in this genre of writing.)

When the news side of rightwing outlets do "coverage" of Kasich, we get stuff like this from the Washington Times, written shortly before the Ohio primary (which Kasich won by 11 percent over Trump):

Gov. John Kasich says his presidential aspirations hinge on delivering a win in his home state of Ohio, but five days out from the Republican primary contest, it appears he is going to have to do it without the help of his own state’s grass-roots Republican activists, who say he turned his back on them years ago

I think part of this savagery has been inspired by Kasich's tactic of talking a moderate game -- Lonely Conservative, for example, gripes that "Kasich’s recent statements about Merrick Garland are only the latest in a long line of leftward sprints by Kasich throughout the course of his campaign and governorship." But what else could he do? Kasich couldn't get to the right of Trump or Cruz without proposing a cabinet-level Department of Fag-Bashing; faking to the left is the smart play. Maybe the brethren can't stand that anyone in the Party would try outreach even as a tactic.

But I believe the real deal is this: As I've been saying, these guys want to stop Trump because he doesn't owe them anything and would mess up their patronage, not because of any real ideological issue. The last guy they elected President created Medicare Part D, for crying out loud! Sure, they prefer the doctrinaire purity of Ted Cruz, but were Trump some blowhard governor who'd worked his way (or, ahem, her way) up the system and suddenly caught fire with America's mouth-breathers, instead of an outsider, they'd be lining his path with palms.

So they're busy setting up the big hit on Trump, and here's Kasich getting in their way for the most conservative possible reason -- his own rational self-interest. Oh, they can buy him -- but he won't be cheap. So they're not mad because he speaks heresies, or even because he really stands a chance of getting Trump elected. They're mad because he's costing them money. They can't say that, of course, so they choose the language of high moral dudgeon, as if Kasich were a poor person who got to eat a steak. But I see what's behind it. Nobody is madder than a wingnut who lost on a deal.

PROBLEM WITH COMMENTS?

Some alicublog readers tell me they can't see the comments here. One reader says he can see them if he uses the no-country suffix -- alicublog.blogspot.com/ncr.

I've sent help requests to Disqus and Blogger, though neither has the most robust customer service. Meantime if you're having the problem please let me know the details (OS, country, browser, when it started, etc.) via comments or by dropping me a line.

UPDATE. Tried a fix. Please give it another shot and see if you get comments!

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 7,833,929.

Remember last month when, at Reason (the flagship of the Eternal Libertarian Moment), Robby Soave told us "Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump," and then --way far down in the article, where only the hardiest spelunkers would find it -- revealed that the cheering kids were not ordinary collegians gone spontaneous Trumper but "conservative and libertarian students affiliated with the campus's Young Americans for Liberty chapter" attending a rally for men's rights nut Milo Yiannopoulos?

Yesterday Soave did an easy layup on the latest stupid campus PC thing, Trump-chalked-on-the-sidewalk at Emory U*, with the subhed "It's enough to make you root for Trump. Well, almost." He closed with this:

It's enough to make you want to grab a piece of chalk and scrawl "Trump 2016" on an Emory sidewalk, huh? No wonder so many non-liberal students are cheering for Trump—not because they like him, but because he represents glorious resistance to the noxious political correctness and censorship that has come to define the modern college experience.

The "so many non-liberal students are cheering for Trump" line is linked to Soave's "Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump" story.

You may ask: Why's Soave acting as if young MRAs cheering for Trump is a meaningful anomaly? I would expect the little shits to like Il Douche -- he's everything they want to be when they grow up. Come to think of it, why would anyone find it strange that a libertarian like Soave could "root... well, almost"  for Trump? As I've said before, libertarians are just conservatives with social anxieties. If Soave decided not to eat his Gary Johnson spinach, and instead voted for Trump just to stick it to those SJW bitches, who'd be shocked? Well, Ole Perfesser Instapundit would at least pretend to be, for The Cause:

Congratulations, Emory Screaming Campus Garbage Babies. If you can make Reason writers think about voting for Trump, you’ll probably swing the election for him.

alicublog commenters mostly seem to think Trump will win the GOP nomination (I'm still bearish) and that most of the conservative #NeverTrump types will run to kiss his ass when he does. I don't know about that, but I expect Soave's fellow libertarians would quickly find the silver lining. After all, none of the regular candidates are going to give them the policies they claim to want, but Trump at least will be an asshole to women and minorities, and I'm sure for a lot of these guys that's at least as important.

UPDATE. Comments are glorious. Among the best, from Ted the slacker: "You'd think if The Donald was such a student favorite, there'd be a 'Trump University students for Trump' movement. I wonder why there isn't."

Also, whetstone asks, "There's been endless analysis of what Trump's coalition is, but what if it is: assholes? Can we get some social scientists on this?" I always assumed so, and that it's not much discussed because the overlap with Republicans is nearly total.

Plus, many commenters wonder how I think Trump can be stopped. Convention skullduggery, of course! Though I wouldn't put assassination past them.

*UPDATE 2, 3/28: I should have known that Emory story was bullshit. I wonder whether Reason will correct... aw, who am I kidding.

TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE.

Ace of Spades, October 24, 2006:

Remember how Republicans deliberately refused to answer exit polls in 2004, just to give Democrats the belief they had won the election, so that their hearts would be crushed when real numbers began coming in? 

Are you dirty, vicious, spirteful little vindictive bastards doing it again? 

I love you guys. 

The only way to permanently defeat an opponent is to either kill him or so demoralize him he defines himself as defeated, permanently, and cannot even imagine the state of being victorious. Leave him humilated and heartbroken so he cannot muster the will to further oppose you. 

Well, we're not technically allowed to kill liberals (although I think Rosie O'Donnell was just saying the Patriot Act allows us to do just that, I can't find a citation at the moment). 

So that leaves us with that faggy defeat-them-in-their-minds thing. 

Ace of Spades, today:

Knowing that you're going to lose, and that therefore there are no nagging pragmatic reasons to compromise yourself, is very freeing. 

I think the important thing is to begin planning ahead, and planning on what we'd like the conservative movement to look like during the Hillary Rodham presidency. 

Do we want to be the party of openness to ideas, and a tolerant party, or do we want to be the mirror image of the Social Justice Warriors, with a litany of angry dogmas and lengthy Public Shaming Lists?

Now, in case you were thinking Mr. Spades had evolved spiritually over the past ten years, have a look at my Ace of Spades archives -- the listings only go back to 2011, but you'll still find examples of him referring to his honorable opposition as, for example, "Stupid and Inarticulate...low-thinkers" who "favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of 'persuasions' of group hooting and feces-throwing," and "nonviolent, peaceful leftist Concern-Fag." He also refers to Obama as "President Made a Poopie," and don't get him started on women (i.e., whores)!

In other words, Spades is the same brutish asshole he's always been, but he's rattled by the Trump uprising so he can't beat his chest with any conviction. Thus the new name of the game is Come Let Us Reason Together. "The party of openness to ideas"! Aside from "give Ace a sinecure in the Party" I can't even guess. (I do love "mirror image of the Social Justice Warriors," though I think he's using the wrong verb tense.)

He'll be back on the car roof with his face painted blue soon, but let us savor the moment.

UPDATE. After bitching because Trump isn't hard enough on Muslims, Ace of Spades acknowledges responses to his earlier outreach and engages in useful dialogue:

Comments Will Be Closed for the Rest of the Day 

If I feel like posting at all. 

Good day. 

We're going to go through the latest convulsion of toxic assholes and just start banning. 

That's right -- just like Charles Johnson. 

And when the assholes evade the bans, we'll just shut down comments. 

The Internet Outrage Brigades -- the Social Justice Warriors of the thuggish right -- are no longer welcome here. Period.

Sheesh, what a drama queen.