NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the week of General Flynn and wacky press conferences. Trump's public appearances always astonish me, possibly because I'm old and used to Presidents who don't act like Al Capone in The Untouchables. But Il Douche keeps finding a way to lower the bar and last week's rambling, belligerent pressers veered into last-words-of-Dutch-Shultz territory. And our true subjects, the conservative intellectual establishment, keep finding ways to call his shit Shinola.

SNOWFLAKES.

Nothing I like better after a long week of reading rightwing idiots than to curl up with some libtard hivemind received opinion at the New York Times! Say, what's this?

[Jerry] Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority. 

“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ” 

He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”

Sigh. There's no getting away from it: From downmarket White Working Class Whisperers like Salena Zito to the Good Grey Lady (incarnated here by Sabrina Tabernise), seems everyone who's anyone agrees liberals are to blame for Trump voters. For one thing, as above, we viciously refuse to agree with them. Who does that? For another...

Late last year, [Medford] hit it off with a woman in New York he met online. They spent hours on the phone. They made plans for him to visit. But when he mentioned he had voted for Mr. Trump, she said she was embarrassed and didn’t know if she wanted him to come. (He eventually did, but she lied to her friends about his visiting.) 

“It invalidated anything that’s good about me, just because of how I voted. Poof, it’s gone.”

...liberals will only have sex with them on the downlow. This bitch wouldn't take Jerry to meet her snooty New York friends just because he insists on wearing his MAGA cap and his FUCK YOUR FEELINGS shirt! Well, at least we can be reasonably sure he didn't give her an orgasm. That'll show her!

He's not the only one who suffers. Pity Ann O'Connell, "a retired administrative assistant in Syracuse who voted for Mr. Trump":

Mrs. O’Connell feels hopeless. She has deleted all her news feeds on Facebook and she tries to watch less TV. But politics keeps seeping in. 

“I love Meryl Streep, but you know, she robbed me of that wonderful feeling when I go to the movies to be entertained,” she said. 

Even Hollywood stars won't kiss their ass! What kind of  topsy-turvy world is this?

Oddly enough, there is nothing in the story, nor anywhere else in the Times, suggesting that Trump voters should in turn reach out to the other side. They seem to assume Trump voters are too fragile to take this kind of initiative themselves, and that the very people these voters are constantly calling traitors should be rushing to their assistance like home health aides.

That's an incredibly condescending attitude, but since these folks play along with it I guess it's justified. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Conservatism is not a political philosophy but a last resort -- something you turn to when you can no longer bear to take responsibility for your own actions.

THE NEW AGE.

Did you catch that Trump presser? Here's a bit:

Nobody talks about that. I didn't do anything for Russia. I've done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember? With the stupid plastic button that made us all look like a bunch of jerks. Here, take a look. He looked at her like, what the hell is she doing with that cheap plastic button?

Hillary Clinton - that was the reset, remember it said reset? Now if I do that, oh, I'm a bad guy. If we could get along with Russia, that's a positive thing. We have a very talented man, Rex Tillerson, who's going to be meeting with them shortly and I told him. I said "I know politically it's probably not good for me." The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that's 30 miles off shore right out of the water.

Everyone in this country's going to say "oh, it's so great." That's not great. That's not great. I would love to be able to get along with Russia. Now, you've had a lot of presidents that haven't taken that tack. Look where we are now. Look where we are now. So, if I can - now, I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But - but it's possible I won't be able to get along with Putin.

Maybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting...

In the words of Curly from the Three Stooges, Ngnnnyaahh.

I can already tell you how the brethren will cover it -- see Hindrocket's praise for The Leader's gibberish at the Netanyahu presser yesterday. Turned out he wasn't the only one who picked a full ear of corn out of that shit, by the way -- dig Jonathan S. Tobin:

His statement was typically Trumpian in that it displayed either his ignorance or his lack of interest in the details, but it’s clear that the president wasn’t supporting either the one-state or the two-state option. Instead, what he was doing was endorsing a diplomatic principle that is just as important: The U.S. cannot impose peace on terms that aren’t accepted by the parties, and we shouldn’t behave in a manner that encourages Palestinians’ ongoing refusal to make peace.

"It's clear"! But first ya have to buy these special Trump-listening earphones! For you, six bits and the future of the Republic!

Anyway, that's what we can expect on this one, and henceforth. Trump-friendly, quasi-legit outlets will produce some less-crazy-sunding snippets and headlines telling the rubes that Trump was attacking that liberal media again, a la "Trump goes on marathon rant against the media," New York Post, and "Trump unloads on media's 'hatred' in singular press conference" -- Washington Examiner. The true rightbloggers will say the liberal media is the real story, as just dropped at Townhall:

Chuck Todd's Scorn: Calls President Trump's Press Conference "Un-American"

NBC News anchor Chuck Todd was not happy with President Donald Trump's fiery press conference on Thursday. After speaking to various media outlets for over an hour, President Trump answered varying questions which included anything from the 2016 election to recent actions by the Russian military.

He answered each question to the best of his ability and gave each reporter ample time to ask any questions they had.

Because of his actions, NBC's Todd deemed him un-American.

It is now apparent that people in the mainstream media believe the First Amendment is something that remains exclusively to them alone and no one else.

Their purposes is no longer only to reverse the New Deal -- it's also to reverse the relative positions of shit and Shinola.

WORST NEO-CONFEDERATE EXPLANATION YET.

Today at National Review it was Ben Shapiro's turn (perhaps he lost a bet) to bitch about the removal of Confederate icons from campuses and town squares (in this case, Yale's removal of the name of John C. Calhoun from a college), and simultaneous explain why it wasn't because he was racist but because blah blah blah. We've seen some sad entries in this line, particularly after the Dylann Roof massacre -- see here for David French's insistence that the flags and statues must stay because in addition to slavery and treason they commemorate "Confederate valor." But Shapiro doesn't have the balls to be that bald-faced, and takes up an educational angle, which makes him sound like a 60s nudie movie producer telling prosecutors he was just trying to be Frank About Sex:

Calhoun’s name on buildings reminds us that Calhoun was once honored for his perspective rather than derided for it. It is a reminder that evil once held sway in our world, and that we cherished it. It also reminds us that brilliance and patriotism and good and evil can all exist in the same human being: Calhoun’s slavery advocacy existed alongside his desire to build up a strong, robust American military; he created the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the same time that he stumped for the expansion of slavery into the Western states.

So I guess all those gomers waving the Stars and Bars (or getting it tattooed on their bodies) are just trying to show us how bad slavery was! Or how evil and goodness can co-exist in the same person, e.g. themselves ("But wait a minute! Hot dog, love's a-winning!").

If only we needed to be reminded but, alas, these guys refuse to disappear.

WITH THEIR COURT DOG-TRICKS, THAT CAN FAWN AND FLEER.

I remember massively enjoying Rev. Al Sharpton's response, at a debate among Democratic Presidential contenders in 2004, to a question about the Federal Reserve. Reverend Al clearly had no idea of what the Federal Reserve even was, let alone what he thought about it, but yet with terror in his eyes he fronted madly all the way through. Ah, those young and innocent days! Now we have an actual president with, let us say, an even more limited intellectual palette, but without even the self-awareness to be embarrassed by his own ignorant vamping, as was evident in his bizarre ramblings about his electoral college margin and one- or two- or whatever-state solutions at the Netanyahu press conference.

Good thing for him he's got lickspittles: Here's John Hinderaker at Power Line, who doesn't even bother with his usual subterfuges and actual lets readers see what Trump babbled --

So, I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

-- and then adds this commentary:

This is smart, I think. The Palestinians need to understand that if they don’t shape up, they don’t get a state.

That's some deep reading. Takes a lawyerly mind to dig that out of Trump's gibberish, or one's own asshole. Hinderaker is like Rip Torn representing Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life ("Dignified, I call it!"), except of course neither kind nor charismatic. But maybe he was just being sloppy there; later on, he wisely refrains from reproducing Trump's doozy of a response to a question about anti-Semitism in America, taken here from the transcript --

Well, I just want to say that we are, you know, very honored by the victory that we had -- 306 electoral college votes. We were not supposed to crack 220. You know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there's no way to 270. And there's tremendous enthusiasm out there. 

I will say that we are going to have peace in this country. We are going to stop crime in this country. We are going to do everything within our power to stop long simmering racism and every other thing that's going on. There's a lot of bad things that have been taking place over a long period of time. 

I think one of the reasons I won the election is we have a very, very divided nation, very divided. And hopefully, I'll be able to do something about that. And I, you know, it was something that was very important to me. 

As far as people, Jewish people, so many friends; a daughter who happens to be here right now; a son-in-law, and three beautiful grandchildren. I think that you're going to see a lot different United States of America over the next three, four or eight years. I think a lot of good things are happening. 

And you're going to see a lot of love. You're going to see a lot of love.

-- which in my view boils down to a combination of "Cabbages knickers it's not got a beak!" and "Vote Quimby!" but which Hinderaker interprets thus:

A journalist effectively accused Trump of being responsible for a rise in anti-Semitic incidents... Trump responded vaguely and with great restraint.

Vaguely and with great restraint! Hey, wait a minute, Torn mentions "restraint" in that scene. Could it be... nah, I doubt Hinderaker ever watches anything except Red Dawn and tapes made at Gitmo sent to him by Andrew C. McCarthy.

If, as I expect, one day at a public function Trump just starts blowing drool bubbles like an infant, Hinderaker will tell his people it was a "subtle meditation."

THE PLOT SICKENS.

You know, I find these mangoes (as we have been calling the wackier wingnut expostulations since earliest alicublog days) in a variety of places. Sometimes I'm tipped off on Twitter. I rarely give credit for that because I consider these links raw material, and flatter myself (he said, eyes demurely lowered, palm pressed piously to chest) that I add enough cream to the jest to make them my own.

But I found the following thing via @BGreuskin, which I freely admit because I can't possibly improve on the source material from Breitbart, in which future U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Joel B. Pollak speculates on what led to the fall of former NatSec Advisor Michael Flynn:

The remaining possibilities are more worrying. The third explanation is that President Obama deliberately, and cleverly, used the bogus sanctions as a “blue dye” test to expose which strings Russia might try to pull to relieve them. Flynn, with a prior relationship with the Russian government, may have been a natural, innocuous point of contact — or perhaps something more.

That Obama -- like The Left, he's got his fingers in everything!

Though the best, that's not all: Pollak naturally disdains the "Democratic Party’s sore-loser conspiracy theory" that Trump is mobbed up with Putin and the Russians; instead, he suggests Trump is more sinned against than sinning, Russkie-wise:

The fourth and most worrying explanation is that the government was not merely monitoring the communications of Russian diplomats, but of the Trump transition team itself. The fact that the contents of Flynn’s phone conversation — highly sensitive intelligence — were leaked to the media suggests that someone with access to that information also has a political axe to grind.

Democrats are clamoring for a deeper investigation of Russian ties to Trump. But the more serious question is whether our nation’s intelligence services were involved in what amounts to political espionage against the newly-elected government.

We know that there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of federal bureaucrats already using shadow communications systems. How far does that “shadow government” go?

The FBI, CIA and other agencies ought to reassure Congress, or come clean.

I imagine when the smoke clears Chaffetz's committee will reveal that it was really Hillary Clinton who said "grab 'em by the pussy."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the courts shooting down the Muslim Ban and rightbloggers rushing to the rescue. Have a look!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Former colleague Rob Harvilla made a great case for Twenty One Pilots; They make a great case for themselves here.
• Here's your new talking point, wingnuts: The San Francisco Court of Appeals! Reliable propagander Jim Geraghty at National Review:

For Trump Foes, San Francisco’s Court of Appeals Is Cloud Nine
The Trump administration’s loss in the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit — it might as well just be called “the San Francisco court” — isn’t surprising, and the tone of the decision isn’t really a surprise, either...

Cuz they's Sanfrancisgy sissy-men! Jeanne Kirkpatrick, greybeards may recall, got a lot of mileage out of "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. A few things have changed since then -- notably, Russia's the Republicans' buddy, and the number of people you can set off with Cisco as a perjorative has declined drastically -- in fact, that population may overlap substantially with the readership of National Review.

• So much of my humor is of necessity grim these days, so how about a genuine ray of sunshine? St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones is running for mayor, and as is customary was offered an interview with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which she declined, sending instead a letter which she shared with the St. Louis American, and oh boy:

Two weeks ago, you used some of your ink to outline what questions you would be asking of mayoral candidates. You complained that “decades of sustained, abject neglect by city leaders have allowed a bombed-out graffiti-covered, war-zone image to prevail.” You said you were afraid to walk your dog at night and you called for a plan to “address blight and abate the graffiti that’s killing our city.”

You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet. And graffiti is not what’s killing it.

What is killing our city is poverty. Since you’re new and you live in a great neighborhood, you probably don’t know that the poverty rate doubled during Mayor Francis G. Slay’s 16-year tenure.

What is killing our region is a systemic racism that pervades almost every public and private institution, including your newspaper, and makes it nearly impossible for either North St. Louis or the parts of South St. Louis where African Americans live to get better or safer or healthier or better-educated...

The whole thing is good and may just bolster your faith in the future of this country.

AN INSPIRATION TO US ALL.

A heartwarming story from Bre Payton at The Federalist and then -- record scratch!

To Poe, all of the hate is worth protecting her customers from exposure to unnecessary vulgarity. Recently, one of her female customers confided in Poe that she had been sexually assaulted as a child. Poe says these women shouldn’t have to relive their painful experiences in her store by being confronted with vulgarity. These women — her customers — have been through so much, Poe tells me. They don’t deserve to have a man or a woman come in here and ask for a ‘P hat.'”

Puts me in mind of Mrs. Doyle on Father Ted: "And of course, the p-word, father, the bad p-word, worse than 'puddy-tat' -- you know the one I mean!"  Let's go back to the beginning -- what is this Poe (oh, it's lovely she's called Poe) on about?

When Elizabeth Poe saw video footage of the Women’s March in Washington DC the day after President Trump was inaugurated, she was horrified by all of the vulgarity on display. Women carried signs emblazoned with genitals, many repeatedly chanted curse words, and celebrities delivered speeches riddled with explicit content and threats of violence.

By "threats of violence," a link reveals, she means Madonna's speech. Typical Federalist readers won't click it, of course, and will go away assuming the March, at which no arrests were made, was all bonfires and menstrual blood feasts, just like everything those crazy people do in the urban liberal fleshpots where they have communism, libraries, and dental hygienists.

Poe, who has owned a yarn store in Franklin, Tennessee for five years, was frustrated that so many women wore knitted “pussyhats” to the march, ruining what once was a “cute little pattern.” When a woman visited her store the very next day asking for pink yarn to make a hat like the ones she had seen women wearing at the march on TV, she took to Facebook and asked customers who wanted yarn to make a pussyhat to go elsewhere.

And for this simple act of courage, claim Payton and Poe, "she’s been screamed at, called names, and threatened with rape and other violent acts." Police reports or GTFO, I'm tempted to say, but that's just the sort of rudeness we rootless cosmopolitans go in for; if we doubt the word of this sweet yarn store lady, how will we ever win back the trust of other embittered honkies who voted for a TV reality show clown because he was white and vicious? I mean, there are almost as many of them as there are of us!

Anyhow, Payton has a high tolerance for Poe's folk wisdom, as evinced by this:

Some people have tried to throw Poe’s Christian faith back in her face by insisting that Jesus would’ve marched to empower women. That may be true, Poe tells me, but “Jesus would’ve marched with his clothes on.”

Poe also claims that her financial losses in the p hat trade have been more than made up for by "orders and support from Hong Kong, Great Britain, and every state in the United States." I like to imagine Brit expats in Red China's Biggest Little City-State crying through megaphones, "'ere, you lot! There's a woyt lady in th' States wot needs a few bob ta fight lesbians!" This is perhaps my favorite part:

Before opening The Joy of Knitting, she worked at Community Health Systems, which operates 158 hospitals in 22 states, according to its website. Poe says she worked at CHS for “18 of the longest months of my life,” before tensions with another co-worker got too stressful, driving her to seek a job she enjoyed, even if it meant going into business for herself.

I marvel that Payton left "tensions with another co-worker got too stressful" in there for creeps like me to interpret in an unflattering way. Why couldn't she just say Poe was called by the Lord?

TRUMPISM WITHOUT TRUMP.

Remember the brave-looking stand National Review took against Trump and Trumpism last year? Ha ha, now look: their front page is devoted to articles like "Approve the Cabinet" by noted free-thinker Kevin D. Williamson and the Trump-flattering encomia of Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew C. McCarthy.  One imagines Trump in doublet and hose: "Was ever loser in this humor woo'd? Was ever loser in this humor won? Sad!"

Worse still are the NRniks who peddle Trumpism without Trump. Get a load of Ramesh Ponnuru's and Rich Lowry's "For Love of Country":

"Dark,” “divisive,” and “dangerous” were a few of the negative descriptors that critics attached to President Trump’s inaugural address, and those were just the ones that start with “d.” (A few threw in “dystopian” for good measure.) The critics took him this way in part because he depicted the last few decades of American life as a hellscape from which he would shortly deliver us: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” But the critics also had this reaction because the address had a theme — nationalism — that has itself long been assumed in many quarters to be dark, divisive, and dangerous.  

That assumption has never been justified and should now be discarded. Nationalism can be a healthy and constructive force. Since nationalistic sentiments also have wide appeal and durability, it would be wiser to cultivate that kind of nationalism than to attempt to move beyond it.

Just because Trump is a monster doesn't mean every ignorant xenophobe strongman has to be one! Surely someone someday might-could declare "Xland for the Xlanders" without the fascist chest-beating. Then comes the history lesson:

Fear of nationalism became very widespread, especially in Europe, after the world wars, and it remains a core premise behind the sputtering drive toward further European integration.

Hitler made nationalism ick,  at least to those sputtering sissies at the EU. They go on: "Nationalism has a bad odor even among some conservatives" because "economic conservatism, particularly as influenced by libertarianism, can come to see borders as barriers to free markets" and some are "influenced by the notion that America is an 'idea' or a 'proposition nation,'" but...

Ugh. You almost want some brute like, oh, Richard Spencer to bust through the flimsy premise of this essay like Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall and go TOUGH SHIT CUCKS I AM YOUR CONSERVATISM NOW! Because that would be cutting to the chase, and who wouldn't prefer it;  after the early, moony grafs about a "benign nationalism" that "includes loyalty to one’s country" and "the revulsion that most people feel when protesters burn an American flag" even the most sympathetic reader must realize this isn't so much an essay as a Country Time Lemonade commercial for NR's milky country-club conservatism.

Who would even read it all, besides me? Some nervy souls may hang in through the Roger Scruton and (Lord help us) Chesterton citations; some bravos may persist past the unexplained assertion that the European Union "has a democracy deficit and always will"; a stalwart few may endure copybook sludge like "the appeal to national pride has also been important to conservative politics"; the dimmer of the half-mad survivors, clawing through the crumbling logic and reek of special pleading, may be encouraged to find themselves washed up on the What's Wrong with Trump's Nationalism section ("He’s not a limited-government conservative, nor does he appear to be a religious man"), but the smarter ones will realize with horror that they've been conned -- the only meaningful difference between Il Douche and Lowry and Ponnuru is that the latter bother to use big words to make the animal appeal of nationalism sound to suckers like philosophy instead of gangster movie monologues. Only relatives and sycophants of the authors will get to the end undamaged.

Bad as it is by itself, this piece of shit has been glossed by Jonah Goldberg. His column is one long wind-tunnel fart and I haven't got the time, but this section will give you some of the flavor:

It is true that nationalism is part of the equation, but it is the less important part. And by mistaking the tail for the dog, we lose sight of what is important. Think of it this way. All, or at least most, marriages require some level of physical attraction, particularly at the outset — that is only natural. But any marriage purely based on physical attraction will struggle to last. No happily married couple I have ever met has confessed that the secret of their long marriage was mutual lust.

No comment. (Loser.)

Marriages endure for a host of complicated reasons, but among the most important is surely a commitment to an ideal, be it religious or otherwise. Nationalism is a bit like lust — a natural human passion that, absent proper channeling, is at best morally neutral and more often a source of unhealthy temptation.

Thank God the writers of National Review can always get some Trump-love on the down-low without violating their vows of intellectual celibacy! Meantime in the real world, Trump's-brain Fat Goebbels is mind-melding with Mencius Moldbug and other nerd-Nazis to create the newer new nationalism, so Goldberg et alia better pay attention so they know exactly how far away to stand -- and exactly where they're expected to be in, oh, six to twelve months.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Super Bowl and the brethren's traditional culture-war bitchfest over it. They have unitary control of the government, and they're still mortally offended that people can express contradicting opinions in TV commercials.

Among the outtakes, John Nolte complains at The Daily Wire that liberals were “ruining” the Super Bowl by allowing its producers to hire leftists like Lady Gaga and the Hamilton cast as entertainment, which he finds perverse because the Super Bowl “reeks of thematic (not partisan) conservatism.” Thematic conservatism, Nolte explains, means “masculinity, patriotism, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, a winner and a loser, the pursuit of excellence, men of all races competing in an environment where skin color isn't an issue” -- things of which no woman nor liberal could possibly approve, apparently; when we play poker, it's not for money but the journey, and Lord knows we're not butch specimens like Harlan Hill. Anyway this is why libtards are always “intruding into, childishly stomping on, and just plain ruining everything that once meant relaxation and coming together as a country.” Future generations will ask the tough question: Who lost concussionball? And what answer shall we give?

UPDATE. They kept bitching into Monday, natch. Tucker Carlson, mid-dudgeon about the Hamilton women, claiming "I'm as pro-sisterhood as anybody, more than most women, probably, actually,” would be the highlight, but Conservative Review had a story called "THE PATRIOTS DIDN’T JUST BEAT THE FALCONS. THEY CRUSHED THE LIBERAL MEDIA," which is like when your asshole friend wins a talent contest by farting into the mike.

But let's give a participation trophy to the insufferable David French, who explains why the heartwarming Super Bowl ads about immigrants and little girls whose fathers want them to succeed just make conservatives angry:

The ads above are like college brochures, full of smiling, happy faces from every nation, tribe, and culture. But behind the smiles is all too often an icy, heartless resolve. The diversity that matters is only skin deep. The “diversity” they celebrate is one where communities of different colors, genders, and sexual practices come together around a uniform ideology — and there is zero hesitation to be as intolerant as necessary in the name of tolerance. (I once sued a major public university that actually declared that “acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”) My fellow believers look at those ads, understand the worldview they express, and rightly know there’s no room for them in the Left’s utopia.

Translation: No one liked them in college -- even minorities were more popular! -- and they've been buttsore about it ever since.

HOES AND TRICKS.

Gonna show you some National Review covers. You've probably seen these before:

OK, now let me show you what National Review has up now:

Ain't even kidding.

Yet this isn’t a Republican “war on women,” as some predicted. It is, rather, progressives and left-leaning media elites who are targeting conservative women. Take the recent Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing Kellyanne Conway, the first woman to have led a successful Presidential campaign...

Maybe this is just the old-fashioned conservative in me talking, but I think in some cases making fun of a successful woman is not misogyny, but an appropriate response to stupidity. Case in point: My several posts about the writings of Carrie Lukas, author of that column. They're not about her characteristics as a woman, but her characteristics as a rightwing shill. I would never dream of, for example, calling her an empty pantsuit.

Know how else you can tell the difference? If you have been sentient during the past 25 or 10 or five years (or even just the past election cycle), think of the reeking shit you've seen constantly expressed about Hillary Clinton not only by internet morons but also by Republican spokesmen. If you don't see the difference between that and the gentle ribbing Conway gets on SNL, you're either dim or paid to act like it.

SOMETIMES THERE'S JUST NOTHING YOU CAN SAY.

Worst new trend:

David P. Goldman's Trump-Lincoln comparison last week was pretty hair-raising, but this thing by Rich Cromwell is just shit. It's so bad that I can't really make fun of it, just as you can't catch a fart and pin it down, as the song from The Sound of Goldberg goes. I will mention that Cromwell's is not entirely a friendly comparison: he talks smack about Lincoln's statism, but instead of taking the usual neo-Confederate line about the Woah of No'thun Aggression -- which might get some PC types triggered --  he chides Abe for other, less loaded offenses, like creating the Department of Agriculture. Thus the dummies who usually read The Federalist will go, "see like my stupid grandpa thinks Lincoln was great cuz he freed the slaves but really he's the reason I can't take laetrile to make my boobs bigger," and the Southrons who find it on Google while looking for history texts to take back to their Battle-Flag-draped survivalist treehouse homeschools will go, "nod's as good's a wink, hoss!" Everybody wins.

Here's where Cromwell's prose really shines, in the John Randolph sense:

So maybe Trump hasn’t called for this to be suspended yet, but apparently it’s time to let our imaginations run wild, so let’s do that. 

Habeas corpus, Latin for “Yo, we’ve got the body"...

Ugh. If you can do anything with this, feel free.

LIBERAL TOTALITARIANISM RUINED MY SAG AWARDS SHOW.

Sometimes, when I feel that my life isn't all it should be (<Laramore> and it isn't </Laramore>), I console myself that I am not as miserable as my subjects. Consider their current position: They have in the White House Il Douche and Fat Goebbels, who will sign every pauper-, LGBTQ-, woman- and minority-immiserating measure the Republican Congress sends them so long as they are left free to (on the part of the former) steal and (on the part of the latter) Nazify. If I believed the twisted shit they believed, I'd be ecstatic.

But are they happy? No! They're constantly bitching that some of their fellow citizens -- okay, most of their fellow citizens, but that's only if you count black people -- disagree with them. That should make their victory even sweeter! Still they seethe and act hard-done-by. They cannot rest so long as one libtard defies them.

Which just makes it funnier that Joy Pullman of The Federalist thinks this makes liberals the real totalitarians. "Trump’s Immigration Order Triggers Left’s Cultural Totalitarianism" is her title and here's her lede:

By now Federalist readers are well-aware many leaders on the Left don’t appear to have learned anything from the election of their once-beloved, now-archnemesis Donald Trump. Their behavior recalls the dramatic, incessant mind-messing reversals from “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia” to “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia!” of the famous novel about totalitarianism, George Orwell’s “1984.”

See also that famous novel about war and peace, "War and Peace." But anyway, first outrage: a lady refused to make a dress for Melania Trump. I should think the appropriate conservative response would be "Who cares, bitch, we're about to make Boss Hogg the Attorney General, Fat Goebbels is splayed out naked in the Lincoln Bedroom screaming the Horst Wessel Song and leaking coke-spit from his asshole, and The Leader's chief concubine can buy a zillion dresses once we loot the Treasury!" But Pullman, bless her, goes instead for wounded irony:

People who refuse nonessential services to others based on deep-seated conscience conflicts are bigots. No, you dummy, they’re heroes, and don’t even need a two-thousand-year global philosophical tradition informing their capricious transaction refusals!

These liberals won't sell a rich lady a dress, yet they want us to serve fags. Hmmph!

Further insults to Trumpkins are catalogued -- for example, a basketball coach questioned The Leader's Muslim Ban:

Excuse me, but did anyone elect Gregg Popovich to represent Americans? No. Popovich is a private citizen who has rights and duties equal to those of every other citizen. So where does he get off presuming some special political authority over fellow Americans? That basketball job has gone to his head. Please deflate that ball, Mr. Popovich. Bouncing it doesn’t give you power to manipulate my political choices.

We've gotten so used to talking about Trump's "distractions" that you may be tempted to think "Please deflate that ball, Mr. Popovich" is, similarly, just a stratagem meant to erase our memories of the insanely stupid shit she said in the first part of the graf. But you could say that about everything she says. As with the current junta, it ain't a strategy, it's the best she can do. She's mad that Buzzfeed is covering the companies who have and have not reacted to the Muslim Ban; she's mad that actors ruined the SAG Awards for her by making speeches about the Muslim Ban instead of about their agents and heterosexual love partners. She ties all this in to her other wingnut martyrs: "Brendan Eich; ALEC; the Heartland Institute; and Memories Pizza, just for starters." Three of these entities are rolling in dough -- excuse me, since the fundraisers I guess all of them are -- and soon the anti-gay policies they favor will be the law of the land, but because a few people chose to defend helpless war refugees instead of an internet multimillionaire Pullman swoons under the yoke of totalitarianism:

...This is coercion. They’re using power they earned in nonpolitical spheres to manipulate their fellow Americans, to socially shame us into at least outward compliance with their political preferences. Intentionally induced intense public shame is a form of manipulation because it engages emotions, not persuasion, which engages the rational faculties. They are politicizing private spheres. They are being cultural totalitarians.

These celebrities made us feel something and it wasn't good!

Jesus Christ, whatta buncha snowflakes.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's executive order on immigration and the degrading lengths to which the brethren went to make it look like something other than a complete catastrophe. Some measure of the disaster is that the more craven shits have already ducked and covered: Rich Lowry, for example, clears his pencil-thin throat and pips, "The reaction to Trump’s executive order has been enormous, so it’s useful to remember that the scale of what happened over the weekend was not..." Translation: It's really not such a big deal, what are you getting so bent out of shape about it... Excellent! Keep it up.

RETURN ENGAGEMENT.

I'm not great at crowd estimates, but we marched from Lafayette Park down Pennsylvania Avenue to about 7th Street, and when we left the street was filled with people in both directions. Looks like we have to keep this up until they get it right. 

UPDATE. In case I wasn't clear, this was not from last weekend's march, but today's organized-at-the-last-minute march against the Trump Muslim ban -- excuse me, the Trump "danger" ban. And bad as I am at crowd-guessing, I'd say this one drew more than 10,000 and perhaps substantially more. On 48 hours notice. Good to know it can be done. 

THEY MADE ME A NEO-NAZI!

Hey it's another Rod Dreher "Reader" Mailbag! As with previous editions, you have to believe everyone who writes to Dreher has approximately the same literary style and language skills level. It's possible! And anyway it's more fun if you suspend disbelief. Ready? Good! Today's a double feature -- two guys who are thinking of joining a White Identity cult because the blacks and the liberals turn them off!

This is from Baby Skin #1:

I’m a white guy.

Let's get that straight right off the bat!

I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

Dunno, but I have a feeling once you start talking the mystery's over, Mr. I'm A White Guy.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it.

Well-educated, and smart and informed! And white! I can see why we're all paying attention to him.

It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

Then maybe it's time you made new friends. Maybe try that before becoming a Nazi! I mean it's a big decision.

After telling us he's not rolling in dough, and has to mow his own lawn despite his brains and education -- ha, tell me about it, bro! -- Baby Skin #1 tells us what's really ticking him off.

But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Maybe he's more broke than he lets on and the only "media" he has access to is an old Black Panther newspaper he found at a yard sale. More likely he's one of those conservatives who lost his TV remote during the Clinton Administration.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

But though intellectual effort should come easy to a bright feller-me-lad like him, he's not sure how long he can hold out against the pull of his Aryan heritage. And if he can't, guess whose fault it'll be?

...It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza. Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

And we're about to lose him -- he, who might have been such a ornament to The Left! -- because we were too nice to blacks and Latinos and the TV was mean to Mr. Charlie. But I gotta ask: if he's so mad at liberals and so torn about going White Pride, why can't he compromise and just become a regular conservative?

Sorta answers itself, don't it?

We don't have to spend much time with Baby Skin #2, since he seems cut from the same cloth (or typed on the same laptop) -- he says libs made him Bund-curious, and you'll be real sorry when it happens (he even ends, I swear to God, "What follows from all of this cannot bode well"), but let me give you the flavor:

I totally get where [Baby Skin #1] is coming from. I’m in his shoes for the most part: white, Christian, male, straight. Add to that that I’m a Southerner. But I’m also a PhD candidate in the humanities...

The new Nazis -- they're so schooly!

...in a discipline where my whole demographic configuration is routinely and openly disparaged as being the fount of all evil in this world.

I've been saying this for years, but why do these guys never take their studies at Liberty University or Bob Jones instead of liberal hellholes where everyone hates them? It's almost like they seek this treatment out -- maybe so they can write about it in wingnut magazines and websites! Maybe both these guys are just woodshedding for their eventual gigs at The Federalist. Or for a book: White Like Me! They better hop to, I bet Dreher's already shopping it.

UPDATE. Comments to this post are up to the usual glorious alicublog standards. Don't miss one by Jeffrey_Kramer that begins, "Maybe we aren't even meant to imagine there's an individual consciousness behind these 'letters'; maybe it's sort of along the lines of those old Reader's Digest pieces like 'I am Joe's Kidney.'"

DEFINING REPUBLICANISM DOWN.

There's been a lot of sucking up to Trump, God knows. Matthew Continetti is making a specialty of it ("He draws strength from his gut connection with Jacksonian America" -- imagine Trump responding to that: "Yes, Michael Jackson was a tremendous entertainer, absolutely terrific. Ben Carson reminds me a lot of Michael Jackson").

But history should specially note this offering by David P. Goldman -- author of "Jay Z's American Fascism" and other gibberish ("Why can't we get 14 million people into the streets to proclaim that Obama is an idiot like the Egyptians did?"). In "Donald Trump, American hero," he invokes Jackson, of course, and also characters created by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John Bunyan, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Capra, and David Peoples. What do they have to do with Il Douche? Why, like them Trump is an American hero -- see, it's in the title. And what distinguishes these heroes? Maybe Goldman's comparison of Trump to Abraham Fucking Lincoln will clarify. Yes, he actually does, and Goldman knows what you're thinking:

That seems blasphemous, for Trump is no Lincoln; he is brittle where Lincoln was tolerant, resentful where Lincoln was self-deprecating, Philistine where Lincoln was intellectual, and often cruel where Lincoln was unfailingly kind. But the parallel remains.

Seems like everything we admire in Lincoln has been ruled out. So what's left?

Not since 1860 have American voters rejected their elite and chosen a candidate without apparent qualifications.

Ah, I see; so in 1860 Americans (40 percent of them, anyway) were sick of this shit and rolled the dice on a former Congressman at the head of a burgeoning movement and party who had stood for the Senate and whose debates with Stephen Douglas, a watershed in American political discourse, had been widely circulated... which lines up pretty good with "former reality TV star" and "famous bankrupt rageclown."

That is, they are both "outsiders," in the same sense that Cincinnatus and Rod Blagojevich were both outsiders. Unlike Lincoln, the new model outsider is unencumbered by toleration, self-deprecation, intellectualism or unfailing kindness. Neither Goldman nor his fellow Trumpkins seem to miss these attributes. In fact, from what I'm seeing they consider it good riddance.

WOMB AT THE TOP.

Welcome back to the pages of alicublog,  Ashley E. McGuire of Acculturated!

Is Ivanka Making Motherhood Great Again?

Is Ivanka Trump America’s Kate Middleton?

Quick primer for the uninitiated: Acculturated is one of those wingnut ladymags commissioned by culture warriors to make young female conservatives feel less lonesome. Their philosophical tradition is Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, but they seem to worry their target will find this dowdy and depressing in its pure form -- like Woman's Day meets Soviet Life -- so they try, as here, to glam it up.

In this viral photo posted on Ivanka’s Instagram page the day before the Inauguration, America’s new first daughter channels the Duchess rather mightily.

In the picture, Ivanka is rocking the whole Duchess package: walking down the red-carpeted steps of a private jet in nude stilettos and a gorgeously tailored outfit, with an incredibly intact blowout with a babe on one hip and a child holding her other hand.

There are entire Google image archives devoted to pictures of the Duchess coming down airplane steps with babies and toddlers in tow.

Great thing about the Internet -- something for every kink! McGuire cites one of her fellow Kate 'n' Kids furries who thrills to the Duchess towing tots in heels, specifically; "a bit precarious," he swoons. McGuire responds:

It is precarious. It’s also precarious trying to be both a mom and a public figure in today’s world: yet another parallel of mastery between Trump and Middleton.

Kate Middleton has done an exceptional job of making motherhood glam again. Unlike American celebrity moms, she doesn’t post on social media about being covered in throw up and never getting any sleep. She doesn’t complain in interviews about the travails of parenting. She doesn’t post the makeup-less 3 a.m. selfie that is supposed to make us think she is a “real mom” like the rest of us. Yes, she has the royal P.R. straight jacket on...

Straitjacket, surely? Or does she know something we don't?

...and yet, she demonstrates her authenticity in motherhood with the obvious care she puts into her children and the genuinely warm way she behaves with them, even under the camera’s glare. She commits the ultimate crime in today’s post-feminist world: She appears to enjoy being a mom, and lets the media run with that perception.

Being a mom must be heaps of fun if you're married to royalty with an army of nannies and minders to take the kids, clean you up, rub your shoulders, and put cream on your nipples as soon as the photographers leave. Speaking of promo, now to suck off The Leader!

Like Middleton, Ivanka has allowed herself to be very much defined by her role as a mom. While Ivanka has a demanding career, she seems proud to let the paparazzi make a fuss over her family life too, occasionally doing what Middleton does not, sharing a more candid and makeup-free moment with her kids with the world.

Which is gross when less conservative celebs do it but she has a way don'tcha think?

...It’s easy to scoff at Middleton’s lack of a career, but she is one of the most scrutinized women in the world.

"Object of male gaze" has been a career for many women, honey, but rarely so remunerative; that it's a crap deal only gets more obvious (thanks in part to the gruesome example of Ivanka's dad!). That's why Teen Vogue is woke and you're a snore.

A TINY FINGER POKING A GREASY TOUCHSCREEN -- FOREVER.

Washington (CNN) -- The Badlands National Park official account tweeted statistics about climate change on Tuesday that could contradict how President Donald Trump's administration may want to present it. 

The tweets were up for a few hours before they were deleted.

But that's been taken care of.

...and no wise guys, get me?