YOU GOTTA FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO PRIDE PARADE.

The Trump era was made for such as Rod Dreher. He likes to protest that he's not a Trumpkin, but no one else on God's green earth has as many "I'm not a Trump supporter but..." qualifiers in his writing as he does. Part of this has to do with his Benedict Option racket -- how can he sell the rubes on his monasticism-plus-wifi palaver if Trump has sanctified the land and removed the need for holy retreat? But mainly it's that Trump is Dreher's secret dream: He's embarrassed by Trump, but he loves what Trump is doing for America -- that is, making it easier for bigots like himself.

Lately Brother Rod's been especially hard on the blacks and the gays. Recently he found a Quillette article by a black wingnut at Columbia where the kid, Coleman Hughes, actually asks: if Rihanna gets to have an all-black band, why can't a white person have an all-white band? The obvious answer is GO TO ANY GODDAMN MUSIC FESTIVAL IN AMERICA OR THE U.K. THEY DO IT ALL THE TIME! But Dreher's excited, thinks Hughes is "very, very brave" -- though I can't guess why, because black wingnuts are worth their weight in gold these days -- why, with such credentials you can commit felonies and, if you're sufficiently vituperative toward liberals, there's a good chance Trump will pardon you. (Dinesh D'Souza is so juiced about his pardon that, to reward his benefactor by making him look racially sensitive, D'Souza actually inferred that he himself is a person of color, which I don't believe I've ever seen him do before; usually he hits black people with racial slurs.)

Anywho, Dreher thinks Hughes is the bees knees and, though there's nothing in the Quillette article about gay people, he hauls them into the target area too:

[Hughes] focuses on blacks, but as a general matter, if you read the mainstream press, you’ll find there’s a tendency to treat gays and other minority groups favored by liberals with kid gloves — as if they were symbols, not real people, with the same virtues and vices that everybody else has.

"Mainstream media" being here an obvious, redundant synonym for liberals, this is a callback to an ancient trope that I've been hearing all my life -- probably most familiar to you via Tom Wolfe, but known to me by the yammering of the bigots I grew up with: That liberals, who are always assumed to be white, must not see blacks as fully human -- because if they did they would, like conservatives, despise them. But this Dreher column is the first place I can remember seeing gays pulled into this if-you-really-knew-them-you'd-hate-them-like-me paradigm as well.

The gays have been on Dreher's mind much of late, thanks to Masterpiece Cakeshop's SCOTUS victory over the same-sexers who thought they had a right to buy a wedding cake from them. Over several posts Dreher pee-dances over the decision because it was narrow and does not guarantee a wider right to discriminate against Sodomites (and to keep alive the BenOp shtick, natch). It's all disgusting, but one section particularly leapt out at me: Dreher quotes with approval (that is, he says the author "nails what's happening") R.R. Reno of the theocon magazine First Things on Masterpiece:

That two gay men in Denver can bring to bear the full power of the state against a baker who does not wish to bake them a wedding cake is the height of absurdity. The gay couple do not belong to a vulnerable class of Americans. IRS data show that male-male married couples filing jointly have dramatically higher family incomes than other married couples, to say nothing of the disintegrating working-class families who don’t enjoy the benefits of marriage. Empowering a segment of the upper class to beat up on those who don’t approve of their sex lives is a recipe for social fragmentation.

This brought to my mind the triumphal citation among normal people of gay earning power and corporate acceptance as a sign that gay rights are here to say. I actually got a taste of this today at the corporate cafeteria I visited for lunch, where they were giving away Pride t-shirts, festooned with anodyne (and mostly too small to read) pro-gay hashtags and the (large and readable) company logo on the back. The innocuous ubiquity, or ubiquitous innocuousness, of this sort of thing may give the impression that the battle has been won.

But the very thing that looks like victory -- and should mean victory, given that America advertises itself as a place where honest commercial and financial success are all that matter -- is what Reno is using to attack gays: the notion that they "do not belong to a vulnerable class," and in fact "beat up on" the "disintegrating working-class families" (always presumed to be white and straight) who "don’t enjoy the benefits of marriage"  -- that is, have chosen not to get married, which in the minds of Reno and Dreher must be the gays' fault -- or that of the liberals (always, also, presumed to be white and straight) who, perversely and disloyally, side with the gays. As for the beating-up, why, that is done by gays merely by being gay, and being so rude as to insist on what in other contexts are called Constitutional rights.

In short, these people will do anything to destroy gay rights, and the easiest path for them now is to pretend they're doing so on behalf of less fortunate white straights -- in other words, that segment of the population shown to be most susceptible to Trump's bullshit. If they can convince these poor white, het dopes that gays are stealing something from them -- Straight pride? Jobs that might otherwise be reserved for heterosexuals? The right to beat up and/or rape a class of people that had been fair game in their pappy's day? -- then they just might be able to hitch the Trump Train to their retro mission and pull things back to the way things were before members of the same gender could hold hands in public, let alone all that other stuff.

What I'm saying is, happy Pride, but be prepared: Stonewall was a riot, and it looks as if we may have to pick up some paving stones ourselves.

MLKKK: HAVE A RIGHTWING MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY!

Conservative MLK Day tributes are always hilarious. This year the brethren seem to have coordinated on the theme that King wasn't really as interested in winning rights for black people as he was in helping conservatives defeat social justice warriors.

A few wingnut outlets go old school: "Does Martin Luther King Day Honor a Communist?" asks a thing called Headline Wealth (one of the Senile Rageaholic Grandpa sites I used to cover), and avers that it does, because the ex-communist Stanley Levison gave him money, supporting "FBI claims that King had told Levison that he was a Marxist." They also repeat the FBI claim that King watched a guy commit rape and laughed, which has also been circulated by more prominent conservative outlets, who always act as if the vile charge were undisputed. 

But most of the brethren realize outright demonization of King is no go, and so try to portray him as one of them, or at least the enemy of their enemies. "The woke Left vs. Martin Luther King Jr." editorializes the Washington Examiner:

The cultural Left’s intersectionality crusade has separated the country into different corners: White people are not permitted to address racial issues, and men are forbidden from speaking about women’s matters (i.e. abortion).

This is exactly what King feared.

If a guy can't advocate white and male supremacy without getting yelled at, MLK's Dream is over.

...it's important also to acknowledge that those who claim to be carrying on King's struggle for justice in modern times have strayed far from his dream..

Instead, they have embraced an identity politics that veers from merely fighting against all forms of discrimination, to carving people up by race, gender, sexual orientation, and placing those distinctions above all else...

Imagine MLK coming back today and seeing people fighting for Latino, immigrant, and gay rights! Boy, would he be mad. The Examiner also says MLK sided with Israel against "Arabs" ("Asked about the argument advanced by a black editor who viewed Arabs as people of color and thus supported them against Israel, King was dismissive"), without noting that, in the very same interview the Examiner cites, King said "peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need" and called for a "Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of  economic security," which is the opposite of what both the Israeli government and American conservatives endorse for Palestinians.

At GraniteGrok, Steve MacDonald:

Today, equality, when invoked from the left, is about silencing free speech or ideas with which the Democrats disagree.

They empower their quest by calling it hate speech, bullying, bigoted, or even supremacist. As if there were a form of supremacy higher than using the power of the state to deny human beings the right to express ideas of which it disapproves.

Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty to say about that.

There follows an MLK quote in favor of free speech, which MacDonald interprets as a wicked burn on "The Democrat party, some in the media, the white tower, and more than a handful of street thugs" who "work diligently to deny you free association and expression even your right to free press –- as a creator, curators, or consumer." Again, if you have to go on Gab because Twitter won't publish your Nazi propaganda, the Dream is over.

The New York Post:

We suspect [King would] also be distressed by the hypersensitivity and growing political correctness of today’s discussions about race — the near-impossibility of honest dialogue and the insistence by too many to label any who disagree with them as racists...

And, while hailing the beautiful prose of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, he’d be saddened by their pessimism about the possibilities for true and full racial reconciliation.

Picture King shaking his head at Coates: "Brother Ta-Nehisi, you have to give the white man a break. How can we achieve true equality if Stefan Molyneaux can't use Mailchimp to send his white supremacist newsletter?"

Maybe the best is by Jeremy Lott at The American Spectator:

About 30 years after King delivered his speech, a young white high school student in Tacoma, Washington, delivered fragments of that same speech over the school intercom. He did so by mimicking Reverend King’s great, deep voice, which apparently rubbed a few black students the wrong way. A friend warned him, “Do you want to get your ass kicked?” He was bumped into a few times and nudged up against a locker. He left by a different route than normal to avoid such a conflict.

That naive student was me, of course. It wasn’t the huge deal it could have become. Things didn’t escalate into the Great MLK Day Throwdown, thank God. By the next day, folks had let it go. Looking back, it’s really amusing. Still, it helped to reinforce in my mind an important lesson: dreamy idealism will get you only so far in life.

The message of Martin Luther King is boy, those black people are touchy!

UPDATE. Meanwhile in Richmond at the big gun fetishist flex,

Interesting argument pic.twitter.com/gYIDJW5xSI

— Jonathan Myerson Katz (@KatzOnEarth) January 20, 2020

 Won't someone please think of the militias?

UPDATE 2. I thought National Review's MLK tribute would be utterly anodyne, the magazine having been in a confused defensive crouch since the dawn of the Trump era. But Roger Clegg turns in a honey. He spends the first half of it praising Donald Trump, and eventually gets to the black people:

Black Lives Matter and Michelle Alexander’s polemics to the contrary notwithstanding, the reason there are a disproportionate number of African-American prison inmates is not because of racist laws or law-enforcers: It’s simply because a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by African Americans.

Um, Happy MLK Day?  Here's his wow finish:

Now, I said that Americans really aren’t hopelessly divided with respect to foreign policy, capitalism, and our constitutional structure: Am I exaggerating when I assert that there is such a division with respect to law, work, family, patriotism, and God?

Well, no doubt there are plenty of people who voted for Hillary Clinton and like at least a couple of items on that list. But I do think there is more of a division here, and certainly it’s more reasonable for a lot of Americans to perceive it here. In one way or another, the Left derides them all — and one major political party is unwilling to challenge the Left, because its politicians and leadership are afraid to.

I’ll end by saying that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while not blameless in his entire legacy, did not intend to reject any of them.

So King was kind of a shit, just like the Democrats, but at least he did his damage unintentionally. Well, no black people read National Review, so no harm no foul.

I WANT YOU TO HURT LIKE I DO. Crunchy Rod Dreher is back from vacation -- which was not spent, as I had hopefully fantasized, scouting locations for the New Jerusalem, but in such normal yuppie pursuits as wine-tasting, restaurant-hopping, and driving an SUV. No sooner has he unpacked his cilices that he starts bitching about other educated white people whose attitudes perversely differ from his own.

See, while Dreher enthuses over Jesus and Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, some honkies choose to enthuse over what they call their "vibrant" neighborhoods "where blacks, whites, gays and Hispanics all live together." Dreher thinks they're just trying to make him feel bad:

White people who use the word "vibrant" to describe a piece of real estate on which ethnic or tattooed people live really want to make a statement about their own broad-mindedness or social progressivism (versus the supposed fear and closed-mindedness of suburban white people). This is why I'm so fascinated by the word. It's an elite white-people social marker, a sign that one-upsmanship is being attempted.

It's not that Dreher doesn't approve of or use the word "vibrant." He just doesn't like it when folks use it on multi-ethnic neighborhoods.

How then should we speak of these neighborhoods? Emulating Dreher's own example, we might speak of our Hispanic neighbors as a potential threat to our real estate values ("We are close, though, to a barrio... should I sell my house while I still can, or risk putting up with crime and the degradation of the quality of life in the neighborhood?").

Or of our gay neighbors as disgusting perverts ("I was amazed by how a city park in my neighborhood became a popular cruising grown for gay men seeking sexual encounters after dark... what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?").

To be fair, maybe it's not the racial or gender-preferential identity of specific neighbors that bugs Dreher. In a 2007 column he says, "the day will never come when we give [our children] permission to play unsupervised on our front lawn," because his neighborhood contains "halfway houses for sex offenders," "stray dogs," and "dodgy older teenagers from someplace else." Dreher laments that his urban nabe is not like the rural Louisiana hamlet in which he was raised.

You can understand why he'd object to "vibrant," or just about any other positive adjective applied to such places. Poor Dreher just plain doesn't like where he lives. He would prefer to live in Bumfuck or Coon Holler, so long as he could also have access to all the conveniences of a large city. It's bad enough that he can't have it all, geographically speaking. That some people who live in cities are content, even enthusiastic about where and how they live -- well, that just steams his vegetable dumpling.

I really hope he gets to exercise his Benedict Option, not just for the comic potential but also for his own sake. No man can serve two masters, and Dreher's unappeasable yearning to have the bright lights of the big city and the ol' swimmin' hole will eventually drive him crazier than he already is.

DERP DE DERB. Over the past day or so, several of John Derbyshire's former colleagues at National Review have posted on his dismissal. As you might expect, whether they approve or disapprove of his defenestration, they all agree that  political correctness is the real crime here.

"Unfortunately the entire vocabulary of racist slurs has been cheapened, and few anymore insist that no one of any race should use any racial slurs," says Victor Buster Poindexter David JoHanson. By this Hanson means black people saying "nigger," which always enrages conservatives, who consider it yet another unfair advantage enjoyed by African-Americans. "There was a time not too far in the past," Hanson reminiscences, "when the black community attempted to stop the use of the N-word in rap music, on radio, and in movies..." It's interesting that Hanson interprets the politicians and public figures who made a stink about this once upon a time as "the black community" -- when such people speak up instead about, say, a black kid getting murdered, Hanson considers it "demagoguery."

Mark Steyn, among others, seems to believe Derbyshire being fired by a rightwing publication is P.C. censorship by liberals.

The Left is pretty clear about its objectives on everything from climate change to immigration to gay marriage: Rather than win the debate, they’d just as soon shut it down. They’ve had great success in shrinking the bounds of public discourse, and rendering whole areas of public policy all but undiscussable. In such a climate, my default position is that I’d rather put up with whatever racist/sexist/homophobic/Islamophobic/whateverphobic excess everybody’s got the vapors about this week than accept ever tighter constraints on “acceptable” opinion.

Out of his devotion to free speech, Steyn is volunteering to listen the one about the coon in the woodpile. What a hero. He also spreads that bullshit about the liberals trying to silence David Weigel, based on something he read at some guy's blog. As I reminded readers at the Voice, Weigel has indeed been fired from a major publication for his opinions -- that is, for making fun of conservatives.

Similarly confused about cause and effect, Jason Lee Steorts, who approves the separation, nonetheless laments that "there is something thuggish, not to mention insecure, in the mob’s expectation that a head be thrown to it without any discussion of the nature of the offense, and in its refusal to entertain any possibility of forgiveness." Rich Lowry, the new Robespierre, throwing Derb's head to the leftist rabble! Someone should paint that.

The best thing about all this is, I can offer these idiots valuable advice and there's no chance in hell that they'll take it. So I will:

Let's say there was some truth to the idea that liberals are mau-mauing you -- using their Svengali influence over black people to make you look like racists. What would the smart reaction to that be? It would be to act like a normal human being; that is, to blow it off, to make nothing of it, and to rely on your impeccably non-racist example to show the world what these awful people say about you is untrue. If it feels tough at times, you could always pray for strength from that God you're always yapping about.

In other words, the smart thing is to actually be, and behave like, the person you are always loudly insisting you are -- unconcerned with race, not even recognizing it, a good friend to all humankind, etc. But the "loudly insisting" part seems more important to you than anything else. It's like you can't help yourself -- anytime you come within range of a racial issue, you have to start talking about it. And you talk rubbish.

Had you been paying attention to, oh, anything when you were growing up, you would have observed that whenever you go on and on about what a [insert positive model here] you are, one result is almost inevitable -- you make a fucking idiot of yourself. You start explaining why, though you buy everything in The Bell Curve about black people being inferior to white people, that doesn't mean you can't treat them as equals, and isn't that what really matters? At which point everyone in the room is giving you the "Springtime for Hitler" stare, and you find yourself wondering yet again why you're always so persecuted by the Thought Police.

I mean this sincerely: You would gain a lot more at this point by giving up than by fighting. You could concentrate on the core strengths of conservatism -- tax breaks for the wealthy and hatred of homosexuals -- and hope for that to win you enough rubes to carry the day.

This might help: Try and forget that Obama is black. Try to suppress that swelling feeling in your gut when you see people cheering for him, or hear the band playing "Hail to the Chief"... oh, but I can see that just my mentioning it has got you drafting another explanatory essay. Well, I did what I could.

CONVENTION NIGHT TWO.

Chris Cox of the NRA is, unlike his beef-faced senior officer Wayne LaPierre, a bland doughball, head almost perfectly round and face almost uninterrupted by features. But he can yap the party line as well as anyone. He tells us "a Hillary Clinton Supreme Court means your raht to own a fahr-arm is goawn!" Also, Hitlery has Secret Service, which is hypocritical for someone who doesn't want all America to be Westworld. The worst and most typical thing is his reference to the NRA as "the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America” — which I guess is their way of telling white people that they're not racist, but actually advocates for arming all and even black people, under the right circumstances. Ha. Look up Huey P. Newton Gun Club on Google; look at the older articles by National Review gun nut Charles C. W. Cooke, when he was pimping that club as a sign of how Second Amendment activism and wingnuttery was for all the races:

In August, as the outrage over the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., dominated the news, an African-American group calling itself the Huey P. Newton Gun Club took to the streets of Dallas, rifles in hand, to protest. Local businesses were supportive, and the city’s police chief confirmed in a statement that his department “supports the constitutional rights of all.” On Twitter, the hashtag #blackopencarry prompted a warm response from conservatives.

Then look at wingnut stories about that Club after the recent Baton Rouge shooting, e.g. this one from Breitbart News: "EXCLUSIVE – MILITANT BLACK GUN CLUB FOUNDER ON BATON ROUGE COP KILLINGS: ‘NATURAL LAW TO TAKE UP AN ARMED APPROACH’..."

According to reports, Micah X. Johnson, who carried out a deadly shooting against police officers two Friday’s ago, “liked” the Huey P. Newton Gun Club on Facebook... 

The past two weeks, armed members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club have been seen at demonstrations in Dallas and Baton Rouge...

Haven't heard from Charlie Cooke about the Gun Club since then. I bet he's real disappointed that his favored black avatar of Guns Everywhere hasn't passed muster, and hopes he can find another group of black gun nuts that his cracker buddies can endorse, some of these days -- but no need to rush into that until after the election.

UPDATE. Ugh, who doesn’t hate Paul Ryan — that fake-suffering, fake-hopeful face, that lacquered hair, that slightly-too-large jacket meant to make him look younger and slimmer. “I found some other things to keep me busy,” he says fake-humbly about the 2012 election, and laughs at stupid Obama and Biden who’ll be cooling their heels in some big-gummint hellhole while he’s on the dais with Donald Trump

“Have we had our arguments this year?” he says, and there’s a rueful hoot from the crowd. But those are “signs of life,” Ryan says, rather than the garbage fires they appear to everyone else. The “Democratic Part Establishment,” by contrast, offers “a third Obama term offered by another Clinton.”

Ryan also throws in “politically correct” — drink! “Four more years of it?” he says, referring to national leadership without racial slurs. The crowd is agin it! Also, the libtards “look down” on them, etc. “Wages never seem to go up… When it comes to ideas, the advantage goes to us.” Heh, check the 2012 wave of “reformi-cons,” and the Trump-friendly “Cure for Trumpism” by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, and you’ll see “ideas” are something the wonks play with in the back room while the big boys play Ooga Booga and Conan The Republican.

Ryan’s a terrible attack dog, but the 327 people on the convention floor give him a lot of support, especially when he runs sentences together at the end to signal the climax. (He drops “America” from the “God Bless America,” one would like to think out of shame.) So this convention is not a total departure from tradition.

UPDATE 2.  Fuck, ABC’s running that golf chick and not letting me listen to Renfield — I mean Chris Christie! Christie is mad because “we’ve seen the Justice Department refuse to prosecute her… as a former federal prosecutor” — yeah, once upon a time people trusted him with that job! Well, it was Jersey — “I welcome the opportunity to hold Hillary Rodham Clinton accountable…” The crowd chants “Lock her up!” Christie, used to being humiliated by the boss, welcomes this turnaround.

Anyway, as Form Fed Pros, he promises, “I’m gonna present the case now against Hillary Rodham Clinton!” He means for this to be a mock trial, like Night of January 16th, but his argument is more like Libya is a mess, so she’s guilty right? Boko Haram, so she’s guilty, right?  And the crowd screams Guilty! If he asked them to scream Kill the bitch, or The gun is good, the penis is evil, they'd do that too. He even knocks Clinton for sucking up to Putin! Yeah, in defense of Putin's buddy Donald Trump! (In his gilt tower, Trump is laughing his ass off and wondering what he'll do to shame Christie when he gets back -- maybe make him eat a cowflop.)

I can't imagine that, each time the goons chant "lock her up," I'm the only one who thinks that, no matter how debased we've learned Christie to be, this is beneath contempt.

UPDATE 3. There's no need to repeat anything the attractive and poised Tiffany Trump is saying. What's maybe important is: Why is this important? I mean, everyone knows that every single one of the 27 family members whom Trump is having speak at the convention is, in the broader scheme of things, a waste of protoplasm, wealth-holders burning up capital, the effluvia of Trump's ambition. Nothing any of them has said in any venue has ever been noteworthy except as something to attach to a boldface name in a gossip column, or believable even when it's about the patriarch. (The guy at ABC News says he heard some "cute anecdotes" about Donald Trump. Please forward them.)

UPDATE 4. That was a nice "Star-Spangled Banner."

UPDATE 5. Forgive me, PBS just showed this afternoon's Trump convention manipulations and I thought for a second we had started all over again. In the tape, Reince Priebus is explaining to an uninterested and/or cowed audience that none of the challenges to Trump's candidacy were ever going to get anywhere, and brings in some poor, terrified woman to read some rules about the times, dates, and business of the Convention they're right in the middle of. Priebus is now speaking Parliamentarian super-fast like a tobacco auctioneer, which must look like shit to any normal people listening in -- and I'm sure none were. Wow -- and these are the Constitutionalists?

The really sad (Sad!) thing was, I missed Donald J. Trump Jr.'s speech, which I'm told was exactly what you would expect.

UPDATE 6. Crazy motherfucker Ben Carson is on, raving about the “politically elite” — yes, that's "politically elite," not "political elite"; I guess his brain sagged at the nexus of “politically correct” and “ruling elite,"  caved in on itself and smushed together. He's descrying “the narrative that’s being advanced by some in our own party — that a Hillary Clinton Administration wouldn’t be so bad…” The crowd snarls. “They’re not using their God-given brain,” assures Carson. Because, he warns, Clinton’s Presidency would be something America “may never recover from.” At first I thought he meant she’d make herself dictator for life — he’s capable of that sort of hyperbole  — but no, he meant she’d appoint judges who would have a “deleterious effect for years to come,” which to hear him tell it would be just as bad.

Then he gets into Saul Alinsky — and the crowd boos! They know about Alinsky, unlike most normal Americans, including the Democrats who are allegedly in his thrall. “Let me tell you something about Saul Alinsky," says Carson. "In the dedication page of his book he acknowledges Lucifer…” And guess what — Carson doesn’t get the joke! He goes into a weird tirade about how God is on all our money, yet Alinsky and the Democrats want to worship Satan — which is like saying, “Ellen Burstyn was in The Exorcist, so if you ever go see Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore you’re trying to take God out of our lives!”

Then Carson talks about Thomas Jefferson and the crowd knows immediately without any prompting because he is crazy Ben Carson that this is Tree of Liberty/Blood of Homosexuals time and they go screaming nuts! “He knew," howls Carson, "that we the people would recognize what was going on, and we would rise up…” REBEL YELLS! Perhaps Carson wanted to explain further, but they’ve already shoved him off stage as GE Smith and his Band of Mercenaries plays Shining Star and the old folks shake their butts and a Code Pink demonstrator carrying an anti-racism banner is grabbed and dragged out of the hall.

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A DEATH CULT, EVERY OBAMA LOOKS LIKE A HITLER.

The White House is having a "Youth Summit"...

...offering young people from around the country an opportunity to discuss the Affordable Care Act and other issues with senior White House officials. White House Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ followers ages 18-35 are eligible to apply to attend this White House event on December 4.

Interested in joining? Sign up for your chance to join other White House social media followers at the #WHYouth social.

This anodyne event has me halfway between "good for them" and "so what." But among my usual subjects, it's Hitler. No, really -- The Right Scoop:

White House youth. I think it has a certain ring to it…don’t you?

Jim Geraghty of National Review:

It's Springtime for Obama. #WHYouth

Bryan Preston of PJ Media:

We Have a ‘White House Youth’ Now?... It’s about the cult, not the country, with this administration.

(Preston also complains Obama's "hosting this 'summit'" -- Scare quotes! So-called! -- "not to talk about our nation’s history or anything that all Americans could get behind. It’s hosting this summit to transmit its talking points about Obamacare." To appease the right -- always a big concern with Democratic Administrations, alas -- I advise the President to say "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two" before launching into his explanation of national policy/fascist propaganda.)

It's a sign of the times that, while normal people would be embarrassed to be associated with this nonsense, rightbloggers are actually reveling in this comparison of a bunch of kids visiting the White House to Nazi bund meetings. "The hashtag #WHYouth prompted all sorts of Hitler Youth-related mockery," giggles Breitbart.com. "The Photos ‘shop themselves and the tweets roll on," whoops Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air. My favorite is RedState's Moe Lane:

Somebody in the Obama administration had an opportunity to say You know, fellows: perhaps we shouldn’t describe this upcoming young person summit thing in a way that could be heard as “White House Youth” – only he or she didn’t, and so here we go again.

It's not his fault -- they keep making him compare Obama to Hitler! Just like all those people on the internet who wouldn't be wasting their weekends Photoshopping a toothbrush mustache on Obama if he weren't always going around annexing the Sudetenland and gassing Jews.

I've been joking about this for years, but it's worth noting that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has had a powerful effect on modern conservatism -- mainly by lowering the brethren's reading levels, but also by convincing them that slapping a swastika on anything they don't like is analysis, and inspiring a million puke-streams like "Top 50 reasons people keep comparing Obama to Hitler" (and no, that cowboy's not kidding, nor taking his meds, apparently).

It's been going on long enough that I wouldn't surprised if it were damaging the conservative brand. Or maybe just clarifying what it stands for.

UPDATE. Meanwhile, for upmarket conservatives, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset

That's how the toffs do it: Don't say Hitler, use abstractions. Less messy.

THE REAL PROBLEM. One of the best things I've read about this Giffords situation is by "hisnewreasons," made in comments to my last post:

I don't think Sarah Palin's rhetoric has inspired violence, because it's essentially meaningless. Whether it's Glenn Beck's Armageddon talk or the internet blather about gun confiscation and socialism, all of this tough talk eventually leads to rather banal ends -- i.e., the rise of a John Boehner to high office.

It's that banality that you find underneath the rage of suburbanites who seem themselves as Nathan Hale, simply because they joined the Tea Party. You don't find potential assassins, but tourists who practically need cannons to take down a moose on hunting trips...

"Lock and load" doesn't make people violent. It makes them stupid.

Just so. Their deliberately menacing blood-of-tyrants, Second-Amendment-solutions blather looks, in the wake of the Giffords shooting, rather sinister -- especially since, after one of their targets was slain, their first reaction was defensive rather than abashed.

But violent delusions aren't the only kind from which they suffer. Take National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez and her recent mooning over that nice Catholic boy Marco Rubio. Rubio inspired Lopez with some mild fourscore-and-seven-years-ago bombast to a bizarre flight of fantasy:

...Rubio recalled — with a savvy “Señor Smith Goes to Washington” appeal — visiting some of the Founders’ memorials in and around town. They stand as reminders and even rallying cries. Those who fought and died to establish this country, those who worked on its founding, believed that “every single human person had inherent rights that came from God,” he reminded the crowd... And what the 112th Congress does will help determine, Rubio insisted, whether, “when my children are my age,” they will come back here to admire the monuments of our core national values, or merely be “looking at relics of a once-great nation.”

I couldn’t have been the only one to picture the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes — and without feeling entirely absurd.

Normal people may or may not be inspired by Rubio's patriotic mush, but they will be inoculated by common sense from taking it too seriously. When they hear the mournful line about relics, they may not know that it is straight out of a specific class of wingnut propaganda ordnance, meant to portray the brethren as the last loyal defenders of freedom -- like Douglas MacArthur's ravings about wanting the curse on a dying soldier's lips to be Roosevelt's name and not his own, and other such self-pitying bluster. They may even feel a little wistful, observe that freedom isn't free, resolve to teach their kids the Pledge of Allegiance, etc.

But they won't fantasize about liberal apes romping in the ruins of our national monuments while Charlton Heston roars GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! And if they did they'd be embarrassed. But K-Lo is proud. To her Planet of the Apes is a work of social prophecy, like 1984.

That's how her mind works -- and how their minds work. The "eliminationist" tropes we've been hearing about recently are part of the problem, but so are the less violent notions we see them parroting every day: That Obama is a Muslim, an alien, a psychopath, and consciously trying to destroy the United States; that Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical; that America's scientists are engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to bankrupt the nation via global warming fraud; that deficits, which were harmless and even kinda fun under Reagan, are under Obama a menace to the future of our famous statues; etc. etc. etc.

The cumulative impact of this kind of magical thinking may or may not lead to assassinations, but it certainly weakens the sufferer's ability to respond to even obvious problems in any reasonable way. And in the long run this is more dangerous to the Republic than the grrr-lookit-me-I'm-a-Minuteman blood-lust we're currently focused on. The wingnut looks, for example, upon millions of citizens financially unable to visit a doctor when they're sick, and the first thing he asks himself is, "How can we defend these people from socialism?" He sees the stock market doing great while ordinary people can't find jobs, and surmises, "This Administration is anti-business." Etc.

Even if you embarrass them (fond hope!) into talking less about guns and revolution, you aren't touching the real problem. I'm not confident that it's curable. The best we can do is keep them away from sharp objects and the levers of power.

UPDATE. Lotta pushback in comments. I'm aware of the copious evidence of conservatives gone kill-crazy, including the bill of particulars of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence's Insurrectionist Timeline (which makes Michelle Malkin's "progressive climate of hate" list look like a kindergarten bad conduct report). And I can imagine the effect the constant threats of violence, masked and otherwise, have on Democratic organizing, especially in communities infested with gun nuts and tricornered delusionals.

I still say that's a problem but not the problem. These nuts wouldn't be out there going shooty-shooty in the first place if they hadn't been convinced by the orchestrators of their own stupidity that Big Gummint is a tyranny that cannot be effected by voting and petitioning. Why should they take part in working groups or doorknocking campaigns when they've been told, contrary to all evidence and common sense, that because these things worked for Obama they have ceased to work for white rageaholics, who must in consequence attack every policy as if it were Bunker Hill?

UPDATE 2. A long comment on this post from Doghouse Riley. Includes:

So much of our politics seems to be a debate about how best to remove most of the pieces of eggshell from our omelette, and none about figuring out how to properly crack an egg.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yes, apparently it's supposed to be played this fast.

•   I originally had only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie to offer you this week -- this one about bullshit liberals (and others) who think you’re getting too worked up about the end of abortion rights. But today I was in a generous mood and thought, screw it, these guys have been working hard all week and, after they’ve trudged home on Friday covered in coal dust and sweat, they would enjoy the refreshment of my new post about some other junk on the Internet. Generous as I am, please remember subscriptions are what make my world go around, and buy one for a friend while you’re at it -- they’ll be non-plussed to receive such high-quality prose five times a week in their inbox, and all honor with redound to you. 

•   I have mixed emotions about the disastrous recent polling on the Supreme Court:

A Morning Consult-Politico poll taken Tuesday found that “relatively few voters believe the ruling should be reversed entirely (28%). Half of voters said Roe should not be overturned, up from 45% who said the same in December.” Furthermore, “voters are more than twice as likely to say abortion should be legal nationally than that it should be illegal. … Relatively few voters believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases (35%).”

Worse, from the justices’ perspective, a mere 14 percent say they have a lot of confidence in the court. Support for expanding the court is up, with 44 percent strongly or somewhat favoring the addition of justices. That’s nothing compared with the 67 percent who strongly or somewhat support term limits. In addition, 74 percent support imposing a mandatory code of ethics; 63 percent favor an age limit; and 59 percent would like the court to have an equal number of Democrats, independents and Republicans (having dispensed with the fraud that the partisans in robes aren’t political). 

Part of me of course finds this hilarious. SCOTUS has been a nest of partisan ratfuckery for years, and it’s about time its stench finally reached the nostrils of the American people. Clarence Thomas, husband of the insurrectionist Ginni, blustering about the respect owed the Court is so rich that if I didn’t know better I’d swear it was some kind of inside joke to show the rabble just how out of touch he and his fellow wingnut operatives are.  As it is conservative commentators, who have been so insistent about defending justices from the merest show of displeasure at their actions, have not to my knowledge acknowledged the contempt their actions have brought upon the Court, and that the proles now want their Black Robed Masters term-limited. Gotta admit, that’s funny!

On the other hand, though, this could be seen as a troubling new development in a decades-long trend. Conservatives have been methodically spreading contempt on government since before Reagan, rightly figuring that the more citizens mistrusted their own government, the easier it would be to elect Republican con artists who could loot the Treasury of behalf of their contractor donors via privatization. Better still for their malign purposes, it also deprived those voters of the expectation that government could render them any meaningful assistance, making it far easier to cheat them on services and safeguards, leading to the landscape of collapsed bridges, delayed and denied justice, and general resentment with which we are now cursed.

The raspberries their Respect for the Court yap is getting now from normal people shows they probably didn’t anticipate that their Drown It In The Bathtub ethos would also affect government institutions that they themselves need healthy and respected in order to further their grift. 

And it won’t stop there: Think about the curses conservatives been casting at the “woke” military, ostensibly because they have normal diversity programs but really because they failed to support the Trump program -- including the attempted coup. This is undoubtedly a big part of the reason why the military’s poll numbers are down among Americans. It’s not nearly as bad as SCOTUS’ collapse, but after a few more years of wingnut hit squads screaming that soldiers are too friendly to the people they hate (i.e. women and minorities) and too unfriendly to their Russian buddies, who knows what might happen. 

A grim thought: Neither the Court nor the military is directly answerable to voters.

LOOTERS.

As you may expect in the wake of the Baltimore riots, on the right it's all ooga-booga all the time. The Mayor of Baltimore said that in giving citizens space to demonstrate, the city had also given "those who wished to destroy space to do that," which to normal people means that if you choose to have a free society, as opposed to a police state, some people will abuse the privilege. To professional bullshit artists like Paul Mirengoff, however, it was evidence that the Mayor was telling rioters to go nuts. Fox's Lou Dobbs said the mayor had "basically have given a free pass to those who are tearing up property," and his guest Keith Ablow responded, "if you want to tear down the system, you might be taking your cues, by the way, from a president who has given the appearance that there is every justification for any level of anger at our country because we're such despicable people." Further proof that ObamaHitler is responsible, from Warner Todd Huston: "Priorities: Obama Sends THREE Reps to Freddie Gray Funeral–Sent ZERO to American Sniper Chris Kyle’s and British PM Thatcher’s Funerals."

At American Thinker, Thomas Lifson decried the "paltry number of arrests" in Baltimore, and quoted his colleague, racial obsessive Colin Flaherty, who said that it didn't matter that crime has gone down in Baltimore, what's important is that "in Baltimore, police will not arrest black criminals" (apparently they were just giving Freddie Gray a lift -- as they've done frequently to others), and the cops, the statisticians, and the media are all siding with their friends the Negroes against persecuted white people:

The idea that crime in Baltimore is going down comes up every time a case of black mob violence hits the local news. Which is pretty much all the time. Everything except that black part, that is, which they leave out.

This, folks, is the modern conservative movement -- a toxic stew of racist paranoia and Nixonian lawn-order. It has nothing to do with that "libertarian moment" PR campaign from last summer, the memory of which gets more grimly funny every month. There's an election coming up and they need to get as many horrified honkies as possible into the van.

Speaking of libertarianism,  here's Robby Soave at libertarian flagship Reason having a rap session with the Baltimoreans:

Violence is violence, and it’s wrong. That’s a foundational principle of libertarianism, for one thing.

Fight the power! Next week he'll tell them about the grave injustice of affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 43,022.

The revanchism continues! The usual suspects are all het up about Hitlery saying, "What difference does it make?" -- which also happens to be the response of normal people when you tell them this whole Benghazi tsimmis is about whether the mob killed four people over a video or over the Siege of Cordoba.

Conservatives seem to sense this isn't going to burn the motherfucker down, so some of the nuttier ones like Rand Paul are expanding their conspiracy theories, which ThinkProgress notices, which in turn outrages Ann Althouse, who sees TP's headline "GOP Senator Pushes Gun-Running Conspiracy Theory During Benghazi Hearing" and complains,

Rand Paul asks a question. It seems histrionic to equate asking a question with pushing a conspiracy theory, and the truth is Hillary Clinton's answer has the ring of... lying. 

The effort on the left to stereotype Rand Paul as a nutcase is so strenuous that it stimulates my root-for-the-underdog instinct. And makes me suspicious. I feel a Rand-Paul-must-be-destroyed conspiracy theory blossoming within.

Maybe she'd prefer the characterization of the impeccably rightwing Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit: "Rand Paul: Benghazi May Have Been Cover-up for Obama Gun-Running." Or that of WorldNetDaily: "RAND PAUL: OBAMA IN GUNS-TO-JIHADISTS COVER-UP? 'A kind of international Fast and Furious in Benghazi.'" Or of Aaron Klein: "MEDIA IGNORE HILLARY’S BOMBSHELL BENGHAZI CLAIM. Secretary insists she did not know about gun-running at U.S. mission." I wonder if, when unbidden negative thoughts disturb her, Althouse tells herself they've been published at left-wing sites so she can discount them.

Other apparatchiks are working on getting city folk to love Republicans. Edward L. Glaeser at City Journal says "successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry" -- which sounds a lot like the "black people like to go to church, why won't they vote for our party, it's full of evangelical preachers?" argument we've been hearing for years. And sure enough, Glaeser seeks to win urbanites with school vouchers, congestion pricing, and knocking down lovely old buildings on the theory that developers will build in their place cheap apartments instead of luxury condos.

At least he acknowledges that the GOP's been punting city votes for years, but he doesn't seem to understand why. Hint: Cities are full of black people, hence Ooga Booga. And the point is moot anyway, as the In Thing for Republicans now is to disenfranchise cities by rigging the electoral vote.

When all else fails they can go back to previous formulae:

It's with love I say it: Don't ever change.

THE FIRST SPUTTERS OF INDICTMENT SEASON.

At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I have unlocked a taxonomy of Trump defenses inspired by his latest indictments. There is no need to explicate the brute brayings of guys like Tim Pool, so I confined myself to complainers who try a little spin – not that the spin makes them any more intelligent or convincing; in fact in some ways they’re more pathetic than the dummies yelling “Civil War!” or “Fix!” or “Kill Biden!” because they’re like precocious kids who have just made their first acquaintance with irony and, seeing how favorably some people react to it, try to emulate it without understanding how it works. 

Some of the operatives are already spinning out of control. Erick Erickson has a real lulu. I mention in the REBID item the chronic bothsider reactions of prestige media clucks; well, Erickson, who after all has been employed by CNN, tries his own version of it:

I don’t think Democrats realize how radicalizing it was for Republicans that Barack Obama sued nuns to force them to pay for abortions. Nor do I think Democrats realize how radicalizing it is now for culturally conservative people across races and political parties that they’re pushing transgenderism as hard as they are. They simply do not realize how much of an existential threat they seem to many voters.

They literally sued a bunch of nuns to force them to pay to murder children, which is what abortion is to a great many people.

I don’t think Republicans realize how radicalizing it was for Democrats to see the “character counts” GOP come out for a twice-divorced serial adulterer…

There is blame enough to share, quoth Erickson, between the Trump fans and the baby-murdering nun abusers! Anyway, because he can’t help himself, Erickson repeats the threat popular among his ilk (“Hell is coming for Democrats, most particularly for Joe Biden and members of his family and cabinet. Republicans will pay them back in kind”) and then tries on the Solomon robes and proposes a solution:

The old man on the right must stop trying to get back into the office. And the old man on the left must pardon the old man on the right and bring all pressure to bear on the two state prosecutors, both of whom are Democrats, to stop their prosecutions too.

It’s like a glitchy AI version of The West Wing. Eventually even Erickson stops pretending to believe it could happen and starts raving about Civil War. Once again I must ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

BRINGING A KNIFE TO A SHOTGUN WEDDING.

Shorter Dennis Prager on bringing together social and fiscal conservatives:




Money shot:

The entire American experiment in smaller government — and even in secular government — was based on the presumption that Americans individually would be actively religious. Unlike Europeans of the Enlightenment era — and unlike the Left today — the Founders understood that people are not basically good. That is a defining belief of Judaism as well as of Christianity. Therefore, to be good, the great majority of people need moral religion and belief in accountability to a morally judging God. In other words, you will have either the big God of Judaism and Christianity or the big state of the Left.

Which is why Europe went up in flames and to this day is used exclusively for guano farming -- oh, wait, no, actually they get two months of vacations a year, socialized medicine, and Gothic cathedrals, and make us look like shit.

The thing is: Prager's probably addressing this appeal (if that's the word for it) to bullshit libertarians like David French who already don't give a shit about any freedoms that don't apply directly to themselves and their employers, and whose libertarianism is a Jedi mind trick that only works on people like Dennis Prager. And if it won't make any difference to them, try and imagine how it will be read by normal people who only seem to be hanging in with the Democrats because they're afraid the Republicans will destroy all safety nets and do away all public positions except Witchfinder General, Corporation Bagman in Chief, and Keeper of the Rapestick. It's like Prager is saying, "Everything you hate about us? That's the part that's non-negotiable!"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Extended version!

•   I know it must seem like old news by now but there are still Confederate statue defenders out there in Conservativeland. And I'm not talking about the bullshit variants invented recently, like when someone tears down a non-Confederate statue and they blame liberals. I'm talking about straight-up hell-yeah-Robert E. Lee at National Review by Bruce Westrate, who "teaches history at a prep school in Dallas."

It's got all the hits. First, the usual Harper's-letter bellyaching about being ganged up on: "I find myself consigned by the media to the ranks of would-be Nazis... simply because I’ve always enjoyed such venues [as Civil War memorials], along with the commemorative Civil War art that abounds among them." I can't find any evidence of a Twitter or web kerfuffle over Westrate's love of Civil War stuff, so I assume he means people who know him think he's a jerk.

Westrate goes on about "young people, abetted by the feckless opportunism of politicians, turning to the likes of the Taliban" and decides "it's all about safe spaces," "all complexity is lost, and context is rendered subservient to a cleansing," etc. and similar sentiments set adrift in a river of high-flown gush. Also, "Shall the FDR monument be removed to appease the descendants of interned Nisei Japanese," ha ha shall it not answer me libs. The guy really loves him some Lee; since he's a historian he must know the General was a slaver and not an especially kindly one either, but he never mentions that, and even defends the Jim Crow era vintage of many Confederate monuments as a misunderstanding:

And while the erection of commemorative statues unfortunately coincided with the emergence of the “Jim Crow” South, there are more understandable motivations that, I would argue, took precedence. These were martial creations, after all, intended to commemorate battlefield feats. Historians have long observed that veterans typically (and understandably) avoid public remembrance and consecration of battlefield combat until decades after the event. The erection of these statues coincides with the dedication of most of the larger American battlefield parks and cemeteries. So, they were aimed less at betrayed freedmen then at kindling popular remembrance of the slain, along with the suffering wounded Confederate veterans had endured.

There, now, black folks, now let's have Jeb Stuart back on his pedestal in Richmond so you can see him on your way to work every day. Also, did you know black people were involved in the slave trade?

If you can't imagine anyone who isn't brain-damaged or already a Neo-Confederate going for this, you must remember that the salvation of the statues is a new Lost Cause, something normal people increasingly abhor, which wingnuts lament in the sort of hurt tones with which they also used to lament that America was not Great anymore before they decided to fix that by electing a senile criminal President. And now that the U.S. military has just banned the Stars 'n' Bars, I guess Westrate and his fellow Rebs have a lot more to cry about. 

•   If you haven't subscribed to the newsletter yet, here, have some freebies -- not only the previously cited cancel-culture one but also one on how amid all his crimes and catastrophes Trump is doing one good thing. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS YOUNG MAN WILL GO FAR.

Remember when Megan McArdle was telling a horrified and in some cases grief-stricken audience that the Grenfell Tower inferno was no reason to go all crazy with sprinklers and fireproof cladding and other so-called "safety" features when the money would be better spent on corporate tax cuts? I think one Max Bloom, a National Review "editorial intern," has topped her -- figuratively speaking, of course, though he defends McArdle with great passion, lamenting that she was "savaged on social media" only for her "transparently reasonable sentiments... People don’t, it turns out, particularly appreciate the notion that safety is a trade-off; they particularly don’t appreciate hearing about the importance of such trade-offs in the aftermath of an unbearable tragedy."

That last is true and, if you were unfamiliar with the sort of people who write for National Review, you might expect Bloom next to acknowledge the corollary: that people get angry at "transparently reasonable sentiments" like McArdle's when they're expressed on the heels of a tragedy because that's how normal human beings react to such boorishness. But Bloom seems never to have had such a realization. That is, he knows these humanoids respond in such a way, but he fails to see the sense in it -- why are these littlebrains so sentimental over something as ridiculous as the lives of people who are not Max Bloom? Don't they see how smart guys like him suffer from their unreasonableness?

There is very little that is worse for skeptics of big government than a tragedy. Since people demand action after a tragedy, tragedies tend to lead to greater regulation, and regulation is subject to a ratchet effect: Once regulations are passed, they are hard to reverse and the new regulatory climate becomes normal. The political effects of a tragedy can shape society for decades — it was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in lower Manhattan that brought about new regulatory standards in factories, and the Titanic changed maritime safety forever.

I like to think some NR editor suggested he put in the Titanic to show that rich people die in these things, too, not just grubby poors; and Bloom thought, well, it's pandering but I'll be needing his letter of recommendation.

Anyway, Bloom eventually counsels compromise with the weepy regulation-ratcheters, for the good of the cause:

It stands to reason, then, that conservatives and libertarians have an interest in promoting modest, cheap, and popular safety rules and regulations. If the United Kingdom had banned the flammable cladding used in Grenfell, as America and Germany had, no one would be talking today about tearing down low-income housing across London, and the cost would be only a few thousand pounds more per development.

The real Grenfell tragedy is, we could have saved money!

Libertarians in particular will find these preventive regulations difficult to stomach. But most of the world is not libertarian — certainly, not after a trauma of this magnitude — and so, difficult to stomach though they may be, safety rules and regulations, carefully chosen and managed, are a worthwhile investment in a slightly more libertarian future.

As grotesque as it looks when put so baldly, it's really what the tradeoff's been all along -- the rest of us trying to live safer, healthier, more humane lives, and these monsters trying to figure out just how little they can get away with letting us have.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Ah, that's the stuff. I miss noise.
(Can you believe they did this in 2003? The ex-kids are alright!) 

•   Biden's speech appears to have gone down a treat among normal people -- naturally, as it was delivered by an avuncular old man who already did a good job of delivering COVID vaccinations and is now promising to similarly fix other fucked-up shit. The brethren are furiously spinning it. Ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson first tried "Republicans Should Be Encouraged By The Biden Speech," on the grounds that it was "a desperate grab for control" that's "going to cause more inflation and that's going to hurt Biden" (Gasp! Not inflation! Someone get out the old WIN pins!) and anyway "the Democrats are headed into disarray... Joe Biden's days are numbered and he knows it."

Erickson must have looked at the polls, because the next day he was claiming "two days after Joe Biden’s first address to Congress, more people are talking about Tim Scott’s response than Joe Biden’s speech." If this were true, since Erickson thinks Biden's speech was a dog I don't see how that's supposed to be bad for Democrats; also, to the extent people are talking about Scott, it's certainly attributable to fascination that there's still a black Republican in Congress, and that he claims liberals called him the n-word. (Didn't say who, though! Maybe he's saving it for his autobiography.) This routine is catnip to Erickson, who praises Scott for "exposing how must [sic] the progressive wokes really hate this country" and "reminding Americans how out of touch the elite tastemakers and opinion setters are." Candace Owens, Sheriff David Clark, and Ali Alexander must be pissed, all their dreams of joining Ron DeSantis on a You're The Real Racist GOP Unity Ticket having crumbled. (I wonder whether Scott's speech moved the 47% of Republicans who think Derek Chauvin is innocent.)

Peggy Noonan does her bit, and it's a chef's casserole of rightwing received opinion. Being smarter than Erickson she knows she'd better acknowledge that Biden seems nice, but then it's Coffee Break Over Everyone Back On Their Heads: After the snottiness that has become the new GOP SOP on Biden's social distancing and masking ("playacting Pandemic Theatre" -- guess she thinks gin kills the germs before they can get to her lungs), and some How Will You Pay for It posturing, it's time to Reacharound Across The Aisle:

The president said again he is eager to negotiate with Republicans. There isn’t much evidence of this, but here are the reasons he should be treating them with respect and as equal partners. It would be good for the country to see the Senate actually working—negotiating, making deals, representing constituencies. It would be good for the Democrats to show they’re not just playing steamroller and flattening the Republicans; they’re reasoning because they’re reasonable. Also they need Republicans to co-own legislative outcomes because whatever they are they’ll be very liberal. Negotiation and compromise...

I'm seriously asking: Does anyone believe this shit anymore? After Tubby paid off Republican donors with his trillion-dollar-plus Tax and Jobs Act, and all the pandemic spending, people have started losing their fear of deficit spending; also, they know economically things are fucked up and bullshit and even Republican voters want a higher minimum wage -- but the Republican Party is still blubbering about deficits and bootstraps, preaching Reaganism to generations who weren't around to be bamboozled by it and who probably look upon the artifacts of the Age of Alex P. Keaton with horror and disgust. How are Democrats supposed to negotiate with that?

Noonan alludes to this shift in the vaguest way possible  -- she sees "a deep reconsideration" and Americans "questioning that oldest American tradition: ambition" and seeking "something new, less driven, more communal." That could mean what the left is proposing with anti-racism and mutual aid -- or it could be evangelical home-school Bible rule. I think she sees a replay of the 1970s, when social and political upheavals led to the Reagan reactionary wave on which she built her career. But it's interesting that she won't say out loud where it will go; a true careerist always leaves the door open for a heel-turn. 

•   This week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies include this one about the stupid Biden Bans Red Meat thing that conservatives were spreading a week ago but you know what? Better you should just go in the front door and look at all the stories that don't have locks next to their descriptors. And then subscribe! I know some of you can afford it. 

THE LATEST CRAZE: AFTERBIRTHERISM!  The brethren learn that in 1991 a publicist said Obama was Kenyan, and suddenly birtherism is resurrected -- in a new, Möbius strip form, Afterbirtherism, in which Obama is attacked as not being foreign born:

It is evidence--not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

Well, if that isn't an impeachable offense, why do we even have a Constitution?

The publicist says there was nothing sinister in it, she just fucked up, and rightbloggers go, oh sure you did -- you "fucked up" at concealing your decades-long plot to deceive the American people! The Right Sphere has our favorite version:

Despite the numerous times the article states that the booklet does not change the fact that Obama was born in Hawaii, the moron Left and their smear merchants are running with the “Breitbart.com has gone birther” narrative. This is their way of trying to kill the story before it makes it to the mainstream media, or at the very least, poison the story and change what the mainstream media says about the new information.

Later, this cowboy hears the publicist's explanation, and sees that it's all been just a misunderstanding and -- oh, who am I kidding?

Not good enough. Who gave her the “fact” she failed to check? There was no google or wikipedia back in 1991. This is not the end of the story.

Second place goes to American Thinker's Thomas Lifson, who closes his Afterbirther essay thus:

It is the sort of thing that can be discussed by anyone, and presents visual elements, which operate on a different part of the brain than words do.

Worthy of Criswell, that one.

Looking at the ferocious stupidity of the posts and of their commenters (love the guy at Gateway Pundit who says, "Everyone should call the New York Times and ask why their journalists never found this or reported on it"), it's clear that the people who go for this don't even qualify as a fringe -- they're like severely mentally-disabled children who react spasmodically to certain colors or shapes. Yet as long as there's clicks and cash in it, the ones who are not dumb but merely cynical, like Ole Perfesser Instapundit, will indulge them.

On the bright side, I can't imagine normal people hearing this bedlam and being convinced of anything except the need to get away from these nuts. Maybe soon the Afterbirthers will just retreat into their private world, and leave the fate of the nation to people who haven't completely lost their minds.

UPDATE. Famous libertarian Nick Gillespie approaches the subject:

... Obama's most-ardent champions must agree this sort of thing is a pretty good catch by the Breitbart.com crew. When you're in a race that's heating up, this sort of blast from the past is the last thing with which you want to be dealing... 

There's no question that this sort of document may add to the idea that Obama is willing to edit and revise his life story depending on circumstance (the insurance company story about this mother's treatments strikes me as a more telling example, since Obama is not really implicated in the author booklet in the same way).

To be fair, there's also a lot of stuff in there about how the distant past isn't as important as the present, so you know Gillespie's really part of the plague-on-both-your-houses libertarian Third Way, which is basically conservatism plus marijuana.

UPDATE 2. Gender of publicist corrected in post, as part of the cover-up.

BLOGGING THE ATROCITIES. More crime scene reporting from Ann Althouse:

Is that what you want in a President? Someone who feels extra confusion because she's a mother?

But I don't believe that for one minute. I think that was just what was considered a good script. I don't happen to think it is a good script, because I don't want a President to roil into a mommyesque ball of emotion when a few people are in danger. Yet that's not Hillary. The only question is why she thought a statement like that was a good one. She probably wanted to make sure not to confirm the widely held belief that she's unemotional, and, while she was at it, delight all the ladies out there who lap up emotional drivel.

Apparently Althouse thinks she's watching a TV show called "America's Next Top Democratic Candidate." If Clinton gets shot, she'll tell us it's a ploy to bring some of the old Kennedy magic to her campaign.

I've been hanging around this echo chamber a long time. I wonder what normal people think when they stumble upon this sort of madness? Say Joe or Jane Six-Pack mistypes an URL and comes across Ann Winebox (or even Roy 40-oz). What do they imagine they're looking at? Maybe they have to read a whole issue of People to get back to normal.

And we wonder why no one is interested in politics.

COLD SHOWERS FOR EVERYBODY! It's Friday -- and at National Review Online, you know what that means: time for sex hatred! The surprising dud in the bunch is Jonah Goldberg, who emits one of those No Guardrails thumbsuckers about how Madonna and Pamela Anderson (!) are turning girls into prostitutes with the help of the Democratic Party. He even writes "What matters is the signal such people send." As usual with Goldberg, this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The hapless K.-Lo. fares little better, submitting what seems to be a synopsis of a botched interview -- maybe the Margarita Hut had a generous buy-back policy -- with the authoress of a book called Girl Gone Mild: Fashionably Long, Overexplanatory Subtitle. From the precis, we may judge that insofar as the book has a point (besides serving as a rightwing front-group party favor), it is that some young women will not wear thongs, dammit, despite what Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may think. "Today, more and more sensible young women are bridling when they hear 'bitches' and 'hos' on the radio," she writes. Very good! How do they react when they hear "bear my baby whether you want to or not, subhuman?"

As often happens in these dimwit competitions, the prize goes to a newbie: legacy pledge Ryan T. Anderson, "an assistant editor at First Things," who says that a skit the Princeton frosh are required to attend "amounts to little more than mandated indoctrination in liberal sexual ideology." Anderson fails to describe the "Sex on a Saturday Night" sketch, so I had to go read another rightwing kid's review, and even through that cloudy prism could see that the skit is a typical bit of agitprop telling the youngsters that date rape is bad. Does Anderson have a different POV? No, he says:

You can tell incoming freshmen that date-rape and other sexual assaults are illegal without subjecting them to an hour of sexual skits, innuendo, “coming-out” scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through.

I hear ya, kid. Similarly, Crest toothpaste didn't have to sell its product by putting commercials on "Will & Grace." They could have just told people how darned good for them Crest was. Turns out people prefer their selling messages to come with racy humor. Who knew?

Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable."

One always hears this from young conservatives who were subjected to just such allegedly soul-crushing mockery (Anderson is a Princeton grad), yet somehow managed to retain their contrary opinions into adulthood. How did Anderson do it? Maybe he passed long nights POW-style in his dormitory cell, scratching "God and Man at Yale" on the wall with a piece of purloined charcoal. In any case, is it true the overwhelming majority of students helplessly adopt every piece of nonsense their professors put in their heads? Because if so, I'm going back to college, and looking for a teaching job at an all-girls' school.