NEW FRONTIERS IN B.S.

Conservatives have been trying all kinds of anti-protest yak to try and counteract America's sudden realization that cops are out of control and black people bear the brunt -- like the traditional Cop Worship thing, the "boo hoo protestors cancelled Gone With the Wind" thing, etc. But I think their big opportunity will be blaming protests for COVID-19 spikes. This is from a mailer I got from National Review today, a "news editors' roundup" -- Jack Crowe cites the Tom Hanks COVID test results and the NBA season cancellation publicized March 11 as what "turned the disease from a media novelty into a visceral reality," then:

Just as it took one day and two relatively trivial developments to awaken Americans to the scale of the threat, it took the events of one day for them to forget. 

Memorial Day, the day George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis Police officer, changed everything. Suddenly, mentions of social distancing and masks, which had dominated news coverage for weeks, disappeared from the big cable shows and the front pages, replaced by coverage of the civil unrest sweeping the country. Gone, too, was the opprobrium meted out to recalcitrant “lockdown protesters,” who selfishly refused to stay home as an act of shared sacrifice. Politicians at the federal and state level, who had been appearing daily to remind their constituents about the importance of social distancing, were suddenly celebrating the open flouting of the rules they had imposed.

Now, normal people reading this might wonder: Didn't something else happen on Memorial Day -- namely, a whole lot of states, many of them red and not really protest hotspots, had opened up bars and beaches for the holiday weekend? Isn't that much more likely to be the cause of COVID spikes -- especially in states (cited in the mailer!) like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina?

You're gonna love Crowe's pitch there:

These case spikes may not be directly attributable to the recent protests. But as the NBA cancellation and Tom Hanks’s announcement demonstrates, the public is fickle, responding to high-profile cues rather than CDC announcements about which phase of reopening their state is in. 

If Americans across the country turned on their televisions in recent weeks, they saw virtually every major city awash in protesters, many of whom didn’t bother to wear masks or had them pulled down. Those protesters were allowed to move about freely, and in many cases encouraged to do so by “public health experts.” All of a sudden, the neighborhood barbecue or pool party didn’t seem so dangerous.

So according to Crowe, Mr. and Mrs. America didn't respond to the call of the ancient holiday weekend when they broke social distancing; no, they saw the protests on the TV and thought, "We were just sitting at home watching TV but, since the kids are giving each other COVID at the protests, I might's well take the family down the shore and eat burgers and drink beers and go swimming with a bunch of people I don't know."

Plenty of others are already working the basic theme, but Crowe takes the cake for creativity. So far.

(I should add that in my own personal experience, and that of others, protestors have a greater tendency to keep their masks on than people at bars and restaurants.)

UPDATE. LOL:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Metro Public Health issued more than a dozen citations to businesses violating COVID-19 Phase Two guidelines this weekend, three of which are bars on Broadway, including Underground and Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk. 

Owners told News 2 it’s a double standard and they’re sick of it. 

“It’s unfair for 5,000 people to march in front of our place yesterday in direct violation of the Phase Two order and then for Mayor Cooper and Dr. Caldwell to come in last night and give us citations,” said Bryan Lewis, attorney for Steve Smith, who owns Kid Rock’s and Honky Tonk Central, both cited this weekend.

Go here to see a picture of the folks crammed in and knockin' 'em back at Kid Rock's. But it's the marches that're making people sick. Well, it's no shock to see motivated reasoning among local merchants who a few months earlier were probably telling the cops "how come you're not out arresting street punks instead of writing me tickets?"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 Locals. They're good.

•    I did a thing for the newsletter (this issue free even to non-subscribers! How can I do it? Low overhead!) about last night's debate. The only way you can paint it as a victory for Tubby is if you grade it solely on yelling, posturing, and other alpha-ape displays of dominance. I certainly don't understand all the people saying, as "Access Maggie" Haberman did, that he "heeded the pleas of his advisers to tone it down." As I observed in the newsletter, that lasted maybe ten minutes. Perhaps Haberman means he sometimes resorted his baby-whisper voice between bellows, but on my TV he was mostly his usual self -- and, as I observed much further back than this, his is not an act that wears well over time, let alone during a pandemic. And who on God's green earth thinks hollering "I'm the least racist person here" over and over again is a winning strategy -- except for total racists, and he's already got them locked up? For the election, I am cautiously optimistic, which is to say frightened rather than despairing. 

•   Speaking of white supremacists, Republican golden boy Madison Cawthorn -- Good looking! Young! Disabled, but charismatically so like Greg Abbott! Running for a safe seat in the South! -- keeps outing himself as a Nazi, and the media keeps outing itself as unable to accept the evidence. Candidate Cawthorn first became famous for his effusions over a visit to "the Fuhrer"'s house in Germany. One could have interpreted his remark charitably, and conservatives did: My very favorite of these attempts is National Review's "Madison Cawthorn Is Not a Nazi." There's a headline that doesn't arouse suspicion! Cawthorn's also been accused of prevaricating about his career and military intention, and of sexual harassment, and of still more fash weirdness:

Cawthorn oddly follows precisely 88 people on Twitter. (88 is white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.”) He posed for a photo wearing a gun holster emblazoned with a Spartan soldier’s helmet, a symbol associated with far-right gun culture in general and the Oath Keepers specifically.

Also he called his no-work company "SPQR."  But, ho ho, maybe he just doesn't know what he's saying! "It would surprise me if Cawthorn knew that these have become alt-right symbols," tut-tutted Reason's Robby Soave, "just as it would surprise most people to learn that making the OK gesture will get them branded as white nationalists by hate-group watchers." (Not if they're paying attention, it wouldn't.) Regular old newsies cut Cawthorn slack, too; even stories that point out more dumb shit he did refer to him affectionately as a "a 25-year-old in a potentially historic bid for Congress."

Anyway, a few months pass, and now we find Cawthorn's website accused a critical reporter of working "for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” (Cawthorn took it down but the internet is forever.) Suddenly all Cawthorn's weird fascist tells look a lot harder to excuse away. Not that the Republicans won't try (Ben Shapiro's already covering for him, posting a Cawthorn op-ed that's light on the Nazism) because they want that seat badly. But the next time they and the press back up one of these guys and say, "I can explain everything," we ought to tell them not to bother.  

•   I see Peggy Noonan's making her late push for a Trump comeback ("Did he? Could he?"), claiming he won the debate and achieved the important goal: 

If you wanted or needed an excuse, an out, to vote for Mr. Trump, if you wanted an argument that justified your decision in a conversation in the office, he probably gave you what you need.

First of all, what's with this persistent rightwing theme that Trump can win by giving his followers an excuse rather than a reason? Isn't that a disqualification rather than a recommendation? Secondly, what would "justify your decision in a conversation in the office"? Sheets and pillows? "Russia Russia Russia"? "ACO plus three"? If you're using this gibberish to excuse your vote to your colleagues, you were voting for him already. No leaner, if such a sad creature exists, was waiting for Trump to yell that he was the least racist person in the room to make the leap.

Mr. Trump’s power, recovered Thursday night, is to speak like normal people, so you can understand him without having to translate what he’s saying in your head. 

"Oh, I get it -- he says Blacks Lives Matter is all about killing cops!" 

Trump supporters believe he will win because of his special magic, Trump foes fear he will win because of his dark magic. Pollsters and pundits stare at the data and wonder how to quantify his unfathomable magic.

Pollsters are looking at polls that overwhelmingly show Trump losing and musing upon his "unfathomable magic"?  If it were anyone else I'd say Noonan was counting on Republican election fraud to make her prediction sensible ex post facto (which it could! So defend your vote, people!), but with her I guess it's the leprechaun telling her to burn her credibility.  

•  Oh, I have one more thing to say about this awful Noonan column:

It’s only a poll, but after Gallup, a New York Times/Siena poll asked the same question, and 49% said they were better off.

What’s interesting, though, is that when Siena asked respondents if the country was better off than it was four years ago, only 39% said yes.

What does this mean? No one knows. If the polling is more or less correct, you wonder: Will people vote on their own circumstances or what they perceive to be the country’s?

This is very, very reminiscent of something longtime rightwing buffoon Jeff Godlstein (old-timers will understand why I spelled it that way) claimed in 2006 as a reason why, despite the "good" economy, "the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public." To Godlstein, it started with Paul Krugman telling them (perniciously!) that some people were suffering, and the American public, which was doing great, taking it too much to heart: 

...the result is Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

That was January 2006. Remember the 2006 midterms? Kinda like the 2018 midterms. Americans are prey to all kinds of bugbears and prejudices, but most of us know when we're being conned. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Pure joy.

Here's the end of yet another week of dumbassery, what with Republicans going to great lengths to sabotage the COVID bill and trying to play off the Capitol attack as harmless patriotic hijinx, and especially with the "cancel culture" guff they're using to make themselves look like victims. (Speaking of that, have some free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues on the subject -- one about a boys' adventure series done in by the woke mob, another revealing the talking points for rightwing news outlets covering such stories.)

Even dumber than the Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss bullshit, for my money, was the scandalette these guys tried to cook up about Biden calling the latest anti-masking crazes -- like Greg Abbott's transparent attempt to distract from his Texas power disaster -- "Neanderthal thinking." Wingnuts raised such a stink about it Biden had to send Jen Psaki out to explain it as if the complaint had been made in good faith rather than as howlingly obvious victimization shtick:

Asked whether it was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals while trying to convince state officials to get on board with the White House public health message, Psaki clarified the president was likening the decision to Neanderthal "behavior." 

"The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear, the behavior of," she said, adding that it was a "reflection of his frustration and exasperation" over some people flouting COVID-19 guidance to help curb the spread of the virus. 

"Whether is was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals" -- get the fuck out of here, less than two months ago your shock-troops were trying to murder Democratic office-holders in the Capitol;  "Neanderthal" is about the most polite thing one could call your cynical and potentially lethal stunts. Yet, at Forbes: 

Then candidate Joe Biden ran on a campaign to bring back civility to politics, and in his inauguration speech called for unity and an end to our nation's "uncivil war." Yet, President Biden's tone and more importantly the words he used on Wednesday were in stark contrast.

Author Peter Suciu then reproduces a series of incredibly stupid rightwing reactors, some of whom even attempt to make "Neanderthal" the new "deplorable," an insult in which they take pride, as if it were the name of their prison gang. If only Biden had called them douchebags! 

The worst of the lot is Noah Rothman at Commentary. He starts out with standard-issue So Much For The Tolerant Left ordnance ("But the president was never the 'good cop' he pretended to be"). Then he tries to defend Abbott's mask-free decree:

It would have been foolish if, for example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told his constituents that “everything’s fine” and Texans should “take off your mask” and “forget” about the pandemic. But that wasn’t what he said, nor is that likely to be the outcome of his state’s policies.

What Abbott announced was that “all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent.” The executive orders put in place during the pandemic, including masking requirements, would be rescinded because “people and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate.” It would have been a premature declaration of victory over the pandemic if Abbott had stopped there. But he didn’t.

Abbott also urged Texans to exercise “personal vigilance.” “Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility,” the governor added. While his orders will foreclose on criminal penalties for people who do not wear masks, businesses can still impose masking requirements on their patrons and deny them service if they do not comply...

I am confident of two things: First, that thanks to COVID-19, most normal people understand (as polls show that they do) that government has to take a major role in combating epidemics; and second, that as soon as the curse is seen to have lifted, conservatives will get busy trying to portray government's role as a total disaster and saying that everything would have been hunky dory in March 2020 if only the Free Market and Trump had been allowed to kill even more people so that the survivors could have instant herd immunity  -- you know, the same way they talk about the New Deal.

In fact the latter half of Rothman's column is devoted to groundwork for such an effort: He cites people who think Abbott's making a big mistake, and shrugs "They might be right, and it would be terrible if they were. But..."

...the way is littered with predictions about how this virus would operate that mercifully failed to materialize. The innumerable “super spreader events” that weren’t and unfounded fears that states without masking mandates, like Florida, would be overrun with pestilence should lead Texas’ critics to be more cautious. Likewise, the suboptimal performance of states with onerous restrictions on individuals and enterprise alike, including New York and California, have led even the most zealous COVID hawks to throw up their hands in confusion. Uncertainty is the lesson here.

How can we really know anything? Like this mask thing -- sure, flu infections are massively down year-over-year, but can you prove it was masks, libs? Maybe Jesus has something to do with it! 

But there is certainty about one thing: Lifting restrictions now undermines what seems to be the Biden administration’s central objective, which is to assume credit for the pandemic’s decline. 

A lifelong public servant actually getting vaccines into people's arms vs. a thuggish grifter getting his own shot and them making a bunch of everyone else's disappear mysteriously -- sure, let's go with door #2. God, if only our education system taught even a little critical thinking. 

RFRA ROFL: MORE WRECKAGE FROM THE INDIANA CRACK-UP.

Some of the libertarians are getting very worked up over this Indiana thing. Makes sense; after all, the real issue behind all the cake-and-florist agitation is public accommodations as a civil rights issue and, as you may remember from Rand Paul's spirited if temporary stand against the Civil Rights Act, libertarians have never fully accepted the justice of making white people do business with black people, so making straight people do business with gay people must seem to them a gruesome flashback.*

Timothy P. Carney, for example, has thoroughly melted down at the Washington Examiner, doing a better impersonation of Carol Newquist from Little Murders even than David Brooks:

Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

Gays, abortion, jungle music -- the injustice never stops.

But no. Tolerance isn't the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.

This will make a great schtick for pride parades: Big Gay puppets lumbering down Fifth Avenue hissing BAKE ME A CAAAAKE!

But for sheer entertainment value you can't beat the religious maniacs. The Anchoress claims she's been busy with some holy shit and after a brief Indiana post scuttles back to it, but in between riddles us this:

There is a staggering amount of hysteria and outrage being spewed about Indiana’s RFRA by many of the same people who — just mere weeks ago — were spewing in hysterical outrage about the nation’s growing so-called “rape culture”, and this despite disputed claims that 1 in 5 women are raped on college campuses, and a highly dubious accusation of gang rape on a college campus.

See, you and your gay friends are all liars. Rape liars!

Rape, of course, is an indisputably heinous act; because it forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do, it must always be roundly decried and despised by all sane people.

That's kind of a strangely mild description of rape, isn't it -- "forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do"? Makes it sound like dusting, or going to her boyfriend's office party. Eventually we see why Thee Anch portrayed it thus:

But, that being the case, what shall we make of the fact that, for the most part, the very same entities who (disputed “rape culture” claims aside) quite rightly insist that a woman should never, ever be forced to engage in acts against her will, have pivoted toward Indiana to demand that “other” people be forced to engage in acts against their wills?

Should governments, or new agencies, or pundits for that matter, really be positioning themselves over people and telling them that if they do not submit to what is demanded of them — and engage willingly — then they will be forced to take it, and like it?

 This is the real War on Women: dusting, rape, and gay cakes.

Doubtless someone will say, “these two issues are not at all the same.”

Wow she's pyschic!

I’d argue that to the people being shoved down, they look exactly alike. 

I’m going back to my project. Comments remain closed.

SLAM! When she comes back, watch out for the spraying hot chrism.

UPDATE. Normal comments policy is, when we delete a troll, we also delete comments in response, but I must say those comments are still pretty funny out of context, so carry on and good job all around.

UPDATE 2. * That's why Ramesh Ponnuru is so calm about the nearly-even split in public opinion over this issue. In the context of the fake story these guys have been pushing -- evil libtard homos versus Christianity -- this would be a disturbing result, since it would suggest America is divided over "religious liberty." But in view of the real goal -- which is to trim back our traditional understanding of civil rights -- it's actually an advance.

LIBERTARIANS: IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN'T MAKE WORSE?

As should shock no one, on the Hobby Lobby decision libertarians come down unanimously for the rights of corporations over those of women who need medicine. Megan McArdle:

Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that [anti-decision] tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. And don’t I have a First Amendment right to express my love of round-faced Bavarian children doing adorable things?

Two things: first, McArdle trying to be funny is a natural emetic; and second, as awful as she is I'm still surprised to see her promoting the ridiculous idea that health insurance benefits amount to "free stuff" (as the conservatives who don't bother to call themselves libertarians have unfailing come to call it) whenever it specifically benefits women's health. (Sample witticism: "My company won't pay for my toothpaste. I'm going to be forced to have cavities now.").  Then, McArdle goes on about how unreasonable other people are being. I guess I'll have to downgrade my opinion of her, if such a thing is possible.

McArdle also suggests that Obama wanted to lose the Hobby Lobby case so his free-stuff-fueled slut-minions will vote Democrat in November. So does McArdle's husband Peter Suderman at libertarian flagship Reason, only presumably he's got a sense of shame because he's more evasive about it:

To be clear: I am not at all suggesting that the administration was hoping or intending to lose in court. But...

[sigh.]

...this does help explain, at least somewhat, why the administration was so eager to pursue the case... It’s the political/legal equivalent of online clickbait; it grabs the attention of large numbers of people, sparks their interests and passions, and gets them engaged (or at least enraged). That doesn’t mean the administration set out to lose, or doesn’t care about having lost. But it does potentially change the calculus about whether and how hard to press an issue like this by offering some real benefits just for fighting the fight, even in the event of a defeat.

If the smell didn't tip you off, the incoherence of the last sentence is a glaring tell that you've just been handed a load of bullshit. What real benefits are offered, and by whom to whom? Also, what were they supposed to do, press less hard? As for the ruling itself, Suderman's all smiles:

The big question isn't whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company -- it's whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company... 

As Alito writes in his opinion, "A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends....When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people." 

In seeking to defend the requirement, the federal government had argued that Hobby Lobby, as a for-profit corporation, was not eligible to challenge the rule under the RFRA because corporations are "separate and apart from" their individual owners and operators. They were distinct, and not "people," and therefore ineligible for the protections of a law designed to shelter "a person's exercise of religion." Alito says, more or less, that this is nonsense: "Corporations, 'separate and apart from' the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all."

The next time someone talks to you about corporate personhood, remember that entire fiction gets dropped as soon as it's convenient to portray the corporate citizen as a mere painting on a scrim, which when rear-lit reveals Ma and Pa Jesus, smiling, waving their snakes, and crooning "we's jes' simple folk, tryin' to get right with the Lord"; when it's time for mega-million-dollar political donations, the scrim gets front-lit again and Ma and Pa sneak offstage to count their loot.

Also at Reason, Shikha Dalmia addresses Jonathan Cohn's suggestion that a single payer system would stop all this my-employee's-medicine-is-against-my-religion crap. Dalmia begins:

One: By calling Obamacare a “new entitlement” and a “public program” he has basically accepted that the program constitutes a de facto government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, a conclusion that liberals have generally resisted. Leftists, notes Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have been trying to convince Americans that Obamacare is not a step in the direction of socialized medicine as opponents claim because it uses private insurance and relies on market forces to deliver coverage. Cohn’s candor is both refreshing and clarifying, so thanks, Jonathan, for that.

The dream of Obamasocialism, and that any normal people give a shit about it, will never die in Galt's Gulch.

Eventually Dalmia gets to the point: single payer is just how "libs" go around "playing their brother’s keeper... and demanding generous subsidies," probably while wearing their I'M A STUPID LIB shirts and going "durr hurr," whereas libertarians want to "unleash market forces to lower soaring costs without resorting to price controls or rationing" -- which judging from Dalmia's sourcing means a tax credits and vouchers scheme similar to Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, which nobody wants because, like libs, they don't understand freedom.

Meanwhile big libertarian Rand Paul (he only wants to kill foreigners with drones, remember?) praised the decison; Cathy Young said "there are many women who believe the birth control mandate infringes on religious liberty -- among them Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green," that Planned Parenthood should stop lobbying because it's "divisive," and bunch of other stupid shit; and -- well, why go on? You knew the minute I said "libertarian" how this was going to go.

UPDATE. Among conservatives who don't mind admitting it, today has also been a festival of pedantic shirt-retucking. Ramesh Ponnuru on Ruth Bader Ginsberg:

[Ginsberg says] “It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage.” Who truly believes that this cost plays any role at all in Ginsburg’s analysis? It’s expensive, so she cites it to show that employers have to pay for it; if it were cheap, she’d cite it to show that employers aren’t burdened by it.

I suppose she'll tell us next that gold is expensive because gold just happens to be expensive! Jesus, it's like Ponnuru is taking lessons from Jonah Goldberg.

Also I'm grateful to commenter Glock H. Palin, Esq. for pointing out that Rand Paul actually doesn't mind killing a citizen with drones, after all. Maybe he's still a libertarian because he likes Drew Carey or something.

THE BATTLE OF SIT-ON-YOUR-ASS.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit's waving the stars and bars at USA Today under the title, "Americans rising up against government." The column is accompanied by a picture of someone poking a Gadsden flag out of a bunch of umbrellas -- maybe them folks under the umbrellas is all a-decked out like Ben Franklin and the Tea Party is back!

"America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately," the Perfesser commences. "It just might be a harbinger of things to come." How so, Perfesser? Three things:

• "First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database." Funny, I don't remember any such protests -- oh, the Perfesser means widespread  in the press and among "lawmakers and privacy advocates," not Ma and Pa Tricorn marching on Washington.

• The FCC's Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs, which was going to question newsroom personnel, went down because "the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now." Again, this was not achieved by a popular uprising, but by the press, with its paranoid conservative wing and normal-people wing united in defense of its own interests.

"Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience." Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Tell us about it, Perfesser:

• "As J.D. Tuccille reports: 'Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.' This is more 'Irish Democracy,' passive resistance to government overreach..."

Really? Sounds to me like a bunch of people sitting on their rear ends. In fact, none of this "uprising" involves... anyone doing anything.

And yet here's how the Perfesser characterizes it:

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.

Us and the guys at Tahrir Square and Maidan Nezalezhnosti! We just have different styles: Furriners do uprising by putting their bodies on the line in lethal mass demonstrations, whereas American patriots sit on their asses and wait for the heroism commendations to roll in.

The timeline of conservative derangement is long and complicated, but I think I can trace this particular strain of gibberish back to Human Achievement Hour, in which conservatives portrayed Americans who did not change their normal everyday energy-use patters as implicit supporters of their anti-environmentalist cause, and the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, in which conservatives showed their hatred of homosexuals (or love of freedom, whatever) by gorging on fast food and deputizing everyone they saw at the mall as co-conspirators. It's the perfect form of activism for a movement largely composed of agitated geriatrics, shut-ins, and people who think they're entitled to everything, including revolutionary status, without raising a sweat for it.

UPDATE. From commenter Fats Durston:

The Revolution Will Be Sitting In Front Of The Television
You will be able to stay home, brother.
You will be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will be able to lose yourself on Xanax and
skip out for beer during commercials, if you haven't DVR'd
Because the revolution will be sitting in front of the television.
The revolution will be sitting in front of the television
Brought to you by Xbox...

MR. BROOKS' CLASS WAR.

Old-fashioned straight-up racism is a tougher sell in the age of Black Lives Matter than it used to be, so racists (and the people hired to get votes from them) must modernize. Some conservatives (including the allegedly reformed Andrew Sullivan) remain quite comfortable saying or at least dogwhistling that black people are treated unequally in this society because they're Bell Curve inferiors. But even they must qualify it: Look, we're not racist because we admit Asians are smarter than us! Look, we're only defending Charles Murray's right to free speech!

There's always the "Liberals are The Real Racist" dodge. But that's usually an unsatisfying balm conservatives apply after they've been laughed off the stage. However, maybe they'll get more pro-active with it -- David Brooks is working in his sociological meth lab to strip the "white" out of "white privilege" and put "liberal" in instead.

How's he doing it? By taking out the actual political and philosophical parts of liberalism, and leaving only the stereotype of sissies who like fancy books, food, and leisure activities, think they're better than you, and have found a way to be rich without quite being capitalists (sneaky buggers!).

Brooks' column, generously titled "How We Are Ruining America" (it's the last acknowledgement of his own possible complicity, though), starts with a long wheeze about how "upper-middle-class" people are soaking up all the good things -- education for their kids, "behavior codes" (presumably like marriage, which makes you rich!), maternity leave, etc. While a socialist, or a Christian or a decent human being, might think, okay, then let's use government to give less upper-middle people better access to such things, Brooks explains that what's really causing these inequalities are "the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent."

This isn't about the black guy who can't get a cab -- why, the fact that he's presuming to hail one shows he's in the upper 20 percent, and thus just as much an oppressor as the whites. The real oppressors are the ones who can pronounce simple Italian words, or who don't freak out when they can't (a sure sign of effeteness):

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree...

BULLSHIT BUZZER ALERT! Maybe she's his nanny.

...to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

What sort of person is class-shamed by an Italian deli? Mmmmaybe the "friend" was Mexican; maybe she'd just come up from Gopher Holler, where they have a Chipotle but not a salumeria. Here's how Brooks explains it:

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

Those fucking Italians! Always trying to make you feel small because you don't know which gabagool to use for the fish course!

Even worse:

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

That "rareified information" being the code to the security systems at their McMansions.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

I know what all this shit is; I must be rich. Rich and rareified! Yet I'm wearing a cardboard belt. Why don't I just leave this stupid job I'm stealing time from to write this, and live on information?

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

I showed the cashiers that I know how to pronounce quinoa, but they still called security when I left without paying.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

If you're still wondering why Brooks downplays the role of money as well as the role of race here, I'll spell it out: His target is not people of color, who don't need David Brooks to tell them what time it is, but 1.) the Trump voters out in the heartland who might resent that they can't afford a block of Pilates classes (but let's face it, they don't read David Brooks nor even know who he is, and would take him for one o' them liberal sissies if they ever saw him); and, more likely, 2.) rightwing operatives who have been peddling arugula-Grey Poupon visions of liberalism forever, and hope that the recent uptick in class consciousness can be exploited against liberals rather than against their coprorate masters -- perhaps with "I am the 80%" t-shirts, and symbolic anti-elitist state-lege bills taxing reiki or requiring yoga studios sell cigarettes, and rhymes like "If you're lib, I like the cut of your gib, if you're centrist, you get a good dentist, but if you're Right, brother, good night, good night."

As America goes further down the crapper, a lot of people are going to get mad at the rich, and the donors might find it worth their while to fund propaganda that says "Don't guillotine you, don't guillotine me, guillotine that liberal hugging that tree." Maybe they'll outfit their Porsches to roll coal so the rabble know they're alright. Since saner policies are out of the question, it's worth a try.

UPDATE. Holy shit, every wingnut in wingnuttia rushed to defend Brooks' imbecilic column. Here's the crest of Megan McArdle's tweetstream:

I mean, all those liberals have to have the same exalted social status as she, haven't they? Otherwise why would Twitter allow them to talk to her? And she knows lots of genuine working class people, like that lady who said such nice things to her on the bus -- although, hmm, that lady was black, so maybe she was on welfare.

Chris Arnade comes in with his usual bullshit -- "I would add, where David Brooks uses upscale delis, I use McDonald's to show the difference in cultural capital between front-row & back-row" -- just in case Brooks is thinking of jumping line, Chris Arnade has McDonald's, bitch (and possibly a licensing deal -- "ba ba ba ba ba, white working class!"). On and on he goes about how oh, you liberals all sneer at McDonald's! Like we're all 23, have trust funds, and dine at Le Diplomate every night -- or that the amount of crap food one has eaten (and I've eaten plenty in my time) is the measure of one's authentic something-or-otherness, instead of a marker for pre-diabetes.

This may be Arnade's nadir: "The online reaction to David Brooks column is largely this -- Snark from people who have cultural capital but not economic."  As if we could ruin people's hopes and dreams by making snide remarks from our studio apartments and crappy jobs! Again, we see the insistence that money has nothing to do with it, and therefore money can't help. It's a great excuse for not supporting government interventions -- because the real power is in positive thinking, and if we just reward that and punish "snark," then by the law of supply and demand we'll Make America Great Again.

This brings us back around to Murray who, looking to diversify from his Bell Curve shtick a few years back, promoted that Fishtown/Belmont "bubble test" hooey, purporting to show that if you didn't watch the right TV shows and listen to modern crap country music (not that rap stuff, though -- only you-know-whats listen to that), you were an elitist and therefore had nothing to say to the Little People. This led to the spectacle of pencil-necked wingnuts imagining themselves butch because they knew the names of some pickup trucks. And now we have the logical end result of this ridiculous obsession, Donald Trump -- on the one hand, the People's Choice, whom no one would call elitist; on the other hand, a golden-palace-dwelling narcissist, the ultimate Bubble Boy. It is amazing what lengths we'll go to as a country to evade paying the butcher's bill -- but I have a hunch the butcher will get real insistent real soon.

BIRTH TRAUMA. At Sadly, No! Gavin does a fine job of twitting Pat Buchanan's latest Death of the West column. Buchanan is concerned that the Jewish people are being outbred by the jihadists, and blames the secularization of many Chosen, specifically "American Jews themselves, who have led the battles for birth control and a woman's right to choose."

This sort of thing comes up fairly often in conservative circles. Along with everything else the West is doing wrong, it isn't having enough children. Yet I have seldom seen a mechanism proposed for solving the problem. Criminalizing abortion is usually implied, but not often stated outright, perhaps because the moment such authors find themselves typing a simple declarative sentence stating that we must force people to have babies so the West can outnumber its enemies, they start to imagine how normal people would react. Better to just throw up the numbers and let the punters figure it out themselves.

Some authors, of course, are not so reticent. Way back in 2000 Steve Sailer proposed a very specific program of incentives and disincentives, including this:

Start a campaign telling citizens it's their patriotic duty to have more kids. Most Europeans are probably too self-destructively sophisticated to respond to this, but the Greeks might, since the Turks give them somebody to hate and fear.

But you see the problem. Hate and fear may be a sufficient aphrodisiac in some cultures, but we in the decadent West are, by Sailer's own admission, too self-destructive for this demographically-driven sort of hate-fuck, and prefer scented candles and maybe a nice dinner with wine. Maybe by now Sailer has moved on to edible body paint subsidies; I haven't got the stomach to look.

The most comprehensive program I ever saw was Stanley's Kurtz's, which involved reversing or destroying enough social programs that "people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age — and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary." In fact, on at least an unconscious level, the Republican Party seems to have been following this plan for years. But they've been getting a lot of push-back lately, so the collapse of the safety nets that encourage birth control may not be effected in time.

If they were really serious about all this, they might consider a different approach.

For years conservatives complained about the babies welfare mothers were having on the public dime. We got welfare reform, and conservatives have been cheered by what they see as the resulting decline in our illegitimate birthrate, especially among black people.

Maybe it's time the demographic-suicide wing of the movement communicated to their brethren at the City Journal and the Heritage Foundation the pressing need for more American children, and proposed a welfare counter-reformation to jack up the birth rate by any means necessary. In fact, if they really think the issue is as important as they portray it, maybe our welfare programs should be made more generous than before. What matter that many of the babies may be illegitimate and impoverished? All the better for the "hate and fear" conditions that will make committed anti-jihadists out of them.

This will be expensive, but we are at war, after all. Instead of fooling with untried plans and issuing dolorous rants, why not go with what has been shown to work in the not-so-distant past?

UPDATE. Commenter aw points out that Australia has already got a "baby bonus" program in place. But, alas, the new Labor Government is chipping away at it. Next year they introduce a means test, so upscale parents will have no incentive to procreate. And if a Centrelink officer thinks a household suffers from one or more of a list of social maladies, their payment is broken into fortnightly payments, presumably to keep the parents from spending the loot on plasma TVs, and the Government is pushing to substitute vouchers for cash payments in some hard cases.

With Australia's birth rate at a 10-year high, this seems no time to go wobbly. If Mama wants a wide-screen telly and a full bar for her efforts, I say let her have them.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/3/23.

Hey, it's happy hour and this is just nice.

Another hard week for America, folks, but at least some of us get the weekend off! Not me, though – I’ll be busy on the weekend getting a head start on next week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues. Speaking of which, let me unload the freebies for the week just passed – first, the Dilbert Diaries, the next logical step in Scott Adams’ career; I am convinced he’s convinced that the full fascist takeover is imminent, and he wants to be New Hitler's Court Jester. 

He may not be wrong! Ron DeSantis has been tearing it up, declaring himself Lord of Disneyland, and planning his destruction of the press and continuing his persecution of trans, gay, and educated people (the Democratic base!) in his mosquito-gator-and-mortgage-fraud kingdom. I half believe that he and Trump are working together, and the governor’s lunacy is meant to make the ex-president look less dangerous so when they nominate him some of the independent voters (the dumb ones who ruin everything) might say, well, he’s not so bad.  

Conservatives don’t see the downside, though, and except for a few apostates they’re all in for the full fash. I actually think they’re excited by it – I mean, Trump was a blast for them, but he only shat on Latinos and foreigners – this guy is a literal queer-basher!  (Fun project: Try to find any DeSantis assurance that he’s not attacking LGBTQ people with these programs. He simply doesn’t do it. What does that tell you?) 

I was directed to Hot Air, which had been an unremarkable wingnut site for so long that I hadn’t even looked at it for years. They got a guy there now called David Strom who has a post about gay and trans stuff called “The Hershey Highway to Hell.” OOOH HOW EDGY. Also he calls the trans woman Faye Johnstone “he,” always a sign of moral clarity/dorkism. (Imagine him among normal people; I put the time between his first deliberate misgendering and his ejection while shouting I’M BEING CANCELCULTURED at about two minutes.) At one point Strom gets after the trans lady’s non-profit:  

“Supporting youth-serving organizations across Canada.” Literally, the only phrase that makes sense in the entire business description is about getting access to children. On that point, alone, is the description comprehensible. Access to kids.

Ever notice how it’s always about the kids? These trans folks don’t like HAVING kids, but they apparently like being with them quite a lot. Preferably with as few clothes on as they can get away with.

There is nothing in fact or reason supporting this slur, but yelling groomer is what they do now instead of lectures on limited government. Oh, and elsewhere at the site addressing the DeSantis Don’t Say Gay bill is an old alicublog figure of fun:

This really, really bothers some people.

Most of the bill concerns the rights of parents, which really, really bothers some people, too.

Hint hint. There are all kinds of ways to call your enemies groomers, and Jim Lileks, being an old-fashioned type, really, really prefers the really, really eyebrow-waggle. 

Hey, but let’s lighten up – here’s another REBID bit, this one about movies you saw when you were younger that take on whole new resonances when you see them later in life. I did Night Moves, but you can do your own in the comments. It’s a community, see; you really ought to subscribe (cheap!).

BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:

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. 

Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Local radio was playing a bunch of power-to-the-people tunes.
I know this one's cheese, but I love it.

•   OK, kids, here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week -- this scene at Mar-a-Lago, in which Tubby talks turkey with his least favorite in-law; and today's fresh-as-daisies ripped-from-today's-headlines item on how the wingnut handling of the Lab Leak story fits with their Rigged Election fantasy -- and the part played in it by éminence Grey Goose Peggy Noonan. Yes, it's not just the Brown Shirts and the von Papens anymore -- even the little von Hindenburgs are getting into the act now. Exciting times!

Precisely why you should subscribe. I actually withdrew one story that had been made public because I'm through being Mr. Goodbar, people. It's not like I'm making Andrew Sullivan money, because unlike Captain Caliper's Substack mine does not flatter the imaginary grievances of honky douchebags, but tells the hard truth to a uncomprehending and contemptuous world with the satire and exegesis it, alas, is too depraved to know it needs. Get in on the ground floor of my lost cause and subscribe!

•   Couldn't we all use a little good news? Of course, that any one of these gruesome specimens will probably be an Ohio Senator is not good news, but it's nice to see that even Buckeye Republicans can apparently smell the fraudulence of Thiel-backed fascist J.D. Vance:

I've had this guy's number from jump (a Rod Dreher endorsement is usually as much warning as you need). And while I can sort of understand the appeal of some GOP assholes -- I've read enough Nick Fury comics to get why a certain kind of guy would like the insufferable Dan Crenshaw, for example -- so many of the media's favorite rightwing grifters are so obviously repulsive that I can't imagine normal people cottoning to them, whatever their politics. Ron DeSantis, for instance, seems to me a replacement-level 50s B-movie goon whom Lee J. Cobb told to get a manicure and a nice suit and try and look gubernatorial. Mike Pence is a wet sack of nothing and Greg Abbott is a pig-eyed creep. If any of these people tried to sell you an encyclopedia, tell me you wouldn't shut the door in his face! So it's encouraging to know that people see through at least one of these wet noodles.

WE PLAY ALL THE HITS.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Now that it's painfully clear that nobody cares, let's have a Benghazi Bullshit clips show!

In other words: Since "Nobama and Hitlery murdered Christopher Stevens for Saul Alinsky" isn't catching on with normal people, it'll be repurposed as a mantra for conservative basement services until 2016, by which time it might be retro enough that people will find it cool.

UPDATE. May I quote me? From those days of Republican Hope and Change, when they thought Obama might be impeached over Benghazi:

"It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon's resignation in disgrace," said WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh. "Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012..." Unruh cited some prominent conservatives, including Mike Huckabee and Ted Nugent, who predicted Obama's impeachment. Plus in a separate column Unruh revealed WorldNetDaily's exclusive poll showed 44 percent of Americans wanted Obama impeached -- and that was back in March! The numbers must be off the chart by now...

"The last time something of this magnitude happened, a U.S. president stepped down," said Susan Brown of Right Wing News." "Is Benghazi Becoming a Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Both?" asked Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. "May be the biggest federal cover-up since Watergate," said his colleague Deroy Murdock. And in case the association didn't sufficiently excite, there was the all-purpose slogan: "Nobody died in Watergate."

Where are the snowjobs of yesteryear?

UPDATE 2. With Goldberg it never rains but it pours -- or, since it's him, I guess we could say it never farts but it sharts. He has a new Goldberg File column out (no link, I get the wretched things by email), in which he gets philosophical and explains how (I swear to God) Curly in City Slickers was wrong that you should find one thing in life that matters because life requires "balance." He makes several lunges at apposite metaphors for this, finally collapsing into the following:

As you get older you change the mix in your portfolio, in the same way people near retirement move more heavily into bonds and away from stocks.

There's a man from whom you want to take life lessons. But why did he even bother?

Now I could swear there was a real point I was building up to... Oh, right, politics isn't everything and everything isn't political.

This he demonstrates by telling us liberals suck:

The true danger of progressivism is that it is "one thingism" hiding in the camouflage of diversity talk. Every institution is free to do its thing, so long as its thing is defined in progressive terms and guided by the State. Diversity means lots of people with different skin colors and dangly bits, who all think the same way... For conservatives, diversity actually means different people, individually and in communities, pursuing different things. 

I don't know why he didn't just say "My name is Ima Liberal, I'm a big four-eyed lame-o and I wear the same stupid sweater every day." I guess prominent conservative intellectuals just can't use that kind of shortcut. Farrrt.

THE BOY WHO CRIED OBAMAHITLER.

At the New York Post, Kyle Smith is enraged that some young woman who used to play violin (oooh arty farty!) is now "senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," and part of something Smith calls the "Nudge Squad" because its mandate is to gently encourage better behavioral choices based on the ideas in Cass Susstein's book Nudge.

Smith is pissed for a couple of reasons. For one thing, this initiative proceeds from the same thinking that got Bloomberg to make fast food joints post calories, which doesn't appear to change patrons' eating habits, at least not in the short term we've had to observe its effect. Fair enough, though letting people know something about what's in the food they eat is a pretty benign intervention, and seems to work well enough with packaged food labeling, unless you think citizens have no business knowing whether their dessert topping is mostly chemicals or if an energy bar will send them into anaphylactic shock.

But what really seems to bug Smith is something he mainly expresses with old rightwing memes and overwrought innuendo: that the Nudge Squad is oppressive. For instance:

This person was a senior at Yale as of 2007, but now she gets to tell you how to live your life. Sorry: encourage you to make choices that will make you happier... 

Remember when FDR, more or less admitting he was clueless about economics, promised, and delivered, an era of “bold, persistent experimentation”? Obama means it literally. We’re all being targeted for “behavioral interventions.” But only after randomized, controlled trials. Which don’t sound scary. At all. (Just don’t say that in a German accent.)... 

...[Susstein] was boasting in a Harvard working paper that [the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs'] central responsibilities, as defined by Obama’s Executive Order 13563, amounted to “a kind of mini-constitution for the regulatory state.” That sounds a bit immodest. And aren’t constitutions, even cute mini- ones, supposed to come up for a vote?

Similarly, shouldn't people walking around with stapleguns have a concealed-carry permit? Inevitably:

The new paternalism of Obama appointees is very much in tune with the boss. In a neverending series of campaign speeches, he’s taken to saying things like, “That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” And, “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

It's all part of the seamless garment of ObamaHitler. By the way, Smith refers to the recruitment e-mail of the Nudge Squad, properly known as the Behavioral Insights Team, but does not link to it. Here it is, and here are some of the previous interventions the Team uses as models:

Increasing college enrollment and retention: Providing streamlined personal assistance on the FAFSA form (e.g., pre-populating forms using tax return data and following up with a personal call) to low or moderate income individuals resulted in a 29% greater likelihood of their attending college for two consecutive years... 

Improving academic performance: Students taught to view their intelligence as a “muscle” that can grow with hard work and perseverance (as compared to a “fixed trait”, such as eye-color) experienced academic boosts of 1/2 a letter grade, with the largest effects often seen for low-performing students, students of color, or females in STEM-related courses.

Why, that's just how the Third Reich started.

Conservatives are always wondering aloud why they couldn't win in 2012 against a sitting president with a shit economy, and I keep explaining that it's because people think they're nuts. I used to assume they couldn't hear me because I don't have large BUY GOLD ads on my website, but I'm beginning to think no one can reach them.

Smith had a small but perfectly legitimate grievance -- that the government might be wasting money on an unproven social-science boondoggle -- but he knew that, as a Post columnist, he couldn't hold his barking readership's attention unless he laid on the totalitarian imagery good and thick. The result pleases people who agree with him that politically-correct race-pimping arugula-muching Liberal Fascists have turned America into a Union of Soviet Socialist Community Organizers, but when they try it on normal people it sends them backing nervously out the door. Even a dim person would have figured this out by now; I begin to think they're not serious about winning.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Billy was the real thing. 

•   They say Tubby got the virus but since they're completely untrustworthy we have to consider alternatives: 1.) It's the truth; there were too many leaks and loose ends to keep it quiet; like what would they tell his next audience of virus-targets if he's too sick to show up? 2.) They're just plain lying, using a get-well-soon story as a distraction from his disastrous campaign week; 3.) They're mixing truth with lies -- like maybe he just hit a serious cognitive drop and they're calling it COVID as a cover. Well, whatever it is, the guy will be low-key for a little while his goons do the talking. Byron York at the Washington Examiner:

Then there is Trump's role as candidate. Remember that the president, and a lot of Republicans, too, have mocked rival Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement" and appearing mostly in virtual events. Well, it now appears that coronavirus will force President Trump to adopt a Biden-style campaign, at least for the next 10 to 14 days. The Trump campaign can still gather big crowds, which he can address via video. But there will be an undeniably different dynamic to those events, because the president always feeds off the energy from a big crowd, and he can't get the same effect sitting in front of a camera.

LOL yeah, let's schedule big rallies where Trump's loyalists can watch him on TV! How heartwarming. It'll be like the GOP Death Cult version of Spartacus, or Stone Soup: The President can't give you the King's Virus himself, but several of you are probably teeming with COVID-19, so you can give each other coronavirus in his name! It's a Trumpmas miracle! 

If you prefer your idiocy mainstream, here you go:

Does Biden suspend his campaign as Trump is quarantined? Is the White House failure to observe protocols a reason for Biden to continue his campaigning?

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) October 2, 2020

•  Meanwhile, from slightly before Corona Don time, here's Rod Dreher:

Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:

A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday...

Dreher actually thinks his frothing hatred of trans people is shared by normal people and will be a game-changer in the election.

Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.

This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 

[Hysteria Bold in the original.] This reminds me of this previous bit of Dreher electoral analysis:

UPDATE: New CBS News poll finds no Kenosha bump for Trump, even in Wisconsin. People who want the situation calmed trust Biden more.

UPDATE 2: A friend who read this told me on the phone, as we were talking, that he finds it impossible to believe that there was no Trump bump from the rioting — but easy to believe that people who intend to vote for Trump would not admit it to a pollster. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t tell a pollster if I was going to vote for Trump. Is that paranoid? Maybe. But I don’t think people are wrong to fear that this information is being recorded, and might be used against them one day.

Not too paranoid, huh? Then he added one of his Letters to Repenthouse "from" someone who feels exactly the same way. I have my own feel-good ideas about how this election could go right, but it seems weird to me to watch the guy say over and over again that maybe fear and hatred will pull it out for the Party of God. Well, I guess it's better than admitting that voter suppression is their only real hope. 

•  Sorry, I can't let the subject alone -- it's too rich. I see the Washington Times is trying to stir shit by sending out a Breaking News alert about this:

It's very obvious UUURGK BAD BROWN LADY TALK BAD ABOUT LEADER stuff, but stop and think: Why would an appeal to sympathy toward Trump work on his fans? They always talk and think about him as superhuman -- an impression supported by his pointed cruelty and brutality, which proves his disdain for human weakness. He doesn't get coronavirus, he gives it! Think about those crazy Ben Garrison cartoons (and the weird Trump-as-Rocky Photoshop sent out by Trump himself) portraying this flabby tub-o-guts as a buff he-man. Can they even imagine Trump suffering from a mere disease? Maybe if it were cancer, that would work -- people "fight" cancer, so the image of a Swole Trump battering the Grim Reaper might play. But a flu virus? That's like a Rocky movie in which the boxer plans a comeback against Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Boring! I expect that when and if Trump pulls through his factota will tell the rubes thrilling stories of how he refused the wheelchair as he lumbered heroically to the snack machine in the lobby.  

MASTER DEBATERS.

Real quick, because I had to miss a bunch of this because of family stuff: Bernie Sanders grows on you. He's obviously not like the other candidates, in that he's not blow-dried or even (let us be honest) possessed of traditional political-theatrical gifts. But he handles very well the challenges thrown at him -- like the shady attempts to fault him on racial justice. His explanation on guest workers -- a solid laborite position based on the rights of both old and new residents -- was more granular and much, much more convincing than the other candidates' I am for a more generous and compassionate America bullshit. (Though when Clinton said let's stop and compare this conversation to what the Republicans are emitting, that was excellent -- as it was every time it happened.) I started by cringing at him, but after an hour I was looking forward to seeing him back on screen. You know why I think that is? Because he's honest. No, I'm not kidding. You don't see him changing the subject or scrambling to get around his own positions. He explained himself very clearly on gun control and it was to my satisfaction. Now, while I'm softer on gun control than most liberals, I'm not totally in agreement with his position --but at least I can respect his position because he respected me enough to tell me why he held it.

By the way, Anderson Cooper and his acolytes were very tough on the candidates -- and boy, what a difference from the Fox News tongue-baths the Republicans got! -- and while at first I was annoyed by the imbalance -- reminding me as it did of the old IOKIYAR dynamic -- over time I came to appreciate it. For one thing, it made Clinton defend her votes for garbage like, say, the Patriot Act -- and she did a lousy job of it. And that allowed Sanders to say, hell yeah, I'd get rid of mass surveillance, and make the case for it. It's nice, isn't it, to be treated with some respect as a citizen for a change?

Jim Webb has a hard time representing the Blue Dogs, but fuck him, he deserves a hard time; I'd hoped he'd try to invite the party toward a greater understanding of rural and exurban poverty and the voters Democrats are leaving behind because they can't figure out how to address it. But he wound up talking about how he'd fight the expansion of executive power and other crap Republicans who like to pretend they're smart complain about.  Really, fuck him. Lincoln Chaffee's a fucking idiot who isn't good even in the rare moments when he's right and should just kill himself.  Martin O'Malley has some good ideas but how the hell did he ever get elected to anything? Does he have gunmen working for him? Also he has a terrible habit of, whenever the others are talking among stuff like inequality, breaking in with WE NEED GREEN ENERGY!

All in all, any of these people, or their congenital fetuses in fetu, or the sweat off their balls, would make a better President than any Republican.

UPDATE. The National Review guys weigh in. Kevin D. Williamson:

The nurses all told basically the same story: They are doing fine for the moment, with a good union that secures for them good paychecks and good benefits. But they worry that the day after tomorrow something could suddenly change, that their hospitals and clinics will go under or be sold to evil hedge funds and that the terms of their employment will change radically for the worse, that their houses will for some reason be foreclosed on even though they’re current on all their payments, that college tuition will triple between now and the time their kids finish up at UNLV, that something bad is going to happen. That’s the Sanders voter, and, I think, the Democrat at large: terrified.

Stop and consider that for a moment. You know, because the author is conservative, that he thinks this is a knock on Sanders on his supporters. But really take a moment and focus on the fact that he thinks people with families who are in fear of losing their livelihoods, in a country where this can happen at the drop of a hat (or at the whim of a venture capitalist), are worthy of his contempt.

Now see with whom he compares them:

It isn’t just them. I was speaking with Sanders supporters almost literally in the shadow of a giant gold tower bearing the name “TRUMP” on the side—it is something of an achievement to create one of the tackiest things in Las Vegas—and the Trumpkins, like the Sandersnistas, are terrified: The big Mexican is gonna come and get them, the scheming Chinaman is gonna take their jobs, the surly Negro is leering at the white women. At both ends of the spectrum, we see terrified—terrified—Americans praying that Big Daddy will provide for them and smite their enemies. With sometime messiah Barack Obama having failed to deliver the goods, they’re turning to Government As God the Father Himself.

People who fear the loss of their jobs and therefore vote Sanders are the same as people who hate Mexicans and therefore vote Trump. Again, I ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

UPDATE 2. In comments (which are great), a nice summary by ChrisV82:

Here's what we've seen after 1 Democratic and 2 Republican debates: Democrats are deeply committed to fixing climate destruction, fighting wealth inequality, and making sure people are not discriminated against based on superficial (skin color, gender, etc.) reasons. Republicans are Neanderthals who bang stones on the ground to celebrate the sky god and show deep concern that foreign tribes will attack under the glow of the war moon to steal their furs, burn their huts and rape their birthing wives.

Just go in and roam around, with special attention to erstwhile Baltimorean dex explaining O'Malley.

WONKS PROPOSE AND MOBS DISPOSE.

As part of the mainstream media campaign to drown America in liberal lies, the New York Times prints Sam Tanenhaus' long, loving article on "reformicons" -- the Republican New Ideas grifters I wrote about a month ago at the Village Voice. This excerpt will give you some idea:

On Jan. 8, the day before the reformers met for their brainstorming session, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida stood in the Lyndon B. Johnson room at the Capitol — it was the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s declaration of a war on poverty — and announced a plan to create a “revenue-neutral flex fund” that would disburse federal funds to the states to spend as they wished on antipoverty programs. The response was mixed. A Brookings Institution scholar said the idea was workable, but liberals warned that bloc grants give too much power to the states. At the same time, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation argued that collecting money at the federal-government level and handing it out to states is the “exact wrong way to produce conservative policies.”

But for reformers, it was a breakthrough.

[Pause to reflect that these people have ridiculous life priorities, and need to be shaken like paint cans in old-fashioned department stores and told to 'reform' their own dork asses, starting out by taking some drugs and jumping into a fountain]

The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mmm, that's some good reform right there! But since so many white people are falling out of the middle class into poverty, will it be as easy as it was in Moynihan's time to convince them that the poor need bootstrappado?

The punchline to this reform bullshit is what conservatives are actually doing these days, as you can see just by reading the news:

• Celebrating a Supreme Court decision that yanks birth control coverage from women because Jesus;
• Blocking buses of immigrants from entering a California town;
• Calling for America to go back to Iraq.

So while reformicons play patty-cake, the people they will allegedly lead into an enlightened new age are dancing around the same anti-contraception, anti-immigrant, pro-war bonfires that exercised them in decades gone by. Meanwhile in Texas, which conservatives like to point to as a laboratory of Republican ideas, the state GOP has endorsed repealing the Voting Rights Act, among other boob-bait. Reform is just something to make the starched-collar crowd feel better about themselves.

UPDATE. "Reading through the comments, I see many of us hit on the 'incentivize work' nugget o' shit," says Derelict, and I can see how that particular bit of awfulness would give most normal people pause. The actual Room to Grow manifesto Tanenhaus and his subjects are pimping contains several similar New Ideas, like this, written by Michael Strain:

The federal minimum wage requires that potential employers take a $7.25 per hour risk on long-term unemployed workers -- workers who are already seen as quite risky compared to applicants who are coming from other jobs or have been employed more recently. The government should lower the risk associated with hiring long-term unemployed workers by temporarily lowering the minimum wage that firms must pay them.

Now, now, he did say "temporary":

Temporarily lower minimum wages for the long-term unemployed should be coupled with a temporary subsidy (through an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit or a wage subsidy) to ensure that no one who works full time and heads a household lives in poverty.

Instead of subsidizing the peons, let's subsidize businesses so they can pay them less -- that's one beauty part. And there another: A hint of how long that "temporary" subsidy would last comes in another part of the same section written by Michael Strain, in which he bitches about Obamacare and its subsidies:

The law gives subsidies to households with income up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line (this year, that would mean up to $94,200 for a family of four) in order to help with the cost of purchasing health insurance. The more money you make, the smaller the subsidy you receive. Because a little extra work results in losing some of the benefit workers receive from the government, the “subsidy phaseout” operates as a tax that discourages work.

Were his EITC plan ever to pass into law, how long do you think it would take for Strain the Cutter to confront Strain the Giver and tell him his "subsidy phaseout" was making people workshy -- that sub-minimum wage workers were declining to bootstrap themselves to higher wages because their cushy government-subsidized jobs had deincentivized them -- and that it has to go? So it would -- and the workers would stay at their starvation wages, because why would Republicans restore a minimum wage they'd always hated and which their Reform scam had finally enabled them to kill?