FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/7/23.

Getting some good music recs lately.

Lord, what a week. First there was Tubby going to court – the inspiration for one of my renowned satirical fantasia and the first of two (2!) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week.

(By the way, as I have told my paid subscribers, I’ll be off the clock next week, so there will probably be no ‘Round-the-Horn on the 14th and certainly no freebies before the week to follow. All the more reason to subscribe and get these treats on the regular. It’s cheap!)

Funny as the embittered and indicted Trump is, I must say his defenders are even funnier – none more so than the Just-the-Tip Trumpers who weep over What Their Movement Has Become under the rule of Tubby but have nonetheless and predictably rushed to defend him from the indignity of criminal charges. (Michael Powell: "Trump's behavior Immoral? Sleazy? [David French] says Yes and Yes. But..." lol)

National Review is currently half given over to the Trump Defense, including this spectacular angle from Rich Lowry:

Yes, Trump Was Extorted
Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.

This hed and dek, and the whole ridiculous thing, posits Tubby as victim, which is hilarious, so as a propagandist must when tasked with peddling absurdities Lowry denies he’s doing what he’s clearly doing, and right out of the gate:

It’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.

From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.

He should be indicting her! Lowry then lists a bunch of other similarly victimized men who were called to stand and deliver merely because they had paid for sex in violation of their marriage vows – and, really, who among us hasn’t been there, fellow conservatives? Lowry includes among Trump’s fellow victims former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, which has to be a first at National Review.

Eventually:

It takes two to tango — the women made the demands, and Trump paid up because it was worth it to him to make these stories go away.

Again, he was no victim, but the women who cashed in were no victims, or saints, either.

I’m sure the conservative audience Lowry accurately envisions would see any man-woman conflict, such as a rape accusation, as something in which the man may look like the sole guilty party – BUT! 

The other REBID item on the arm is today’s, about the pile-up of rightwing outrages including the expulsion of those two Tennessee reps by Republican assholes and why it may all come out alright. Dare to dream! 

UPDATE: Speaking of rightwing outrages and Just-the-Tip Types, I see the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel is nervous that the loony abortion bans feral Republicans are shoving through their state legislatures is costing them votes:

Conservatives cheered mightily last year when the Supreme Court returned abortion to the states with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And rightly so. Yet that was a legal victory. The political question is something else entirely, and it’s the left cheering now. In race after race, state after state, Democrats are pummeling conservative candidates on abortion, drowning out every other topic, stoking fearful centrists, suburbanites and women to turn out and elect them to office.

Even with the smell of the coffee strong in her nose, Strassel spins: It's about the Democrats' "pummeling," not the voters rebelling. Also, overturning Roe was wonderful, Strassel says, but they're not selling it right:

The GOP’s problem is muddle and inaction. Fearful of getting crosswise with the pro-life right, Republicans have failed to land on a consensus position.

LOL, bullshit: It's not "muddle and inaction," it's the gleeful misogynistic id of the conservative movement reveling in its victory over bitches. Why would they act all sober and compromising when the Wingnut SCOTUS gave them the keys to the kingdom? Strassel misses that, while her constituents believe in the same terrible things she does, unlike her they aren't obliged to try and make it look good for the manicured readers of the WSJ. They do lie, but not to cover their tracks -- they lie because, and for the same reason, their idol Trump lies: Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to her enemies to show them they are not. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GOP RETURN TO RELIGIOUS MANIA EDITION.

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FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For the weekend of the glorious Fourth, the obligatory.
• At The New Criterion James Bowman is mad that obituaries of the recently departed Michael Herr often refer to Herr's Dispatches as "the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Stuff and nonsense, huffs Bowman; it was instead a definitive liberal media put-up, as was Herr's contribution to Apocalypse Now. Says Bowman:

Neither the book nor the movie tells us anything about the war that the media, echoing the anti-war movement, hadn’t already told us. On the contrary, both existed to confirm our prejudices about the war as senseless, savage, insane, and criminal.

How else would people get a negative impression of war, if not from mendacious liberals? Bowman also laughs at Herr for having a nervous breakdown over the war, which Herr saw close up as a correspondent ("[we] were all 'traumatized' by Vietnam just like poor Mr. Herr..."]. Bowman is "well known for his writing on honor," according to his bio, which mentions no military experience. I'm pretty well accustomed to conservative culture-war gibberish, but it's always something of a surprise to find it in their actual cultural journals; it's as if Film Comment contained nothing but YouTube comments.

• Good old Nancy Nall reminded me about Jim Lileks the other day and I realized I hadn't read him in a while. So I pulled up a 2016 Bleat more or less at random and there he is complaining that the Oxford American had chosen to write about Terry Southern:

But the hangers-on - who had limited talent, if any, and whose purpose was to flatter the guy who Did That One Thing, would somehow believe that they were part of a great creative era because they had gotten high with the writer while he talked about Mick Jagger, who was interested in this project. Mick Jagger, man! He knows Mick! And the people to whom he's telling the story think then his dope must be really good.

There's a deadness at the heart of the period. Endless hours of unlistenable psychedelic music, endless pages of unreadable prose, cheap movies...

This from a guy who apotheosizes old matchbooks. Here's part of a more recent one:

Lest you think all Traders Joe clerk-customer interactions are a model of sparkling wit and bright banter, I had a disconcerting exchange the other day...

Yes, it's another in Lileks' endless series of insufficiently understanding service workers. They're still letting him down! He told that rapscallion about "Halt and Catch Fire" all right. Then on to Brexit:

The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there's one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they'd love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

You should see those gulags where they sent people who wouldn't use metric! Well, that visit will do for a few years.

• I have Monday off, so like many of my fellow citizens of this wretched neofeudal society I am being crushed with work to make up for that tiny respite, so that does it for this week's 'round-the-horn. This weekend celebrate your country as you see fit: as something to be seized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, by radical Islam, by the glorious sexual revolution or whatever -- remember, it's our dreams that make us Americans!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN ON A SUNDAY: 2/26/23.

Yum.

•  Sure, why can't "Friday 'Round-the-Horn" happen on a Sunday? We had one on a Saturday once, remember? Wasn't that crazy? We're pretty quirky and unpredictable here. Sky's the limit! 

•  Anywho: The major freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down from last week is this one about a Zoom meeting between the GOP leadership and their policy chief. I notice that in recent weeks the alignment of the Republicans with Russia is getting tighter. Maybe you saw Matt Gaetz's House resolution calling for the U.S. to stop helping Ukraine repel its invaders. (It's actually called the "Ukraine Fatigue Resolution," as if their House propagandists didn't bother to change the name from the talking point that inspired it.) And you may have seen that preeminent conservative intellectual CatTurd2 advanced the theory that he Ukraine war is actually some sort of false flag operation ("Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets"), to the approbation of his millions of fans. 

And last week the Head Defenestrator in Charge himself, in announcing his withdrawal from the START Treaty, gave what amounts to a 2023-style U.S. Republican campaign speech:

Look what [Western nations] are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages...

But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Ron DeSantis couldn't have done it better! And the rubes are eating it up: the account in the hard-right Trumpist Christian Post, for example, tells the story from the Putinist POV ("Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning over what he called religious attacks from Western culture Tuesday...") I keep making jokes about Putin following Orban to CPAC, but at this point I'm expecting him to speak at their next National Convention. 

•  Whew, that's depressing. So here, here's a straight-up fun thing from REBID, about books you don't read so much as graze. Got any like that? Tell it to the comments box! (And subscribe -- it's cheap!)

•  Finally I want to thank the universe for the gift of laughter, courtesy of Scott Adams telling the world what he thinks about those pesky black people and getting his "Dilbert" thrown out of a bunch of newspapers. Guess he decided 2023 was a good time to go full racist -- the Bund will remember and reward him comes Der Tag. 

Adding cream to the jest are all the cancelculture crybabies like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Cathy Young rushing to tell us that oh, no, Adams getting chucked for his beliefs isn't cancelculture because race hatred is something we all condemn -- you know, like trans health care. I predict Bari Weiss' next scam will be a guide to which firings and dismissals qualify as cancelculture and which don't -- and no one will realize it's just the Republican national platform. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (ON A SATURDAY): 11/26/22.

I'm developing a taste for these
Low-impact Led Zep tunes.

Another Friday ‘Round-the-Horn on a Saturday! If you must know, I was so relaxed by the Thanksgiving break that I absolutely could not rouse myself to perform my usual duties on Friday. Normally I’m a two-fisted, copy-churnin’ machine, but once I lose momentum it’s hard to kick the engine back into gear.

I did fulfill my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down duties, though – how could I not, with paying customers waiting on their shipment! I can let you free-riders can have a little taste – here from Monday is Alex P. Keaton transported to the Trump Age! 

And, you know what, let’s pull one out of the vault that, thanks to my deathless prose, remains daisy-fresh – a Hallmark movie for the MAGA set. I was reminded of it by the recent contretemps over Candace Cameron Bure, the lady who -- near as I can figure from the reporting, which seems to rely on readers having more knowledge of the Holiday Movie Industry than I can boast – was a star of Hallmark Channel Lessons in Life and Love Machine and is now the centerpiece of Great American Family (formerly Great American Country) Lessons in Life and Love and Jesus Machine. Since Jesus, in this context, means No Gay People, Bure was able to generate some prestige-media controversy on the subject, thus increasing her and GAF’s media attention in time for the holidays. 

Well, it’s all in the game, but it does make me wonder how Ben Shapiro, who keeps promising us his own family-entertainment conglomerate, was taking the increased competition. With homo-hating Christianity dying off in the West, GAF leaves an even smaller slice of the pie for Half-Pint; the MAGAsaurs aren’t going to want more than a few such streaming services, though maybe the “continuing to charge aging customers after they die” strategy may keep such a venture afloat. 

Speaking of which, here’s another old REBID episode on the Shapiro Network! Yet another reason to subscribe: deep content reserves! 

Meanwhile the news is full of dumbness to keep up with, but let us spare a thought for the latest Cancelculture Crybaby, in the Washington Post:

Former surgeon general faces his wife’s cancer — and the ‘Trump Effect’

Jerome Adams, M.D. was SG under Trump and now people don’t seem to want to hire him. It’s so unfair! High-level White House posts are supposed to lead to lavish sinecures! Also, “Adams and his wife, Lacey, want to tell a personal story about melanoma and cancer prevention,” so if you don’t give him six figures at least it’s like you’re pro-cancer.

Former surgeon general Jerome Adams and his wife, Lacey, often find themselves talking about what they have named the “Trump Effect.”

It followed them from Washington to their home in the Indianapolis suburbs. They felt it when he was exploring jobs in academia, where he would receive polite rejections from university officials who worried that someone who served in the administration of the former president would be badly received by their left-leaning student bodies. They felt it when corporations decided he was too tainted to employ.

And all because he chose to work for a famous scumbag. But get this: Adams is also a victim of Trump: 

As Donald Trump announced this month that he will run for president again, [the Adamses] had hoped it all would have faded away by now. 

They would rather talk about public health, in a very personal way... But the stigma of his association with Trump, even though neither of them is a supporter of his political campaign, remains.

Oh wait, it gets better:

Whether indicted or shunned or marginalized, a cavalcade of former Trump World figures have foundered in the aftermath of one of the more chaotic presidencies in modern American history.

Eichmann, Mengele – you know they’re bitching in hell that no one gave them this kind of treatment. Hey, Jerome Adams is kind of a common name – couldn’t this guy just say it was a different Jerome Adams who was Surgeon General, and then claim he was in Switzerland the whole time?

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 1/14/23.

I know there are a lot of great versions;
I just like this one.

Look, you’ve been busy, I’ve been busy – sometimes a Friday ‘Round-the-Horn is out of the question. I have found a moment on Saturday, and it’s all yours! 

There are two free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories for you from this past week. (Reminder: Subscribers, who pay an absurdly low $7/month, get this stuff five days a week.) The first is a fanciful meeting of the minds between two of the nation’s worst people, cancelculture crybaby queen Bari Weiss and Florida Minister of Propaganda Christopher Rufo, on the campus of the freshly wingnuttified New College of Florida in the not-distant future.

Michelle Goldberg recently interviewed Rufo and he’s even more inclined to say the quiet parts out loud than most conservatives these days – probably because he’s not elected, and so doesn't have to pretend that the consent of the governed, not to mention common sense, means shit anymore. Rufo expresses an intention, in his political-correcting of New College and whatever other schools his confederates can get their hands on, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.” I remember when conservatives thought there was a marketplace of ideas, and were pretty triumphalist about conservative capitalism’s victory therein (in part because they had a well-funded marketing campaign). But when it became apparent people were no longer buying their bullshit, they decided outside agitators led by long-dead boogeymen like Antonio Gramsci had made that marketplace obsolete and that it was now time for a command economy of ideas instead. As Adam Serwer has pointed out, this tracks with their current conception of democracy in general: it's OK to be free so long as their preferred result wins; otherwise it's time for the boot and truncheon. 

The second freebie is straight from the Congressional Record (in my mind!): Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a respectable elder stateswoman of the GOP, demanding an investigation into an ancient menace and this time it’s not The Jews (not directly, anyway). The House GOP has gotten crazier quicker than even I predicted – they’ve even jumped directly on the “Joe Biden Try’n Steal Mah Gas Stove” bandwagon with – this I am not making up – “H.R. 263, the Stop Trying to Obsessively Vilify Energy (STOVE) Act.” 

Again pointing back to former conservative talking points,  I remember when they all chortled along with P.J. O’Rourke that Congress was a “Parliament of Whores” because Dan Rostenkowski got free stamps; now, as we have seen from the spreading George Santos tsimmis, the House is even more corrupt than before but, unlike in the old days, its members can’t even serve the nation’s interests properly and indeed seem hell-bent on sabotaging them even as they play at culture war. It’s still funny but this ringside seat on the Death of the Republic is getting a tad uncomfortable. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JULY 7, 2023.

Let's class the joint up a little!

Last week I skipped ‘Round-the-Horn – AGAIN. Apologies. The move that never ends formally finished with the clearance of our last effects from our previous home, but the house remains unsettled as the missus applies the Klotski method to her goods and chattels, plus we still have in-laws aboard. Leisure is at a premium. And they told me old age would be mainly a matter of finding ways to fill my time! 

But though I come late I also come laden with free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions. For one, there is the resumption of Sam Alito’s Wall Street Journal column, answering the complaints the thin-skinned old bastard, in my imagining, could not help but notice after the shit decisions he and his fellow wingnuts lately foisted on America. I expect to see him on Joe Rogan one of these days, sputtering over the loss of respect SCOTUS has suffered, and how unfair it is, when all he and his mates have done is rule so that, were the 18th-Century slaveholding plantocrats who founded this nation to come back from the dead, they would feel right at home.  

The next is inspired by the coke cache found in the White House, and how a certain onetime habitué might interpret its meaning. (Fans of the “Formula” series may appreciate the callback.)

On to other outrages. I’ve been telling you people for years that David French is a fraud, a rightwing religious maniac whose winsome NeverTrumper act has fooled many centrists including the ones who hire columnists for the New York Times, and his latest column runs true to form. He inveigles non-MAGA readers by agreeing once again that Trump is no good, but then goes on about how his deluded fans feel not merely “rage” but also “joy” at Trump's events, in his presence, and even gazing upon the insane videos and memes that celebrate him as a buff avenging American Messiah. The dread-and-circuses “give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging,” French says. 

This may seem to some of you like a clever angle – we talk about how crazy they are, but let’s bothsides this, can’t we just admit that they’re also full of joy! (And let’s not refer to it as “mania” or a “mood swing” because that would be Very Bias. Also, these are French’s neighbors and friends back in old Tennessee, so it would also be impolite.) 

But as usual with French this is just a sneaky way to pitch liberals on giving in to the obnoxious ideas that he and the Trumpkins actually share (i.e. most of them, stripped of the unpleasant frankness of MAGA viciousness), and ends with something resembling a plea for understanding and more: 

During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.

What “something” are we supposed to offer these people? The lives of one of our more vulnerable minorities? A do-over in states where he loses next time? Furthermore, why should we offer them anything? They advocate terror, treason, and bigotry. They represent a third of the country and demand violent reprisals against the other two-thirds. Fuck those guys. They want to kill me. There's nothing to discuss. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUNE 9, 2023.

Was just thinking about it.

If you follow alicublog’s Friday ‘Round-the-Horn sessions, you may have noticed I didn’t manage one last week. Apologies; I was moving house, and interstate, and with a spouse who, unlike me, hangs onto every goddamn thing. 

So it was agony, and it’s not over, which brings us to our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie of the week, about that very thing. But if that’s too personal-essay for you, here’s another freebie – which is personal too, in that it’s based on my own actual dealings with what I’m sure is a new frontier in AI horseshit, but, you know, full of complaints about the state of the nation, as the public has come to expect under the Roy Edroso byline. 

Not sure how much this will move you now that Tubby’s under federal indictment. Like many of us I’m cynical about these things – after “Mueller Time” (not to mention “Fitzmas”) how can you not be? It’s times like these that make one sympathetic, if not forgiving, toward the crazies whose whole politics is conspiracy-based – I mean how hard can it be to nail this crook, anyway, unless The System is not so interested in justice as it is in titrating tension-and-release with these slow-moving prosecutions toward some nefarious, Bilderbergian end? Best to stay cool and see how Aileen Cannon fucks it up. 

Far greater entertainment value can be had from that daft bint Peggy Noonan, who squints at the carnage that is national politics and says, you know what, maybe a third party candidate can win it all in ’24! This is of course the sort of bullshit that got Trump elected in 2016 and Bush the Lesser elected in 2000, but Noonan doesn’t mention Jill Stein or Ralph Nader (nor the crackpot RFK Jr.) – though she does fawn over the No Labels fraudsters, and Ross Perot is her beau ideal:

Perot was a business visionary, the founder of a great company, Electronic Data Systems. He was public-spirited and blunt-talking. In June 1992 he was leading both George Bush and Bill Clinton. But his campaign was hapless and gaffe-filled, and he was unpredictable.

That’s putting it mildly; Perot was a Musk of the machine age, an ego freak who thought himself a world-beater. To this day I suspect he was in it just to fuck Bush over some obscure Texas beef, and so he did. Noonan marvels Perot got 19% of the vote even though voters “thought he might be a little nuts” – which to a normally observant person would suggest a comparison with the berserker Trump, rather than a smoldering, decades-old hunger for a third party candidate, but that’s a road Republican Peg doesn’t want to go on. So she weakly essays: 

… I can quite imagine a competent third party now getting 35% of the vote to the other guys’ 32% and 33%, say. What would happen then? Most likely, no candidate would receive a sufficient Electoral College vote. The election would go to the House, causing uncertainty that would at some point be resolved.

“would at some point be resolved” ho ho ho – I guess Noonan scared herself there, but gamely tries to wrench the fantasy back into focus:

It would be real edge-of-the-seat stuff in a nation that already has too much edge-of-the-seat stuff, but also seems to like it. 

A short while ago America elected the ancient trimmer Joe Biden because it was sick of Trumpian whoop-de-doo, and the only reason Noonan is pretending that didn’t happen is because her party’s prescription for victory is to act like trans people in beer ads constitute a screaming emergency requiring drastic measures like Mystery President. She knows as well as you do that RFK Jr. and No Labels are just cons to siphon off enough votes to put the Republicans back in power. But she made her bones peddling the Reagan fantasy, which was no less ridiculous until it happened, and I suppose she figures lightning can strike twice. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A GOOD SWIFT KICK EDITION.

Got their Mojo workin'.

RIP to a real one. I met Mojo back in the day, and he wasn't putting it on, that was really him. I told him that when I came down South for the Memphis Jazz Fest I ate so much barbecue I didn't take a shit for a day and a half. He referred to me thereafter exclusively as Hambone.  

I missed a ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! But here, let me offer you a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie from that timeframe which is still good, or will be till after the Super Bowl: My as-usual behind-the-scenes look at how Tubby and his team plan to fight back against the Taylor Swift menace. I know, there’s been so much written already about the rightwing meltdown over the pretty white girl with a football hero boyfriend who for some reason doesn’t love enraged Nazi incels, but mine’s funny.  If you ain't read it yet, it's news to you! 

And look, it’s gotta be better than Ross Douthat’s plea for conservatives to embrace Taylor Swift because “the cultural valence of the Swift-Kelce romance... [is] normal and wholesome and mainstream in an explicitly conservative-coded way” – Ha! One images the wispy-bearded doofus trying to pitch that to a mob of howling conservabros and getting his ass hitched to a Ford F-30,000 and hauled out of Burlyman Camp in response. You can't reason with them, Father Ross!

Of more recent vintage is my other freebie, inspired by the latest in a series of prestige press Trump-wanks: A “guest essay” in the Good Grey Lady by Kellyanne Conway, the Trump bullshit firehose temporarily disguised as a disinterested observer of the American Scene, who asks, “Who Should Be Trump’s #2?” I expect the next such essay will be Stephen Miller asking, “Aren’t All You Regular Volk a Little Tired of Untermenschen Questioning Der Fuhrer?” We’ve gone way past the well-observed “working the refs” phenomenon, whereby rightwingers scream about “bias” until milquetoast liberal journalists are exhausted/intimidated into waving through all their bullshit; now it seems well-trained bigtime editors look at every single political event or issue and ask themselves, How is this good news for the John McCain Donald Trump?

Thus we have a former president who is very upfront about becoming a fascist dictator if he’s reelected, yet is portrayed in the prestige press as a victim because state officials interpret the Constitution as disqualifying insurrectionists from holding that office; also when a Republican investigator can't find evidence to charge the current president but takes the trouble to insert slurs about his mental state into his report, the pressies all run headlines like “Democrats’ Anxiety Over Biden’s Age Grows After Special Counsel Report.” I can only hope, as I wrote, that Americans have not yet lost the ability to smell bullshit. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUST GOT BACK FROM LOST WAGES EDITION.

I stopped paying attention to this guy early. That was a mistake.

I skipped last week’s “’Round-the-Horn” because I was rushing into a much-needed holiday, which is not yet quite ended but I figured I’d just pop in and let you know I’m still part of the warp and woof of American life. (“Norma Desmond? I thought she was dead!”)  

As Roy Edroso Breaks It Down was also on hiatus last week, I have no free samples to give away. I did read the papers, though, and like (I’m sure) many of you I noticed how heedlessly many institutions of higher learning showed their ass during the recent student demonstrations on behalf of the persecuted Gazans, and how conservatives all ran the “durr hurr ‘mostly peaceful’ protests” routine when it was self-evidently the cops and Proud Boys (but I repeat myself) who did 99% of the violence (as often). I hardly need to supply links but Luke O’Neill says it well: 

Hey check this out: Protesting for good causes is good and protesting for bad causes is bad. Simple as. Occupying a campus building to pressure your school to divest from the military industrial complex and to register your horror over our country's dogged complicity in an ongoing genocide is an unequivocal good. Reasonable people can disagree about this you might be thinking? No they can't! Finding moral clarity on this matter is one of the easiest things a person could ever do.

Being an elderly Democratic simp I understand why Biden is doing his pro-Israel difference-splitting bit: He knows if he loses in November we’re all cooked, and believes this is the politically expedient path out of the crisis as by the election most voters will have forgotten it and Tubby’s troops will be screaming about Messicans and tranny-sexuals and (because they can’t help themselves) describing in lurid detail how they will murder their enemies, which Biden reasonably thinks may invigorate his base. Not how I would do it, of course, but then my own presidency would probably end like The Phantom of the Opera and be no good to anyone. 

It’s sad and infuriating that we even have to deal with an influential-out-of-all-proportion minority of American voters (and a majority of rich fucks) who have the temperament (we can’t really call what they have “politics”) of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. If you see a way out, please provide in comments.

Well, at least some recent news is hilarious:

But alas, the hilarity is not unmixed – and I don’t refer to the execution of Cricket, which I’m not sure even happened. Going back to Romney’s rooftop dog gambit, Noem’s story was obviously meant to show what passes for toughness in the sick word of conservatism, but as often happens the promulgators of the shtick had no idea how normal people would react to it. I’m afraid it’s Judge Holdens all the way down. 

Oh well. Back on the job Monday. Subscribe, why don’t you? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Just in the mood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•  BTW WTF:

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

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

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

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

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

LOL, go drink some tea, bitch.

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

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

As a teenager I had three Emerson Lake & Palmer records.

•   Well, why not Saturday, huh? Just because it's always been Friday 'Round-The-Horn doesn't mean it always must be. Dream of a better world! In this case I have just been too busy, and not even entirely with holiday stuff -- the Day Job encroaches, as does other stupid shit. 

All the more reason for you to subscribe to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my high-volume and -quality content newsletter, and make it more profitable and possible for me to just dish out bon mots on the regular! REBID delivers five days a week, just like an actually periodical, and though it's on Substack there is no pissing and moaning about how kids picking their own pronouns is why in a couple of years we'll all be speaking Chinese. (You can even give gift subscriptions, perfect for you last-minute shoppers.)

Anyway, Here's this week's free issue, in which celebrity murderer Kyle Rittenhouse again visits the Mar-a-Lago White House in Exile, where Tubby takes precautions to avoid a repeat of the prior incidents. I note with interest that Rittenhouse is getting the full rightwing public relations workup, with so much Fox News coverage that the network is bragging on a "Tucker Carlson Originals" program that "captures never before seen footage" of Rittenhouse, which I assume includes the baby-faced killer walking on the beach with a dog, autographing rifle stocks for adoring fans, and visiting the grave of Charlton Heston. 

Also Rittenhouse is a featured attraction at the next Turning Point wingnut convention, which has the rabble excited and some of the Conservatives With Good Taste delivering hilarious demurrers: Here's Baseball Crank/Dan McLaughlin feebly trying to say why cheering a kid wholly famous for shooting two protestors dead in the street from a prominent conservative platform is a bad idea. He compares Rittenhouse favorably to Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, whom he calls a "propaganda-addled zealot," and Greta Thunberg (who McLaughlin, knowing his audience, does not bother to slur). Rittenhouse, on the other hand, he calls "properly acquitted," adding "one can even argue that his motives in being in Kenosha were noble." Apparently hoping that he has bought the readers' good will by showing his preference for a rightwing vigilante over leftwing activists who haven't killed anybody, McLaughlin mourns that Li'l Kyle "has an uphill battle getting a job or into a college right now" and asks his readers to let him "go quietly back to the business of growing up." 

Comments are, expectedly, a stitch, with many respondents telling Baseball Head to get stuffed and rooting for Rittenhouse to sue The Media. Still, I'd enjoy the spectacle more if we could be walled off from these people; as it is, it's like watching the inmates grow increasingly agitated in Marat/Sade before storming the audience. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of the greatest things ever.
•  Now that it's round-the-horn Friday I'd like to dish out some unpopular opinion. First, as regards the great Eryka Badu saying she could see the "good" in Hitler and other bad people, and people flipping out about it: I was raised Catholic, and as that upbringing was in a New England factory town,  it was neither a fussy nor even a particularly sweet-tempered Catholicism; but even so we were taught that it is wrong to assume anyone is in hell, because only God knows the heart of any man, living or dead. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" isn't a war-whoop, but a reminder that eternal judgment is above your pay grade. So what Badu said neither shocks nor particularly displeases me. I am more saddened that our prominent Christians are such poor exemplars of Christ that anyone should be so outraged and so displeased by it. (The worst reactions, to my mind, were those that lamented Badu's "bad PR judgment." First, as Lisa Respers France justly said, have you met her? Secondly, PR is by definition bullshit and these days we are drowning in it; so let us not scruple over optics, and think instead of right and wrong.)

•  I will also raise a mild demurrer over the rage that fell on Matt Yglesias (or, as the assholes at Twitchy put it, "Holy s*it: Matt Yglesias is getting DRAGGED") and others who criticized Judge Rosemarie Aquilina's speech at the end of Larry Nasser's trial. Nasser is scum and I hold no brief for him; nor do I find Aquilina's anger or her advocacy for the victims inappropriate. But I note that many of her defenders said as a point in Aquilina's favor that her speech was no worse than what you'd hear used against less powerful defendants in a county courthouse. I'm sure that's true, and that's the point: I would rather no one waiting for prison doors to swallow them be so used. We Americans have a thirst for retribution that, like our thirst for corn syrup soda, is entirely too easily slaked and no good for us.  (Watch an episode or two of Cops if you don't know what I mean.) So if someone objects when a judge beats on a convict, even one who is undeniably guilty, I sympathize. Call it unwoke if you will.

•  I hope now that the "Secret Society" bullshit has been debunked that we will not forget the wonderful prose poetry it engendered from such as Truepundit:

This isn’t just any rag-tag group of disgruntled employees complaining at the water cooler at the post office. This ‘secret society’ wields serious clout: the type of power that can investigate enemies (see Mueller vs Trump) or take others down (see Flynn)... 

Who belongs to this secret society? 

FBI agents gone rogue against Trump in favor of Barack Obama’s agenda who are linked to the many investigations into FBI corruption

• Federal judges
• Federal prosecutors
• Retired FBI
• Possibly one sitting Attorney General of a large U.S. state
• Possibly former Attorney General(s) of the United States

They communicate with meetings over cocktails, at homes, via encrypted chat rooms, texting on drug-cartel-inspired burner phones, and even via an email list, according to sources. Others have secured phones in the names of relatives to try to stay under the radar. 

Corruption in motion...

Secret societies. Secret lists.

The Deep State at work...

A conspiracy so vast oops never mind! Well, it's been a long week and we all could use a laugh.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A-HOLES AND PSEUDO-NICE GUYS EDITION.

Anybody else remember the rumor that the “pusher” was Soupy Sales?

Gather ‘round, kiddies, the man with the goodies is here!  And by that of course I mean Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for y’all. 

The first one is another in a series about conservatives’ ever-decreasing emphasis on policy and ever-increasing emphasis on being assholes. The hook in this instance is the people who spread the vicious rumor that Burning Man had become an Ebola superspreader event, and how, when you checked these jerkoffs’ feeds, they usually were also into classic rightwing disinfo – COVID denialism, the “stolen” 2020 election, cities “burned to the ground” by BLM, etc. Because panic and loathing and unreasoning rage are what they have instead of policies that anyone would want.

If you’ve been paying attention at all, this should be self-evident, but a National Review writer named Zach Kessel seems to have missed it; he writes about the recent rightwing rage-gasm over Julia Mazur (if you don’t know, lucky you; she posted about being happy though childless, the expected ensued) as if it only recently occurred to him that this sort of thing was going on among his fellow conservatives: 

There’s plenty that could be said about the experience of a single, childless woman in her late 20s. I obviously have very little practice being one, so I’ll address something else: the sheer nastiness in [merkin-faced clown Matt] Walsh’s post. His attack on a woman who’s simply trying to appreciate what she has in life is emblematic of a broader problem on the right: the conflation of “conservative” with “jerk.” Walsh is by no means the only offender, with many other right-wing influencers solely focusing on “owning the libs.” The “owning” often stoops to bullying. 

Reading this is like reading about the Fulcrum and Lever at this point. It would be weird to read about “right-wing influencers” who were not bullies. Kessel: 

This is a real problem for conservatism. Over the past decade or so, many elements of what once constituted the movement have crumbled, especially within much of the right-wing media ecosystem. Small government? That’s old-fashioned. Clear, universal ideas of morality? So archaic. A globally engaged United States? That’s “not where the voters are,” and even if it was, America isn’t necessarily the good guy.

They still make you? Where has this guy been? Again, these concepts just weren’t pulling – everyone knows by now “small government,” for example, means tax breaks for the wealthy and the rest of us get shit – so now the con is all fascist funhouse garbage. Why does he think Trump and his less talented twins DeSantis and Ramaswamy command about 80% of Republican presidential race support, while the serious and pseudo-nice-guy candidates scramble for scraps?

Can this guy ever get it? Doubtful:

One only needs to look to national politics to see the impact the Right’s approach could be having on voters. Young women have only become more liberal in recent years, and it’s not far-fetched to say the “trolling” streak in some corners of the Right is a turnoff.

“Trolling” – guy, might the aggressively anti-abortion politics shared by both the asshole conservatives and the pseudo-nice-guy conservatives have “young women” convinced all conservatives/Republicans consider them rightless broodsows? Maybe, by being assholes, these guys are not distracting from their beliefs – they’re affirming them.

Anyway: Here’s a less-grim freebie from Labor Day, about how increasingly screwed Americans might just be ready to go for bread and roses again. Solidarity! 

UPDATE. Speaking of those abortion policies that Zach Kessel doesn't think affect young women's feelings toward conservatism, LOL -- from his own magazine: 

After suffering a string of electoral losses on the issue of abortion, Republican lawmakers are considering moving away from the term “pro-life” to describe their position on the issue...

“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things,” said [Republican Senator Josh] Hawley. “So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted. So if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific"...

I know we said it was murder, ladies, and it is -- you're all murderers! But we're allowing some murders as a political calculation. There! Don't you feel better about the Republican Party?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/28/23.

But I think you know/That I can't let go

It’s the weekend – let’s be re-creative! One of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries from this week that I’m unlocking is an open call for your favorite cover versions of songs – especially ones that go the extra mile to get something new out of the originals. I already posted my top pick (The Residents’ eerie “Viva Las Vegas”) but I have to admit the prize could as easily go to the tune up top here, Erasure doing “Take a Chance On Me.” It’s so breezy, so sweet, so gay! But your choices are at least as valid, let’s hear ‘em. 

The other REBID freebie is one of my scenes in the Catholic Conservative Rectory, with Mr. Justice Boof Kavanaugh sharing drinks and colloquy with the Elders of the Comedy Irish. Poor Boof is back in the news because some folks have noticed that back in 2018, as Above The Law bluntly states, “The Senate Fucked Up The Kavanaugh Investigation” by tossing credible testimony about the now-Associate Justice exposing himself at a party at Yale. Of course, most of us knew the Senate was bum’s-rushing the guy onto the Court at the time – what do you think the protests were about?

(Lagniappe: Here’s one of my White House scenes with Kavanaugh from the reign of the former guy. Lotta laughs if your sense of humor tends toward the mordant. You ought to subscribe.)

Speaking the shitshow that is the current SCOTUS, Jamelle Bouie is very good this week on how it’s rotting from the head. Polls show the rest of the country has some idea how bad it is, too. I can imagine Roberts putting a tail on Alito to make sure he doesn’t fuck up the mifepristone case like he probably did Dobbs, but I don’t see the trajectory turning around anytime soon and there’ll be plenty of opportunities (like Moore v. Harper) for them to speed the decline. Pack that shit already. 

UPDATE. No sooner do I mention how fucked up the SCOTUS cons are when...

Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’
The author of the Dobbs abortion ruling answers attacks on the court’s ‘legitimacy.’ He says he thinks he knows who leaked the draft and is certain about the motive.

Yes, the guy who almost certainly muscled his fellow wingnuts by leaking his own draft decision on Dobbs is granted a high perch in the Wall Street Journal to say it musta been a lib:

He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

How brave he and his fellow wingnuts were to resist! But as the previously cited poll results show, that's not how Mr. and Mrs. America see it -- they find the Supremes, rather than their critics, untrustworthy. Rather than reason with these commoners -- ha ha I know; like they read the Wall Street Journal! -- Alito rages how unfair it all is:

“We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

Alito cries about how no one defends him and his buddies -- even the bar associations (“if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks”) -- how he has to be "driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force," and how hard he has to work on his decisions, etc. Surely he doesn't sound like an old autocrat who need not answer to any authority and who is hated by the people he purports to serve, eh? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN, EXCEPT ON SATURDAY.

A day late, but I did it. Here, have some vintage live Black Flag for your trouble.

•  I finally got into the National Museum of African-American History and Culture this week. It’s very much a typical, signage-heavy Smithsonian museum — long on curios, display cards, and uplift. At first I thought the slavery history galleries were a little too talky, and should have had some of the grim immersive effect of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. (I feel the same way about the National Museum of the American Indian, which always feels like it’s hiding something, genocide-wise.)  But then I noticed the place was packed, mostly with black families, and they were reading the history with great interest, so maybe they neither need not want to be smacked in the face with the horrors of slavery and segregation. To be fair, there are some coups de muséologie like the Emmett Till casket, and also images with quieter, more melancholy power; for example, a large wall projection of a photo of an Emancipation Day Parade in some city in 1905; a sea of black folk, neatly dressed but showing no sign of revelry or even celebration, seeming in fact somber, for reasons we are moved to imagine. And once you gets upstairs to the cultural section, all is bliss and wonder; special credit to whoever designed the groovy light boxes in the 70s-radical section. I take Steven Thrasher’s point about “respectability politics,” but it is on the nation’s biggest tourist strip, and you could do worse with four hours. (Oh, and like the American Indian Museum, the food is very good.)

•  I have to thank Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog (which you really should be reading, especially lately) for alerting me to the latest by culture-war clown Christian Toto appearing at the once-proud The Hill:

Film 'Miss Sloane' another reminder of Hollywood's liberal smugness

We warned you effete liberals, by our glorious election of The Leader, that we didn’t want to see anything but Batman vs. Superman vs. Wonder Woman’s Tits XVIIIVXI from now on, but you preemptively ignored us during the production cycle of this movie (or as you sissies call it “film”).

Now, the industry hopes a new film will change the public narrative on gun control. When will celebrities learn their one-sided sermons rarely change hearts or minds?...

Eventually Toto pretends to actually review the film and, surprise, says it’s bad on the merits, which is as may be, but clearly that isn’t why he finds it worth talking about because 1.) he’s Christian Toto 2.) he keeps sticking in talking points like “never mind that the National Shooting Sports Foundation recently revealed that women are the nation’s fastest growing group of gun owners,” and 3.) It’s in The frigging Hill, not Cahiers du Cinéma.

The film suggests most Beltway types want more gun control, but the gun lobby strong arms senators to make them do their bidding. Off screen, there are forces on both sides, each with its own resources and forms of persuasion. Like glossy Hollywood movies…

Like glossy Hollywood movies! From Hollywood! What a bunch of hypocrites.

Hollywood didn’t bother to ask why some Americans thought Trump, flaws and all, might be the change agent they craved. And “Miss Sloane” refuses to consider any NRA member’s arguments regarding the Second Amendment…

He seems to want advisory councils brought in to make sure the artistic product doesn’t challenge the Trumpenproletariat, at least not without an appearance by a raisonneur named Tistian Chroto to explain why conservatism rocks. In show biz they call these focus groups, and that’s how we get Batman vs. Superman vs. Wonder Woman’s Tits XVIIIVXI (in IMAX^®!). Which I guess will be the ideal entertainment for the New Age.

•  As for the Carrier deal, you know what? First and foremost I’m happy for those guys who will get to keep their jobs. It sucks that many of the Carrier employees are losing their jobs and no one seems to give a shit, and that the propaganda Trump is making of it is probably a model for his general kleptocracy cover, and (most of all) that nothing about him and his factota suggests there’ll be anything like a policy that would generate better-than-subsistence-wage jobs for those hinterland honkies who thought voting for him was gonna fix everything. But in this round of winners-and-losers at least somebody who isn't a billionaire won something; also, we get to hear the hardcore wingnuts sputtering that it’s not real conservatism — and their Twitter followers snarling back at them. It's an ill wind that blows no one some laffs!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Funeral today tomorrow. Words of wisdom from the deceased. 

•   When Obama said he was going to do all those gun orders, Charles C.W. Cooke did a long, weirdly wound-up post called "President Obama Has Let His Emotion Get the Better of His Judgment":

Has Obama lost his mind? This is a man, remember, who is supposed to be admirably dispassionate; a man who is supposed to understand how the game is played; a man who is supposed to reflexively refuse to be taken in by the emotion of the moment. And yet he’s going to use a good deal of his last year’s political capital in order to tweak a few minor rules around the edges? Why?

Also, "Which is to say that Obama’s behavior is not at all rational," "Even if he wins this round, he will have done precisely nothing of merit," "Were I a gun control advocate I’d be livid with him. Livid," "Obama has let his emotion get the better of him here. He and his fellow travelers will likely pay a price," etc. Lots of italics, there, Chuck. Today we see what he was so hysterical about: A CNN poll finds that, while they disapprove of Obama using executive orders to do it, the American people approve of his gun control measures 67%-32%. Even 51% of Republicans and most gun owners support the measures. The respondents are also skeptical that the measures will work, which makes sense -- but what a pity CNN didn't also ask why they were skeptical, and list "because the Republicans will do everything they can to fuck it up" among the possible choices. (Extra credit, BTW, to Breitbart.com, which headlines its poll coverage "CNN POLL: MAJORITY OPPOSE USE OF EXECUTIVE ACTIONS FOR GUN CONTROL" and adds this kicker: "The majority of respondents to the CNN/ORC poll were not gun owners. Only 40 percent said there is even a gun in their house." So how can true patriots even take them serious! Show us a poll taken by gun owners instead, preferably not while they're on the way to the emergency room.)

•   So many examples, but I might as well take one of the more egregious, from The Federalist:

Hillary Clinton Should Stop Excusing Juanita Broaddrick’s Sexual Assault
Juanita Broaddrick recently opened up on Twitter over her sexual assault by Bill Clinton and Hillary's dismissal of her suffering.

Look on the bright side: At least there's one woman in America conservatives believe was raped. Favorite kicker and author bio on the subject, from Newsday:

I’ve often wondered how she and Juanita Broaddrick and Eileen Wellstone and Sandra Allen James and Christy Zercher, among others, have felt watching Bill Clinton go on to become a revered national and international statesman. 

If Trump can give them a second hearing in the court of public opinion, maybe his candidacy is worth something after all. 

William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.

I guess it could be true -- the guy pushed through NAFTA, after all, so in my book he's capable of anything.

•   How about a quick run through the gibberish pits of the culture war? Ross Douthat did something for National Review that defies analysis....

And then there’s pop culture itself. In the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.” Thirty years later, the biggest blockbuster of 2015 was about . . . Darth Vader’s grandchildren. It is directed by a filmmaker who’s coming off rebooting . . . Star Trek. And the wider cinematic landscape is defined by . . . the recycling of comic-book properties developed between the 1940s and the 1970s. Even fashion shows a similar repetition, as Kurt Anderson pointed out in Vanity Fair several years ago...

Yeah whatever beardo, fast forward:

...we’re dealing with issues (from an aggressive Russia to, yes, Libyan-linked terrorist groups) that Marty and “Doc” Brown would recognize immediately. (Though in fairness, we do make movies about colonizing Mars, and the special effects are excellent.) 

The word for this kind of civilizational situation is “decadence.”

Well, at least it's highfalutin' and incoherent. Most of the current cultwar crop is quotidian propagandist yak: Operatives like John C. Goodman and Steven Hayward, for example, instructing their minions to see The Big Short as an indictment not of unregulated greedheads wrecking the economy, but of poor people getting mortgages. Connoisseurs of longform cultwar can take in Kyle Smith, who at Commentary tells us that Hollyweird often changes the details of supposedly "true stories" -- not to make them more dramatic, as you may have thought, but to please their Stalinist masters! Keep fucking that culture war chicken, comrades.

•   Speaking of culture warriors, Virginia Postrel says David O. Russell's Joy is better than The Social Network (a movie from five years ago) because it's nicer to capitalism:

The respect extends to products and customers. “Joy” acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.

Book my seats now!

...Most of all, however, “Joy” makes its protagonist an untragic hero. She gets tough and she gets rich, but she winds up neither lonely nor mean. 

Mildred Pierce was originally like that, but FDR made them change it to promote socialism.

Audiences embraced Sorkin’s compelling but dark fable of the friendless tycoon as if it were a much sunnier story. The real-world triumph of Facebook overpowered the fictional desolation of "The Social Network." 

“Watching this movie makes you want to run from the theatre, grab your laptop and build your own empire,” wrote one moviegoer. If Hollywood won’t give people an inspiring movie about big-time entrepreneurship, audiences will imagine their own version.

Hollywood's always trying to tell us that ambition may isolate us from other people, but that's just because they're communists; what regular people really see in The Social Network is wealth production -- because why else would anyone see a movie except to celebrate an economic theory? The whole thing's full of howlers, but here's my favorite part:

Hollywood regularly produces positive movies about small businesses, often in the hospitality industry. “Chef,” “The 100-Foot Walk,” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” come to mind.

But really, what's the point of these recommendations when audiences will imagine their own versions? Helps her meet her word count, I guess.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

God save your mad parade.

 (Note: Contrary to custom, the freebie links are at the end.)

Funny, I’m actually susceptible to royal drama. I remember the scenes around Victoria’s death in PBS’ dramatization of The Forsyte Saga – the maid crying out, “it’s the Queen, mum, the poor old Queen – she’s dead!”; the archival footage of the cortege, and the infirm Old Soames tottering to his feet: “Don’t care to be seated when the Queen is passing.” I even felt a little blush of sentiment in Frears’ The Queen when the little girl proffers Liz the flowers and says “they’re for you,” notwithstanding the real meaning of the scene is that foxy Tony’s scheme worked a charm.

But I’m not so depraved that I can’t also enjoy some good Dead Queen jokes, and apart from Irish Twitter the funniest have been unintentional – that is, the puffed-up boo-hoos of reactionaries who halted, as if by reflex, their usual smackdowns and slurs on the poor and underprivileged to blow their noses over Betty Saxe-Coburg and talk about the Passing of the Old Order. For example, Andrew Sullivan:

For my impertinent reply I got a week off Twitter. Worth it! 

Sadly I can’t slap ‘em all. Erick Erickson, for example, glurges that the people cracking wise at the Queen’s death are all snooty liberals. He seems particularly incensed at the black ones, whom he angrily accuses of anger; “undoubtedly,” he fumes, “they also understand their careers are what they are because of white progressive elite head-patters, and it makes them angrier.” Hey, give Erick credit – he learned a variation on “liberal plantation”! But the rest of the shtick is musty as hell – “the left is increasingly cloistered inside a bubble of their own making,” blah blah blah – though nothing in the thing is more sick-making than his attempts at funerary prose: 

Truly, I have no words to add to the hundreds of thousands already written about the death of Elizabeth II. I can only offer my prayers. Her shoes are too big for anyone to fill, so I will also pray all of us can give King Charles the grace to walk in his own shoes in his own way, unshackled from the expectations left by our memories of his predecessor, his mother, the Queen. In the shadow of his mother’s crown for so long, he now comes into the light beneath its weight on his head and its burdens on his shoulders as he and his people mourn Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. What a time.

As their eyes pass over this, I doubt even the people who take Erickson seriously are paying close attention, and it registers merely as a gush of So Sad So Sad God Save & Are Eye Pee. But for those of us who can’t help ourselves, it conjures vision of King Charles III trying out one of his thousands of pairs of shoes with a renewed sense of purpose (and a great fat book on his head, to improve his posture), and Erickson, squeezed into an equerry costume, bawling out the late Queen’s honorifics at a suburban barbecue. 

I’m grateful that old Bess stood up to the Nazis with whom her wicked Uncle liked to party, and can even understand how the durability of her reign gave very old people some sense of continuity and stability, and that it must be rough to lose it. But most of us do not have such a sense, because the world has been getting worse for a long time and dragging our hope and fortunes down with it; and in that light the bejeweled lady hanging in there year after year to greet one horrible knob after another, then bidding them cheerio as they went out to fuck up England and the world some more, doesn’t seem so much a comfort as a cruel joke.

That’s why the jokes are funny. And speaking of jokes, I have a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on the subject – accept it please in the spirit of the occasion (and tell your friends, since, ahem, I can’t tweet the link). And while you’re at it, read and enjoy the previous one about people who think liberal arts degrees are bad because they don’t make you rich.