ONCE-SLOW GOLDBERG SHOWS HE'S GOT PLENTY OF GAS IN THE TANK.

I have noticed that the Trump takeover of the GOP has left Jonah Goldberg a bit adrift and demoralized, so it is with pleasure that I announce he's returned to form with a column worthy of his alicublog tagline: the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else.

First, recall all the recent news stories of hours-long lines of early voters and Republican voter suppression and voter harassment. OK, now catch Goldberg's headline:

How early voting endangers democracy

Not even kidding. In his lede, Goldberg suggests that the recent blockbuster (and bullshit) Comey email drop is vital voter information that would have gotten early Clinton voters to change their minds, then follows with a classic Goldberg tic: trying to make this look bipartisan-like by adding,

...a couple weeks before that, NBC News released a tape of Donald Trump describing how he likes to sexually assault women. Since then, nearly a dozen women have come forward describing treatment that closely tracks the behavior Trump himself described...

Early-voting start times vary by state and often by county. In Minnesota, people started casting ballots in September. In Ohio, voting began just five days after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced...

Someone who voted in early October might have missed that Trump was a scumbag! Acknowledging that "early-voting supporters concede the point and then say it just doesn’t matter" -- i.e., everyone knows this is a phony argument made up by Republicans who typically get creamed in early voting -- Goldberg tries this:

They note that the people most likely to cast early votes are committed partisans, immune to new facts and information. There’s surely some truth to that --

Which is why the Comey drop would have made them vote for Trump, I guess.

-- but as the scale of early voting increases with each year, it must also be less and less true every year.

It must be, because the longer the line for something, the less likely it is that all the people on that line really want what's on the other end, that is I mean  farrrrt did you hear that? Who did that? Why are you looking at me, I say that's grounds for ending this argument with me winning --

Unfortunately all around Goldberg still has a word count to fulfill, so we come to this:

Also, one might wonder why people who decry the rise of ideological polarization and partisanship are so eager to make it easier for hardcore partisans to vote... 

Every day we hear pious actors, activists and politicians talk about the solemn and sacred duty to vote, and yet everyone wants to make voting easier and more convenient.

[Blink. Blink.]

Many dream of the most cockamamie idea of all: online voting, so we can make choosing presidents as easy as buying socks on Amazon.

This gets human nature exactly backward. Nothing truly important, never mind sacred and solemn, should be treated as a trivial convenience. Churches that ask more of the faithful do better at attracting and retaining congregants. The Marines get the best and most committed recruits because they have higher standards...

Drop and give me twenty, then you can vote! That's how we did it when America was strong -- well, sort of, actually we used poll taxes and literacy tests. And, because we wanted to motivate black people to be all they could be -- like the Marines, and the Church! -- we used it mostly on them.

I predict that whoever wins Tuesday, we're in for a golden age of Goldberg. Keep a gas mask handy!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Evan McMullin fantasy presidency. Yeah, I contemplated making this week's column about the Comey bullshit, but the situation is still in flux and in the absence of an actual accusation it's basically a scarecrow for Republicans to shake and make scary noises behind. I mean, look at the Ole Perfesser's page from last night:

PREDICTION: “Comey broke precedent about announcing a criminal investigation near an election because he saw something disqualifying.” If so, Hillary may regret the demand that he release everything ASAP . . . .

Meanwhile, as to the timing, note this: FBI agents knew of Clinton-related emails weeks before director was briefed. Does this mean that the agents were afraid to tell him for fear of Loretta Lynch-style interference, like last time?

Posted at 6:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds 

Questions Remain! Jon Stewart already has "Bullshit Mountain," so what can we do with this -- Bullshit Tsunami? Bullshit Event Horizon? (No, better save that for the endless Congressional investigations.)

The McMullin thing, on the other hand, in addition to being hilarious reflects the brethren's deepest fears and desires. The sources cover a good cross-section of wingnut-world, from Jonah Goldberg to the Christer nuthatch Witherspoon Institute to Erick Erickson's clubhouse. Plus when rightbloggers mention it their eyes go all gooey, like that dog whose owner dressed up as his favorite toy.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the pussy thing, and the debate. The topic was an embarrassment of riches, not to say a plain embarrassment, and here are some of the outtakes:

Regular readers will recall that Rod Dreher has been extremely Trump-curious lately (“The more things like this happen, the more sense Trump’s idea to halt Muslim immigration for the time being makes”). Friday morning Dreher was swooning for him, with “Trump To Catholics: ‘I’ve Got Your Back’” (“Donald Trump sent a letter to Catholic leaders gathering in Denver… I find this encouraging”) and an even more embarrassing post called "The Little Way of... Donald Trump?" Hours later Dreher was demanding Trump resign. “There is no way a pig like this will be elected president. None,” he wrote, the scales falling from his eyes, or his thumb falling from the scales. Later Dreher declaimed, “When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option [subject of Dreher’s new book] will be all we will have left.” By then there’ll have been enough born every minute to make it a best seller!

After the debate Dreher declared Trump the winner and wrote,"You know, I really think Donald Trump still has a chance — not much of one, but a chance — to win this thing. I did not expect to be saying that after this debate." That would be a good reason not to constantly make hysterical statements that you have to disown a few hours later, dummy.

The most interesting thing about Jonah Goldberg’s column on the subject was that it wasn’t totally stupid: He even said people who “still think Hillary Clinton would be worse” than Trump should “just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name.” I think that, while other big-name conservatives are secretly rooting for Trump, this campaign has really put the zap on Goldberg's head. Imagine that your biggest claim to fame is a book about how liberals are all fascists, and then one day your whole movement is taken oven by a guy whose campaign blueprint is the rise of Adolf Hitler. Even worse, the guy thinks you're a loser. If Goldberg’s entire career hadn’t been a geyser of poison shit I’d feel sorry for him.

UPDATE. You gotta be shitting me, Scott Gant and Bruce Peabody at the Wall Street Journal:

What’s next for the Republican Party and Donald J. Trump? After hearing Mr. Trump make a series of derogatory and sexually predatory statements in a 2005 recording that was leaked last week, Republican officials are openly fretting about the future of their party and its candidates. Some are calling on Mr. Trump to step aside so that a new presidential nominee can be chosen.

With Mr. Trump emphatically rejecting that idea, the best chance for Republicans to secure the White House (and improve their prospects down ballot) may be a different course: Mr. Trump could publicly declare that although he will remain the Republican nominee he will resign immediately after taking his oath of office on Inauguration Day, leaving his more-popular running mate, Mike Pence, to succeed him as president.

In this way, Republicans can effectively replace Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket, without having to endure the logistical and legal turmoil of formally nominating a new standard-bearer less than a month before Election Day.

"Logistical and legal turmoil" meaning "impossibility," in this instance.

...Under the 20th Amendment, the newly elected president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20. A President-elect Trump could recite his oath of office and then immediately resign.

I think they should let Trump do the inaugural address first. Maybe even sit in the Oval Office awhile and give away some pens.

Fantasies like this aren't meant to convince. They're just symptoms of dissociation. Conservatives want the benefits of a Trump campaign (all those nice new Nazi frog voters and energized hillbillies!), but they want you to believe -- they want to believe -- that it has nothing to do with them, because they're in a tower above the fray, swaddled in nice, reasonable discourse.

IT'S SO NICE TO HAVE YOU BACK WHERE YOU BELONG.

Here's more evidence that Jonah Goldberg may be slowly coming out of his Trump funk. Who else in American letters would, in attempting to explain the power of (urgh) "narrative," come up with a passage like this -- not to mention leave it in:

President Obama understands this too. Just consider the way he talks about terrorism — often reassuring Americans that they’re more likely to die in a bathtub accident than in a terror attack.

And he’s right.

On the other hand, bathtubs aren’t trying to get nuclear weapons. Nor are bathtubs destabilizing the Middle East (often killing massive numbers of non-Americans) or otherwise plotting to conquer the world.

Thought experiment! There's a tornado coming! And your only hope of shelter is a local mosque! Sure, in a tornado you could get smashed like a mosquito -- but the Koran says you're a dhimmi, and in a room full of Muslims there's gotta be one who's gonna wanna dhimmi you up! At least the tornado has no ideology! What to do?

To be fair, Goldberg is trying to make a point about how narratives can be deceiving:

I’m not naive. Crafting stories to serve political purposes is as old as politics itself. But the problem seems to be getting worse.

Perhaps it’s because our country is so polarized and our media environment so balkanized and instantaneous. Politicians and journalists alike feel compelled to make facts serve some larger tale in every utterance.

You can take it from the author of Liberal Fascism! Ah, Jonah, it's been too long.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Luscious Jackson got in my head this week and hasn't left.
Not complaining.
•   The New York Times has a story on Vladimir Putin's drive to make the Russian Orthodox Church into, as one observer puts it, "an instrument of the Russian state." The Church's shock troops are medieval in outlook -- one of its bishops "warned worshipers that new biometric passports, required by the European Union in return for visa-free access to Europe, were 'satanic' because they contained a 13-digit number" -- and of course favor the persecution of homosexuals, as Putin does. This gives Rod Dreher yet another opportunity to tell us how he really feels about secularism and its inferiority to the Every Knee Shall Bend model of governance. While he claims "it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy," nonetheless...

...as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars... 

The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model? 

Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions...

I understand why Glenn Greenwald et alia object to what they see as the revival of a Red Scare in this country, but come on: At least people who sympathized with the old USSR thought they were trying to advance human liberation. Dreher sympathizes with today's Russia for the opposite reason.

•   Donald Trump recently attacked the Food & Drug Administration as the "food police." Who knows why he does what he does anymore, but it gave us a chance to hear some straight-up bull-goose looney libertarianism from Nick Gillespie of Reason:

You get rid of "official" food inspectors and you know what will happen? To the extent that customers demand any sort of certification beyond public reputation, private-sector and nonprofit groups will be created to provide this or that level of inspection. We see that already with kosher and halal food prep, of course, not to mention other sorts of watchdog groups (think Fair Trade coffee and the like). Yelp or some other rating system would likely add some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval-style process as well.

The yelpification of food poisoning! I can't put it any better than Kia on Twitter: "I would have given these diet pills one star but I am dead."

• Jonah Goldberg complains about the obstreperous black guy who is interfering with his mild interest in football ("entertainment more than passion," Jesus Christ is everything about this guy terrible?). His premise is that "particularly among men, sports talk is a kind of safe space and common tongue all at once" and politics isn't supposed to interfere. He quotes and comments on a 2003 E.J. Dionne column:

And then [Dionne] added: “Politicizing everything from literature to music to painting and sports was once a habit of the left. The Communist Party’s now-defunct newspaper once had a sports column called ‘Out in Left Field.’ Now, it’s the turn of the right to politicize everything.”

I’m not sure that was entirely true then, but it’s definitely not true now.

Oh yeah? We need not get into the wider world of wingnut culture war here -- just remember that from 2011 until someone wised up, National Review ran a sports blog called "Right Field." This is from the inaugural post:

The facts of life are conservative, and in no sphere is that truism more manifest than in the world of sport. In the games we play, the same rules are meant to apply to all — and we are outraged at the injustice when they are not. There are winners and losers, and we don’t agonize over the self-esteem of those who do not prevail: We expect them to learn from defeat and improve...

Yuk. To this day we have conservatives like Matt K. Lewis claiming that sports blogs are "dominated by liberals" because no one wants to hear wingnuts snarling about political correctness instead of keeping their eye on the ball. (Yes, like every other thinking person in America I know about today's David Brooks column and his strange conviction that black people will be moved to reconsider their sports protests because they might make bigots mad and his Thanksgivings harder to enjoy, but by claiming conservatives don't go in for this sort of thing, Goldberg has effectively out-stupided even him. There can be only one!)

FRENCHIE NEEDS A SAFE SPACE.

With Jonah Goldberg in a parlous state, David French is charging hard in the paint for the honor of being National Review's biggest dumbass. Earlier today I thought he'd outdone himself with this post, in which he discovered a study finding more self-identified conservatives among millennials than heretofore suspected and, despite having written umpteen articles about what little liberal shits Millennials are -- e.g., "Blame Parents for Millennials’ Laughable Fragility," "A Note to Entitled Millennials in the Workplace: Give Humility a Try," "Do Millenials Dislike Capitalism Because It’s Not a Safe Space?" and so on -- suddenly declared the kids are all rightwing; in fact, despite what he'd been writing for years, French claimed he'd been seeing this New Trend for years:

But roughly five years ago, I began to sense a change in the wind. I was encountering not one or two truly counter-cultural students but entire roomfuls of young conservatives who were openly disdainful of the dominant social trends in their peer group. Where their peers demanded participation trophies, these kids threw them in the trash. Where their peers dismissed traditional social conventions, these kids (particularly in the South) were reviving the use of “sir” and “ma’am” in conversations with elders...

And these New Millennials will "sir" and "ma'am" our great country back into its pre-homosexual greatness:  "...this new counter-revolution is ultimately built on devotion to God, enthusiasm for our nation’s founding principles, a healthy respect for tradition and our nation’s most valuable cultural institutions, and hard work. This revolution won’t be televised, but it will be on Snapchat..."

Gag. But I looked again tonight and, amazingly, French has topped himself. Get a load:

Free Speech Is Killing Free Speech

Has he changed his mind about Citizens United? I wondered. Ha, j/k -- that kind of free speech is great. But when the NBA moves the All-Star Game because it doesn't support North Carolina's anti-anti-discrimination laws, that's double plus ungood free speech. It's bullying! It's both micro and macroaggressive!

Increasingly, Americans are using their right to free speech to destroy free speech. Rather than seeking to inform, they intimidate. Rather than seeking to persuade, they publicly shame... 

It seems odd, given the widespread trolling on social media, to assert that America’s culture of free speech is under threat, but the cumulative effect of shame campaigns and intimidation strategies is that millions of people simply flee the field, leaving the battle to the most extreme voices or to those people who’ve slowly developed the thick skins necessary to maintain a public presence...

And God forbid people like French should have to develop thick skins -- that's for libtards like Katie Couric, who should roll with his punches as God intended. Just as French turned on a dime to declare Millennials soldiers of Christ, so he's flipped on the much-derided concept of a safe space; it's great, he's now decided, so long as he's the one safely spaced.

UPDATE. Comments are (as always) well worth your time, Mr. and Mrs. Blog Consumer. trex does us the favor of noticing that back in 2015, before he got the PC bug, French was all for offensive speech that cut a certain way, e.g.:

In 2007 San Francisco State University put its chapter of the College Republicans on trial for desecrating the name of Allah. At an anti-terrorism rally, members of the College Republicans stomped on paper representations of the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which contain the name “Allah” written in Arabic script. Bear in mind, this is a school where activists routinely burn or otherwise desecrate the American flag. Students charged the College Republicans with “attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of incivility.” 

At the time, I worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, and we filed suit, seeking an injunction against California State University–system policies that mandated “civility” and prohibited conduct that was “inconsistent” with the university’s “goals, principles, and policies.”

Which would be fine, albeit assholish, if French weren't now bitching that the spectacle of liberals boycotting Chick-fil-a is "progressive bullying" and diving into his den of coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies.

THE COMEBACK KID.

As I noticed some months back, Jonah Goldberg has been off his feed lately -- shoved off it, I assumed, by the goons and musclemen of Trump Inc. who took over his beautiful conservative Playland. But today he's showing some of the old stuff. His topic is Trump's transparent and offensive pretense of a play for black and Hispanic voters.  (Relevant quote: "You'll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot. Look at the statistics.")

For a second, Goldberg actually seems to see what the rest of us see:

The conventional wisdom is that Trump isn’t trying to reach out to African-American voters. Rather, he’s trying to signal to moderate and suburban whites, particularly women, that he’s not the racist some have painted him to be.

But then:

I think the conventional wisdom is right, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump himself thinks his pitch his sincere.

What? What makes you think --

I would also note that I think the strategy is very Kellyanne Conway, but the words sound more like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.

?? So... he's sincere about mouthing the script of his latest campaign advisors?

Shouting at blacks that they all live in poverty is not exactly a nuanced or persuasive way to go. It’s more like a guy losing his temper in a bar argument.

Oh, so that's why you think it's sincere. But then why did you --

But at the general level, some people seem to think it is a terribly cynical thing for Trump to reach out to whites by making an overture to blacks. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. Just because one has cynical motives doesn’t mean one’s actions are objectively bad. Lots of people cynically give to charity to make themselves look good to the public, that doesn’t mean charities should refuse money from anyone not of pure heart.

Keep in mind that Goldberg is comparing "shouting at blacks that they all live in poverty" to charitable donations. One may seem worse than the other, but you gotta look to motive! Similarly, when the guys from The United Way shakes their canister at Goldberg, he tells them, "HEY WHATTAYA CALL A PUERTO RICAN TEST TUBE BABY! JANITOR IN A DRUM!" and offers, as they withdraw in disgust, to explain why this was an appropriate response.

...George W. Bush campaigned with Colin Powell in 2000, not because he was under any illusions that he would pick up a big swath of the black vote, but to reassure those very same moderates and independents that Trump is after. The differences between Bush and Trump on minorities, immigration etc. are deep and wide, but the tactic was similar.

Bush only got 9% of the black vote in 2000, but he won 35% of the Hispanic vote, and in 2004 he won 44% of it. Trump will be lucky if they don't deduct votes from his totals on behalf of those communities.  You only have a couple lines left, Jonah -- play us home!

He's still got it!

UPDATE. I should add that putting quotes from rightwing columnists into Frinkiac is something I learned from @ralphdouthat.

DNC DAY TWO.

There were highs (Joe Crowley stripping the hide off Donald Trump for "cashing in" on 9/11 while Hillary was helping survivors and first responders) and lows (Lena Dunham and America Ferrera making Oscar-telecast-dumb jokes), but I'm a Democrat so it's always fun to watch Bill Clinton work. Headlines suggest it was about selling himself as the First Whatever, but the speech was both more generous and more targeted than that. Bill breezed past his own accomplishments, including the Presidency, to talk about hers; much of it was like some kind of Charlie Kaufman experiment where the President of the United States is a minor figure telling in awestruck tones the life story of some minor politician. It was strange and charming to hear how the future leader of the free world was "dragged around" on an unelected official's quest to get more kids in pre-school. Of course the romantic stuff helps; everyone likes courtship and sending-the-kid-to-college stories. But they were there mainly so the usual assholes couldn't notice their absence and go into their sham-marriage shtick. And even the cute stories were turned toward heroic biography -- it's not just that she was a good mom, but that she was a good mom while doing all these other things. I would add that it was a measure of Clinton's cunning professionalism that he left the implied rebukes to the Trump campaign -- which we all know he is both motivated and equiped to deliver at operatic length and scale -- to a few minutes at the end, as if, compared to the woman he'd just described, the shitheel on the other ticket wasn't worth the sweat off his balls. A+.

Speaking of shitheels, Jonah Goldberg managed to embarrass himself before and after the speech. In the prelude Goldberg does his usual inept search for poetry in slander -- get a load:

The notion that Bill Clinton, of all prominent Americans not convicted of a violent crime, might be officially named “First Gentleman” is a crime against all logic, fact, and decency.

"Ecrasez l'Infame" it ain't, but if you're a wingnut legacy pledge who thinks fist-shakings over Clintons are your sluice to the Pantheon, you're not likely to do better. Eventually Goldberg stumbles into the realm of Clinton fanfic:

I think he could help himself enormously by offering some glimmer, hint or suggestion of remorse or apology for what a spectacularly horrible husband he has been. Everyone in the audience — well, at least the TV audience — knows he’s been a cad. It makes his potential status as the “First Gentleman” endless fodder for late night comedians — and Donald Trump. It might happen, but I doubt it. Bill is a gaslighter...

A few hours later, as the Wells Fargo Center rings with cheers and Clinton is adulated for yet another brilliant speech, Goldberg shakes his head at the gaslit masses and attacks Clinton for not telling them what a shitty family man Goldberg thinks he is:

The simple fact is that everyone expects husbands to speak well of their wives — even Bill Clinton. That was a box he could have checked in 10 minutes of his speech. Instead, he took the 9,072 minutes of his speech (by my rough estimate) reading Hillary Clinton’s C.V. The biggest problem is that the more he talked the weirder it was that he didn’t address the elephant(s) in the room. This is not a great marriage by any normal person’s definition, unless you measure them almost solely on the metric of political success.

I’m not saying there weren’t effective bits. But my God that speech was boring unless you’re already fascinated by Hillary Clinton.

Yeah, because why would people watching a national political convention want to hear about the candidate? It's a good thing Goldberg's writing never had to sell anything except the perpetual renewal of his wingnut welfare.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Reagan's president elect/ Fascist god in motion
• There are all kinds of things you can say about Trump's speech last night, and pundits are busy saying them.  What I will say is that in terms of policy it was perfectly consonant with 50 years of American conservatism -- by which I mean, there was no policy, except to scare voters out of their wits and then offer to let Daddy take care of them. This has been the traditional appeal of even the more avuncular GOP candidates like Reagan, whose celebrated sunniness was only powerful in contrast to the dark Democratic dystopia he and his henchmen were constantly portraying as the only alternative to himself. If Trump is more frightening to some people than Reagan or any of the others, it's mainly because when he does this routine, he indulges very few of the fake pieties I talked about yesterday with which conservatives traditionally try to make their bait-and-switch look socially acceptable. That's his main innovation. But just because you're scared doesn't mean other people don't find it attractive. Just like Reagan, Trump has a sunny shtick -- those goofy faces he pulls, the snarl-smile with thumbs up, seem wolfish and creepy to me. But then I didn't buy what Reagan was selling either, and I bet a lot of whatever customers of his are still alive are voting for Trump.

What I'm saying is, make sure your passport's renewed.

• And be not deceived about the #NeverTrumps: Many of them are at least Trump-curious already. Jonah Goldberg, for example, still attacks Trump, but in the middle of it says

Many Republicans I’ve talked to find Trump’s willingness to outsource actual policymaking to Mike Pence or Paul Ryan reassuring. And in a sense, it is...

If Trump could be trusted to simply play a ceremonial role, serving as a kind of corporate motivational speaker for the country, I might board the Trump train. But can anyone say with confidence that Trump has the discipline to do anything of the sort?

This is a wussy way of saying, this Hitler's an intemperate fellow but at least he has the sense to delegate important work to von Ribbentrop, perhaps the Nazis can persuade me. Meanwhile at NeverTrump redoubt Erick Erickson's The Resurgent, Steve Berman says of Trump's speech. "It’s honestly the most terrific, finest, greatest speech I’ve read/heard in quite a while (and the crowd reacted very energetically)–and Trump was very well suited to give it. If the speech could run for president, it would win hands down." He does add, "Except there’s no bifurcating Trump from his speeches," and does the usual Trump-is-a-very-bad-man shtick, but finally says, "If the speech wins, and we get Trump along with it, at least it won’t be Hillary." Like I said, Trump is selling standard-issue conservatism with the mask off, and these conservatives, with whatever difficulty their social anxieties cause them in admitting it, are all hoping he'll win.

WORST OF A BAD LOT.

I know there are lots of other candidates and we do have fun with them, but sometimes I think the guys at Power Line are the worst -- it's just I don't look at them much as I do the other rightbloggers. alicublog faves such as Jonah Goldberg are fun to watch, because they're flummoxed, bamboozled, and scared by the truth into falling down three flights of stairs in an entertaining fashion. But the Power Liners are cold-eyed propagandist shits who aren't so much flummoxed by the truth as committed by whatever mad scientist created them to obliterating all traces of it. It's like the difference between the border guards at the beginning of The Grand Budapest Hotel and the border guards at the end.

Fortunately, they're lawyers, so their arguments are transparent to normal people as bullshit. Today, for example, I noticed a June 21 post by PL's Paul Mirengoff in which he responded to a thoroughly vetted and well-supported Politifact post, "Donald Trump said, 'Crime is rising.' It's not (and hasn't been for decades)," by:

• Calling Politifact "a biased liberal operation";
• Insisting "Trump, in this instance, is correct. Crime is rising."
• Supporting his claim by:
  • Citing a poll that says the percentage of Americans who “personally worry about crime and violence" is up. and "this dramatic increase in concern surely reflects a change in the facts on the ground — i.e., increased crime and violence." Right you are if you think you are!
    
  • Citing rising crime stats in FBI's "preliminary" numbers for 2015 which, though unvetted by the Bureau, nonetheless "still represented the FBI’s best estimate as to whether crime was increasing as of the beginning of 2016." Which is rather like saying that the famous chart of the status of the British Pound after Brexit shows, because of a couple of rising blips near the end, that Brexit has actually launched the rise of the pound:

So I dropped by Power Line tonight to see what their headline was, and found this by John Hinderaker:

TRUMP HOLDS BIG LEAD AMONG WHITE VOTERS

No doubt. But Clinton in the latest poll leads by 12. So?

One thing is worth pointing out, however: even in this outlier poll, Trump holds a ten-point lead among white voters, 50%-40% (down from 57%-33% in May!). It is remarkable that even at his low ebb, Trump wins by a near landslide margin among white voters, a majority of the electorate. Not many years ago, that would have assured him of victory.

Jesus, I know these guys think black votes should only count three-fifths, but really...

This is why Democrats are so anxious to “fundamentally transform” the United States through mass immigration from Third World countries. Only by building up the minority population do they have a chance to stay competitive. But that still wouldn’t be enough, even if the Democrats got most of the votes cast by minorities, if minorities voted in anything like a normal pattern. In order to win, the Democrats need to roll up ridiculous margins, like the 90%-8% lead that Clinton holds with blacks in the ABC/WaPo poll.

He doesn't support this math with anything but, if he and his candidate Trump keep talking this way, 90% should be a cinch.

Racial conflict suits the Democrats. In fact, they need it to have a chance of remaining competitive.

Lucky for them they're running against you.

I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO....

One of the many interesting fallouts from this horrible Orlando situation is the brethren demanding that the President perform a magic incantation -- in this case, "radical islamic terrorism" -- as if it would, like saying "Rumpelstiltskin," immediately destroy the enemy.

This ridiculous demand started with Donald Trump, whom Obama schooled on the issue. Wingnuts nonetheless have been backing Trump up:  For example, Jay Caruso at RedState cries "UNBELIEVABLE: Obama Is More Upset At Donald Trump Than He Is At ISIS!... When people are slaughtered by terrorists he's 'No Drama Obama.' When somebody gets under his skin, he's Stompy McStompfeet." (Yes, someone actually wrote that shit and signed his name to it. Apparently Chris Christie's not the only one who's sold his ass.) "No One’s Looking for ‘Magic Words,’" sputters Commentary legacy pledge John Podhoretz, dimly aware that he's being mocked and spinning defensively like a teased hog:

This is all an effort at misdirection. The problem with Obama’s conduct isn’t that naming radical Islam would solve the problem. Of course, it wouldn’t solve the problem. The issue is that the refusal to name radical Islam is part of the problem. Obama’s refusal speaks to the mindset at work in the White House about the threat we face.

We didn't say saying "Rumpelstiltskin" would fix everything! The real problem is Obama refusing to say "Rumpelstiltskin"!

Does any of this sound familiar? It did to me, so I went back to the alicublog archives and found this from ten years ago:

Oh, this is cute: the boys at The Corner are debating on what name we should give our adversaries in the War on Whatchamacallit. Slow propaganda day! 

[Jonah] Goldberg shows off some of the names he learned while researching his alleged book; he certainly can parrot catch-phrases, but alas, education gives Goldberg about as much real benefit as Cytosport Muscle Milk would give Stephen Hawking, and his proposed name for the dusky hordes is -- get this -- "Bin Ladenism." 

Bin Laden? Isn't he that guy we don't care about anymore? Also, what if we find Bin Laden? Does that mean Bin Ladenism is dead, and the war over? (Fools! Bin Laden is at this very moment enjoying the hospitality of our luxurious American psychiatric facilities!) 

Cliff May sums up:

We are struggling to come up with a term that (1) accurately describes the network of ideologies and movements that have risen up with the “Muslim world” (I hate that phrase) and which seek to defeat America and its allies, a term which also (2) clearly conveys to the average person in the West that this is an enemy who must be taken seriously.

Are you tempted to send in your own suggestions -- but painfully aware that The Corner, which keeps a large bin of prepared "reader responses" next to Goldberg's cooler of Snickers, will never publish them? Drop them in our comments box! Somebody will read them, as I plan to visit an internet cafe later and loudly announce, "Hey check out http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2006_08_27_alicublog_archive.html#115712390303821411 -- they got Shakira fucking a dog!" 

Just try and pick something that can complete phrases like "In our war against..." and "England, alas, is already a casualty of..." in a such way as to warm the willies of warbloggers. I'll start:

• Ooga-Booga.
• Islama-dama-ding-dong.
• Homosexuality. 

Actually, I'll just stick to "Whatchamacallit." 

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter R.Porrofatto, who points out that winger nuthouse Gates of Vienna has just concluded a WOT Slogan Contest. Among the entrants: "Kill 'em All, and let Allah sort them out," "Eradicate or be Eradicated," and "Burn the Koran." The winner was "Allah Akbar -- It's the New Sieg Heil!" Oh, that'll get the crowds on their feet! I imagine half the Cletuses asking, "Whut's Ally Akbur?" and the other half asking "Who's Zig Heil?" 

If they'd only had the humility to ask, I could have told them that FREE BEER! or PARTY! would serve their purposes much better, assuming that the sound trucks from which they blared would also distribute weapons and Pantone chips indicating the darkest acceptable skin tone! 

My own slogan: Death to Dhummitude!

Aaaaaand... scene. Sometime this gift of prophecy [places back of wrist to forehead, swoons dramatically like Victor Davis Hanson]... actually feels like a curse!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yo La Tengo does John Cale. What's not to like?
•   Not yet feeling the holiday weekend zest? Then figuratively haul your sorry ass to The Sherman Oaks Review of Books which has plenty of fresh-enough content including a bagatelle by me and other yukworthy objects including "John Fogerty Doesn’t Understand This Thing Called Rain" and others. If that doesn't work, there's always liquor.

•   Just the other day Jonah Goldberg was telling us how he'd never vote for Trump but Hillary was worse than Trump but he would never vote for Trump, wink fart. This appears to be his #NeverTrump modified limited hangout route for the election cycle.  Today Goldberg offers another example:

From the earliest days of this [email] scandal — and it is a scandal — Clinton has lied. Unlike Donald Trump’s lies, which he usually vomits up spontaneously like a vesuvian geyser, Clinton’s were carefully prepared, typed up, and repeated for all the world to hear over and over again.

I would think this is an important distinction.

Really? Why? (Besides this is how you ever got a job in the first place.)

Neither of the candidates is worthy of the office in my eyes, but voters might discount many of Trump’s deceits as symptoms of his glandular personality. Much like Vice President Joe Biden, who always gets a pass for launching errant fake-fact missiles from the offline silo that is his mouth, Trump is often seen as entertainingly spontaneous.

Meanwhile, Clinton — who lives many time zones away from the word “entertaining” — is marketing herself as the mature and upstanding grown-up. She does nothing spontaneously. And that means all of her lies are premeditated.

At least it'll be fun boy Hillary whattabitch huh fart.

DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:

Don't Blame the Republican Party for the Rise of Trump

Because he's the Democratic nominee presumptive? No. Because he's the nominee presumptive in some other party that isn't the Republican Party? No. Because [throws a handful of dirt in your face, runs]. This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written. Seriously, look at this:

Or maybe those liberals shouldn't be forgiven so easily. I’ve been pondering these theories -- advanced by everyone from Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Bill Maher -- and the thing is, they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. They seem to posit a Republican electorate that is, on the one hand, so malleable that the GOP leadership could create the emotional conditions for a Trump candidacy -- and on the other hand, a Republican electorate so surly and unmanageable that it has ignored the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals, in order to rally behind Trump.

That there is some bullshit, and not just because what she presents as either-or choices are not mutually exclusive, but also because both the "either" and the "or" are gibberish. GOP voters don't have to be "malleable" to turn from covertly pyscho to overtly psycho: They only needed to suffer through two Black President terms, bookended by the humiliation of George W. Bush (hey, wonder if the Republicans will finally invite him to a convention this year?) and the recent Gay/Trans Apotheosis, for their psycho-sap to rise and run over all by itself.

Neither is there anything weird about the Trumpenproletariat "ignoring the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals." Who, aside from some National Review cruise-goers and Inner Circle party donors, has ever cared what Jonah Goldberg and Billy Kristol said or thought? The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up -- hell, they were hot for President Sarah Palin until she decided to run a safer grift. And before Ronald Reagan's elevation to sainthood, he was just a talking doll with a nice smile and strong appeal to the Strom Thurmond wing of the Party -- which wing never went away, but only got older, grimmer, and mad that they can't say the n-word anymore because of political correctness.

The rest is also crap and who has time, but I will say that anyone who writes "triple-distilled balderdash … high-test twaddle … self-congratulatory swill … nonsense on stilts" ought to be sent to a young-fogey rest home and given plenty of sedatives.

Believe it or don't, McArdle was still out-crazied -- but, less surprisingly, by David French:

The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option.

And at this point, Mitt Romney is the only man who combines the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.

Does French actually think Romney has a chance in hell? He has at least enough brain cells left to be sneaky with his answer:

A third-party Romney bid would introduce the chance of a different outcome, giving millions of Americans the important option to choose a man of integrity as their president.

Similarly, millions of Americans had the important option to choose windshield washer fluid over Coca-Cola as their beverage at lunch. It could happen!

But the goo-goo ga-ga winner is David Marcus at (where else?) The Federalist:

How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

Long story short, liberals are talking about bad things white people do, and how else can a rational honky react except by going neo-Nazi?

White people are being asked -- or pushed -- to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more.

I see a crying cowboy in Oklahoma, who can't watch TV no more without seeing them Key and Peele fellers talking down His People -- and since you libtards injected race into things, this is forcing the cowboy to "identify with it more." Marcus laments:

This is a remarkably bad idea. The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.

When we start lynching people, remember who started it! Why must you always provoke us.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

10 days of drizzle -- let's fight it with Hasil! Hoo! Hee! Ha! Ha!

• I got another thing in that Sherman Oaks Review of Books. Not only is it funny, it's humor. I am a humorist, like Dave Barry and Dennis Prager. [struts gaily into bankruptcy court]

• I mentioned the other day how weak Jonah Goldberg's columns had become -- not that they were ever strong, mind you, but they once had some energy, powered either by crowing certainty of untrue facts or desperation at the possibility that readers would notice what a dunce he is. I think the Trump surge took some of the break-wind out of his sails; when Trump attacked him personally I think he expected all conservatism to rise to his defense; instead goons flooded his inbox, called him a cuck, and took over the Republican Party. Well, Goldberg seems to have found a coping mechanism: a weird sort of fatalism, because oh well, Trump may destroy his movement but at least he'll beat up Hillary, and thus restore the honor of the Goldbergs [obligatory fart]. It's kind of like cheering a serial killer on the loose because he might murder someone you don't like. Get a load of this:

And, more to the point, The Hillary Story is far less entertaining than The Trump Story. Clinton is boring. She’s as fun as changing shelf paper on a Saturday afternoon. 

Meanwhile, who wouldn’t want to see a sequel to Back to School in which the Rodney Dangerfield character becomes president? Clinton is rich, and morally and ethically corrupt. So is Trump. But at least he’s entertaining. Everyone suspects they know what President Hillary Clinton: The Movie would look like. Trump: The Movie? That could be a wild ride.

Goldberg's template for black humor is a shitty Reagan-era comedy, apparently. If things get really grim, maybe he'll give us Ernest Goes to a Concentration Camp.

• "An old friend" sent Rod Dreher another Tale of Trans Terror from (get this) "North Texas" and -- well, I don't know guys...

“I thought I knew what was going on in this country,” she said. “I was wrong.” 

She had taken her teenage son to see the Captain America: Civil War movie for his birthday. In line behind them waiting to buy tickets stood several men in their early 30s who were obviously transgendered, and a young woman who presented as a man, though was plainly a female. My friend, “N.”, said the group started talking about sex, including their favorite positions, their favorite sex toys, you name it. One of the group was 20; an older transgender said to him, “You’re just a kid now, but when you turn 21, we’re going to take you out and get you broken in.” They proposed an orgy. 

On and on like this. And more transgenders joined them, not waiting in line, but moving towards the front to stand with their friends. N. told me that the trans group was very aware of itself, and did not care who heard their filthy talk...

...and then they pulled out their switchblades and had a rumble! This scene sounds unlikely to have taken place in the West Village, let alone Texas. Could Brother Rod be trying to heighten the contradictions -- as groundwork for his Benedict Option book? Would a Christian lie to us?

POSITIVELY THE WORST PRINCE MEMORIAL COLUMN.

Almost without my noticing it, David French has become the worst thing at National Review. Jonah Goldberg has, as we know, a distinguished history of stupid, but his recent columns are just so lazy and aimless that they're not even worth making fun of (I mean, look at this shit). Contender Kevin D. Williamson seems at first a clinical sociopath, but once you tumble to his shtick (call everyone else stupid, drop in an obscure reference or two to make it look intellectual-like) it's kind of like Porky Pig tumbling to Daffy Duck's "People shouldn't push me around... I'm a split personality!" routine; the magic is over.

But French just keeps finding new ways to be wrong. Take his Prince column. Yes, seriously, this horrible wingnut Jesus freak wrote one.

Prince died last week, and America overreacted. No, I’m not diminishing Prince’s talent. He was one of pop music’s most gifted songwriters and musicians. As millions shared his more memorable performances, I realized I’d forgotten what a great guitar player and showman he was. He could write hit songs like few others, and he shared his talent freely, “gifting” songs to other artists. In short, he was one of the few pop stars whose fame was fully justified.

You can really feel his pleasure at Prince's work, can't you? You can't? Well, of course not; this is exactly the sort of thing I would write about a NASCAR driver ("I had forgotten what a great NASCAR driver he was... he could turn left like no other") if I were trying to pretend I liked him as a way to win the confidence of someone whose intelligence I didn't respect.

But to spend time on the mainstream and left-wing Internet last week — or to listen to some of the web’s more popular podcasts — you would have thought America lost a national hero, and not merely an immensely gifted artist.

You heathens didn't cry like this when Andrew Breitbart died!

...In our post-virtue culture, we worship celebrity and talent not for its own sake but for ourselves. Their talent is all about us. Their fame is for our amusement. Pop music fills the hymnals in the temple of the self. We are the stars of our own biopic, and we just lost someone who wrote part of the score.

Can't you see how selfish, how narcissistic it is to enjoy music? I mean, music that isn't hymns?

The sentimentality is understandable, given the millions of people who could remember some significant moment in their lives that happened to the sounds of “Lets Go Crazy” or “When Doves Cry.”

(You know he had to look them up.)

...Our country doesn’t lack for heroes, but our true heroes certainly lack for fame. Even on the Left’s terms, valorizing Prince for his transient activism disrespects those who spent their lives in the trenches, fighting for their vision of “social justice.”

Hmmm -- I don't remember "the Left" telling me not to mourn Prince; maybe I missed a meeting... but hold on, brother French has taken up a snake:

For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience.

GLORY HALLELUJAH THIS "PRINCE" WAS A VILLAIN IN A CHICK TRACT, MAKING THE KIDS GO A-FRIGGIN' AND A-FRUGIN' WHEN WHAT THEY NEED IS CHEESUS!

...I don’t say any of this to denigrate Prince or his talents.

Fuck you.

And I don’t say this to shame people out of listening to music they enjoy, though not all music is worth hearing.

You heathens ever hear Three Doors Down?

Rather, it’s time for a dose of perspective. Music has its place...

!!!!

...and gifted musicians undeniably enhance our lives...

You know, like air conditioning or wall-to-wall carpeting.

...but if our hearts are given to these songs and those who make them, then our lives are unnecessarily impoverished.

And then it hits you -- French isn't just ignorant of Prince, or even just of music -- this poor, twisted freak literally doesn't know what art is. He doesn't know its place in human history, or why human beings invented it, or why it persists even when it doesn't make money or is suppressed. He thinks it's upholstery. He thinks it's some sort of trivial comfort. And he thinks so because he's been taught that all you need are Jesus and Bill Buckley and the pleasure you can take from the suffering of your inferiors, and anything else that has a claim on the human soul, whether it's justice or sex or art, must be crushed lest it steal their thunder.

These are the monsters that monsters bred. You think Trump is bad? You have no idea.

SECOND-SUPER-TUESDAY THREAD.

I enjoyed this:

But I enjoyed this more:

I mean, it's guilty fun to see rightbloggers blinking in the hot white light of the Trump Express as it bears down on them, but it's unashamedly a riot to see them acting pissy about the instrument of their destruction: Hmmph, he thinks he's such a big deal, well I'll show him with my Tweet! It's even more enjoyable than their ObamaHitler shtick, because they only got occasionally around to being dismissive about him -- you know, the talk about his sissy mom jeans and so forth; most of the time they have red-facedly denounced him as the tyrant crushing the Constitution with his big black cock. I still think Trump fades, but if he doesn't I look forward to watching conservatives fumbling to develop Trump snark -- they're so not used to being genuinely bullied that they haven't got the chops liberals (older ones anyway) developed over decades of Reaganism and Middle East war fevers. Maybe after five or ten years they'll learn to make jokes that are actually funny.

Ah, who am I kidding -- even before the electoral coup de grace they'll be on the Trump bandwagon, thumbing their nose at the people too sissified to climb up there with them.

UPDATE.  Jonah Goldberg farts fretfully, or frets fartfully, over what might have been:

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this sorry state of affairs is that many conservatives have been arguing for years that we must update Republican policies to help the very people Trump is now winning over through ideologically haphazard and substance-free demagoguery. Indeed, a diverse group of intellectuals associated with the Conservative Reform Network and the journal National Affairs developed a host of policies that apply Reaganite principles to today’s problems.

"Policies that apply Reaganite principles to today’s problems!" Why would people choose an entertaining strongman over that! But look, Goldberg's willing to be reasonable:

As Ramesh Ponnuru (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and National Review) has argued, cutting top marginal tax rates were a priority when President Reagan took office in 1980 because they were at 70 percent. Now they’re at 39.6 percent, so maybe other forms of tax relief should take priority?

We've been servicing the rich and telling you to wait for the trickle-down for 35 years, but now that you're coming down the lane with pitchforks and torches, I am authorized to offer you a slight expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Also, what's with the question mark? Maybe Goldberg is emulating Vox-y millennial uptalk in hopes it'll make him look smart, like a dog with glasses and a pipe.)

...Reformocons, as they’re sometimes called, were trying to find a way to grow the party without abandoning Reaganite principles...

I wrote about the Reformicon scam back in 2014 -- it was a self-evident smoke-and-mirrors show to make disastrously failed old policies look fresh 'n' wonky. But I thought they were still pushing it -- Big Chief Reformicon Michael R. Strain keeps appearing in the pages of NR, most recently to pimp his own Washington Post column in which "I argue against Mr. Trump." Yet Goldberg talks about Reformicons' efforts in the past tense. Has the routine been shelved, and is the "Young Guns Network" of Reformicon wonks at this very moment being reimagined as some other kind of racket -- maybe as a legion of super-heroes? Stay tuned!

GOING DOWN WITH THE FLAGSHIP.

That National Review broadside against Trump last month seems not to have done the trick, and the magazine's employees are hysterically demanding Republican Presidential contenders lay down their political lives for the good of the Bush tax cuts and their phony-baloney jobs.

Culture-warrior David French sputters that Ben Carson and John Kasich, good Christians though they may be, have given in to the sin of Pride by staying in the race, and must repent:

And here’s the ultimate irony — these pro-life Christian candidates can do nothing by staying in the race except help a biblically illiterate, thrice-divorced, proud philanderer hurtle ever closer to the nomination. Every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio is a vote toward embracing Planned Parenthood and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. It’s a vote away from sensible judicial nominations or a rational foreign policy. And it’s a vote toward the potential destruction of a Republican Party that — for all its faults — is America’s last political hope of protecting life, religious liberty, and national security...

Ah, but "every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio" is also a potential vote for John Kasich or Ben Carson! Think how many more books they'll sell, how many more dollars their speaking engagements will draw! And isn't that really what the Almighty wants -- whatever will make any given member of the Elect richer? Read your Bible, French!

As the race goes on, my respect for Scott Walker and Jeb Bush grows. Both men had plausible paths to the Oval Office. Both are immensely accomplished public servants with solid conservative records. Both were once favorites to win the nomination. But they both had the integrity and foresight to bow out the instant it was clear they’d missed their chance.

Walker had the "integrity and foresight" to see he'd run out of donor-suckers, and Bush, whose heart for the struggle seemed to have caved in like an overdone soufflé months ago, probably quit in dutiful response to a note shoved under his door by The Family.

Meanwhile imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke says "It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project," and blames not the candidates but that plurality of the GOP electorate who won't vote for National Review-approved, housebroken wingnuts:

For the last eight months or so, a significant portion of the Republican party’s voters have been in thrall to a bizarre, Occupy-esque conspiracy theory, which holds as its central thesis that sabotage and pusillanimity are the root causes of the Right’s recent woes. In this mistaken view, the conservative movement’s failure to counter all of the Obama era’s excesses is not the product of the crucial democratic and structural factors that prevent any one faction from ushering in substantial change, but of a lack of will or desire...

On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk.

Shall he, now? Yet Cooke is the same guy who, a few years ago, wrote in "In Praise of Paranoia" that "reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic," and also this:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Now, having fluffed the black-helicopter-watching, lunatic fringe of his movement in expectation that all the benefit would accrue to him, Cooke has seen them go Trumpers -- who could have predicted! -- and tries now to summon sensible conservatives to shut them down. But don't worry, he has suggestions:

If Donald Trump can flood the airwaves with his nonsense, his opponents can counter it incessantly. And while they are at it, they can tie him up in court, just as he’s trying to do to Cruz. There are a good number of “just asking” questions ready to be put to them, among them “Trump’s mother was Scottish, can he really be president?” and “Trump ran a host of scams designed to rip off the poor; surely one of them would like to sue him?

Ha ha, Scottish! Imagine the confusion among the Trump fans: "S'coatish? Is thet what them funny-boys call a nigger?" Also try to imagine Trump confronting an aggrieved poor person in front of an audience of Republicans -- they'll probably start chanting "moocher!" and kill the pauper before security can haul him away. Here's Cooke's closing peroration:

“If not us, who?” Ronald Reagan asked in the heat of the 1981 budget battle. “If not now, when?” Time to go nuclear, chaps.

I say! Screw your courage to a sticking place, wot? There's a good fellow. I hope they pushed a few desks aside to make some room for volunteers at NR headquarters.

But hold on, it's not over till the fat homey sings: Jonah Goldberg, raise the roof!

As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That’s awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don’t become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely.

It may be cribbed from his freshman comp assignment "Our Friend, The Beaver" but it still sings! After some similar rhetorical dazzlers, Goldberg proposes to the Presidential Candiate action figures on his desk "a Rubio-Cruz ticket":

Cruz won’t work at the top of the ticket for the simple reason that too many GOP quislings fear Cruz more than Trump. But a unity ticket — a la Reagan–Bush in 1980 — in the form of Los Hermanos Cubanos might just do the trick.

But the silence of the action figures seems to have gotten to Goldberg --

There are real costs to such a deal (not least the fact that there are better general-election running mates for Rubio).

A series of tiny farts like the squeaks of a trapped mouse (Frrt frt frt FFrrt frt), a drop of flop-sweat,  and Goldberg lunges to close the deal:

Maybe there’s another way, but I haven’t heard it.

[A concussion grenade of farts.]

And in a race where Trump has changed everything with his boldness, it’s long past time for his opponents to provide some of their own.

Be bold, shitheel Republicans who will never have a better chance at the Presidency, and stand down at the command of magazine editors! Your reward will be great in the buffet of their next subscriber cruise!

UPDATE. The struggle is joined! Pimped by futility infielder Megan McArdle herself, there's a conservative anti-Trump PAC called "Make America Awesome" -- cuz "America's already great," get it -- run by Republican operative Liz Mair. Did you know they've been around since December? They kinda sneak up on you. Check out their humorous ecards, e.g., "When I get hitched, it'll be to a guy who won't invite Hillary Clinton to our wedding." Feeling the Rubiomentum yet? No? Obviously they need more donations to make the magic happen. Then, when the GOP finally puts Trump on Double Secret Probation, they can have a beer bust with the leftovers and pad their resumes with declared victory. The grift goes on forever and the party never ends!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Comin' to D.C. March 29. Looking forward.

Beautiful day, let's play two! Kia found this one.

•  The latest thing among those eternally-whining wingnuts is that Twitter is censoring them via something called "shadowbanning," by which self-promoting men's-rights activists and people who use "cuckservatives" unironically allegedly "have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines." Evidence: an "[unnamed] source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech," whose "claim was corroborated by a[n unnamed] senior editor at a major publisher." Good enough for alt-journalism! According to Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos, Twitter seeks "to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by muffling conservative voices on the platform," so if Trump loses the nomination by a handful of Tweets, you'll know the reason why. One preponderator of this story blames "Twitter’s recruitment of radical feminazi Anita Sarkeesian to lead its censorship board, I mean, 'Trust & Safety Council.'" Sigh, girls spoil everything, don't they? At least this guy has some dim awareness that Twitter is not a public trust but a private company that can have whatever terms and conditions it likes, and so lays off the ridiculous "censorship" yap in favor of some free-market fist-shaking:

On Twitter as on Facebook, the deck is stacked against countermoonbats. A lucrative opportunity awaits whoever can create a social media outlet that does not impose an oppressive left-wing political creed.

Get ready for Conservapedia: The Social Network!

•  In another fartful post, Jonah Goldberg starts with what may look like a startling admission:

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake.

Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees.

But he's done this before. Nine-and-a-half years ago, Goldberg said, "The Iraq war was a mistake." Of course he didn't want to leave -- he wanted to stay in: "A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out," his reason-fart echoes down the years. Some paragraphs later, he added, "I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay. Polling suggests that they want us to go. But polling absent consequences is a form of protest." Sounds like he was feeling cornered, and rightly so -- the American electorate was days away from returning Congress to the Democrats. Now he's confessing error again. I wonder what's worrying him this time? (BTW: This seems as good a place as any to recall Conor Friedersdorf's roundup of conservative slurs against those of us who were against the war before they were.)

•  I get what some people say about Bernie Sanders' electability problems, but I also see that conservatives absolutely do not know how to deal with him. We've seen, God knows, plenty of Sanders=Trump bullshit, but even rightbloggers seem to be getting sick of that. The other popular shtick is "Socialism = Stalin, vote Bernie and get the gulags," a ploy which depends strongly on explaining away European socialism -- usually by pretending Scandinavian countries with universal health care are Reaganite laboratories of unfettered capitalism -- and hoping nobody tells the voters about the "sewer socialism" under which millions of Americans once cheerfully lived without being hassled by the Secret Police. But Jazz Shaw at Hot Air has come up with an interesting new angle:

Sanders really seems to have it in for money and you have to wonder where the grudge comes from. 

In an editorial at Investors Business Daily, we get a glimpse of one possible source of Bernie’s unrelenting war on dollars: he’s never really had many of them.

Yes, the argument against Bernie Sanders is that he never made a lot of money. Well, at least that'll kill the Sanders=Trump thing.

As IBD notes, he never really earned a steady paycheck until he was in his forties and even then it was from the government when he was finally elected mayor. Before that he ran up debts, failed to pay his own utility bills and was known for being perpetually broke.

It's almost like something was more important to him than money! I imagine Shaw hearing the Gospels and going, "Pfft! Who is this loser?"

This is the guy who now wants to oversee the management of all of our collective money in the federal government?

Part of me wishes they'd run with this -- "Poverty Sucks, Vote Alex P. Keaton" -- but maybe there's some appeal here for a certain type of Republican voter -- the kind who really worries about whether his neighbor's car is nicer than his, who likes to brag about what a killing he made on the market or by only ringing up two of the three cereal boxes he got at the Safeway, and who is less outraged by human suffering than by a welfare recipient who got to eat fresh fish instead of gruel. You know -- assholes.

OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."