INTRODUCING THE PANTLOADOWN.

Don’t look now but Jonah Goldberg has a podcast. The debut is here and no, no fucking way guys; last November I actually listened to a Reason podcast with Nick Gillespie and I still wake up shaking in the middle of the night. But I did read Goldberg’s stupid “G-file” letter on it (no link — it’s for fans!), and I can report that it’s full of the shitty goofy-image-Mad-Libs Goldberg considers jokes, and some director’s-cut insights into his working method:

I’m the first to admit that, like Flamenco Dancing or buffalo taxidermy, solo podcasting doesn’t come naturally to me.

What’d I tell you.

I don’t want to be an “interviewer.” Conversation good, Q&A boring. So I went into this with no notes and nothing prepared.

What a shock. Goldberg is so lazy I’m told when he wants to eat, he has one intern pack his maw with Cheetos and another intern put the belt from an old-fashioned reducing machine under his chin and turn it on high.

…In my imagination, I want [the podcast] to be like being stuck in an airport bar with a relatively sober Hunter S. Thompson, a tipsy William F. Buckley and a few entertaining strangers in the mix.

Yeeeahh that sounds great. Anyway why listen to the actual atrocity when we can enter the World of Pure Imagination:

GOLDBERG: Heidi ho, National Review interns, American Enterprise Institute interns, Heritage Foundation interns, and friends of my mother, it’s the Jonah Goldberg Podcast. I want to thank 3 Doors Down for that righteous musical intro aaaand I’ve just been handed a note, whoa, really nice stationery, “Arent and Fox” it says on the letterhead… okay, that was the last time we’re going to play that particular tune and I just want to say one of the worst things Obama did to this country was make people uptight about copyright laws. I mean think what if National Review was copyrighted. Copywritten. Whatever. I mean, who would have ever heard of William F. Buckley Jr. Or me! Something to think about. But I’m being rude to my guest, Megan McArdle, a columnist for the, uh, Weekly Standard, and I understand she’s working on a book about Puerto Rico and Hurricane Whatshername, isn’t that so?

MCARDLE: Literally none of that is true.

GOLDBERG: Hey, lighten up there, Megan! I’m just flying by the seat of my pants here, no prep, no notes, cuz “facts” and “proper attribution,” I mean boring, right? [tries to do Homer Simpson voice] Bo-ring! Did you recognize that? That’s, that’s, that’s the guy on The Simpsons.

MCARDLE: I’m a proud Bloomberg View columnist and I’m not writing a book about Puerto Rico — though I suppose I could, because I was surrounded by those people growing up in New York, and the fact that they’re still there filling up perfectly good East Village property with their housing developments despite their lack of economic dynamism is one of the worst things about the de Blasio Administration —

GOLDBERG: De Blasio, he’s the worst! You folks can’t see it but I’m giving him a big thumbs-down. And that goes double for Ma-Mumia-something-something whatshername the Puerto Rican.

MCARDLE: I mean God, the Italians, Italian-Americans I should say, they gave us all this gorgeous food that I enjoyed so much when I went to Italy. And what have the Puerto Ricans ever given us, culinarily? I mean guacamole, right? And what else? Refried beans. Yuck. It’s poor people food.

GOLDBERG: Yeah. Pretty ghetto. Pret-ty ghet-to. It’s the internet, we don’t have to be politically correct.

MCARDLE: Is there a gas leak in here?

GOLDBERG: Cheese, that’s cheese. I had a cheese. Have a cheese sandwich. In my pants. Pants pocket. [squeaking noise] That was the wind, a mouse. [rustles papers] Homina, homina. Please go on.

MCARDLE: But anyway, what I am interested in is the inevitable, like it’s so predictable, all these people after Las Vegas, talking about and it’s of course a terrible tragedy but they want to just get rid of the guns, like you could do that, and it’s like, haven’t you been paying attention, I mean like Marine Todd, well I mean not Todd he’s fake okay [laughs], but this other Marine, I saw him on CNN, this man took out an armed robber in a store because the robber did. Not. Know. He was a Marine. And those people? In Las Vegas? I mean maybe they were brainwashed by all those gun-control movies like, I don’t know, tsk, I’m sure you know what I mean, like —

GOLDBERG: Like Stop-Loss and Lions for Lambs.

MCARDLE: Uhhh, pretty sure they’re about Iraq.

GOLDBERG: Uhhhh, pretty sure not.

MCARDLE: Whatever, but these people in Las Vegas who just did what was expected of them and just ran and ducked and died, what they didn’t realize was that the sniper — he didn’t know whether they were Marines or not. Right? I mean, people gave me a hard time after Sandy Hook when I said rush the shooter. But what they didn’t know, and what just occurred to me now, is if the shooter thinks you’re a Marine, and you run toward him, then that shooter is going to hesitate and that’s when you get him, when he’s off his guard! Or if you can’t get to him because, and omigod I just realized this [laughs], he’s like twenty stories up in a hotel window, then you can go [in a deep voice] “Ooo-rah!” Like really loud. “Ooo-rah!” And that gives the police time to get him, because he’s intimidated because he thinks you're all Marines. Now, would it work? Would people do it? How should I know? But it certainly makes more sense than gun control. [Pause] Hello?

GOLDBERG: YES! Got the high score, BITCH! [Sound of chair tilting back and falling, GOLDBERG hitting the ground; GOLDBERG’S voice, slightly off-mike] OWWW! OMIGOD! SHOOT! That’s all we have time for! Oww! I wanna thank whatshername for coming on the podcast. [Loud farting sound] Sorry guys, I said I wouldn't but I had to activate the “gas cushion.” I hurt my bummy-bum real bad! [Cries; Three Stooges closing music]

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how the brethren reacted to Trump's deal with Pelosi and Schumer -- with a special guest appearance by the Lamestream Media!

I regret I didn't have more space for Jonah Goldberg, who in addition to the see-I-told-you-he-was-a-Democrat dumbness complained that the Republican Congress couldn't do anything because Trump was blocking them by being a bad leader: “Even under the best circumstances, major legislation cannot get out of Congress without robust presidential leadership,” he protested. “I wish it were otherwise, because Congress is the first branch of government and should take the lead. But in the modern era, you can’t outsource the big stuff to Congress.”

This is funny because, waaaay back in June of 2017, Goldberg saw things very differently: while “for decades, under Republican and Democratic presidents and Republican and Democratic majorities, Congress has been a feckless doormat for the president,” he said then, Trump’s being a bad leader meant McConnell and Ryan “have had to step up, filling a breach that began under Woodrow Wilson and became a chasm at the end of the Obama years,” and in consequence “the system isn't breaking down, it's finally starting to work as intended.”

Luckily for Goldberg, his readers can’t remember much further back than their last visit to the gerontologist.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

If you’re feeling down this’ll pick you up.
This is my favorite Sammy Davis Jr. number, a great tune from Finian’s Rainbow that he just swings the hell out of.
Love the byplay with Jerry (RIP) and with the audience, too.
• My Bartlett's entry about Jonah Goldberg has been around long enough that we sometimes take it for granted, but today he proves the truism true: he really has come up with the stupidest thing ever written. It's an entry in the Confederate monument debate, which has already inspired a lot of brain-bleeds on the right, but no one else need bother now that Goldberg has weighed in (in part because he broke the scale). Here's a typical farting point:

Indeed, the fight over Confederate statues is just a discrete and more understandable eruption of the larger trend. This stuff has been happening for decades. One of the first outbreaks involved the word “crusader.” The term hurt the feelings of people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. Left-wing historians (and the Islamists who love them) convinced themselves that the Crusades were a trial run of Western imperialism and colonialism. They were, in fact, largely defensive wars intended to beat back the aggression of Muslim colonizers. Even the organization Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to “Cru” lest people get the wrong impression.

Goldberg doesn't see why lefties and their head-chopping Mooslim friends consider the Crusades a racist symbol. I wonder if he sees why actual racists (including Anders Breivik) consider them a racist symbol, too. Maybe the liberals and Mooslims bamboozled them? Oh, and:

What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. Mark-Viverito is from Puerto Rico. More than 95 percent of the people there speak Spanish. The dominant religion of Puerto Rico is Catholicism (85 percent). As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors — Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University. I could find no mention on the Internet that she has burned her diploma in protest.

You have to hand it to Goldberg -- the whole "you use an iPhone, your anti-capitalist argument is invalid" shtick seemed totally dead, yet he's given it new life by declaring it hypocritical to denounce colonialism if you speak Spanish (or English!). Goldberg braps the field again -- what a great way to shart the morning!

• "John C. Danforth was a Republican U.S. senator from Missouri from 1976 to 1995," intones the Washington Post, instead of saying "here's another old Republican who has nothing left to lose by disowning Trump":

Many have said that President Trump isn’t a Republican. They are correct, but for a reason more fundamental than those usually given. Some focus on Trump’s differences from mainstream GOP policies, but the party is broad enough to embrace different views, and Trump agrees with most Republicans on many issues. Others point to the insults he regularly directs at party members and leaders, but Trump is not the first to promote self above party. The fundamental reason Trump isn’t a Republican is far bigger than words or policies. He stands in opposition to the founding principle of our party — that of a united country.

We are the party of Abraham Lincoln...

LOL Abraham Lincoln! Buddy, most Republicans today would postpone the freaking 2020 election if Trump said it was necessary. They also think his nice-Nazis response to Charlottesville was a-ok. Most of them think colleges have a "negative effect on the way things are going in this country." Oh, and Republicans nominated and elected Trump. Notwithstanding his horrible policies are virtually the same ones the other preening dickheads they've been sending to statehouses and Congress for years have been pushing for, I understand why the Senator would prefer the lumbering, murderous Frankenstein he and his comrades brought into being to have a more thoughtful, "Presidential" countenance. But the actual voters have decided: It's not good enough being self-centered bigots on the downlow anymore -- they want to revel in it. I wonder if anyone not sitting on an editorial board is fooled?

ASSPECTS OF THE NOVEL.

I'm late to this, but my truism that anything Jonah Goldberg writes is the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else may have been shattered by the synapse-freezing stupidity of his column last weekend. Written in the form of a Q&A, for a while's it's just normally Goldberg-dumb: He mentions he's writing "sort of a prequel to Liberal Fascism" (like The Phantom Menace, only performed as a monologue by Jar Jar Binks) and meanders through some politics:

Q: What do you think of the White House’s new immigration proposal?
M: I haven’t studied it.
Q: Is that a dodge?
M: Sort of. I will say that the reaction has been ridiculous. The idea that it’s racist to control your borders or copy Canada is bonkers. It’s also funny. Liberals love to insist that Europe or Canada or Scandinavia does things in a more enlightened way. But say, “Okay, let’s have Canada’s immigration policy or France’s national-security policies or Switzerland’s health-insurance system” and the same people freak out.

Durr hurr you liberals love Canada but you don't love stampedes but Calgary has a Stampede every year WHICH IS IT LIBS.

But later, McRib intoxication or something sets in:

Q: Will you ever write a novel?
M: I hope so. I never planned on being a pundit. I wanted to write comic books and sci-fi. I kind of stumbled into this life. I have several ideas, but I need time and/or f-you money.

Faulkner said, "The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper." Goldberg says well, if I save up enough money from writing about how liberals are Hitler maybe I'll write a novel. And I bet he'd be great at it -- listen to his aesthetics:

Q: What do you mean fiction is about human nature?
M: I’m glad you asked. I think there’s a profound conservatism to all great fiction.

[Almost imperceptibly -- with the merest shiver of leaves and panic among the animals -- the fart-rumble commences]

If I had to define the essence of leftism in a single phrase, it’d be “the perfectibility of man.” This is the idea that stretches back past Rousseau and probably the Gnostics to Plato’s Republic. Before public policy or any ideological agenda, conservatism recognizes the bedrock fact that man is flawed. He can be good, but only by being civilized. That’s why science fiction is so conservative.

[Now all can feel it, like the first stirrings of Sensurround; all can hear it, like the ripping of a distant, gigantic sail; and some poor, sensitive creatures can even smell it]

It can be set in some far-flung galaxy or some technological wonderland. But what makes it accessible to us is that humans — or even aliens — are still driven by timeless motivations. Human nature is the rock in the river of time. Acknowledging the fact that human nature has no history is the first principle of realism, and realism is conservative.

[A FARTING COMES ACROSS THE SKY -- like the jagged bellow of a cassowary caught in a paint-mixer, amplified a hundred-fold. Nostril hairs singe; lungs convulse. "The fools," gasp those who have not been immediately knocked unconscious, "they let Trump near the button."]

I've already asked the TLS for dibs.

THE HATE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS PREMISES.

You may have seen Katherine Stewart's Times Op-Ed suggesting that the "government schools" theme beloved of modern conservatives has its genesis in slavery and segregation. Some relevant clips:

Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.

Flashing forward, Stewart touches on the influence of protowingnuts James W. Fifield Jr. and Rousas Rushdoony, and on the Brown v. Board of Education fallout in the South, where "some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private 'segregation academies' for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes."

Stewart also mentions the influence on this movement of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, which insight appears to have twisted some of the brethren's guts -- for the same reason that, you may have seen, Nancy MacLean's recent book on another libertarian saint, James Buchanan, has enraged rightwingers from Reason to The American Spectator to Jonah Goldberg (and, in my view, if you were trying to triangulate the absolute worst of the conservatarian movement you could hardly pick three better coordinates).

Speaking of worst of the worst, Rod Dreher gets after Stewart today:

...I read this op-ed piece from today’s New York Times, in which Katherine Stewart says that people like us — parents who have chosen to withdraw their kids from public schooling, or not to send them there in the first place — are Jesus-crazed racists who hate democracy, or at best useful idiots of said villains. It is liberal crackpottery at its purest.

Then Dreher quotes two of his buddies (Andrew T. Walker and, God help us, David French) on how bad she is -- but he does not quote Stewart. At all. In fact, he doesn't even try to characterize her arguments, except as something he and his pals hate -- and his quotes from them don't mention her historical sources, except for an offhand reference to "tying [church schools] to a Confederate past" from French. Her point of view only appears, distorted, as a reflection in the shiny surface of their rage.

Even for Dreher this is a bit much. But I shouldn't be surprised. As we've seen time and time again, Dreher is pretty much a segregationist, and usually drenches that sentiment in many thousands of words of God-gab and crap sociology to make it hard for non-initiates to see clearly. But what makes him even more defensive and obfuscating in DJing this hatefest than he is in the normal course of his writing, apparently, is when someone catches on to the whole rotten shtick -- that the conservative movement (and the white evangelical movement that feeds it votes) is not just touched by racism, but relies, indeed is founded on it. Then he puts on the whole armor of God.

That's probably what drove him to such an extreme: It's a bit early for him and his comrades to reveal themselves -- after all, Trump's only been in six months; there'll be time enough to talk turkey when this godless democracy thing has been weakened sufficiently to be dispensed with. Meantime anyone who's caught on early has to be swatted like a fly.

UPDATE. I see Megan McArdle has gotten in on this, too ("Demonizing School Choice Won't Help Education," LOL), though she brings her own unique bucket-footed style to it:

One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation. But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

Sure, some people want to get their kids out of public school because they're segregationists, but be fair -- some people want universal health care because they want to gas all the Jews.

TWO GREAT TASTES THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER.

As has become axiomatic, National Review legacy pledge Jonah Goldberg normally comes up with the stupidest thing ever written all by himself, but in his latest -- yet another wingnut weeper about how accurately describing the lethal consequences of the new health care bill is a death threat against Republicans -- he stoops to phumpher:

Would people die? Despite a host of very specific numbers from people like Senator Bernie Sanders, no one really knows.

[Headdesk, facepalm, pigpoop, Farrrrrrt.]

The data is at best mixed about whether Medicaid improves mortality rates or even health overall (though it’s clear that some people, such as pregnant women, do benefit). Still, it might be true that some people would die earlier than they would have if we kept the status quo. This is not the damning concession it may appear to be.

How can we ever really know anything, except when Mom tells us?

Politicians like to defend some law on the grounds that “if it saves just one life, it’s worth it.” But by that logic we should make the speed limit 5 mph. That would surely save lives. Are you a murderer if you oppose such a move?

I'll be dipped in dogshit -- Goldberg is actually using Megan McArdle's Speed Limits Are Futile argument from her Grenfell Tower column ("To drive a car even at 5 miles per hour is to accept a small risk of killing oneself and others")! This is like the worst The Brave and The Bold teammup ever -- or maybe more like The Inferior Five Minus Three.

Poor Goldberg, Trumpism has been hard on him. Imagine building your career on a book about how liberals are the real fascists, and then having to deal with a president who, in furtherance of his own grifts, is pushing every nightmarishly conservative policy you've ever supported -- and his role models are literally Hitler and Mussolini. Even a consciousness more insulated from irony than Goldberg's (if such a thing can exist) must at least dimly perceive and be tortured by it. That, or he's just gotten lazier. (P.S. Scott has more.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

We often forget, because Hope made it his signature, that "Thanks for the Memories" is a sad song.
•   If you like comics, and are enough of a connoisseur to know the spectacular work of Danny Hellman, have I got news for you: Hellman's Resurrection Perverts: Hunter's Point is out in hardcover, and it's a corker. It stars the last of the old-fashioned porn kings, Harry Homburg of Harlot magazine, riding high from the biggest celebrity-skin caper of his career when he's suddenly air-lifted into the infinite. It's the first volume in a continuing saga, so there's loads of (I suspect) foreshadowing -- which you'll have time to notice because the graphics are expectedly gaze-worthy and the printing surprisingly rich. Highly recommended, as a gift or for personal use.

•   I see the wingnuts who think modern-dress Shakespeare is a death threat are at it again. Here's the new version of the shtick: if you point out that, by taking away their health care coverage,  the Republican Obamacare replacement basically surrenders thousands of people to untimely deaths, you're shooting Steve Scalise all over again. John Nolte at The Daily Wire:

It has only been 10 days since Rep. Steve Scalise was gravely wounded after a Bernie Bro attempted to massacre two dozen Republican lawmakers guilty of nothing more than practicing baseball. And it has not even been 10 days since shots were fired at a truck flying a "Make America Great Again" flag.

Nevertheless, and although the death threats against the GOP continue to mount, in the wake of two politically-driven murder attempts, the kind of rhetoric the media assures us provokes this kind of violence, has only increased from the mainstream Left.

On Thursday, no less than the political media's very own It-Girl, Senator Elizabeth Warren, accused Republicans of wanting sick grandparents and babies to die, of writing a healthcare bill that amounts to nothing less than "blood money." Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Warren outright accused Republicans of "paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with American lives"...

Mary Katharine Ham tries the same thing at The Federalist: "You want to go that route while one of your colleagues is still in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound?" Why can't Warren do the sensible thing and just mildly criticize the bill as "not very nice" before giving up?

From time immemorial, statesmen have warned about the human cost of legislation -- in fact, I seem to remember some talk of "death panels" a few years back. Yet now opposition is murder. Nolte adds:

Also on Thursday, left-wing actor Johnny Deep openly mused about the idea of assassinating Trump...

Same thing as Liz Warren, right? I mean, they both allude to mortality.

...And where is our objective, unbiased media? Right back to pushing the Trump Is a Dangerously Unstable Traitor Who Pees On Russian Hookers hoax — which is its own kind of clarion call for violence.

Criticism of The Leader is assault! The brethren seem to be on the downside of their traditional mood swing between triumphalism and victimhood, and will be whimpering in their safe spaces by the time the Republicans amend EMTALA to make poor people who go to the ER and are kept overnight in the hospital sleep standing up, and maybe mop up their own blood. Ugh. Would it be assaultive to say that I wouldn't piss on these people if they were on fire?

•   Rather than give it any close reading, I will merely quote you one paragraph --

But here’s the funny part. If Hollywood listened to the writers of Ms. magazine and went all-in on an Andrea Dworkinized Wonder Woman and distributed it globally, you know what the right term for that would be? Imperialism! Specifically, cultural imperialism.

-- which ought to be enough to convince you that Jonah Goldberg is still, as Harry Truman suspected of Joe McCarthy, not mentally complete.

UP TO A POINT, LORD FARTER.

I've been laughing at the collapse of conservative NeverTrumpism for a while now, and it never gets any less funny. Check out Jonah Goldberg trying to reason with Dennis Prager -- I know! Funny already, right? -- because Prager accused NeverTrumpers of purity policing. Talk about the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible! Prager barks at the wets that "Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters"; Goldberg clears his throat and pipes up, finger aloft, "Donald Trump is literally no one’s general, because the president isn’t a general." Aaaagh! It's like Pee-Wee and Francis. And we haven't even got to Goldberg's objection to "another problematic turn of phrase" by Prager (and try to imagine any of Prager's yak qualifying as a 'turn of phrase' rather than as, say, a spume of stupid) -- that is, that NTs have a "utopian streak," to which Goldberg rejoins, basically, nuh-uh (and of course farrrrrt).

Vanitas, vanitas: This is just the rightwing version of virtue-signaling. As I've shown in the past, Goldberg is only NeverTrump up to a point -- the point where it becomes obvious that Trump is doing everything conservatives want and the only worry for such as Goldberg is that he isn't making it look nice and patty-cake, like something he can be House Intellectual of. When Goldberg gets too close to that point, he farts and stammers out gibberish like "What worries me about the nascent Trump administration is that he is making it difficult to defend Trump on the merits." Similarly he has to treat Prager like a misguided comrade ("If Dennis had used the phrase 'culture war' or some such, I think he’d be entirely right") in order to maintain the fiction that they are still united in a "movement" rather than competing for whatever rich donors and brutish Snopeses they can bamboozle into entering their pigeon coop.

Another up-to-a-point man is Jay Caruso, who sometimes says mean things about Trump but still has to make excuses. Today Trump continued paying off his Moscow enablers by starting to return two spy compounds Obama had seized from them. Everyone sees and everyone knows, but here's Caruso:

Trump Administration May Return Seized Russian Compounds Proving Nobody Over There Understands Optics

Almost anybody with a cursory familiarity with politics understands the value of optics. When something looks bad, people are going to think it’s bad.

If only the Trump people knew how this would look! Cut to Sergei Lavrov sneering at reporters about the firing of James Comey, then going backstage to laugh his ass off with Trump and Kislyak. Champ, these people don't care how it looks. If anything, they want people to see how little they care how it looks, so they'll get discouraged and stop caring themselves.

Their little tut-tuts ain't doing shit. But then, they don't want them to.

COULDN'T SAY SHIT IF HE HAD A MOUTHFUL.

Sonuvagun -- Jonah Goldberg, whom we just saw groveling for Trump over Comey, has dumbled down:

Courts, Colbert Enabling Trump’s Violations of Democratic Norms

You're not hallucinating -- he means Stephen Colbert.

A great deal has been said about Donald Trump’s violations of “democratic norms.” I agree with much of it.

But the big problem with violating democratic norms — the unwritten customs and practices even political opponents traditionally abide by — is that once you’ve done it, everybody else wants to do it, too. This makes everything worse, because when the people most offended by Trump’s violations respond in kind, they not only contribute to the problem, they create incentives for Trump and his biggest supporters to keep doing it.

"You started it!" isn't working anymore, so the new thing is "Trump started it, but you should know better!" And by "it" Goldberg doesn't mean actual outrages like the grotesque misuse of office Trump has made SOP; he means rudeness. So Trump may be the new Nixon minus the brains, but Stephen Colbert made a swear on the TV:

Suffice it to say that if you want to condemn a president for his incivility, you squander some credibility when you describe the president of the United States in a lewd act with a foreign dictator.

Adding to the fartfulness of declaring a comedian's moral responsibility to outclass the Leader of the Free World is Goldberg trying to belittle Colbert by snorting, "TV is a niche business these days, even at the broadcast networks," as if the exalted shitposts now filling the flagship of National #NeverTrump-#NeverMind were some kind of lofty height from which to look down.

This pearl-clutching is emerging as a popular favorite among wingnuts -- see Noah Rothman's dudgeon over "Shock-Jock Democrats," and the multiple tsks chronicled at the end of my recent Village Voice column. The general idea seems to be that Trump's coarseness is the only problem with him -- they have no problem with his politics, which (I keep saying, because some people don't seem to have gotten it yet) he has adopted and enables only so the Republicans will let him keep up his grift -- so if a liberal is coarse, it's equally bad. The only honorable position, in this view, is to endorse a police state, the further immiseration of the poor, and persecution of minorities -- but daintily.

Oh yeah, there's some gibberish in Goldberg's column about how "judges have taken to acting like pundits" because their decisions on Trump's flagrantly unconstitutional Muslim ban point out that it's flagrantly unconstitutional, but if I pack all of his stupidity into one column my servers might go up in a giant fartcloud.

A FART TO THE FINISH.

Here is Jonah Goldberg, onetime #NeverTrump leader ("Sorry, I Still Won’t Ever Vote for Trump") and author of "Conservative Purists Are Capitulating with Support of Trump," on the Comey firing:

Finally, this might have been the right thing to do on the merits. President Trump may even be doing this for all the right — and stated — reasons. But this, too, points to the mess Hillary Clinton created for herself and the country. If Comey needed to be fired — a defensible position — that’s downstream of the hot mess Hillary Clinton dropped on all of us.

The man who Goldberg once pretended to find morally indefensible has just fired a high public official who was investigating him, and Goldberg's reaction is to retreat to his Clinton-hating happy place.

I never liked Goldwater but he at least found the balls in the 11th hour to tell Nixon to get lost. Conservatives are just shit anymore.

WANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

Trump has really taught conservatives to turn on a dime and accept new realities that were once (if you ever believed a word they said) disgusting to them. Remember when it was a wingnut rite of passage to hatewank over Lena Dunham? (My detailed examinations here, here, and here.) Now that her show Girls has ended with her character apparently getting a ridiculously impossible academic job and a kid, the brethren are in love with her.

Well, it's a kind of love. They want to have their cake and eat it too -- and in this their attempt is very like what they do with Trump as well: They say mildly bad things about her, but endorse her policies -- that is, endorse what they think her show's conclusion means in the purely political terms they think apply to every area of human life. Here's Erika Andersen at The Federalist:

Don’t Tell Her, But Lena Dunham Just Made A Pro-Life Season Of ‘Girls'

See, Andersen says, in the real world Dunham's a baby-killer -- "I don’t know for sure if she supports abortion up to 9 months of pregnancy," she says, "but let the record show, she probably does." (Despite the vinyl revival, Andersen doesn't seem to know what the word "record" means.) But the Invisible Hand of the Art-Marketplace forced Dunham to call for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, culture-war-wise, by having her character have a baby:

They could have thrown in a late-term abortion (and wouldn’t the pro-choice media just love the “stigma-reducing” that would showcase?), but they wouldn’t dare go there. 

Why not? It’s her body, right? Because it’s not, and everyone — yes, EVERYONE — knows it. 

Every time a character on TV has a baby, it's a thumbs-up for the Republic of Gilead. (Except Murphy Brown -- she's still a whore.)

Meanwhile Kyle Smith -- National Review's new culture-scold hire, probably enlisted to appease the readers who are confused and angered by Armond White -- praises "Lena Dunham’s Ultimately Conservative Message." Dunham, you see, is the bad Hannah -- "[she] says unconscionable things, just like her narcissistic screen alter ego" -- but "Dunham the writer," ah, she's almost as good as Jonah Goldberg, and "Hannah’s reckless, destructive self-absorption" betrays Dunham the writer's awareness that Dunham the slut is a filthy slut and abortion is murder. Maybe in her next project, Dunham the writer will kill Dunham the slut, like Dr. Jekyll did Mr. Hyde! In the meantime, comrades, let's keep our wits sharp with our guiltily-retained Fappening files!

Of course, the show's not over till Chunky Reese Witherspoon sings, and one can only approach Ross Douthat's contribution with a certain Hell No. Take this:

Tony Soprano pining for the days of Gary Cooper set a tone for all these stories, which then echoed and re-echoed in the Louisiana swamps of “True Detective,” the New Mexican borderlands of “Breaking Bad,” the halls of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Again and again the viewer watched a male protagonist trying to be a breadwinner, paterfamilias, a protector and savior, a Leader of Men; again and again these attempts were presented as dangerously alluring, corrupting, untimely and foredoomed...

On “Girls,” though, something very different was going on. The fall of patriarchy had basically happened, the world had irrevocably changed … and nobody knew what to do next.

You young people today -- Destroy! Destroy! When are you going to find time to build! By the time you get to Douthat's fuzzbeard Catholic version of Lena Dunham is Conservative ("True, this was motherhood solo, without a mate or male provider. But the male absence felt more like a signifier of masculine failure than feminine empowerment") you have...

Who am I kidding -- I'm sure nobody ever actually gets to that part; why bother to read that far? (Certainly not for the pleasure of the prose!) In the end, these exegeses are unneeded: the people who liked the show will bid it adieu and go watch something else, and the culture warriors will just scan the headlines and quickly flip ahead to the Ann Coulter column, taking it on faith that their public scribes have properly informed History how everything they like -- TV shows, Clint Eastwood movies, choc-o-mut ice creams -- is further proof that tax breaks for the wealthy and persecution of minorities are God's holy will.

Anyway now they can move on to Emma Watson. She too is a libtard, and hot, and ripe for conversion fantasies. Which of them with be the first to write that Beauty and the Beast shows the good Emma's desire to be done with Pajama Boys and instead enjoy the violation of a true conservative mangoat? My money's on Rod Dreher!

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

Bret Stephens to the Times? Figures; he sucks. Steve M of No More Mister Nice Blog has the goods. This header from one of Stephens' WSJ columns will tell you a lot about his hackery -- and yes, I know authors don't pick them, but this one's perfectly appropriate:

This was the column that made the balloons drop as the millionth time some wingnut said liberalism was like 1984 Farm. I haven't written about Stephens too much here, but in the late campaign he took a Trump-is-the-new-Obama tack beloved of idiots, which probably convinced the Times that he was one of those sensible conservatives like Brooks and Douthat whom, after the Trumpian deluge, they can use like sourdough starter to create a new neoliberalconservatism.

UPDATE. Maybe this is one of those whatchamacallits, "inflection points" I think they call them, where the wingnuts suddenly want to be recognized as anti-Trump, just like in the old days. There was Jonah Goldberg's pathetic effort yesterday, and today, perhaps recognizing what a botch their legacy pledge made of it, National Review has gotten "a politics writer for MTV" to pitch in "What If There Is No Such Thing as ‘Trumpism’?" The article suggests that because Trump "at once could claim a purported allegiance to Evangelical Christianity and wave a rainbow flag at a rally," and other such conundrums, he's not a Real Conservative. The author misses, or pretends not to notice (who knows? Like I could divine the motivations of a "politics writer for MTV" who thinks publishing at National Review is a good move!), that 1.) the Republicans at the Cleveland convention, who were not significantly different from those at previous GOP quadrennials, cheered these alleged contradictions lustily, and 2.) they and 95% of conservatives cheered because they knew Trump would deliver the things they really want: tax breaks for the rich and Muslim-bashing. 

Anyway, as the speed with which they all ran to heel when Trumpy dropped a bomb shows, these cowboys will fall back in line as soon as he shovels big money to the fat cats. That's why he's making them wait for it -- it's his storied showmanship: he knows it'll come off better if he builds up some tension first. (They still know it's coming, but if there's one thing these guys are good at, it's the willing suspension of disbelief.)

THE FAMILY IS THE ONLY PLACE I CAN BE.

Jonah Goldberg:

If you’ll forgive the self-indulgence, let me start by sharing a few things about my professional life since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, in no particular order. Every day, on social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump, even if I include praise or beneficial context. During the election season, I lost large sums of money — large to me, anyway — because I had to turn down speeches in which I was expected to be a de facto surrogate for the Republican point of view. My appearances on Fox News have dropped precipitously...

One might wonder what this workshy legacy pledge, whose columns betray an ever-decreasing amount of effort, could possibly have to bitch about. Rick Perlstein, it turns out; Goldberg claims he has been slandered by him at the New York Times Magazine, thus:

National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.”

The quote, BTW, is accurate. Goldberg retorts:

For starters, Perlstein’s insinuation — that my declaration that “Never Trump” is over represents some kind of “embrace” of Trump — isn’t just wrong, it is breathtakingly dishonest. The very article he’s quoting from has the sub-headline: “The Never Trump movement is over, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop criticizing Trump when he deserves it.”

Which is like saying, "I lost, but that doesn't mean I'll stop complaining about it." Goldberg actually lists several columns where he's been "criticizing Trump." Let's take one at random -- "The False Prophecy of the Presidential Pivot” -- and look at the lede:

It was just last week that Donald Trump had the finest moment of his short presidency — his address to a joint session of Congress. Even many of his harshest critics praised his speech or reluctantly conceded that it was “presidential.”

Really lets him have it, huh? Actually Goldberg does get to criticizing eventually, but it's mainly criticism of Trump's intemperate Tweeting -- that is, his failure to "play the part of a somewhat sober, serious, responsible president — even one with an ambitious populist-outsider agenda" when he's handling his device. And he can't even do that without qualifying it -- for example, talking about Trump accusing Obama of tapping his phones, Goldberg admits it sounds bad but has to stick in that "there is an enormous amount we do not know" and "I think more investigations are in order (including of the leaks plaguing the administration)." And here's his finish:

The pivot stuff was always false prophecy. Being president has a funny way of making people more presidential. And by day, Trump’s White House staff can contain his worst instincts. But all bets are off when he’s alone at Mar-a-Lago and the moon calls forth the beast.

In other words: Trump's got a good staff, so things are going okay, but hoo-boy, those crazy Tweets, am I right? He sounds like a 70s Democrat talking about Billy Beer.

Though Trump directly insulted Goldberg and won the nomination by basically telling the establishment Goldberg represents to fuck off, the fact is Goldberg's always been willing to praise Trump. Why shouldn't he? Trump's viciousness is right in tune with Goldberg's brand of conservatism -- it's just less dainty. Even during the campaign for the Republican campaign, Goldberg's NeverTrumpiness was already beginning to take on water. Here's me last May describing one such column:

Take Jonah Goldberg, dean of the #NeverTrump crew at National Review. Last week, Goldberg taxonomized and reviled several Trump-allied factions: "alt-right" loons, converts "who don’t in fact believe in anything at all beyond their own self-interest," "Closet #NeverTrumpers" without the courage of their convictions, and "Fake Moderates" who, Goldberg claimed, had "urged the GOP to be more inclusive and nice" before endorsing Trump.

But conservatives "who simply think supporting Trump is making the best of a bad situation" — well, that was different. "I understand that position and I have sympathy for it," said Goldberg. It would also be okay if Ted Cruz and this year’s other unsuccessful GOP contenders gave Trump "some grudging, pro-forma support… albeit reluctantly and with grave reservations," said Goldberg. Helping to destroy the country is only bad, in other words, if you seem too cheerful about it; a grim visage redeems you. Sort of like Puritanism!

Or you can read him from August defending Trump's transparently bogus outreach to blacks ("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..."). Or you can --

Ah, what's the point. I could continue to pick apart his bullshit buffalo stance, but who's left to convince -- no one hears about some Trump outrage and says, "I can't wait for Jonah Goldberg to weigh in on this!" That's because the movement Trump took over is still his home and, like Charley Partanna and the Prizzis, he's got nowhere else to go. Even when he's being pissy, he still inside the tent pissing out; just because he can't quite find the flap and catches splashback every time doesn't mean he was ever even thinking about going outside to piss in.

FART FOR FART'S SAKE.

Longtime readers will understand that my real beef with Jonah Goldberg is not so much ideological as aesthetic. I mock him not mainly because his ideas are terrible (though they are -- I propose the Liberal Fascism monument show Goldberg tumbling bucket-footed down Spongebob's Stairs of Learning as he tries to draw a Hitler mustache on FDR) but because he writes shit like this:

But let us be fair: Deks, as these are called in the biz, are sometimes composed by editors rather than authors and, though I can't imagine Goldberg's ego would abide an editor, it's possible they convinced him to let an intern write his deks, and that intern, perhaps tired of doing hourly Cheetos runs and getting nothing in return from Goldberg but bon mots like "Wanna big tip? Then rub it!" decided to fuck with him. So let us examine Goldberg's lede:

Dystopia is in the air these days. George Orwell’s 1984 is selling like hotcakes — if hotcakes still sold well in this low-carb world.

Come back! I know that gag makes Erma Bombeck look like Noel Coward, but let's give the man a chance.

Is the president to blame?

I think historians, no doubt working from their subterranean monasteries, bunkered from the radioactive wasteland above, will note that dystopianism, apocalypticism, and other forms of existential paranoia actually predate the Trump presidency.

Okay, I think he got the crap poeticism out of his system; I promise if he does Latinate alliteration we'll skip down.

It’s a fever that passes from one subset of the population to another and occasionally blows up into a full-scale pandemic. We all carry the infection in us, sometimes slow-simmering, sometimes in remission, and sometimes in extremis.

[vomits] OK, let's skip down.

...Apathy is the practical opposite of fear.

Uh --

Given that tyranny, going by the historical and evolutionary record, is the natural state of humankind, the greatest bulwark against it is a highly cultivated, deeply informed but nonetheless instinctive fear.

Whuh?

Edmund Burke never actually uttered the most famous quote attributed to him — “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” — though that is a useful summation of his views. And it’s certainly true. 

 Guh --

Apathy is the grease that makes slippery slopes so treacherous.

The old saw still cuts: This is the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else.

TRUMPISM WITHOUT TRUMP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No comment. (Loser.)

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

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

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG.

"Why National Unity Remains So Elusive," by Jonah Goldberg. Did you guess libtards? Congratulations! But Goldberg makes us go through a detour -- specifically, the early part of his word count -- before we can get there. It's about how we're all mad at each other, despite Goldberg's attempts to bind up the nation's wounds with books like Liberal Fascism.

The front-padding done, Goldberg gets to the John Lewis thing and gives us a dull recap of the conservative take I described on Monday: Lewis "earned his icon status on the Edmund Pettus Bridge" but now he's just a mean libtard and did you know that "the goons who cracked Lewis’s skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were acting at the behest of a Democratic governor and Democratic local officials"? Lewis is just confused as to who his friends are, apparently; I bet he doesn't even know Robert Byrd was a Klansman.

All this would not be worth noting were it not for a choice Goldberg Easter Egg of the sort he often drops when he's in a hurry to finish up a column and get to the Cheeto trough. Here's today's:

Now, Lewis is going further still, refusing to attend Trump’s inauguration and arguing that Trump cannot be a legitimate president because of Russian meddling in the election. Lewis may have reason to believe that Trump did not win fair and square, but questioning Trump’s legitimacy is exactly what the Russians probably wanted from the beginning: to undermine Western and American faith and confidence in democracy.

Not only does John Lewis not appreciate the Republican Party's continuing commitment to civil rights, he's playing into the hands of the Russians -- like Edward Snowden! Maybe Trump should have him charged with treason. It'll show he's serious about foreign policy.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm sure I must be someone; now I'm gonna find out who.
•   Amanda Prestigiacomo of The Daily Signal is enraged because the Washington Post ran a long tribute to our outgoing President and didn't do one for George W. Bush back in the day. But the Post is just giving the people what they want, as they say in show biz: Even casual observers will know that Obama is currently very popular, and that his 55% approval rating contrasts starkly with GWB's 34% at the same stage of his Presidency. (I guess WaPo could have done an 18-page "Thanks for the Recession" feature, but what advertiser would have plunked down money for that?) Cripes, even Republicans know this: It's no accident Bush hasn't attended a GOP National Convention since he left office; clearly no one at the RNC wanted to remind the public of how badly they fucked up the country last time they were in charge. In fact, the citizens may have begun to remember what Republicans are all about lately: the incoming Il Douche is at 37% the least-approved incoming President in recorded history. Nonetheless Prestigiacomo feels compelled to cry Liberal Bias, and even Conspiracy:

Perhaps the "fake news" scare was not only an excuse for Hillary Clinton's truly awful candidacy, but a move in a long game effort to get more conservative news suppressed, as if it hasn't been suppressed enough already.

Honey, it's so much simpler than that: If you don't want to get pelted with tomatoes, leave the stage when they start to boo.

•   Robert Tracinski, insufferable culture warrior, bitches out SJW Wars:

In ‘Rogue One,’ The Hollywood Empire Strikes Back 

'Rogue One' is a throwback to the highbrow Hollywood culture that the original 'Star Wars' film rebelled against back in 1977.

Manny Farber he ain't.

Not many people realize that the great conservative filmmakers of our age are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Forget about their personal political views, which naturally conform to the left-leaning Hollywood consensus. Think purely in esthetic terms. Lucas and Spielberg collaborated on the two great movie franchises that helped shape the culture of the 1980s: Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

It’s not just that these films were nostalgic tributes to an old-fashioned style of story-telling, the Westerns and movie serials of the pre-Counterculture era. It’s that the stories were told in bright, primary colors...

But this new stuff is about people who believe in something, which is a drag:

That’s the other thing that’s disappointingly different about Rogue One. There’s a lot of talk in this film about “the cause,” including a scene in which the two lead characters have a tiff about who is more down with the struggle. This probably helps Hollywood leftists feel more at home, because lefties pull this sort of thing on each other all the time. But in the original Star Wars films, there was little discussion of or interest in “the cause"...

It's like when Victor Laszlo told Rick "Welcome to the fight" in Casablanca -- gross, right? It should have ended when Rick got Ilsa to fuck him! That's capitalism, baby -- I stick my neck out for no one! I guess it never occurred to Tracinski that Han joined the rebels for something besides pussy. Or maybe (a stretch, I know) Tracinski doesn't actually give a shit about culture at all, and is just getting with the new realities. Come to think of it, force-choking is a sign of American Greatness!  

• Yet another wan column from Jonah Goldberg, who has been observably demoralized since his Liberal Fascism racket got queered by the election of Republican Mussolini. Or maybe it's not demoralization; maybe he's just taking the opportunity, like other great artists working under constraints, of exploring new frontiers -- in Goldberg's case, of intellectual sloth. The column is mostly "Our Friend The Beaver" phumphering ("With a bullpen of writers like that, it’s no wonder that Washington’s farewell ranks among the great works of literary statecraft..."). Kudos to historian Kevin M. Kruse, however, for noticing this:

Of course, the era of radio and television necessitated — or created the perception of necessity — that presidents address the people directly. Whether that amounted to progress is for others to decide. But until Obama, it never occurred to a president to deliver a televised address from anywhere but the Oval Office.

What a maroon. (Also: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this scale model of the Wall here on my desk in the Oval Office, from which all presidential addresses are given.") Oh, and according to Goldberg Obama's speech was "grandiose" and a "campaign rally." He quotes literally about a dozen words of it. I'll be frank, I don't think he saw or read the speech - I think at best it was on in the background while he was playing Battleship with Jay Nordlinger, or trying to get his fist in his mouth (his own, not Nordlinger's, though you never know, Nordlinger sure isn't earning a salary with his writing). And people think liberals are demoralized! At least we don't have to pretend shit is gold.

PANTLOAD DESNUDO.

This may be the most Jonah Goldberg line of all time:

And yet, defensive though it may sound, I think the claim that I got “everything wrong” in 2016 reveals more about my detractors than about me.

This is not just a Goldbergian farrt, it is a Kent Treble Bob Major farrt. Backstory: Trumpkins are telling Goldberg they "forgive" him for getting "everything wrong" about Trump. As seen above, Goldberg puts up a bit of slap-fight defense, then backtracks:

That said, I already feel comfortable admitting that, beyond my electoral prognosticating, I got some things wrong about what a Trump presidency will look like. Though many on the left and in the media see his cabinet appointments and policy proposals as cause for existential panic, as a conservative I find most — but by no means all — of them reassuring.

As long as Trump gets billions of federal budget dollars diverted to conservative crony contractors, he's okay with Jonah! Then Goldberg feels the sharp wind on his shapeless buttocks and senses he's been stripped of his pride -- and with hundreds more words to go before Mom will let him play video games! So he scoops this garbage out of the gutter, holds it in front of his junk, and asserts his dignity:

And that brings me to what I think I got right: Trump’s character. I am not referring to his personal conduct toward women, a culture-war weapon that Trump and Bill Clinton together have removed from partisan arsenals for the foreseeable future. Nor am I necessarily referring to how he has managed his businesses, though I think those patterns of behavior are entirely relevant to understanding our next president.

Trump's pussy-grabbing doesn't matter because Clinton dur hurr, and neither does his grifter status notwithstanding that he's about to enter the national henhouse with an axe.

What I have chiefly in mind is that rich nexus of unrestrained ego, impoverished impulse control, and contempt for policy due diligence. I firmly and passionately believe that character is destiny. From his reported refusal to accept daily intelligence briefings to his freelancing every issue under the sun on Twitter — including, most recently, nuclear-arms policy — Trump’s blasé attitude troubles me deeply, just as it did during the campaign. 

On balance, I don’t feel repentant. 

"Trump’s blasé attitude troubles me deeply," please make sure to get that in the record, bracketed in harrumphs. But then again let's not beat a dead horse, there's a country to wreck:  

But I acknowledge that Trump has surrounded himself with some serious and sober-minded people who will try to constrain and contain the truly dangerous aspects of his character. If they succeed, I’ll happily revisit my refusal to ask for forgiveness.

And he marches off the stage, trailing dead leaves and McDonalds wrappers and a cloud of methane, head held high. You may think it's for nothing -- most of his National Review colleagues dropped the act long ago -- but I bet whoever collects the checks and cruise ticket receipts for NR is relieved; there's no money in old-tyme conservatism now, subscribers actually thrill to the New Order, and the smart play is to go full MAGA (with some erudite gush along the margins so the high-end users won't actually feel they're actually rubbing elbows with those beasty Breitbart types). That requires Goldberg to eat shit. And there's the benefit to the guy being so dull: He probably thinks he has craftily avoided an apology, while his handlers realize all he has to do to show obeisance is humiliate himself, and that's a safe bet even on a good day.

NUTSY NAZI TIME.

It's turning into old home week at alicublog, and mainstays like Rod Dreher and The Federalist are always good for holiday cheer. But let us not sleep on Roger L. Simon, kingpin of the PJ Media empire, who in his occasional waddles to the mike always says something sensational, and this week is no exception:

Are Europe's 'Extreme Right' Parties Really So Extreme?

If you're curious to hear what Simon thinks of Jobbik's call for a ban on all immigration in Hungary, or of the overtly fascist Golden Dawn in Greece and People's Party in Slovakia, apologies, his handlers have steered him toward three more telegenic/less ostentatiously jackbooted entities: UKIP, which he thinks is all about "local democratic rule"; Geert Wilders, a notorious bigot but only against Muslims, hence MSM-friendly; and Germany's AfD, which has recently started slowly to de-Nazify itself, which may explain Simon's sangfroid ("my knowledge [of its extremism] is not first hand, but I am skeptical") -- or maybe he's heard that many of the new neo-Nazis are trending pro-Israel and figures, hey, let bygones be bygones.

So he doesn't see what's so Nazi about these guys -- but...

The irony of ironies may be that the true heirs to the Nazis are the Merkels of the world, not the AfD, etc. While not Hitler-like in mass murder and megalomania, not to mention all the master-race insanity...

(Because that's not the important part of Nazism.)

...they do share a background with the genocidal dictator -- socialism. The Nazis were the National Socialist Party.

Like Jonah Goldberg, Simon thinks libtards are the Real Fascists; unlike Goldberg, he doesn't even dimly perceive what a hash of that theory the election of Trump makes.

That Merkel is East German is not accidental.

Similarly, Trump can't be a fascist because like FDR he's a white American. Then, a kill-Mozzies close and it's off to his weekly fedora-reblocking. So much for linking arms against fascism, guys; guess we'll have to do it ourselves.

EARLY AND AWFUL.

That's how yez do it in a Demmy-crat town, yerrah!

It's Election Day, and already hilarious, with turnout depressed in traditional bellwether Dixville Notch -- 4 for Hillary, 2 for Trump, 1 for the stoner and 1 for Mitt Romney. Protest votes in Dixville Notch! By 2020 they'll have armed poll watchers.

At the New York Post Charles Gasparino just can't fathom "The markets’ foolish panic over Donald Trump":

Since nearly the moment Comey made the announcement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 357 points, or nearly 2 percent of its value, through Friday...

All of which is lunacy.

As crazy as Trump’s demeanor has been at times during the campaign — I’ll admit it’s more than a bit odd that the possible leader of the free world gets into late-night Twitter feuds — there’s nothing nutty about what he has proposed on taxes or regulation, at least from the market’s perspective. If history is any guide (see the Reagan years, and the last six years of President Bill Clinton) lower taxes on individuals and corporations, as Trump is proposing, are usually a good thing for stocks, as are fewer regulatory burdens for business.

I know Uncle Ragey smells like "medicine," runs red lights, and has a tendency to reach over the seat and grab the girls, but I still don't see why you'd rather take the bus to school -- the bus costs money!

Will update as often as goddamn job allows.

UPDATE. At National Review, Dennis Prager is bringing in the sheaves:

I was one of you in vigorously opposing Trump’s nomination – on my national radio show and in my syndicated column. And I paid a price, as you have, in losing longtime supporters – in my case, any number of listeners who supported Trump from the outset and found my strong opposition to him disappointing and worse.

Unlike you, however...

I'm a sleazebag whore who's really only here for the money and the white supremacy.

...I did say from the beginning that if he were to be the nominee, I would vote for him.

Oh man, Dennis, you were so close! Quit living the lie, Dennis! You're only 27 years old, your hair shouldn't be that white!

Most of you are simply too intelligent, too idealistic, and too self-questioning not to have at least on occasion had second thoughts. If you understand – and I cannot believe that most of you don’t – how destructive another four years of any Democrat in the White House, let alone the truly corrupt Hillary Clinton, would be, it is inconceivable that you have never questioned your Never Trump position. Never Trump, after all, is not the same as Never Question.

"Doesn't my hand feel good on your little pussy? You can say 'Never' to Uncle Dennis, but you can't say 'Never' to pleasure!"

To prove my point, one of my favorite Never Trumpers, Jonah Goldberg, wrote in May: “If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump.”

In that moment of exquisite honesty, Jonah acknowledged one of the most important moral arguments to be made for voting for Trump – the lesser-of-two-evils argument.

YOU WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG -- YOU ARE ALL ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE! YOU ALONE CAN CHOOSE THE FACE OF GOD, AND YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT TO BE ANGRY AND MALE FOREVER! Prager also addresses that tiny minority of conservatives worried about their conscience or, as Prager dismissively refers to it, "self-image":

How can they, truly decent people, vote for someone who has exhibited the uncouth speech and behavior that Trump has? Or, as some have expressed it, “How can I explain to my daughter that I supported Donald Trump?”

As someone who also thinks of himself as decent...

Yeah I know but give it a minute.

...I think that saving America from Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the Left is the most decent thing I can do. And as for your daughter, just have her speak to any of the millions of wonderful women who are voting for Donald Trump. They will provide your daughter with perfectly satisfying moral and woman-centered answers.

He doesn't say what the woman-centered answers are; probably the usual bullshit, only in pink.

UPDATE 2. Roger L. Simon dismisses the "virtue-signaling" conservatives who couch their support of Trump and act embarrassed -- "I have supported Donald Trump unabashedly from the moment I thought it was clear he would win the nomination," he says. Trust me, what he's signaling ain't virtue:

At first blush, or any blush, Donald Trump -- a brash real estate tycoon who made much of his money from gambling casinos -- would seem an unlikely leader for such a crusade. But I submit it's the contrary (and, no, I'm not virtue signaling—at least I don't think so). The extreme situation we are faced with today -- we might call it "crony socialism" -- needed and needs an extreme personality both to get our attention and to get change accomplished. Nothing much would have happened, in all probability, with any of the other candidates. This time, of all times, an outsider was necessary.

Put another way, we have to fight their thuggery with a thug of our own.

In hell, Franz von Papen gets the small comfort of seeing, albeit through a wall of flames, his shtick become fashionable again. My favorite of Simon's insights is this:

He is also the first Republican in decades to make a serious attempt for the African-American vote. We can only hope that others will follow his lead, for the benefit of all our communities.

If only Republicans knew it was so easy -- and so effective!

UPDATE 3. As of 9:30 pm, I see some of you guys are nervous. Don't be! Not because the worst can't happen -- the worst currently has the inside track. But let's be honest with ourselves -- the frog knew that scorpion was a scorpion when it gave him a ride. Is America the frog, or the scorpion? Questions Remain!

If it all goes to shit, remember, nothing in this life is guaranteed. The next four years may require more of us than you expected. But when you get to a certain stage in life, you realize that no road is smooth all the way. Get you some tires with more tread, and press on.

UPDATE 4. 

Silver lining: They're not going to even pretend not to be white power peeps.