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.

BRINGING A KNIFE TO A SHOTGUN WEDDING.

Shorter Dennis Prager on bringing together social and fiscal conservatives:




Money shot:

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

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

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

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. 

WHY SO SERIOUS?

Among the many similarities between the Trump people and the more overt alt-right is their common impulse to cover their more repulsive sentiments as jokes. Look at Trump's recent declaration that Democrats who didn't applaud him at the State of the Union might be traitors, and his spokesman Hogan Gidley's assurance that Trump was -- obvs! -- just kidding. The brethren took the hint; Dan McLaughlin of National Review portrays Trump's statement, unimaginable from any previous President, as gentle if totalitarian ribbing -- "the subversive, somewhat cleansing but ultimately corrosive part of Trump’s brand of political performance art," McLaughlin puts it, trying as best his shitty prose skills can manage to soften the "corrosive" part with an invocation of a Lenny Bruce for Bigots -- and asks the libs Are You Triggered:

...if you watch the actual video, you can see the flippancy here. Trump is plainly not being serious about treason – he’s playing this for laughs, and getting them – and liberals going to DEFCON 1 as if he is are yet again proving how little interest they have in distinguishing between tyranny and mere boorishness. The loss of perspective is just wearying to watch at this point.

I can imagine McLaughlin at the computer, musing: Am I wearied by the loss of perspective or amused by it? I assume he eventually flipped a coin.

This treason-amirite stuff is of a piece with other apparently serious and horrific Trump comments that his factota later disown as gags -- like asking Russia to steal Hillary Clinton's emails -- or that Trump himself laughs through, either to cover the violence or because he genuinely finds it funny, as when he light-heartedly told cops to smash suspects' heads into car doors.

And it really reminds me of the trollery of alt-right icons like Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional asshole who pretends, semi-successfully, that his slurs are a type of stand-up, and such elaborate kidding-not-kidding as the Chuck Johnson crowd claiming the OK sign as a white power symbol, then denying they did it.

I'm not sure to what extent these alt-right guys get encouragement from Trump,  or whether their outrages, fed to Trump in his morning memo, give him encouragement (though I'm pretty sure Trump's Me/Not Me development is sufficient retarded that, if he likes something, he assumes it originated with him). But the real meaningful resemblance between Trumpism and the alt-right isn't their compatible bigotry and viciousness; it's in their similarly bland insistence that it's all just a joke that you'd be a Fool and a Chump and Triggered to take seriously (unless you're people like the Kochs and DeVoses who have big money to promote it, in which case please take it very seriously indeed!). It's like every up-and-coming wingnut is, in the manner of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, that one friend everyone had in high school who made outrageously vicious statements and, when he didn't get laughs, told everyone to lighten up -- only expanded into a movement with millions of followers.

Now even some old-time, credentialed conservative writers are picking this up. Here's Robert VerBruggen on the recent analysis by Washington Post reporters who found, sure enough, the immigration restrictions Trump has promoted with volley after volley of racist vomit would in fact keep America whiter for a few more years -- which news, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe, would thrill a substantial portion of Trump's base, if they ever read high-falutin' big-city papers like the Post.  Now, VerBruggen is one of National Review's more obvious racists, but still paper-trained in the classic Buckley manner so he's unlikely get kicked out for being too obvious like John Derbyshire -- and now that he's caught on to the New Breed's why-so-serious style, he's got a fresh new way to cover his tracks:

Now the Washington Post has done the yeoman’s work of calculating how the [Trump] framework would affect the demographics of the nation as a whole, and you won’t believe how pale everyone will be a quarter-century from now if we let Orange Hitler have his way... 

In 2044 this country will be only about 47 to 49 percent nonwhite, instead of 50 percent. The Make America White Again plan could delay the dawn of a majority-minority United States, currently expected to arrive 26 years from now, by one to five years. In wanting to stop immigrants from bringing over chains of distant relatives with no regard for their skills, Trump is clearly motivated by nothing other than — come on now, don’t be shy to say it — racism.

Ha? Well, I didn't say he was smooth about it. But that doesn't matter. In fact, a certain clumsiness goes with the territory -- to successfully tell a joke, after all, you have to have at least a little joy in your soul that you wish to express, but to these guys, "joking" is just a formal strategy for the very serious business of realizing their will to power. I mean, look at The Daily Wire's response to Jimmy Kimmel's gag about conservatives not being smart enough to do late night TV -- "7 Conservative Talk Show Hosts Who Are Smarter Than Jimmy Kimmel." (Here's a taste: "Dennis Prager is the longtime host of The Dennis Prager Show and author of eight books on theology, history, and politics..." Stop, yer killing me!) Trying to disprove Kimmel's point with actual humor isn't even an option. Humor isn't their strong suit. But, like the Soviet functionaries who used to squeeze out Krokodil every month, they'll pretend, because they dimly perceive that it brings down the defenses of those Earth People they're trying to sucker. And, who knows, maybe it even helps them fool themselves.

CHUTZPAH. An anti-circumcision bill is under consideration in San Francisco. The local ACLU has come out against it, there's a lawsuit against it, some Democratic state assembly members are trying to head it off, and the polling doesn't look good for it.

Still, dare to dream, Dennis Prager:

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left.

Maybe Prager can try an "Operation Chaos"-style vote freep to get it passed. Won't Rush be impressed if it works!

Can't leave Prager without noting this:

The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Many of the youths who survived the [Norway] massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

I must say, sticking somewhat to the subject, that it takes some balls to find an anti-Israel angle in the story of an Islamophobic mass murderer.

THE WORSE, THE BETTER.

What’s Bad for America Is Good for Democrats

I'm beginning to think National Review's Dennis Prager is just toying with us now.

...Even today, after decades of feminism, most Americans agree that it is better for women (and for men) — and better for society — when women (and men) marry. Yet, when women marry, it is bad for the Democratic party; and when women do not marry, even after — or shall we say, especially after — having children, it is quite wonderful for the Democratic party. 

Married women vote Republican. Unmarried women lopsidedly vote Democrat. 

It is both silly and dishonest to deny that it is in the Democrats’ interest that women not marry. 

Which is why we make them wear those ugly Birkenstocks and not shave their legs.

Also, "the more a black American considers America a racist society, the more he or she is a guaranteed Democratic voter," which is why Democrats make such obvious efforts to stir up racial resentment: Prager offers in evidence Ferguson, which only really got out of control when Debbie Wasserman Schultz went down there and started setting trash cans on fire.

The Democratic party cultivates singlehood, black anger at America, Latino separatism, victimhood, group grievance, and dependency on government... 

The Democratic party has been become a wholly destructive force in this country. Even though you may not intend to, if you vote for any Democrat, you contribute to that damage.

I was waiting for him to tell me that doctor in New York purposely spread Ebola to drum up business for the Democrat-medical complex. I think even people who refer contemptuously to wingnut welfare can agree that Prager is one of those poor souls who really couldn't survive without it.

UPDATE. Elsewhere at National Review, Tim Cavanaugh

The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses

The theme of the article, near as I can pick out of the fevered prose, is that the conservative Ebola panic brigade does not exist, it's really elitist public health officials and a New Yorker writer who are trying to spread "Ebola panic among people who didn’t go to college" by saying there's no reason to panic when there really is because look, bowling shoes, but Cavanaugh is totally not trying to panic you, plus Chris Christie's a RINO. Someone should take Cavanaugh's temperature, or at least quarantine him.

UPDATE 2. Mollie Hemingway, having made a similar we're-not-the-panic-you're-the-panic case before, returns with more of the same and worse:

I’m sorry, but if you read the phrase “based on science” and don’t immediately guffaw at the unfounded arrogance and unchecked assumptions of it all, you are probably a typical reporter.

People wonder what happened to the Know Nothing Party -- well, wonder no more! First climate studies, now epidemiology -- wonder what branch of science conservatives will come out against next? (I know, I skipped psychiatry.)

WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOUR WON? It's amazing that Dennis Prager wrote "When a Woman Isn't In the Mood: Part I." It's astounding that he published it. It's mind-blowing that, having published it, he didn't hop a tramp steamer to Vera Cruz and try to make a new life for himself. But reenforce your skulls with duct tape, because Prager's back with "When a Woman Isn't In the Mood: Part II."

His argument is that, to preserve the marital bliss of their households, women should have sex with their husbands whether they feel like it or not. We might call this the nut graf, were not all the grafs nuts:

The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it.

And here's an analogy that should really win the ladies over: "Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood?" That's why it's called a blow job, girls.

Even more disturbing than his argument is his sheer doggedness in pursuing it. I can understand begging, pleading, emotionally manipulating, and even dressing up nice, buying dinner, and pretending to be a nice guy to obtain sex, but writing two columns for Town Hall is where I draw the line. They're both as repetitive and incantatory as a bad 18th Century religious tract. It's as if Prager had heard the famously ugly womanizer John Wilkes' explanation of his romantic success -- "Give me half an hour and I can talk my face away" -- and decided: give me two essays and I can talk my penis into her vagina.

Someone should send him a bottle of Astrolube with a note explaining that it's not just for women.

THE LADYKILLERS.

As I've said, and keep saying in my latest newsletter (subscribe! It don't cost much), it seems all conservatives are now solidly on board with Brett Kavanaugh and the Tit and Clit Club and, when it comes to their arguments in defense of the accused attempted rapist, the sober mainstream types are more or less indistinguishable from the crazy he-man woman-haters club types on the fringe. Dig professional harrumph machine David French, for example, arguing in the allegedly legit National Review that the real problem is not Georgetown Prep Republicans who think they own women, but liberal jazzbos who "stripped away moral prohibitions against extramarital sex, celebrated youthful experimentation, combined it with similar celebrations of drug and alcohol use — even at early ages — and then have been shocked — no, stunned — at the sheer amount of groping, grabbing, coercion, and assault." Yeah, elite males getting drink and rapey are the fault of Hugh Hefner; before the 60s, they only raped low-status females who were easily paid off and no one was the wiser.

But give the low-class conservatives credit; while guys like French are matching them in misogyny, they can't keep up with their expertise in plain old insanity.

Take Robert Stacy McCain, who I last noticed attacking Sarah Jeong for racism against whites -- "No one at Harvard or at the New York Times will speak a word in favor of white people, Christians, heterosexuals, or police officers" -- which was pretty ballsy of him, considering McCain is a neo-Confederate.

Well, sure enough, the American Spectator enlisted McCain to tell this mouthy Christine Blasey Ford a thing or two. A large part of his rap, you will not be surprised to hear, involves the Rolling Stone/UVA case -- when Men's Rights types can't get it up for normal porn anymore, they can always get a stiffy over that.

But the meat, as it were, of McCain's argument is that Kavanaugh's accuser has no right to be in a position to make such an accusation -- and the fact that she is in such a position suggests that she's lying:

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser is a university professor. The former prep-school girl Christine Blasey went on to obtain two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology, marry an engineer named Russell Ford, and thus become Professor Ford of California’s Palo Alto University. 

That's how women get doctorates and professorates: Marrying titled men!

Having spent her entire adult life working in academia, Professor Ford is eminently qualified as a representative of the mentality that currently prevails on our nation’s university campuses, where male students are presumed guilty of rape as soon as any female student accuses them.

Interesting. And what mentality is represented by Kavanaugh, who has spent his entire adult life as a factotum to Republican Party bosses? Why should his predictable careerist rise be any less suspicious than hers? It would seem the main difference between Kavanaugh's and Ford's position among the "elite," in McCain's view, is that hers is absurd because she lacks a penis.

This mentality was what led to the debacle at the University of Virginia in 2014, when a Rolling Stone reporter destroyed her career...

Let us draw the curtain, or close the men's room door, on McCain, and look in on Dennis Prager at National Review. Prager is a total idiot who has in the past argued that wives owe their husbands sex ("Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood?"). I wouldn't say he's topped that in his pissy column "The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored," but he comes close. First he pretty much accepts that Kavanaugh tried to rape Ford but shrugs it off because he's been such a good boy since ("No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager"), and that anyone should think otherwise is just "another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left." But here's the money part, and by "money" I mean nuts:

When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.

If only gals would learn to dodge their bosses' advances like Andy dodged butt-rape in The Shawshank Redemption, then come home and gave their husbands the blowjobs they deserve, we'd have the little gender thing fixed up PDQ.

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: PROMOTION OF THE PUTZES EDITION.

Poison fishes and they're freakin' me out, man/
They're so delicious and it's freakin' me out

Yeah, a day late and many dollars short. But look, I have free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts! They make great icebreakers at parties, assuming you still go to those. 

I already came across in the previous post with a freebie on the Trump defense taxonomy, so now I’m releasing the PragerU “Slavery as Vocational Training with Frederick Douglass” outtakes to gen pop. Anyone with any sense can see that Florida’s employment of the uncredentialed rightwing bullshit factory PragerU to help teach alternative history to schoolkids is a cynical con job designed not only to misinform the kids but also to discredit the very idea of education (because conservatism thrives on ignorance, and how better to promote ignorance than by turning schools into indoctrination centers that no one, including the kids, can take seriously). 

But what really gets me is that the gig fell to Dennis Prager, truly one of the stupidest wingnut factota around. I still remember his 2008 articles (yes, more than one!) arguing that women who didn’t feel like having sex with their husbands should do it anyway because, well, because daddy horny, that’s why. As I observed at the time:

And here's an analogy that should really win the ladies over: "Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood?" That's why it's called a blow job, girls.

Even more disturbing than his argument is his sheer doggedness in pursuing it. I can understand begging, pleading, emotionally manipulating, and even dressing up nice, buying dinner, and pretending to be a nice guy to obtain sex, but writing two columns for Town Hall is where I draw the line.

Over the years I’ve gotten perverse pleasure from his ravings, the absurdity of which often increases with age as whatever bat was banging around his belfry when he wrote them passes out of living memory (e.g., “If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left”). I assumed the conservative establishment would have found Prager too bizarre and unstable to entrust with big jobs like the destruction of public education, yet here we are. Well, we saw what chaos The Best and the Brightest wrought on public policy – I guess it's time to find out what The Worst and The Stupidest can accomplish.

THE PERFESSER REVEALS A NEW AREA OF EXPERTISE! Recently on Instapundit -- January 17:

THIS ESSAY ON PORNOGRAPHY by Natasha Vargas-Cooper in The Atlantic takes a rather dim view of men, going on and on and on about “the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn legitimizes.” Are there any “unlovely aspects” to female sexuality? And, if so, what social institutions legitimize them?

January 18:

IN SEARCH OF the Year Zero Face. Well, given that we prize women for sex rather than childbearing nowadays, maybe it makes sense that women want to look at what’s supposed to be their sexual, rather than reproductive, peak — age 36!

January 19:

REPORT: Men have upper hand in sexual economy. Maybe that’s what has Natasha Vargas-Cooper so unhappy.

Finally:

BYRON YORK: Before banning ‘crosshairs,’ CNN used it to refer to Palin, Bachmann. I blame the network for creating a climate of hatred and violence. There’s blood on your hands, CNN!

Well, there’s some sort of bodily substance involved, anyway.

I'm not sure what the hell is going on over there, but I think he should spin these posts off to a separate blog. If he needs help, Dennis Prager could fill in. It'd be the perfect Tea Party sex column; they could call it "Pump Action."

UPDATE. In a Thursday morning post on "Palinoia," conservatism's new Restless Leg Syndrome, the Perfesser ejaculates: "Women are always meanest to other women." There's a man with something on his mind! That new column can't come fast enough.

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?

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,

No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.

If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)

Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:

Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.

Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says

Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.

Ain't even kidding.

The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.

Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

SHORTER DENNIS PRAGER: This guy whose sister died on 9/11 pleads, in her name, for America to reach out and build better relations with Arab nations. I blame this reprehensible attitude on liberalism.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the alleged end of the culture war. Both rightwingers and leftwingers have suggested it's done, but I say this is America, where no grift stops until it runs out of suckers -- and this one's not even close to running out.

I should mention that the white-flag-waver with whom I started the column, Matt K. Lewis, has in a follow-up hedged on his original claim that "The culture war is over, and conservatives lost." Now he thinks there's a chance. Among his proof points:

The good news for cultural conservatives is that a new generation, aided by new technology, might finally conspire to change things. Young conservatives like R.J. Moeller — the man who brought comedian Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager together — are dedicating their lives to ideas and culture, not overt partisanship.

Apart from creating the headline lounge act in Hell, this is what Moeller's about.  I'm sure he can get people to pay him for it, but it hardly seems like a way to win hearts and minds.

UPDATE. In comments Spaghetti Lee has an angle:

I think the overtly churchy, you're-going-to-hell culture warriors are going to fade out, honestly. Who the hell is going to replace Pat Robertson or Maggie Gallagher when they bite the big one? I think we're going to see/are already seeing a rise in its more insidious cousin, the libertarian conservatives who are too hip and cool and with it for things like making sure 90% of the country actually has livable incomes and that the air and water supplies aren't full of poison...

He numbers among them the Randroid priest who can talk to kids.

AND THEN FIX ME A SANDWICH, BY ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE.

D.C. McAllister, one of The Federalist's awful writers, has decided to make a more overt play for the frustrated rightwing geezers in her audience, and comes out in support of "service sex," which is apparently about women having sex when they don't feel like it because that's just how it's supposed to be. Yes, Dennis Prager has done this bit in the past, but for a lady to do it might just titillate some Fox News producer looking for new on-air talent. (She can always dye her hair!)

McAllister takes off on a column by Wednesday Martin at CNN -- here's a representative Martin passage:

Plenty of us have sex once in a while to make our partners happy. But regular service sex is something else -- an arguably destructive habit fostered by specific social conditions, a symptom that something is amiss in not just our sex lives, but in our larger lives, and the culture more generally.

Later, Martin suggests a "sex strike" a la Lysistrata to level things out; whatever you think of that tactic, her notion that there's something fucked up about women having to make sexual sacrifices that aren't expected of men, and that the phenomenon is related to other sexist assumptions, would strike most of us as perfectly reasonable. I suspected that would be the case when McAllister buried the link to Martin's column deep in her own, and she and her editors offered readers several mendacious descriptions of Martin's POV as an alternative to checking it out themselves -- e.g., "Being Kind to Men Is Actually Evil," Martin is "painting men who want to make love to their wives as sexually entitled" and "instituting a matriarchy," "Men Want Sex, So Don’t Give It to Them," etc.

That sort of thing is par for the course for The Federalist, but it's McAllister's paean to Ugh Alright Can We Leave the TV On sex that stands out:

Service sex is when a woman has sex with her husband or long-term partner even though she’s not in the mood. She does it, not because she gets particular pleasure from it, but because she thinks it’s what she should do to be a good wife.

Most people who have been married more than a couple of years can relate to this.

We can? And here I thought we both had to be in the mood! Wait'll I tell the missus. "Honey, guess what."

The husband comes home from work tired, drained from a day of endless meetings, frustrating assignments, or just the monotony of existing among the gray cubicles of “Joe Versus the Volcano.”

Well, I guess I use a lot of obscure pop cultural references myself.

The wife has been working too. She’s tired. All she wants is a bath and a pillow, but her husband gets that twinkle in his eye.

If the twinkle's too subtle, "Suck my dick!" should do it. And you gotta admit, he's entitled:

He needs reconnection and the calming balm of his wife’s physical presence after a lonely day in his work zone.

And his wife needs to get to work on that hard-on, pronto! She can finish waxing the floor later.

Wanting her husband to be happy because she loves him, she complies. The husband is grateful even if he doesn’t say so.

LOL. "We got any leftover Chinese?"

After all, he loves her too, and having sex is his love language, as it is with many men.

"It's my dick in a box!"

Sometimes the wife fantasizes of more exciting moments—she’d like to be ravished once in a while like that girl in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books—but the daily grind of life saps energy for such novelties.

So, ladies can't be too tired for sex, but their husbands can be too tired for role play. Or is it the wife who's too tired for the role play she desires but just can't summon the strength for -- probably because she's gonna be doing all the work. (Is this what they mean by topping from the bottom?).

She’s a little sad about that, but she has sex anyway.

This relationship sounds great. Be sure to stick around for the end, when McAllister finds support for her paradigm in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. No wonder conservatism's so popular, at least among a certain demographic.

THEY DON'T MAKE CULTURE WARRIORS LIKE THEY USED TO. Really, I miss Pat Buchanan. At least he could write -- vicious ravings, sure, but well-turned! Sadly, the Right couldn't abide Pat's alleged anti-Semitic stink, and has replaced him with a squad of pablum pukers who, while perhaps even crazier that Buchanan, utterly lack his chops.

One of these is Duncan Maxwell Anderson, last seen in this space comparing Jesus to a Marine. Twelve years ago he was telling America how the nefarious, little-known Securities and Exchange Commission ("The Securities and what Commission? The SEC was founded in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt...") was going to destroy multi-level marketing. Today Anderson runs something called Faith & Family magazine -- yes, it has a weblog, where you can can read ALL CAPS exhortations to avoid Calvinism, as well as some extremely confused Constitutional theory -- and runs something called High Tor Media, whatever that is (There was once a very fine playwright named Maxwell Anderson, and he wrote a play called High Tor -- if this DMA is in fact his progeny, let us take up a collection to have some spikes driven into his coffin to arrest the poor man's spinning.)

Occasionally, mystifyingly, Anderson writes for the New York Post. Today the Post has published his "A Time for Manhood," which treats the ancient conservative Daddy Party theme (Right is Strong, Left is for Homos, etc). Even poor, crack-brained Peggy Noonan knows that this sort of thing requires an angle, however trite -- but Anderson just combines various cliches as a child might mash together lumps of Play-Doh. And they're not even current cliches -- there's "Let's Roll" again, and when was the last time you saw Alan Alda used as a symbol of liberal emasculinity? On an episode of C.P.O. Sharkey?

Though I must admit, comparing the Democratic Convention to "the Berlin Olympics of 1936" is a new one. Incomprehensible, but new.

Meanwhile we have Jonah Goldberg explaining why feminism is to blame for girls' pants with words on the butt (all the while explaining, as is his increasingly pathetic wont, that he's no prude). And Dennis Prager, defending his right to beat on children ("why should a 12-year-old girl be immune from adult criticism?"). At least he's found an adversary whose stage of intellectual development may not have exceeded his.

Such are the new Shondekommando. Go here, punks, and see how it's done. If you're gonna be nuts, at least be articulate!