FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Eat a peach.

•   Tubby can still maybe-might-could steal it, but his opportunities are rapidly dwindling, and his supporters are awakening to winning Biden totals from Georgia and Philadelphia and realizing they're getting beaten by black people! Adding cream to the jest are conservative poobahs flipping their shit. When it looked better for his cause on Tuesday night, Godly Rod Dreher was cooing over the socialist race-mixers' defeat ("something very good happened, and I want to celebrate it"); he even ran that picture of a ululating SJW that all MAGA trolls have in their Pictures file.  But when Tubby started to sink into the Slough of Despond, Dreher retreated to the "A Divided Country" angle beloved of losing wingnuts throughout history (when they win, it's a mandate; when they lose it's a "divided country"). Of course, lickety-split Dreher returns to ressentiment; Trump is the "bodyguard" conservatives need against the tyrannical Left, who "control all the heights of the culture, and even that is not enough for them" -- they presume to win elections, too! Bonus LOL: "The progressive writer Jesse Singal gets it."  

But the real howler comes when Dreher attempts to tug the heartstrings. Cue the mournful harmonica:

Last point. A couple of weeks ago, I was up in my rural hometown buying chicken feed for our hens. As I was checking out at the tractor supply, I saw a very old white man toddling into the store on a walker. He looked to be World War II veteran age. 

At this point I wondered: Why not have him wear something that would definitively identify him a WWII combatant, like one of those VETERAN hats?

He had a patriotic mask on and a red MAGA hat. 

Ahh, I see. 

His voice was so weak that the checkout clerk couldn’t hear what he was saying through his mask. 

Awww.

Finally someone in line interpreted it for her: he wanted to know where he could find brackets to mount his flagpole on his front porch. 

AWWWWW.

It was like something out of a Spielberg movie — but of course you would never see anyone wearing a MAGA hat in a Hollywood movie, except as a villain.

Sputter sputter that lefty Spielberg Jew-know-what! 

I don’t even know who that old man was — his mask covered most of his face — but he loves his country, and wanted to fly the flag. Not a Trump flag — the American flag.

I guess the old man was too frail to mount a Trump flag on a truck and run a Biden bus off the road. Keep playing that harmonica, Slim! 

Now, consider Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones...

LOL OMG contrast this white-man-who-probably-raised-the-flag-at-Iwo-Jima with this insolent Negress!  

...the founder of The 1619 Project, which teaches that America was founded in iniquity: for the sake of preserving slavery. It’s factually untrue, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s legitimately contestable. 

Pfft, slavery, in America? What are they teaching them kids?

This narrative has become standard in American media, and among many progressives. Can you imagine someone who believes what Nikole Hannah-Jones does wanting to fly the American flag from their front porch?

Dreher pitches bitch-fits about Hannah-Jones every couple of days, yet he seems not to have actually read her 1619 essay, which begins, "My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard."

If not, then what does that tell you about why so many Americans chose to vote for Trump, despite his many grievous faults?

It tells us they're morons. 

We are going to remain a divided country. The election solved nothing. 

Again, the "divided country" thing: "solved nothing" is just another way of saying it was a disaster for honky soreheads like Dreher who are about to lose their "bodyguard" and have to share power with people they've been taught since birth to despise. 

•   To add some sparkle to this historic morning, why not enjoy my latest White House scenes unlocked from my newsletter, where Tubby plots his defense of the throne? Like real life only with better timing! 

HEY SAL, HOW COME YOU GOT NO HONKIES ON THE WALL?

Look, I know you can open Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative any day of the week and get some yuks, but this new item is particularly ridic. As often, it's about how some institution is being destroyed from the inside by political correctness -- in this case, medical school.

How is it being destroyed, you ask? Are students being forced to alter prescriptions to benefit black patients? Is every tenth surgery patient to get forced gender reassignment?

No -- some pictures of white guys are being taken down at some med schools.

If it’s [any day of the week], our Very Woke Media is going to find some new way of telling the story about how white people, especially white male people, are the worst people in the world, and need to be Otherized for the common good. Yesterday it was NPR, bringing to us this “health news,” as they call it.

NPR quotes Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist with Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on the 100%-male portraits of Lasker- and Nobel-winning scientists hanging in a university auditorium: "It's probably 30 headshots of 30 men. So it's imposing... I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, 'What kind of message are we sending?'"

Sputters Dreher:

Leslie Vosshall is in most respects vastly more intelligent than I am, but she is a racist, sexist nitwit. What kind of crazy person looks at portraits of a medical school’s Nobel Prize winners and other alumni who have great achievements to their name, and only sees … white men. Who are (therefore) bad people who need to be erased from public life and the institution’s memory?

The Vosshall bitch maybe knows about so-called "science" and "medicine" but by God Rod Dreher knows when white men are getting erased! Plus they got a black guy complaining about his representation! Jesus Christ, what is this, Hitler's "Woke" Germany?

Dreher also relies on this Twitter spin on the traditional Dreher Letters to Penthouse for backup:

"Afraid to say openly" yeah, I bet that means they said "who gives a shit" and Flier said "Gasp! So they got to you, too??" Do check the responses to that tweet -- many female students and MDs kick this guy's ass. And note especially this exchange:

But Dreher totally buys it:

“Afraid to say openly” — because they’re intimidated by the commissars. I keep hearing this, over and over: that people see injustices like this, and they hate it, but they keep their mouths shut because they’re afraid. Guess what, people: this is how bigotry and oppression takes root. In part because of your cowardly silence.

He gabbles on ("Liar. Bigot.") and finally gets to a doozy of a oh-yeah-what-if-it-was-black-people bit:

Let’s say we were talking about the Berklee School of Music, and most of the high-achieving graduates in jazz in the school’s history were black men. If there were a move to remove or relocate portraits of those men because it would make white students feel unwelcome or ill at ease, we would know exactly what was going on here: a racist attempt to deny history, and human achievement. But in this case it’s happening to white males, who, in the eyes of American elites, are demons.

There will be a terrible price to pay for this, you progressive trolls.

Wait'll he finds out there's no picture of Kenny G at Berklee.

UPDATE. Commenters make the excellent point that nowhere in the story is it confirmed that the palefaces will disappear -- Voshall is "redesigning that wall of portraits at Rockefeller University, to add more diversity." Some are just being moved, or integrated, as it were, with portraits of women and people of color. ("We really want to emphasize that we're not trying to erase our history," says a student at the University of Michigan. "We're proud of the people who have brought us to where we are today as a department. But we also want to show that we have a diverse and inclusive department.") Commenter Mortimer2000 notes a Boston Globe story in which some of the living subjects say it's cool with them if their portraits at Brigham and Women's are moved. Ah, but that's only because they fear the PC po-po, no doubt!

NANNY STATE DIARIES. Rod Dreher, back at the porn trough:

[A high-school teacher] said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

Taken in isolation, that statement is not objectionable -- in fact, it could be seen as admirable. Pornography has its uses, but it's a very poor video-game substitute for human relationships, which is why we try to restrict it to adults, teenagers being presumed insufficiently mature to take porn in stride.

But this is Rod Dreher we're talking about here, and this is his very next line:

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here.

And, brothers and sisters, it was the demon porn that set him off! Suddenly we've abandoned the protection of pre-adults and moved on to the hoary idea of porn as insidious demonic force.

Then, Lord love us, Dreher starts talking about Ted Bundy.

There are a few reasons why Dreher always spins off this way. One is his traditional rejection of feminism. "Feminism was supposed to raise the consciousness of men," he says elsewhere, "but it has made so many women just as raunchy and sex-obsessed as many males." This in an article about Bratz dolls, which he admits feminists probably wouldn't like, though he forebears to say why -- probably because it might have to do with their peculiar equanimous ideas about gender relations, which conflict with the ones Jesus taught him, rather than general sex-hatred. (At the same time he's creeped out by lesbian separatists. No pleasing this guy.) The idea that women might require respect outside of a restrictive religious context blows his mind.

The other has to do with Dreher's idea of life in general. He's alarmingly sympathetic to plural marriages between/among nymphets and middle-aged men in a religious context. But the notion of sexual fantasy nauseates him. With God, all things are possible indeed: if a grown man picks the right faith he can live like Humbert Humbert minus the guilt, but if he or anyone looks at Miss November not only is he doomed, but so is society.

Since the topic is naked ladies and gents, the normal reaction is to laugh it off. Still, it's worth remembering that these guys -- a major factor in our national governance till recently, and champing at the bit to get back into it -- actually think this way about everything. Because it's really the thought that a human mind might, with the merest provocation, be spurred to thoughts Dreher can't control that rattles him.

Nonetheless, as usual, his commenters are a joy. "Softcore 'porn' is indeed everywhere, including the pews in front of me at church all too often (especially during the summer)," says Zach Treed. " Few things are as mortifying to the eyes as approaching holy Communion while following behind an intermittent parade of hardbodies who can't, or won't, dress any differently for Mass than a stripper dresses for the start of her dance." Where has this church been all my life? h/t Nancy Nall.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

I just love it, okay?

•   Hey, it's almost time for the big game -- by which I mean the Oscars, a week from Sunday. Over at the newsletter (it's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, if you want to know what to ask for at the newsletter store) I've started my Best Picture nominee reviews. Last year I correctly predicted Green Book to win, so I'm feeling pretty damned cocky (though I only got 61% right overall). For those of you non-subscribers who want to get in on the tinsel and glamour, I've unlocked my reviews of Marriage Story, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, and Jojo Rabbit; -- the other three are coming soon. Oh, and as long as I'm here: Chiefs by 3!

•    I assume most of you are acquainted with the Rod Dreher "Letters to Repenthouse" shtick, whereby conservative operatives (compensated or not) pass him their "I never dreamed this would happen to me" missives and he posts them as Vox Populi. Here's his latest, in a post called "Actually, There Is A Christian Case For Trump"; Dreher explains that he's still only thinking about voting for Trump (LOL) but if he does it'll be for better reasons than those trashy not-artisanal Evangelicals have, and to back it up he dips into the ol' reader mailbag and finds a fellow who rails against "local, woke Democrats in positions like D.A., city council, etc. in cities." The rubes have a hate-on for cities these days, so you can see why Dreher picked it, notwithstanding its lack of relevance to Trump:

The ideology they are pursuing, of completely ignoring any quality of life related criminal behavior and deconstructing muncipal competence brick by brick, is horrifying. Decriminalization of theft, of open drug crime, vehicle break ins, public urination, etc. is turning our cities, and increasingly exurban towns, into absolute hell holes.

So far it's standard "Them there big cities what gawts fee-cees an' needles in 'em" boob bait, but how did our alleged correspondent come to know the horrors of city life?

These doofuses are bringing the medieval plague back to Los Angeles, where I recently visited my fiancee’s family. The stuff I saw there was shocking, and really sobering. It made me remember why I identify as a centre-right person to begin with, and why despite being a bit more on the Tucker Carlson side of view on markets, I will have no time for woke municipal governance.

I'm guessing the guy is a "centre-right" citizen of the Commonwealth. But couldn't Dreher have at least proofread his copy for Britishisms? They rather spoil the effect. The best part of the post is not from mailbag guy, but from Dreher himself on his big dilemma about voting for Trump:

If Bernie Sanders were a pro-life social conservative, I would strongly consider voting for him, even though I don’t like his economics.

If you don't like his economics, then why the hell would you be interested in voting for him? Maybe Dreher believes that bullshit about Sanders loving George Wallace.

•   One other thing: The Republicans laying down for Trump on impeachment is no shock. (Democrats will make it hurt for them in November, if they're smart, which, yeah, I know.) This is all Republicans are good at anymore. Here's a great example from the Washington Examiner, reporting that a "surge in meth could bring drug overdose death rates back up." This couldn't be good news for the god-emperor, especially coming after the Examiner recently said a 2018 drop in U.S. drug overdoses "offers President Trump a boost during his reelection campaign as Democrats criticize his administration for not going further in fighting the crisis." So here's how they spin it:

A top Trump administration health official is worried that meth-related deaths will counterbalance the progress the United States has made in reducing drug-overdose deaths

See, it's not that Trump isn't doing great against drug overdoses -- it's that his success has been counterbalanced by... failure. (Well, who could have guessed meth was a problem?) I'm going to try this at work: I didn't fuck up, my good work was counterbalanced! If only I had an entire political party willing to cover for me.

QUINTESSENCE OF DREHER. Rod Dreher tries to get the CrunchyCon kids excited about John Edwards. He agitates to get the big papers (presumably including his own) to cover the Edwards affair story, which has so far been proffered only by the National Enquirer, bloggers, Fox News, and that monstrous hybrid of all three known as Mickey Kaus.

Dreher says he has very serious reasons for wanting to promote this story. "[Edwards is] still a big player in Democratic politics," says Dreher, "and might have been either an Obama running mate, Attorney General or held some other cabinet post." To elevate the tone further, he refers to Edwards twice as "the Silky Pony."

Amazingly, Dreher's readers don't take the bait:

Sounds like you are rationalizing. And gossiping.

I'm no fan of Edwards, but is it any wonder why people don't go into public service?

I am so glad I am not the only one who reads the tabloids when standing in line at the grocery store. Seriously, though do we know if these rumours are even true? It seems in poor taste to malign someones character without proof of their alleged indiscretions.

Some readers also mention the rich veins of McCain scandal that could be opened under this forgiving policy.

Dreher responds as one would expect of a Christian:

It is impossible for some people to engage in a rational critical discussion of the point. Another reader just wrote me privately to say I should shut down all the comboxes for a while, because the tone has gotten so nasty he doesn't want to visit them anymore. I'm not going to go that far, but I am going to shut down this one. Sorry, screaming mimis!

I'm tired of the excuse that Jesus is just misrepresented by his followers, and am going to have to assume that He's an asshole, too.

IMITATION OF CHRIST. P.Z. Myers' communion-wafer stunt has received ample commentary from CrunchyCon Rod Dreher. Before the event, Dreher used his traditional approach to sacrilegious artists: "Just try doing the same thing to what Muslims regard as sacred. Let's see what you're made of."

Later Dreher hoped for blowback, telling readers that an obnoxious atheist had helped make him a Christian and that he hoped "Myers' infamy will be redeemed at least partially by it shocking the conscience of agnostics, and encouraging them to read more about the Christian faith..."

After Myers had desecrated the host, Dreher played the forgiveness card, trying, with veins bulging in his neck, to follow the passive-aggressive example of Christ:

I was thinking last night what the proper Christian response is. If you think about it, P.Z. Myers has done far more to damage himself than anything any of us might do. With his Satanic pride and diabolical act, he has put himself in serious danger of hell -- and that's far worse than any worldly sanction we might (justly) [?? -- ed.] see applied to him...

But what would he do if the response to his hideous blasphemy is ... love? What would he do if Catholics and other Christians, and even sympathetic members of other faiths, turned up en masse on his campus simply to pray quietly for him? What kind of witness would that be to the wider culture? How might that make straight the path to salvation for P.Z. Myers, and many who now admire him? Wouldn't that be blessing those who persecute you, as Christ commands us to do?...

Let's provide a counterwitness for what faithful Christianity is capable of. God may work a miracle in that man's life yet (consider the example of Saul). Let's not get in the way of the work of redemption in this lost man's life. As much as we can, let's answer hate with love...

Yesterday Dreher showed what he means by Christian love: discussing ways to get P.Z. Myers fired.

I'm not a fan of Myers' approach -- not because it is counter-productive, but because it is unproductive. It appears designed to expose the hypocrisy of his opponents, but that is on full display at all times, and has been for centuries. Pointing it out -- even as spectacularly as he has drawn Dreher to do for him -- doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

GAYPOCALYPSE NOW!

Good ol' Rod Dreher is predicting (based in part on the perorations of some guy who has Charles Bronson in Death Wish as his Twitter avatar) that the left will go crazy with violence soon:

[Fake Paul Kersey] says another big takeaway from his tweetstorm to that point are that political violence can come from anywhere, and that the left has the infrastructure to make it happen more than the right does, in part because there are mainstream leftist leaders who would accept it. These don’t exist on the right.

Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem --  but I expect my throat-clearing is wasted on Dreher, who believes that since liberals are "allowing courses that teach students of all races how terrible white people and their culture is," the only possible result is SJW Violence and Ooga Booga unleashed across the fruited plain.

[Fake Paul Kersey] gets very dark in this series, and says that the actions of the left on Inauguration Day may prove decisive. He links to this article about how various left-wing and anarchist groups are organizing to disrupt the Trump inauguration. If that goes down in a significant way, you can bet that Trump is going to break heads over it — and that a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be on his side.

I wonder why he's so confident liberals will riot at the inauguration -- wishful thinking, perhaps, or maybe he's got some inside information from James O'Keefe.  But more provocative than the blacks and the college students is Dreher's Pubic Enemy Number One:

There’s a report that queer protestors are going to start the ball rolling with a gay dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s home. If that happens, and there is anything lewd about it, then you can bet that the Christian Right, even people who aren’t fond of Trump, will begin to migrate solidly to Trump’s side...

Lewd gay dancing -- the thin, erect end of the wedge! When Mr. and Mrs. America get a load of gay people working it to "Bounce" in the presence of Vice President Pence, there'll be hetero hell to pay. Then maybe Dreher will get the Great Re-a-Straightening he's been dreaming of -- hell, maybe they can turn Milo!

I know we're supposed to be scared of Trump, but I can't imagine being as scared of anything as Dreher is scared of everything.

UPDATE. Dreher always brings out the best in my commenters. "Fidel from the Castro: 'History of Disco, Volume 3 will absolve me,'" and "RuPaul Revere: 'One if by glam, two if by glee,'" contributes J---. "Maybe Rod should drop Logo from his cable package," suggests AGoodQuestion. And Fats Durston gives us a sneak preview of the forthcoming classic, Rainbow Dawn:

Sergeant: The Bisexuals reinforced with some weird division. Subarus across the plains. Thrusting ever forward, right down our throats. Cut the pipeline we needed. Dykes overran the dikes we had set up round N'Orleans. Just when it stabilized, then six million screaming ladyboys.

Kid: I thought there were ten million screaming ladyboys?

Sergeant: There were.

Go look just to see what he uses for "Wolverines."

TOGETHER AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!

Rod Dreher's back from another of his extended Parisian foodie boondoggles -- I swear, for someone who's always going on about Little Ways and common people he spends an awful lot of time in Yurrup, and not doing missionary work neither -- and has resumed his usual Ben Op/Get-Ready Man routine, supplemented with great lashings of Harvey Weinstein because it fits with his Fallen World scenario. But give him credit -- I looked in because I always expect him to exceed himself, and by God he has delivered.

This post is mostly about how 1.) Mark Lilla would be perfect if only he accepted Christ as his personal savior, and 2.) Ta-Nehisi Coates is a racist. At first I thought this was the plum of the post:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and [neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races.

But as loony as it is, it's of a piece with other Dork Right attacks on Coates, like this woo-woo at The Federalist by Dimestore Douthatwith Threenames about how Coates, in his perfectly reasonable prediction that America's inequality might lead to violent confrontation, is "feinting toward violence as a means... of achieving social justice," as if Coates had done the interview bare-chested and bandoliered and simultaneously strangled a white man.  (I can imagine Threenames in 1963 hearing Malcolm X talk about chickens coming home to roost and muttering, "see, what'd I tell you about those people.") No, the plum comes at the end:

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. I am on record as strongly disapproving of some of the antics of Milo Yiannopoulos, but he and I are on the same page here, in this excerpt from an interview with America magazine, which he says they refused to print...

By "on record as strongly disapproving," Dreher means posts about Milo like "CPAC Welcomes Pederasty Advocate." But convinced as Dreher is that gay marriage will destroy America (see his Obergefell essay, "Democracy Is Dying; Persecution Is Coming") unless he and his God Squad can destroy it first, he's nonetheless pimping for this recently-gaymarried aging twink because in the alleged unpublished America excerpt (Milo is a master of persecution-as-self-promotion), he praises in his lubricious way things Dreher loves: the military ("Now the men in uniform are much better men than I"), muscular Christanity ("too many in the Church keep masculinity hidden or the subject of shame"), and Rod Dreher:

I’m with Rod Dreher: Anybody who only preaches a namby-pamby God, and not the highly masculine God of Scripture, is leaving young men vulnerable to the monstrous false gods of race and ideology.

Looks like Milo is eager to be gathered in from the wilderness, and has wisely pegged Rod as among the easier gatekeepers to grease. Hope he at least got a reacharound!

AND WE HEIL, HEIL, RIGHT IN DER FUEHRER'S FACE.

Rod Dreher's been on another of his foodie-Nazi vacations (doesn't spend much time down on the farm, does he?), this time in Hungary, and by utter, absolutely unforseeable coincidence someone decided that one of America's leading white nationalism apologists should meet Victor Orban!

You may have heard that the Hungarian prime minister is a cryptofascist who gutted the nation's top court when it gave him a hard time, took over the national media likewise, and chased a leading university out of the country because of (((Soros))), among other atrocities. But Dreher basked in the man's presence and wants you to know he's dreamy -- in fact, so mesmerized was he that though he had 90 minutes with Orban he didn't ask him any questions.

I tell you this so you readers don’t ask me why I didn’t challenge Orban on this or that policy of his government. I am perfectly aware that he is a controversial figure who has done things and pursued policy goals that are highly controversial for a number of reasons. However, this was a completely unexpected opportunity to be in the presence of one of the most extraordinary world leaders of our time, and to get a sense of his mind.

I mean, would you ask Jesus questions?

If the only thing you know about Viktor Orban is from Western media accounts, you would think that he was nothing but some kind of mafia thug. The Viktor Orban you encounter in person is very, very different from the Viktor Orban shown to Americans by our media. In Orban — who speaks good English — was energetic, fiercely intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, realistic, and at times almost pugilistic in talking about defending Hungary and her interests. 

Well, I'm convinced. In case The Leader's act wasn't enough to convince the group Dreher was part of, Orban also had on hand "Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS." What that's got to do with Hungary? Silence, mortal! Nicodemus does Flava Flav to Orban's Chuck D, ringing out every so often with "Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body" and such like.

Dreher faithfully transmits Orban's messages ("Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not") and closes with what he clearly considers the convincer:

Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.

Yes, Paris is nothing but a wasteland of ooga-booga and trans commisssars, just like California is nothing but bum shit and New York covers up its high crime with low crime!

If you aren't convinced by Vic 'n' Nic, Dreher comes back at you with a whole extra post of Orban fan art:

[Christopher] Caldwell points out that the [Orban] anti-Soros campaign arguably did traffick in anti-Semitic rhetoric... still, that completely justifiable circumspection should in no way justify averting one’s eyes from the fact that Soros really is using his considerable fortune to liberalize Europe, and to dilute European peoples.

Well, at least he said "dilute" instead of "mongrelize." Maybe in February Dreher can jet off to Brazil and, along with the food and drink, take in Jair Bolsonaro, who will explain to the no doubt speechless American why God wants him to destroy the rainforest.

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.

Well here's a rabbit-hole for the weekend.• I know I've spent a lot of time on Dreher already this week but the guy's just been so awful. It's like he came back from the week or two he spent in Hungary pimping his book crazier than ever. While he was there he seemed happy enough and mostly posted gush about how great the Saving Remnant in godless Eastern Europe are (and of course how great the food is -- when this Benedict Option thing blows over he can be the new Jeff Smith). But something put a burr up his ass -- maybe he found out fellow theocon Michael Brendan Dougherty said mean things about Viktor Orbán just as Dreher was ready to come out for him, and it spoiled his high. Since then he's been raging on the usual stuff like the Trans Menace, but also displayed a particular hard-on for Pope Francis, who is the head of one of the many religions Dreher has belonged to, albeit not the current one. All wingnuts hate Francis, of course, but Dreher's goes above and beyond; he seems especially mad now that Francis did not strongly refute a reporter who said Francis does not believe in hell ("Francis is winking"). Example:

Think back to 2013, when he made his famous “Who am I to judge?” remark about gays in that press conference. A reader of this blog who teaches religion at a Catholic high school wrote to say that in a single stroke, Francis destroyed all the work that he (the teacher) has done with the kids in his classes. The students all concluded from that remark that they could believe anything they wanted to about sexuality, because even the Pope said, “Who am I to judge?”

This is Francis’s way. Remember his drawn-out answer when a Lutheran woman married to a Catholic man asked why she couldn’t receive communion in a Catholic church?

In other words, Francis refuses to stress hell, gays, and intermarriage -- that is, the parts of Catholicism that nobody, including Catholics, likes. I assume Dreher's mainly mad that his ex-religion has, as Jack puts it in The Ruling Class, forgotten how to punish -- what's the fun in being godly if you can't feel confident that your opponents will burn for all eternity? It perhaps also stirs Dreher's dreams of being himself the first modern-era cross-cult Pope -- I bet he daydreams about a scenario like that West Wing episode where John Goodman was President for a couple of days. Then again, maybe he's just logrolling a fellow God-botherer's book. In any case, I look forward to his next conversion, hopefully to Sufism so he can work off his nervous energy by whirling.

• Remember when brave National Review editor Rich Lowry got all the conservative stalwarts to contribute to an "Against Trump" issue in 2016? And how most of them started going over the side before Trump was inaugurated? Today Lowry makes it official in "The Never Trump Delusion":

A realistic attitude to Trump would acknowledge both his flaws and how he usefully points the way beyond a tired Reagan nostalgia.

Goodbye "Reagan" macro; hello MAGA macro!

...The hold that Trump has on the GOP has a lot to do with his mesmerizing circus act, but it’s more than that. He’s been loyal to his coalition on judges, social-conservative causes and gun rights. His desperation to get a border wall speaks to his genuine desire to deliver on a signature promise. The same is true of his tariffs this year.

The last two items underline Trump’s heterodoxy, although he isn’t as ideologically aberrant as Never Trumpers would have it.

Liberals have known this all along, of course -- Trumpism is just conservatism with the gloves off and a screw loose. It's about conning the rubes by beating up their perceived inferiors and promising windfalls that never come. Some of Trump's con games eschew wingnut orthodoxy -- you won't hear him giving lip service to the magic of the market -- but the end result is the same: tax cuts for the rich and the poor get screwed, with a new war a short-odds favorite before 2020. As I've been saying since this started, the deal is he signs their bills and they let him grift. With few exceptions, the conservatives who have been wringing their hands over Trump's bad manners have been as sincere as Noah Cross' show of sorrow over Evelyn's death in Chinatown, and now they're skulking away with their prize.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WEIRD TALES.

Today Rod Dreher took a break from his customary racist and homophobic material to rage about sex, this time quoting extensively from a Mary Eberstadt Weekly Standard essay that seems -- though it's hard to be sure, for all the froth -- to descry "the destigmatization and mass adoption of artificial contraception" as the cause not only of widespread abortion but also child poverty, sexual assault, lonely old age ("Each year, some of [Japan’s elderly] died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell”), and other horrors. Even the good news she can't ignore is contaminated by contraception: "Although teen pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to rise." It would seem the only end to this nightmare, if you follow Eberstadt's logic, would be the banning of birth control. (Hey, maybe the new Trumpified court can do it!) But maybe an end to it isn't what she seeks: Maybe all she wants is for us to feel dread and shock and bad about ourselves for daring to get laid without fully committing to childbirth.

Dreher gets right in the spririt: "The truth about the Bolshevik Revolution was to be found in the gulags," he cries. "The truth about the Sexual Revolution is to be found among the poor in our inner cities and trailer parks."

But shortly before that, Dreher got on an even weirder subject: Was Anthony Bourdain suicided by witchcraft?

Somebody in my Twitter feed last night observed that “the Internet” was making a pretty good case for Anthony Bourdain’s suicide being tied to the occult. Say wha’? Lo, it turns out that his girlfriend Asia Argento is a witch, and not just a casual one either. There’s lots of extreme darkness there, right in the open. She flaunts it. Bourdain, the poor fool, was doomed the day he met her...

This is exactly where we are as a post-Christian culture: we have usurped the powers of binding and loosing from God. The Satanists admit what the rest of us cloak as advanced liberty and self-determination. Here is the line that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be most remembered for. It’s from the 1992 Casey ruling reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion...

This is so loony Dreher eventually took it down (the prior link is actually to its Google cache). But I think it was an instructive post: For all his theological palaver, a lot of Dreher's ravings are rooted in the sort of doomy, scary stories that used to bulk up pulp magazines, lurid 60s tabloids, and comics like House of Mystery; their place has been filled by websites like the crackpot collection where Dreher got this one. Come to think of it, posts like Eberstadt's owe a debt to this genre as well: The world as a nightmarish place to gawk at, with perhaps a little moral uplift at the end to make you feel like you got your money's worth. Well, at least in that sense these guys are observing the verities.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. My long-term readers may wonder what has become of some of my former favorite figures of fun in whose grills I am less up than once I was. Sometimes I wonder the same thing.

When I heard the Catholic Church has decided that the 60s made their priests fuck little boys, I was put in mind of that early adopter of the POV, Rod Dreher. He's brought me great joy over the years. For several months, though, Dreher hasn't been blogging much, apparently on the orders of his employers at the Templeton Foundation. He is still authorized to spread the Good News in major media, as with this Washington Post op-ed, in which he tells again how he removed his family from Catholicism and the "loosey-goosey moral teaching in Roman parishes" to the Orthodox Church, with its "seriousness about sin... the long liturgies, the frequent prayers, the intense fasts... Men love a challenge, and that’s exactly what Orthodoxy gives them."

This sounds like something from an artisanal tour of the World's Finest Religions, which suggests to me that Dreher is still the Crunchy connoisseur, judging morals by mouth-feel -- as does his slam on the "dreary parish life" found "often among the ethnically-oriented older parishes that see themselves as little more than the tribe at prayer." The locals don't know what they've got, it seems, and that's why they need professional converts like Dreher to curate the icons and bring in celebrity guest cantors.

So I wandered out to see what's been doing with Old Crunchy. I see he is on Twitter, addressing the sacred ("Progressives tear down taboos around sex, and are shocked when men turn into beasts") and the mundane ("I've been off sugar & starch for a month now -- never felt better").

He appears also to have become embroiled in a controversy over pseudonymous postings at an Orthodox site, which activity, it is suggested, runs afoul of his Templeton strictures. If there's anything to this -- and I'm not about to take the word of religious maniacs on anything -- I am in sympathy with Dreher here, not only because he's already been savaged on this account by the likes of Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Riehl, who hate him for his deviation from traditional wingnut doctrine. Dreher's inability to stop talking is to me his most charming feature, though (perhaps because) it leads him into buffoonery. And if his problem is that he couldn't refrain from blogging even after his masters cautioned him, that just endears him to me all the more.

While I was on this memory trip I looked in on James Lileks, another onetime alicublog mainstay. Along with his column and his Bleats, Lileks now contributes to Ricochet, a clearinghouse for high-toned wingnuttery. Lileks' dispatches there are what you would expect: Snarls at liberals, including those reportedly within the Muslim Brotherhood -- "does he believe," Lileks says of James Clapper, "these liberals won’t make common cause with the 'conservative' wing the moment they got their hands on all the levers?" And he's got a point -- isn't that what liberals do in the U.S. Congress?

So he remains politically engaged, but in short bursts. Back at the Bleat, from what I can see, he mostly leaves off national news and contents himself by explaining how "the rot" pervades his day-to-day life, often evinced by the insufficient helpfulness of clerks and laborers. Here's a recent example: A deliveryman wouldn't drag some fabric rolls into a store for some nice ladies.

“What a jerk,” one of them said. “I understand he can’t help for legal reasons, probably, but he was just so unpleasant.”

Stop and think about that: can’t help for legal reasons. The modern assumption: if you do anything outside the tightly defined parameters of your job, and something happens – say, you swing around an enormous roll of fabric and knock over a dressmaker’s dummy, and it’s scuffed – there will be LAW INVOLVED, or at least something in your file that recounts the regrettable consequences of your decision to cast heed to the breeze and help two women drag the stuff from the curb to the store. He couldn’t even take the items off the pallet.

I was waiting for the more specific Big Gummint corollary -- something about labor unions or OSHA, or how customer service has declined since FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court -- but then Lileks mutters:

Or he just didn’t want to. He didn’t have to and he didn’t want to.

Maybe that just makes it worse. This Bleat also contains Part III of Lileks' war with insolent bicycle shop employees: "Nothing like a bike shop to remind you how the economy would look if capitalism was abolished and pot legalized."

Now for the button, thanks to commenter Halloween Jack: A return visit to Annie Jacobsen, not a member of our regular cast past or present but a guest star, who in 2004 freaked out over Arabs on a plane, who turned out to be not terrorists as Jacobsen feared, but musicians. For this misapprehension and the notoriety it brought her, Jacobsen was rewarded with gigs at Pajamas Media and the Los Angeles Times.

Jacobsen is now promulgating a new terror-in-the-skies story, this one having to do with the Roswell UFO incident. Per Time:

What really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, was not an alien ship, nor was it a weather balloon as previously speculated by many, according to Jacobsen. In fact, she says, it was a Soviet spy plane. And it was controlled by disfigured adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.

So those photogenic corpses weren't aliens after all -- they were Commies! Even better: They were mutants created by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Stalin's orders to look like aliens and thus throw America into turmoil. Son of a gun -- Jonah Goldberg was right!

FELCHIN' WITH CRUNCHY ROD DREHER. It was a treat to scroll through the latest Crunchy Rod Dreher stuff and find a post that begins, "In the most recent Eminem thread..." Boy, there's a phrase I haven't seen in a while!

This bit of internet retro came up because Dreher had earlier read somewhere that a mass murderer had chanted Eminem lyrics during his slay-fest, and despite admitting up front that "it's wrong, of course, to blame Eminem or his music for these murders," he proceeds to do just that ("That's on you, Marshall Mathers. Live with that, Mister"), and to also titillate the faithful with some of the allegedly psycho-enabling lyrics (a popular gambit with this lot).

Later it is pointed out to Dreher that the psycho in question did not spit Eminem lyrics at his terrified victims. This leads Dreher to announce that he is "backing off -- somewhat -- the force of yesterday's post," which of course means a longer, more fevered rant to follow. First he tries to bring aboard liberals, as he perceives them, by denouncing the horror that is "24" ("its valorization of torture was having enough of an effect on troops in real life..."). Then, black kids laugh at a severed head in a movie theater! Clearly a sign of End Times, like the Haunted House at a fairgrounds. And then, along with more Bill Bennett vintage horror stories, comes one of the great Dreher couplets of all time:

I wonder what higher faculties of the soul are nurtured by contemplating Eminem's couplet in which he discusses ejaculating into someone's anus, then eating the semen. (Sorry to shock you, but if we're going to talk about this, let's be clear what we're talking about).

Watch that slippery slope, Rod -- soon you'll be running a midway tent and promising suckers a glimpse of the Depredations of the Liberals for only one-tenth-of-a-dollah. Oh wait -- change the last bit to "click-through" and he already is.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Whattaya think? Kinda Young Marble Giants meet Pylon, right?

I know, Rod Dreher's an easy layup, but I'm feeling lazy. Here's a post availing Dreher's traditional "reader" "mail" device. This alleged tenured professor, after the customary his-masters-would-punish-him-severely shtick ("if you post anything I share, please keep both my name and university confidential, as I am supporting a wife and a large family, and cannot risk getting doxed at my job"), bitches at length about his online diversity training, which Dreher agrees is totalitarian. One fascinating section:

 Look at the first and last bullet points here in particular.  The first: “Call transgender individuals by the name and pronoun that reflects their gender identity.”  I have no issue with the “name” part, but look how they are also forcing us to use their preferred pronoun.  They could have kept the peace by saying “name or pronoun,” as calling somebody by their preferred name would not violate my Christian conscience, but of course there can be no compromise here.  I refuse to use a non-biological gender pronoun, for the exact same reason that I would refuse to call an anorexic person overweight, which makes me wonder how long I will be able to stay here before the issue is forced.  

 First of all, I've wracked my brain and can only guess that the professor is willing to use a trans person's name but not their pronouns because it's easier to express contempt with a proper name ("Give this file to... 'Mary'") than with a pronoun. That's the only way this hairsplitting makes any sense. (Come to think of it, maybe he's got some kind of mind-game going where maybe a guy could be called Mary -- look at Evelyn Waugh and Leslie Nielsen! -- but can't be called "she," because pronouns are of The Lord or some shit.) Also, yeah right, next we're gonna force the guy to call skinny people fat, because respecting trans people is just a wedge-end for our real goal, demonic mastery of REALITY ITSELF mwah hah hah. Yeesh, even Dreher's imaginary characters are nuts.

 Then Dreher comes in and yells a while and does this interesting bit:

His point would seem to be that United is doing affirmative action and any black person thus "socially promoted" to pilot would be so unqualified they couldn't fly a plane. But we'll all pretend they can because PRONOUNS WERE JUST THE BEGINNING. (It occurs to me that it was easier to put this affirmative-action bullshit over when it came to college admissions, because grading is always a little arbitrary and one could imagine unqualified people getting inflated grades -- as rich guys' sons had been getting since forever -- but the idea that recruiting more black and female pilot numbers is a suicide mission because women and black people just naturally can't fly planes and white liberals are willing to die in a fiery wreck just to dispute this elementary fact of life, well, outside Dreherland that's a harder sell.)   

 (Lagniappe: Dreher announces he's summering in Budapest (or as he puts it, "moving to Budapest for the summer" -- maybe he thinks that less touristy and more artisanal). Guess his earlier taste of Viktor Orbán was not enough! Wonder if he'll come back with armbands for the family, if he does come back.

Oh, this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies -- almost forgot! Here, and here. Have fun! 

THE SIN OF MAUDLIN CLODHOPPER. In case you're wondering how shitty a film critic Crunchy Rod Dreher was at the New York Post, get a load of his aesthetics:

I remember riding back to midtown in a cab from the Manhattan screening of some movie, can't remember which, and listening to the two well-known film critics sharing the cab with me talk about what we had seen. It was a very violent film of some sort, as I recall, and the thought occurred to me as we rounded Columbus Circle -- I do remember that part vividly -- these people don't have children. They could analyze the film more coolly than I -- who was not a father yet, but who would be in a few months -- in part because they didn't imagine, or didn't seem to imagine, what it would be like to raise kids in a society where lots of people had their moral imaginations informed by eviscerations and the like.

I think Dreher is only pretending not to remember the name of that film. And that's because he suffers from a guilty conscience. If he told it, we'd know when the incident took place, and we'd know how much longer Dreher took Uncle Rupert's money for a job he was clearly incompetent to perform.

Maybe, on or about this date, he went to his editor and admitted that he couldn't review movies as art, but only as moral medicine for the masses, or as things that did or did not hurt babies. But either the editor entered into a corrupt pact with Dreher to mask this revelation from the public, or he told Dreher to stop being such a fucking dink and do the job he was paid to do.

(Of course, it was the Post, so maybe the editor was too drunk to comprehend him.)

Either way, assuming the cab ride did not take place on his last day on the job, by commission or omission Dreher practiced prevarication. Being a stickler for moral perfection and shame for others, he should make a great public show of contrition for this, perhaps a barefoot march to the tomb of Manny Farber.

But he doesn't even seem to think he did something wrong. That's the problem with Christians. They can commit any kind of sin without blanching, so long as they can think up a moral-sounding excuse for it.

RACIST WITH AN EXPLANATION.

"Is Racial Profiling Ever Okay?" Of course it is, says Rod Dreher. When he lived in DC, Rod used to cross the street if he saw "young black men dressed like street thugs" coming at him, but not if they were clothed in "office wear." He bets you would too! Did you know a couple black guys beat up Matt Yglesias? Yet he still defends those people!

If you think it's not about playing the odds in a late-night street encounter, but about day-to-day life where black people get treated like shit on a regular basis even in daylight, Dreher knows all about that -- he too has suffered from racial prejudice:

The time that stands out to me was years ago, when I was applying for a newspaper job that I really wanted, and was told that I was perfect for it. Then the paper stopped returning my calls. Finally, an executive there told me that either the editor-in-chief or the publisher, can’t remember which, decreed that a minority or a woman must be hired for that job. It was humiliating and infuriating to me. All I was to that newsroom executive was a white male.

Also, can you believe it, in the little Louisiana town where he moved to, some of the black people have negative feelings about white people. But they're not all like that: Dreher knows this black lady whose mother "prefers to hire white repairmen because based on experience, she trusts them to do better work. Who am I to argue with this woman’s experience? Who are you? If it was your money at stake, would you profile in this way?"

Dreher is the upscale Internet world equivalent of the sort of Reasonable Racists you're bound to run into if your scope of acquaintances is wide enough. Mention the difficulties of black life in America, and you'll get the exact same routines: I was mugged by black guy so I know. Oh, you were mugged by one too? If you still don't see how dangerous they are, you're blinded by political correctness. Listen, black people racial-profile me all the time, I went to this bar one time and they wouldn't serve me...

They always have an argument, and they always say they want a "dialogue." (So does Dreher, here: "Why is it right in college admissions and hiring to reduce individuals to their race or gender? I’m not asking rhetorically. I really would like to hear what you have to say...") But you, my readers, are pretty well-travelled, and you know what they really want: They want you to tell them they're not bad people for feeling the way they do.

If you won't give it to them they way they prefer, right away, as something they're owed as a fellow white person, then they'll get argumentative. If you say, as Yglesias said about his assault, "that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis... aren’t committing any violent crimes," the racist will say something like what Dreher says: "But it is reasonable to assume that if you are going to be a violent crime victim in DC — as most people in Washington are not, and never will be — then your assailant will almost certainly be a young black male." See? You have statistics, he has statistics. Now why don't you be reasonable and admit he's not a bad person?

The one thing that never occurs to these guys is that racism is not like monetarism or socialism or academicism or henotheism or anarcho-syndicalism; it's not a thought system we can sit up arguing about all night and be, other than the hangover, none the worse for wear after; it's cancer. Centuries of experience documented by historians and artists show it, if you need guidance, but a few years living in America ought to wise you up to it pretty quick all by itself.

I like to contend about everything, but you know what? On this subject, there really isn't anything to discuss.

OH MERCY. In case you were wondering, Rod Dreher is still pecking away at his Crunchy Con blog, and still a big dork. Most days he's just dreary, but sometimes he puts a little extra Praise Jesus into it, and achieves insufferability.

Today he actually caught me off-guard. When I saw Dreher had a post about those kidnapped TV newsmen who had to "convert" to Islam to get out of jihadi jail, I expected something less stupidly bellicose than, say, the ravings of Mark Steyn. I should also have expected that Dreher, by simpering and vacillating over the exact nature of his moral superiority, would be even more annoying than the frostback chest-thumper.

Dreher starts by admitting that even he, filled with grace as he is, might not be such a good Soldier of Christ with a knife to his neck, and maybe "I ought to be merciful toward the Fox guys."

Mercy from a Christian! Should have known it was a bluff -- after quoting some other blowhard who says he doesn't hate the newsies for converting but for not displaying shame over it, the scales fall from Brother Dreher's eyes:

If I had capitulated, the shame of it would haunt me for the rest of my life. And it should. What those two men did was understandable on a human level, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Two things. First, if the jihadis got me and all I had to do to get out with my neck was sing The Three Stooges Alphabet Song, I'd go for it in a second. And though I never like being told what to do, I doubt I would experience great anguish over the performance. The Nicene Creed and whatever the Mohammedians recite mean as little to me as that Alphabet Song, and vice versa.

Second, if this is what Dreher and his fellow chesty-boys think of the TV reporters, what must they think of that Austrian girl whose recent escape from a madman's dungeon after eight-and-a-half years has been in the news? What the rest of us heathens think of as an "ordeal," surely the Jesus folk see as 8.5 years of continuous shameful capitulation for which the traumatized victim must feel everlasting shame.

But of course with this lot you're supposed to feel shame about everything, except crappy prose and a soul-dead insensitivity to the suffering of everyone except Jesus and yourself.

CRUNCHY CONS GO DOWNMARKET. I see that Rod Dreher has moved his Crunchy Con blog to Beliefnet. Time has not been kind to his movement, and it seems the come-down in venue has made Dreher more anxious to boost his conservative niche brand into the big time: he's talking less now about the relation of medieval theology to organic food, and more about gay toilet sex:

...a gay Republican male -- very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll -- told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar"...

...what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?... it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture...

Yeah, the media never asks Elton John if he likes it up the ass in a crapper. (Maybe Dreher's gay Republican friend can do a special report on Fox!)

Most of Dreher's recent posts are about your basic culture-war bullshit -- like how kids don't say sir or ma'am no more (especially when they's raised by New York bitches!), or how no one takes time to be pals anymore (and neither does Dreher -- oh well, that's life! Bye!) -- or standard-issue conservative belligerence: posts about how Israel must kill more, we must kill more, here is one of God's creatures I really want to die, etc. Not much here about Heraclitus or wheat germ.

Apparently the Crunchy book didn't summon an army of Ned Flanderses, marching with a cross in one hand and a bucket of Seven Stars yogurt in the other, so Dreher's going back to being a ordinary pain in the ass.

MAU-MAUING THE FAT CATCHER. The new fun at NRO's blog on Crunchy Conservatism -- which, as previously explained, is Rod Dreher's revival of Jesus Freaks as home-schoolin', homo-hatin' yuppies -- is the exploding head of Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg challenges Crunchy Con Man Rod Dreher's assertion that "the 'conservatives' will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise."

Now, you or I might sensibly tell Dreher: "So what?" (Come to think of it, it is instructive to consider how many of the complaints of today's lifestyle conservatives invite, nay demand, just such an answer.Hollywood doesn't make movies I like! So what? TV commercials make men look stupider than women! So what? Young girls are exposing their midriffs! Where? I mean, so what?)

But Goldberg, alas, has neither the standing nor the inclination for such clarity. He is a Big Wheel of Big Tent Conservatism, fond of defining conservatism extremely broadly, the better to keep together the great Republican coalition whose victories keep his Wheel Big. "You don’t really have to be a free-marketer or capitalist to be a conservative," he has argued. "The simple fact is that conservatives don’t have a settled dogma." And so forth.

This laxity suits Goldberg's role at NRO. He can make all kinds of ridiculous, lazy assertions, and when he is contradicted he can say: yes, you have a point, I'm sure the opposite can be true, too, we aren't really arguing and anyway it's late and I have to walk the dog etc. (No link needed: most of his stuff is like this.)

But when Dreher and his stupid hippies start spouting snake-handler gibberish, you can tell that Goldberg is just revulsed. Maybe it's just due to a storm of negative pheromones between those who smell of organic compost and patchouli, and one who smells of Cheetos, Johnson's Baby Shampoo, and farts. Anyway Goldberg lashes out instinctually at Dreher's imbecility -- "Have you ever met a conservative in your travels who won't attack promiscuity because to do so threatens corporate profits?"

But then Goldberg is ever so lightly challenged, and his instinct is to run to his suckup strategy. First he defends mainstream conservatives as every bit as spirited a set of fist-shakers and finger-waggers as the Crunchy Cons: "This administration puts real dollars behind its advocacy of abstinence, here and abroad... Conservatives criticize the popular culture." But -- here he reaches out -- "Now, they may not do it enough. That's a legitimate argument to make." Later, Goldberg strives so hard to accomodate Dreher's millenarial Christer philosophy that he even defends Karl Marx ("As for the alienating and deracinating effects of the free market and all that, I think some of the critiques — Marxist and otherwise — have varying degrees of value and merit"). See, Goldberg concludes, "I'm not the strawman conservative who idolizes the free market Rod has constructed."

So we see a leading figure of the Cause who, assailed by a new and radical fringe group convinced of its righteousness, has not the intellectual ballast to withstand the attack. I agree with your ends, he says; it's your means that I question!

Does this remind you of anything?

UPDATE. Meanwhile Ross Douthat, a smart fellow, reminds readers that the secret to success for a conservative niche brand like Crunchy Conservatism is to not take it very seriously:

...if such a cultural movement is going to win converts — or at least supporters — it shouldn't be too hard on those fellow-travelers who aren't up for home-schooling their kids, and don't quite have the time and energy to seek out the local organic co-op, and love "Lost" too much to get rid of their televisions. It's important to hold up an ideal, but it's also important not to let that ideal get in the way of making common cause with people who are, well, doing their best.

Sometimes I perceive that, despite all the fervent hallelujahs, modern conservatism is just a marketing exercise. Douthat's got his finger on the aspirational component of Crunchiness. And if you can get people to buy your hot cereal by telling them "It's the right thing to do," why not?

I realize this is a cynical reading, but it is also very charitable, considering the alternatives.