NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' 9/11 and how it perked up when Hillary Clinton got sick. The revival of the wingnut trope that Hillary is too infirm to serve as President was almost as funny/sad as their pivot, once it was revealed that Clinton had pneumonia, to outrage that she had briefly concealed a temporary illness and thus made them all look like idiots. National Review's Rich Lowry, who earlier in the day had disputed Clinton's claims of dehydration ("It isn’t a particularly hot day in New York City today; in fact, it is gorgeous"), upon being informed of her illness sputtered:

Here’s hoping she gets well soon, but...

Ugh, that quick "but" says so much, doesn't it?

...1) not for the first time, a Clinton has made his or her supporters look silly -- they spent a lot of time and energy pooh-poohing the health concerns...

Sure, it was Hillary's people who looked silly.

...2) she was diagnosed on Friday -- when did she plan on letting everyone else know?

I wouldn't be surprised if she had loose stools sometime during her illness. Would Lowry like updates when these occur? Maybe they can send him samples. The rest of the brethren are doing what they can with it; the New York Post says her diagnosis "settles nothing" because OKAY BOYS BREAK OUT THE ALEX JONES SHIT AGAIN: "We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too..."

I guess these days, fed as they have been on a diet of crap pseudo-news for decades, wingnuts are sufficiently addicted to conspiracy theories that they'll read something like that and go, "It's just like the black helicopters -- my friends told me they weren't real but then I saw that Transformers movie..." But are there enough of them to win a national election?

UPDATE. Rod Dreher brings the porch-biddy perspective: "A new angle. That poor woman." (Ha ha, oh please.) "Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?" Earlier Dreher published one of his famous reader letters, in this case purportedly from a doctor:

It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you...

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.

It's like those "I never believed Reagan coins would cure my cancer until today" stories popular in wingnut media. Was Rod conned, or is he the con artist? Why not both?

UPDATE 2. That Dr. Vinnie Boombatz gets around! Like Dreher, Scott Johnson of Power Line also has an anonymous alleged doctor -- a "prominent internist" who, based on his study of YouTube videos, diagnoses possible "aspiration pneumonia," which is "commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease" -- both, as it happens, popular wingnut conspiracy theories. Dr. Boombatz ends by saying "someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records... Every voter should know what’s at stake," which is a curiously stark political pitch -- but I suspect Dr. Boombatz had some assistance from his scribe.

STILL NOT GETTING IT.

Rod Dreher does another one of those "we must take the Kultur!" posts.

Still, it’s a dead end—creatively, philosophically, and politically—for conservatives to mimic left-wing storytellers. 

For one thing, conservatives today lack the artistic skill to tell stories as well as the left does. More philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.

It would seem from this that Dreher still thinks liberals have some kind of mysterious formula, transmitted to them by Satan, for turning their nefarious ideas into a magic weapon called Art that moves the masses.

Conservatism has within it the capacity to answer these challenges, but not if conservatives cling to stories that have lost their salience. We don’t need stories that offer prepackaged ideological answers to questions few people are asking.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere...

We need stories like the one told in the comments section of my blog on the American Conservative website by a Texas reader.

Oh shit. I'll spare you, but it's about how the guy's town was ruined by Big Gummint. But some of the policies that doomed the place were "authored by the New Dealers, others by Reaganites" -- so see, ambiguity! That's artistic, right? Throw in some jokes and we have a hit.

Another guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":

“Someone who is teaching can be the Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom of this movement. Someone who’s working a factory floor can be the Wendell Berry. I’m not comparing myself to these guys, but someone needs to write about these things in a sustained way.”

Maybe he can place an ad in the New York Review of Books to hire someone to actually write the stuff.

This reminds me of Liberty Island, the Ben Shapiro conservative arts site that has a manifesto but no content anyone would want to read. These people want culture as a means; the end is to effect the horrible political ideas they spend 99 percent of their time talking about. And as to stories, what Dreher won't admit is that they've had those all along: The Welfare Queen, The Dirty Hippie, The Child-Corrupting Homo, The Tax-and-Spend Liberal, et alia. But these stories were not created to reveal the human condition -- they were created to gull rubes into hate-voting for their candidates.

If conservatives don't have the kind of stories that move people the way a great song or play does, it's not because liberals took over the arts; it's because they don't really want them.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,200,843.

When Rod Dreher ostentatiously shows concern for his fellow man, you know there's a catch:

Readers, I have to go out for a few hours on a sudden errand. When I get back, I would like to hear from you who are in the flood zones of Nebraska and Iowa. It’s amazing how little coverage your tragedy is receiving. If I didn’t follow the Twitter accounts of Sen. Ben Sasse and Jake Meador, I would barely know a thing about it. I know the same thing happened in 2016 when we had the devastating Louisiana floods.

Let's see what The New York Times, which is Liberal Media Central and must be suppressing this story out of irrational hatred for the Common People, has been doing about it in the past three days:

March 20, "U.S. Farmers Face Devastation Following Midwest Floods [Reuters]"; "An Iowa Town Fought and Failed to Save a Levee. Then Came the Flood"; "The Latest: Minnesota to Help Nebraska Flood Fight [AP]"; "Missouri River Towns Face Deluge as Floods Move Downstream [Reuters]"; "Flooded Iowa Communities Surviving With Trucked-In Water [AP]."

March 19, "Rising Waters: See How Quickly the Midwest Flooded"; "Like ‘House Arrest’: Flooded Roads and Swamped Bridges Strand Nebraskans"; "Pets, Livestock Among Victims of Midwest Flooding [Reuters]"; "Missouri River Flooding Catches Small Nebraska Town Off Guard [Reuters]"; "Midwest Floodwaters Tear Through or Spill Over Many Levees [AP]"; "‘It’s Like an Island’: Scenes From the Midwest Floods [multimedia]"; "The Latest: Pence Views Raging River, Visits Shelter"; "Floodwaters Threaten Millions in Crop and Livestock Losses."

March 18, "Why Is There Flooding in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin?" "‘It’s Probably Over for Us’: Record Flooding Pummels Midwest When Farmers Can Least Afford It"; "Flooded U.S. Air Force Base Underscores Climate Risk to Security: Experts [Reuters]"; "'Angels of the Sky' Offer Flights Into Flooded Nebraska City [AP]"; "Scenes from Record Flooding in Nebraska [multimedia]"; "Homes Flood as Missouri River Overtops, Breaches Levees"; "Nebraska Nuclear Plant Still at Full Power as Floodwaters Recede [Reuters]"; "Three Dead, One Missing in Devastating Floods Across U.S. Midwest."

I may have missed a few. Dreher seems to have missed considerably more than a few. In comments (not in his main post), he breezily notes,

To be fair to the media, some readers say they’ve seen a lot of coverage. I think that this is an example of how silo’d we tend to be, even if we don’t mean to be. Sometimes a reader or two will accuse me of ignoring a particular news event because I haven’t posted on it — and I haven’t even heard of it!

Tee hee! Meanwhile a number of Dreher's commuters snarl things like "Why isn’t this covered more, Rod? This affects only the benighted people in flyover country..." and "The headlines are the latest nothingburger from the Mueller probe and Beto eating dirt." Elsewhere on Twitter, a bunch of people who seem unable to use Google News act like there's a media blackout on the floods. "Is it me or would this be getting a lot more attention if this were closer to New York or LA?" uueries pollster Patrick Ruffini. Others chime in: "This is catastrophic and mainstream media is pretty much ignoring this." "If a disaster happens on the coast, it’s full scale media coverage. But a disaster in the Midwest .....crickets. It’s ok, we don’t need u elites anyway." "Where is all the media’s coverage about the devastating floods in Nebraska?!?!" Ad infinitum.

I keep telling and telling and telling you guys: There is no flakier snowflake than a wingnut, and their propagandists feed them on grievance stories like the Great Media Blackout of Your Tragedy and how the big bad city slickers don't care because a steady diet of bullshit is what keeps them voting Republican.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Billy was the real thing. 

•   They say Tubby got the virus but since they're completely untrustworthy we have to consider alternatives: 1.) It's the truth; there were too many leaks and loose ends to keep it quiet; like what would they tell his next audience of virus-targets if he's too sick to show up? 2.) They're just plain lying, using a get-well-soon story as a distraction from his disastrous campaign week; 3.) They're mixing truth with lies -- like maybe he just hit a serious cognitive drop and they're calling it COVID as a cover. Well, whatever it is, the guy will be low-key for a little while his goons do the talking. Byron York at the Washington Examiner:

Then there is Trump's role as candidate. Remember that the president, and a lot of Republicans, too, have mocked rival Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement" and appearing mostly in virtual events. Well, it now appears that coronavirus will force President Trump to adopt a Biden-style campaign, at least for the next 10 to 14 days. The Trump campaign can still gather big crowds, which he can address via video. But there will be an undeniably different dynamic to those events, because the president always feeds off the energy from a big crowd, and he can't get the same effect sitting in front of a camera.

LOL yeah, let's schedule big rallies where Trump's loyalists can watch him on TV! How heartwarming. It'll be like the GOP Death Cult version of Spartacus, or Stone Soup: The President can't give you the King's Virus himself, but several of you are probably teeming with COVID-19, so you can give each other coronavirus in his name! It's a Trumpmas miracle! 

If you prefer your idiocy mainstream, here you go:

Does Biden suspend his campaign as Trump is quarantined? Is the White House failure to observe protocols a reason for Biden to continue his campaigning?

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) October 2, 2020

•  Meanwhile, from slightly before Corona Don time, here's Rod Dreher:

Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:

A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday...

Dreher actually thinks his frothing hatred of trans people is shared by normal people and will be a game-changer in the election.

Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.

This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 

[Hysteria Bold in the original.] This reminds me of this previous bit of Dreher electoral analysis:

UPDATE: New CBS News poll finds no Kenosha bump for Trump, even in Wisconsin. People who want the situation calmed trust Biden more.

UPDATE 2: A friend who read this told me on the phone, as we were talking, that he finds it impossible to believe that there was no Trump bump from the rioting — but easy to believe that people who intend to vote for Trump would not admit it to a pollster. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t tell a pollster if I was going to vote for Trump. Is that paranoid? Maybe. But I don’t think people are wrong to fear that this information is being recorded, and might be used against them one day.

Not too paranoid, huh? Then he added one of his Letters to Repenthouse "from" someone who feels exactly the same way. I have my own feel-good ideas about how this election could go right, but it seems weird to me to watch the guy say over and over again that maybe fear and hatred will pull it out for the Party of God. Well, I guess it's better than admitting that voter suppression is their only real hope. 

•  Sorry, I can't let the subject alone -- it's too rich. I see the Washington Times is trying to stir shit by sending out a Breaking News alert about this:

It's very obvious UUURGK BAD BROWN LADY TALK BAD ABOUT LEADER stuff, but stop and think: Why would an appeal to sympathy toward Trump work on his fans? They always talk and think about him as superhuman -- an impression supported by his pointed cruelty and brutality, which proves his disdain for human weakness. He doesn't get coronavirus, he gives it! Think about those crazy Ben Garrison cartoons (and the weird Trump-as-Rocky Photoshop sent out by Trump himself) portraying this flabby tub-o-guts as a buff he-man. Can they even imagine Trump suffering from a mere disease? Maybe if it were cancer, that would work -- people "fight" cancer, so the image of a Swole Trump battering the Grim Reaper might play. But a flu virus? That's like a Rocky movie in which the boxer plans a comeback against Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Boring! I expect that when and if Trump pulls through his factota will tell the rubes thrilling stories of how he refused the wheelchair as he lumbered heroically to the snack machine in the lobby.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

If I’m honest, I think this is the greatest American song, and this is its best version.

•   OK cowboys and cowgirls, I’m giving you not one but TWO free samples from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down this week. Feast your eyes:

1. The one about how, though you hear pundits talking about “civil war” as if both sides are choking for it, civil war is really a rightwing thing -- for reasons both political (they know most people won’t vote for them so they celebrate other means of holding power) and psychological (they’re nuts).

2. The one about the rightwing ladies’ magazine I was talking about here yesterday, and how its development mirrors that of other culture-warrior attempts to promote a “conservative” version of something popular: After an initial attempt to “pass,” they give up and become yet another industrial-strength propaganda pump.

Think how great it would be to receive such treasures in your inbox five days a week, with a subscription! But meantime, enjoy.

•   It’s not like me to recommend other people’s essays because I’m selfish, but I encourage wide dissemination of Michael Hobbes’ “The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism” in which, after a quick and apt comparison to the “tort lawsuits out of control” bullshit stories of years past, he rips the bark off the whole Cancel Culture Woke PC blubber brigade. You all know how I feel about this subject, but Hobbes takes a bit of time to pin down some malefactors and it’s glorious, e.g.:

A surprisingly large percentage of “illiberal left” articles pull this same rhetorical trick. In 2019, Laurie Sheck, a New School professor, was investigated by her employer for saying the n-word in class. For weeks, centrist and conservative media outlets sputtered to her defense: The word appeared in a quote from James Baldwin! She was leading a class discussion about racial slurs! Invoking epithets wasn’t even prohibited in any school policies. The case became a totemic example of Wokeness Gone Mad that still pops up in anecdote-parade feature stories two years later.

But that version of the story leaves out an important epilogue. The university cleared Scheck without any punishment. The pundits were right: She hadn’t violated any school policies.

Scheck’s case, as soon as you tell it in full, turns out to be an example of a university that isn’t captured by leftist ideology. Only a single (white) student complained about Sheck’s use of the n-word. Like most universities, the New School has a grievance mechanism that allows students to file complaints and obligates administrators to take them seriously. The term “investigation” conjures up comparisons to Orwell and Kafka, but in this case it appears administrators interviewed Sheck and the student, reviewed their policies and moved on. Perhaps you wish the student had never filed a complaint in the first place, but this is the story of a system working as intended, not breaking down.

And so on. There’s plenty else to say about this popular rightwing propaganda technique -- I’m reminded of the endless skein of Rod Dreher “reader” “mail” in which anonymous alleged correspondents claim they’ve been cancelcultured -- and we have to keep telling the truth about it, notwithstanding that bullshit is at present more popular, in the hope that it'll eventually sink in. 

SELLER'S REMORSE. Michael Ledeen notes the latest mayhem in Iran, blames unnamed liberals:

But, just like women stoned to death in Iran, or the mass starvation of the people of Zimbabwe, these horrors are greeted with the silence that racists reserve for the less-than-humans who behave in an uncivilized way. Their unspoken attitude is, well, what can you expect of these untermenschen?

And anyway, it's all Bush's fault.

The Ole Perfesser concurs:

"UNTERMENSCHEN:" He's right. That's how they seem to think.

UPDATE: Reader Ted Clayton emails: "Perhaps you could specify who "they" refers to. "

As you can see from reading the linked item, it refers to those allegedly-progressive Westerners who refuse to hold non-Westerners to the same moral standards applied to, say, America and Britain. That should be obvious to, well, anyone who's paying attention.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley writes: 'I am shocked, shocked, to find prejudice among our "best and brightest'." The descent of the "progressives" into racist double-standards is an old story, but it's still one that bears pointing out now and then.

I'm sick of this shit. First, conservatives called for the invasion of Iraq, with the welfare of the Iraqi people one of their flimsier pretexts. And since the whole DemocracyWhiskeySexy business went south, it's conservatives we most often hear talking about what a disappointment the Iraqis have been.

General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, for example, has said he wants an end to "'peace, love, and understanding' silliness" in Iraq, and cites as a better model for pacification "the Mau-Mau revolt, in which the British won a complete victory -- thanks to concentration camps, hanging courts and aggressive military operations." And, he has also said, "if Iraq's Arabs choose to backslide into the regional addiction to corrupt governance, it's a lick on them, not on us."

John Derbyshire has said that while he supported the invasion as a "psychic shock to the whole region" -- which "It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left" -- he came to realize that "we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that."

Another rightwing erstwhile warfan, Crunchy Rod Dreher, now says that "I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people."

John Podhoretz says "If the Sunnis and Shiites really go at it, it's hard to see what exactly we can do to get them to stop."

Even Rich Fucking Lowry, author of the notorious "We're Winning" National Review cover story, has said that "The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true... All around the chaotic and violent Middle East, human hearts are yearning for many things, but freedom isn’t high on the list."

Yet Ledeen and the Perfesser persist in saying that those of us who predicted that their invasion would result in a shitstorm are the ones who look down on the Iraqi people.

I'd say they suffered from guilty consciences, if there were any indication that they had consciences of any sort.

UPDATE. Commenters point out that The Good Glenn got there first with more. How could I have forgotten the Perfesser's "more rubble, less trouble"? I guess that's why Greenwald is at Salon and I'm wearing a cardboard belt.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I know I've posted this before but I'm in a fuck-everything sort of mood

and nothing but the Pride of Syracuse will do.

•   Bernie Sanders wrote this in 1972:

A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. 

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously. 

The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their "revolutionary" political meeting. 

Have you ever looked at Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf at your local bookstore? Do you know why newspapers with the articles like "Girl 12 raped by 14 men" sell so well? To what in us are they appealing? 

Women, for their own preservation, are trying to pull themselves together. And it's necessary for all of humanity that they do so. Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other. Men and women — both are losers. Women adapt themselves to fill the needs of men, and men adapt themselves to fill the needs of women. In the beginning there were strong men who killed the animals and brought home the food — and the dependent women who cooked it. No More! Only the roles remain — waiting to be shaken off. There are no "human" oppressors. Oppressors have lost their humanity. On one hand "slavishness," on the other hand "pigness." Six of one, half dozen of the other. Who wins?

The rest here. The meaning of this admittedly jejune take on learned helplessness and gender roles will be clear enough to anyone with at least an eighth grade reading level. Wingnuts, though, are pretending it's a bombshell because, derr hurr, libtard said rape. Some of the dumber ones pretend Sanders said "All Men Dream Of Tying Up and Sexually Abusing Women, And All Women Fantasize of Being Raped By Three Men." "'Pretend Todd Akin said this': Where’s media outrage over Bernie Sanders’ pervy old essay?" headlines Twitchy. Akin, you may recall, not only professed to believe that women can use stress to stop a rapist's sperm from impregnating them, but reiterated this belief after his comments blew up his campaign, which I'd say is different from discussing the psychosexual effects of inequality.  Sanders' spokesman says the 1972 article "was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the '70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then," and while that seems accurate as far as it goes, I'm sorry he felt the need. I yet hope for a candidate who, confronted with this sort of thing, will hand out vouchers for remedial reading classes, or at least demand that his persecutors conjugate a sentence.

•   Hey, Rod Dreher has discovered incivility in an internet comments section! And guess where:

I’m a regular reader of Douthat and Brooks, and am constantly shocked by how hateful so many NYT readers are.

Those vicious, foulmouthed Times readers! They're the nastiest slur-merchant that ever sailed the seven million IPs! Doesn't get around much, does he? (Actually he's seen it before: in his own comments section. ["I have always been puzzled by the people who read this blog, and who seem to hate everything I believe in or say, yet who keep coming back to tell me what an SOB I am."] I envy the state of wide-eyed innocence to which Dreher disingenuously pretends.)

•    At The Federalist, professional culture-victim Mollie Hemingway explains why the New Yorker cover about the GOP Presidential candidates is not funny you guys:

Anyway, how did The New Yorker pick these seven candidates? It certainly wasn’t which seven had the most popular support thus far, at least based on the Real Clear Politics average. That would have included Ben Carson and not Chris Christie. And the magazine already noted that it wasn’t who had actually announced their candidacy. That includes Carly Fiorina, the only female in the GOP race. They didn’t include people who have actually won primaries before, such as Rick Santorum, who finished in second place for the GOP nomination in 2012... 

Maybe they’re just terrified of letting liberal readers know how diversely hued the GOP field is. I don’t know... 

But even if the media wish the GOP field weren’t as diverse as it is, particularly relative to the Democratic field, the media shouldn’t do the artistic equivalent of airbrushing photos to get there.

I hope you stupid libtards realize that by not including the one black and one female candidate from the 342 prospective GOP Presidential candidates, you prove you're the real racist-war-on-womanist for misrepresenting our party's diversity. Now who's laughing -- wait, it's still you! Reverse prejudism!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Al Franken imbroglio, as well as the attempts of some liberals to reexamine the Clinton impeachment, and the ways in which conservatives have attempted to weaponize these events for their own ends. I hope you won't think me ungenerous in saying that these guys are not interested in advancing the Believe Women movement. They're just trying to take the post-Weinstein moment, in which abused women are getting a little more attention and credence than usual, and exploit it. You can see it especially clearly in the pissy oh-yeah-you-libs-are-supposed-to-be-feminists routines from conservatives like Laura K Potter at RedState:

We’d at least expect former presidential candidate, Mrs. Hillary Clinton to express some sort of support for Ms. Leeann Tweeden, as a fellow woman and believer of all those who come forward, right?...

Nope. Nothing. Third wave feminism is showing, once again, that women deserve to be heard and respected if they hold they correct (read: progressive) viewpoints.

If you'e thinking, wait a minute, Clinton did make a measured and reasonable statement about Franken -- well, yes, but not at the moment when Potter was looking at her Twitter feed, and when you write for RedState there's no point in updating. (Potter's only subsequent article at this writing is, awesomely, "International Men’s Day Spotlight On Male Suicides.")

The culture warriors got into it, too: You saw here last week how Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard took a journey through the past and ranted about the drugs these damn hippies were using on Saturday Night Live and the soiled honor of Spiro T. Agnew. President Trump himself brought up a sketch Franken and other SNL writers worked on, in drafts of which multiple celebrities get raped by Andy Rooney, as if it proved anything except SNL writers took a lot of drugs -- and, for the millionth time, that conservatives don’t understand the difference between fiction and reality.

But Rod Dreher, as usual, outstripped them all in Fallen World paranoia with a froth of outrage over one of the last really funny things SNL did, the 40-year-old "Uncle Roy" sketch with Buck Henry. What's that got to do with Franken? Get a load:

I tried to find out if Al Franken wrote that skit, but my research indicates it was his frequent writing partner, the late Tom Davis. I was wrong — as two readers who watched the Henry interview till the end point out, it was two women: Rosie Shuster and Ann Beatts. Anyway, the reader sends in this more recent clip of Buck Henry defending the integrity of laughing at pedophilia...

And here's a clip of W.C. Fields laughing at blindness! And what about Mel Brooks laughing at Nazis? All these Hollyweirdos are corrupt!

Again: Al Franken did not write the Uncle Roy skit, though he was part of the team that aired it. I’m not saying that Al Franken is soft of pedophilia! I am saying, however, that the 1970s and those who were at the leading edge of pop culture’s evolution back then are probably going to have a lot to answer for as more and more people come out about being sexually harassed or assaulted. I’m wondering if this purgatory spasm we’re living through is going to consume way more famous Baby Boomer males than we can even imagine.

The whole thing's a pisser but what's most amazing, or what would be amazing if we weren't so used to Dreher shattering the limits of ridic, is that he kept going even after admitting his whole premise was wrong.

Finally, to Andrew Sullivan: Dude, let it go.

UPDATE. One other thing that's struck me is the way the brethren deal with the lack of contact between Franken’s hands and Tweeden’s breasts in the famous photograph. Like Peter Hasson at the Daily Caller: “Franken’s defenders in the media have also given him credit for, they say, not fully groping Tweeden.”  I guess in sexual assault close counts, like in horseshoes. (I should add it's not only rightbloggers -- MSM types have fallen into it, too, like Nate Silver, who said the photo "appeared to show Franken groping Tweeden’s breasts while she was sleeping — not providing a lot of room for 'if true' statements about Franken’s conduct." If you're not watching that three-card-monte of a sentence closely, you'll come away thinking he's feeling her up.)

Also, thanks for Yastreblyansky and Sentient Al from the Future in comments for pointing out that the Menendez underage claims  to which Nolte alluded never panned out; I had something about that in the original but didn't feel the column would bear the time it would take to explain -- which is, come to think of it, how a lot of their shit gets over.

THE DEATH OF OUTRAGE. The Miley Cyrus story is not much, and so not much that even Howard Stern has denounced her Vanity Fair photo spread. (The odd bit is that her father Billy Ray is a former Pax TV actor and Jesus testimonialist. Well, to be fair, Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.)

Maybe I don't have much of a story either, as my favorite God-botherers are taking this rather lightly. Rod Dreher, having perhaps exhausted his compassion on Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, cuts the little tart no slack. "The dear thing is shocked," he says. "She was, she claims, hoodwinked by the evil Annie Leibovitz into appearing semi-nude after her parents left the set (never mind that her publicist, her granny and her manager were still there)..." Then, for laughs, a Brother Theodore routine on nymphets. I guess Dreher has finally decided that the Benedict Option is in full effect, and is preparing for a new Zion where the Cyruses will be unwelcome and the nubiles will dress less provocatively when not screwing fogeys.

James Poulos does offer a wistfully Benedictine closer ("It's going to take a long time to untangle the psychosexual web this culture's woven. Maybe forever") but defends the principle of "marvelous fresh fecundity and youthful radiance" in representational art, which is inevitably reduced in our corrupting times to "the erotic appeal of a giant confection. In an earlier era, this picture would in fact be a painting of a nameless young girl, and it would be a work of art. In this era, it's a brick in a long, high wall." So maybe the real problem is mass production -- in a nobler time, we had to wait for geniuses to laboriously hand-paint our softcore porn, and it was shown in galleries where jacking off was frowned upon. Supply and demand being what it is, the Masters wouldn't have bothered with Miley, who is "not particularly gorgeous," and the Cyruses would have been content with a simple, rustic existence, with Dad appearing in Passion Plays and singing with his daughter in the church choir. I wonder that Poulos chooses to contribute to the degrading march of technology by writing online; doesn't he realize that every new reader he brings to this fetid trough will be degraded beyond redemption? The more the merrier, I say, but he should consider switching to illuminated manuscripts.

Ross Douthat figures the Cyruses have it macked: because "the Cyruses are stage-managing this whole 'controversy,'" they probably have "enough worldliness and self-awareness to navigate Miley's adolescence without letting the celebrity machine grind her down into Britney Redux." He saves his tears for "the weak and the damaged and the dumb" who suffer in the maw of the machine. Well, that's capitalism, comrade -- most of us writers are likewise too weak and damaged and dumb to score a prestigious gig (like an Atlantic blog), and will wear away our souls scribbling unprofitably, maddened by the prospect of fame, pathetic victims of the opinionating machine. Weep for us!

We could easily go downmarket for some real ravings, but when the major thinkers of culture war can't pop a stiffy over a half-dressed teenager, America may be on the verge of losing her moral compass, and alicublog of losing some valuable material. I hope at the next Restoration Weekend Bill Bennett gives them a good talking-to.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GAAAAAAAAH! Just finished Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. It has three big themes, two of which are not wholly convincing, but one of which is dead on.

The overarching story is of the complete infestation of the Republican Party by fundamentalist Christians and, as the subtitle suggests, the disastrous results of those agents' many public downfalls in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Blumenthal could have made a whole book (and twice as long) about the origins of the fundamentalist political movement, starting with the theocrat R.J. Rushdoony and proceeding to those who in one way or another were allied with or influenced by him -- the Birchers, Jerry Falwell, Gary North, Francis Shaeffer, et alia -- until we get to the familiar names still prominent in the Religious Right, and their apotheosis in the Administration of born-again George W. Bush. I had almost forgotten how looney Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tom DeLay and many others were from the very beginning, and never knew how cunningly they networked to achieve their influence.

The escapades of Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Jim West, Mark Foley and others are still well known, but having their burlesque routines told with full narrative vigor rather than in disjointed news clips helps recapture that halcyon time when the GOP revealed itself as a dysfunctional therapy camp for repressed homosexuals and, with the concatenation of Sarah Palin's negative campaign revelations (and some things that were not so much revealed -- the stuff about George Otis and Bishop Thomas Muthee gets even wackier than the Palin witch doctor video, if you can believe it), makes a stronger case than I would have expected for Blumenthal's implied thesis that the far-out religious component in modern GOP politics reached -- inevitably, it would seem -- a critical mass that "shattered the party" and loosened its grip on power.

Of course there was that tanking economy, too. Also Katrina, persistent military occupations, etc. Blumenthal doesn't say much about these, but I wonder if citizens might have been more likely to avert their eyes if many of these moral catastrophes weren't playing out against a governmental collapse on a national level.

Also, Blumenthal goes in for some group psychology and deduces that the repressionist nature of hardcore Christian dogma -- evidenced by such grisly artifacts as Dobson's Dare to Discipline, hardhat violence, the wacky theories of the anti-gay movement, and the sad case of Matthew Murray, home-school rebel turned psycho killer -- turns its political operators in sado-masochistic freaks who demand either dominion or debasement depending on what side of the Lord they perceive themselves to be on at any given moment. I sort of see the point, as might anyone who reads Rod Dreher* on a regular basis. But it's a lot to load onto a political history of this scope. The bizarre behaviors of the characters will suggest plenty to any attentive reader about the soundness of their belief system, and for me the canned expert opinions actually reduce its impact. (Blumenthal has a tendency to bring in quotes from Erich Fromm and other such analysts, which suggests that he didn't trust the story, depraved as many of its anecdotes are, to make the case for him. It's sort of like adding passages from Freud to a history of Congress in the Gilded Age.)

The clearest success of Republican Gomorrah is as a full-length portrait of the Christianist wing of the modern Republican Party -- a component which, both the book and recent events suggest, may be all that's left of it. It should prove useful background as the GOP tries to integrate the Tea Party people into its fundamentalist redoubt and bring it back to national size. We certainly ought to keep an eye on Mike Huckabee, whom I now know to be crazier than I ever imagined.

*UPDATE. Dreher has actually read an excerpt from the book and gotten something out of it, though he is enraged by "The Nation's disgustingly prejudicial headline on this story, titled 'The Nightmare of Christianity.' Writers almost never write their own headlines, so it's not fair to blame Max Blumenthal for the words..." The title of the article is also the title of the excerpted chapter from the book, and based on a comment by its subject, Matthew Murray.

UPDATE 2. Lots of interesting Suggestions for Further Reading in comments. For chuckling's and perhaps others' benefit, the three themes I saw were 1.) The fundies took over the the Party, 2.) The fundies wrecked the Party, and 3.) The fundies suffer from a specific clinical syndrome. The first is the one I found most convincing -- it seems intuitive, but I'd never seen the case made so well before -- though on further reflection I'm not sure that a wholly-owned GOP would have countenanced John McCain, even given the dramatic circumstances; Blumenthal speeds through that part. You could as easily deduce that the fundamentalists have great but not full power, and it waxes when times are good for them.

That may just be cautious self-restraint, though if they're as crazy as Blumenthal paints them, it's hard to see how they'd summon any restraint at all. And if they aren't capable of riding the brake, why isn't every national nominee a born-again? It begs the question of who else has power there. People like David Brooks seek to position themselves as part of a temporizing if not temperate force, but we all know that's ridiculous. Probably, as I had long suspected, it's lobbyists and C. Montgomery Burns.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I made a mistake when  I looked over my shoulder/ Cromwell was right behind me, in the driving rain...
•  Well, I’m going for the Oscar gusto again this year. I've already discussed The Post, and will now treat Dunkirk, which I just saw. I said back in 2009, when Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight, that unlike many other A-list Hollywood moviemakers Nolan could at least shoot an action sequence so I could tell what the hell was going on. He's gotten even better since then, and Dunkirk is a great opportunity for him to show off. From the Brueghelian bombardment of big ships crowded with drowning, burning, and leaping soldiers, to the strafing of a small boat full of shushed, terrified child-soldiers, to balletic dogfights, Nolan can orchestrate mass movement and violence like nobody’s business. And he is beautifully abetted in all the craft details, especially Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography, which combines high contrast with judicious color saturation to give things a edge alternately dreamlike and nightmarish, and Hans Zimmer’s score, which underpins good old-fashioned orchestral pumping with machine sounds and postmodern shrieks to juice the tension. Though the technique is modern and even modernist, the intent is antique-heroic — most clearly seen in the rah-rah over the Little England flotilla and the stiff-upper-lipped British officer class, each beautifully represented, no coincidence, by British national treasures Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh. That’s well-earned in both history and the movie, but as an American I found it odd that there was absolutely no humor — even Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve had jokes. Still, if the unrelenting seriousness makes it hard to take Dunkirk to heart, it does increase the effect of the ending, in which filthy, bedraggled survivors awaken on the train home to windows suddenly filled with hay-brightened English sunlight. And though I do look forward to Gary Oldham’s Churchill, I can’t imagine I will be as moved by his rendition of the “Never Surrender” speech as I was by Fionn Whitehead reading it haltingly out of a newspaper on his way back home from hell.

•   On the Oscar theme, I should also mention Get Out: You've probably either seen it or heard enough about how great it is, so I don't have to go into how much I loved it. But I will say that one of the things I love about it is, though it's clearly about race, the central conceit is so powerful and expansive that, were it possible to show the film to people who had no experience or understanding of racism, they would still understand the terror, because it represents a fundamental anxiety: that of anyone entering a world that for whatever reason -- money, background, culture --  is so different from their own that they suspect and are quietly terrified by the prospect of psychic kidnapping and enslavement. Of course, even the slightest awareness of racism and its role in our national history inflames that anxiety considerably -- because it actually happened. This is not, as some morons have suggested, a politically evanescent phenomenon, but a real work of art based on the insanity of American life. 

•   OMG, here's another alleged "reader email" that God-botherer Rod Dreher is just passing along:

I’m a longtime (and recently wavering) atheist, but I have had a very devout evangelical friend of many decades. 

Suuuure you are/have.

He lives in Oregon. He couldn’t afford to send his daughter out of state for college. But he wanted her to go to college and experience the income and class benefits that had eluded him (as a GED holder) throughout his life. 

All this devout evangelical wanted was for his daughter to have the advantages he never had! But alas, to do so he had to send her to godless College, and though it was "the most milquetoast of the bunch from the political activism perspective," she had within a few months been brainwashed by Lesbo Hippies to "disavow her female gender." Perplexed pop's friend reports:

The pressure, he said, was too much, and from all angles—peers, instructors, campus organizations and media, etc. “Non-binary” was a taken-for-granted ontological reality, and to question it was bigotry. To fail to realize your own “non-binary-ness” was self-hatred rooted in bigotry.

Sure enough, by her junior year, she was a “non-identifying queer,” neither male nor female, and an activist. Their relationship is now essentially nonexistent, as she sees him to be a “Nazi"...

It's such a sad tale that I half expected it to end, "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died gender-fluid."

CHECK YOUR HEAD, BUCKO.

I see Patron Pseud of Anti-Wokeism Jordan Peterson has pulled a BariWeiss -- that is, not having succeeded by obnoxious behavior in getting himself martyred by defenestration, he has quit his academic sinecure while blubbering over the unfairness with which he has been treated, hoping for the same effect. At the Ezra Levant Post the professor explains: 

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions....

By "unacceptable philosophical positions" Peterson seems to mean "status as a public laughing stock." The rest of his lament resembles your average Rod Dreher column: Lots of sweeping and hysterical claims with thin or non-existent documentary evidence, e.g. "there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough... This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades." Peterson also says his colleagues "all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same," which ought to really set the tone for his U of Toronto going-away party (and excite his future Substack readers!). I especially liked this bit denouncing a well-known implicit-bias test, about which I am fully prepared to entertain doubts if they are expressed via coherent analysis, as opposed to whatever this is: 

The much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. [Cite please - Ed.] The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II....

Is this guy still on the all-meat-coma diet? He seems to have missed a few OS patches.

You can see how this is meant to work: the casual reader may see the length of the thing and catch some keywords, but be put off by the poor writing and painfully aggrieved tone from reading too much of it, and think, "Well, he has a long list of complaints, some of them must be justified." That's how the whole cancelculture/CRT scam gets over; when it wears out, they'll move on to the next grift. 

POGUE MAHON. A reader points out that the leprechaun on today's National Review masthead looks gay. Oh, yeah? Well, Allan Bloom was still a fine American, pal!

Anyway, St. Paddy's is celebrated at Nat Rev, as you might expect, by a Scotsman bitching that the Irish are not authentically Irish enough to suit him. (Maybe he's a Crunchy Conservative!) Said Scot also seems to think that "fine, honest, unpretentious Dublin pubs... 'renovated' to look like the fake Irish pubs you might easily find in places such as Frankfurt Airport" are an example of "postmodernism." Really? Sounds like American-style, tasteless capitalism to me -- but of course, except for Dreher's hippies, National Review is in favor of that sort of thing, so the Scot is obliged to use the conservatively-correct swear word "postmodern" instead of the right one. What a horrible way to have to go through life; I hope they pay these poor dolts well.

Oh, and the NatRevvers do spare a few tears for a colleen done doort by the fookin' RA, but only as a lead-in to one of most hilarious Bush blowjobs of all time:

Ah, but here President Bush reveals his moral depth. He grasps how one of the fundamental lessons of Sophocles’ Antigone applies to this case: in a democracy the purpose of the state is to safeguard the dignity of each and every individual.

One likes to imagine Bush tentatively mouthing "Soffi -- soffi -- sofficle --" as his thought-balloon fills with corned beef and cabbage, frosty mugs of O'Doul's, and a leprechaun commanding him to invade Iran.

Finally there's this silly bint, who uses a War-on-Christmas lede to barge into the magazine, then just wastes everyone's time. OK, not entirely -- she does offer a solid contender for the Worst Multicultural Moment Contest:

One year at the Irish fair — to which the Scots also come with their Highland games — I brought along a Hispanic friend. After wandering the grounds watching the dancing, eating grilled bangers, and listening to the music, she remarked, "I didn't realize white people had culture!" And after being transfixed by a hot bagpipe player, she was hooked.

Have I been wrong all these years? Does a St. Patrick's Day parade really reflect white culture? Then Vive la Reconquista! Also, she closes, "In the sense that silly traditions keep the Irish in America from being more than just another pale face, the culture war is won." It is? It's over? Does that mean she and her idiot friends will stop bitching about homos in the movies and such like? I can't wait to check tomorrow and see if it's really true!

Till then, y'all have as authentic or inauthentic a St. P as you like. I don't think I'll have time to get to one of our few remaining Blarney Stones earlier than noon, which sort of defeats the whole self-loathing purpose, but I will taste at some point the Water of Life, and think of you as I do.