THE LATEST CRAZE.

If you see less of me here than previously, overwork at my cott-damn job and sloth are only part of the reason. So many of the conservative tantrums I see in print or online these days are dull beyond imagining and it's often hard to get inspired. Trumpism has made many of the brethren lazy; remember when they felt obliged to construct elaborate fantasies to defend their stupid ideas -- for instance, that marriage makes you rich? I sort of miss those days. I recall they used to even promote actual policies that were almost as funny as their rages against Lena Dunham. but why bother to try and make it look good when the most overt rightwing grifting and racism are now national policy, and your comrades in the Q miasma are coming up with ever more outlandish conspiracy theories for you to believe in? In this environment even my usual punching bags like Jonah Goldberg have lost quite a bit of sawdust; I mean, look at this shit. You see my dilemma.

But there are some Trumpkins\ tropes that are worth recording if only for the historical record (though I suspect future generations will remember us mainly from Leibowitzian memorabilia). A major example is the I'm No Trump Voter But shtick. I normally refer to this in the context of Rod Dreher, who is constantly using it in "I'm no Trump fan, but"/ "I'm no Trump supporter, but"/ "I didn't vote for Trump, but" locutions. Here's a recent example:

Politically speaking, religious liberty is the most important issue to me. I wouldn’t rule out voting against Donald Trump in 2020, because some other issue was so urgent, and so important, that it justified voting against my religious liberty interests. But every time I start to think that, some progressive organizations will come out with statements that portray ordinary First Amendment backers like me as some sort of unique and horrible threat to decency.

Dreher's column starts out as a defense of Jeff Sessions' obviously anti-gay God Squad, which he starts defending by quoting sympathetic lefty milquetoasts. But when he runs out of those, he seems to realize all that's left for him is to defend it himself, which would make him look ridiculous; so he flips the table by talking about how libtards are making him, A Reasonable Conservative, vote for Trump, so there.

(For extra entertainment catch Dreher's update: "If your a liberal who can’t come up with anything more serious than, 'Christians are just mad that they can’t discriminate against blacks anymore' — seriously, this was one comment — then you shouldn’t waste your time commenting, because I’m not going to publish it." Sheesh, what a snowflake.)

Another fine example is John Kass' recent column at the Chicago Tribune, the news hook for which is Paul Manafort's trial. Kass takes Manafort's side, believe it or not ("Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump"), and even quotes Mollie Hemningway, a hi-sign for Trump dead-enders. But, probably realizing (like Dreher) this tack will make him look stupid if he doesn't gussy it up somehow, Kass devotes most of his real estate to how the Media -- from which wingnut columnists always exempt themselves -- are dissing The Little People, and (everybody say it with me) This Is Why Trump Won. Kass declares himself Not A Trump Fan, of course -- "he wasn't my choice for president" -- but he kicks it up a notch by suggesting that even Trump's voters aren't Trump fans, either:

Many were shocked by Trump’s manner, by his bragging, his rude behavior, reference to his hand size, his boorishness, the way he treated women.

And still they voted for him. Why? Because they loathed the other side more. They loathed the establishment. They loathed the media. And their reservations about Trump were washed away by the laughter following Clinton’s “deplorables” line.

No wonder people seem so grumpy these days -- they all have a president that nobody wanted!

I've been trying to come up with a name for this line of guff. "Tsk-Tsk Trumpism" is one I like; @TelegramSam100 has offered "Trumpism Private Reserve (Not that yucky stuff the peasants drink)" ; @txoffender says "Trump Goggles." Any other ideas?

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PERSECUTION MANIA EDITION.

The Ol' Perfesser was pimping something at Forbes called "Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey," and I thought, that's strange, I haven't seen any such thing. I have seen those crazy kids at Acculturated kvelling over Downton Abbey as some sort of conservative thing, as if it were a political candidate and not some stupid TV show. I've also seen Jonah Goldberg claim the show for  the right because "the whole point of the show is to sympathize with the landed gentry" and one of the villains is gay. Since then I've seen similar yak from PJ Lifestyle ("5 Covert Conservative Lessons in Downton Abbey"),  First Things ("Downton Abbey is the perfect anti-Girls" -- their hard-on for Lena Dunham never dies), Gary North ("here we TV have a show which basically is opposed to the idea of confiscatory inheritance taxation" and references to Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), etc.

So I went to Forbes to see Jerry Bowyer lay out the evidence:

That’s arguably why the left is bashing Downton Abbey. The New York Times Art Beat column has reported that British critics are ‘torching’ Downton Abbey. Apparently Downton Abbey is snobbish, culturally necrophiliac (and if you don’t yet know what that word means, I suggest you leave it that way) and its popularity in the United States is due to the rise of the Tea Party movement and conservative opposition to the death tax. Even worse, creator Julian Fellowes is the holder of a Tory Peerage. Definitely not the right sort of people.

Wait a minute -- British critics? I clicked through to Art Beat: They mention the criticisms of Simon Schama and James Fenton, and... that's it. Two English guys.

Having thus established the conspiracy, Bowyer goes on to explain why The Left/two English guys hate the show: "Downton Abbey‘s message is an anti-class warfare one. The fact is that the spirit of the critics is hard left, and maybe that’s why Downton Abbey makes them so angry, because the success of the series shows that this group does not speak for America."

These guys couldn't be projecting any harder if they had halogen lamps up their butts. Plus: Don't they feel ashamed to be watching anything on the communist PBS?

UPDATE. I wonder why Bowyer didn't mention this, from Irin Carmon at Salon: "Why liberals love 'Downton Abbey.'" It's about... why liberals love Downton Abbey. Why, it's as if they have the ability to enjoy things that don't flatter every single one of their prejudices. What savages! But at the Washington Times, Jack Cashill offers an alternate explanation:

Carmon’s liberal friends may have sensed that their own ill-formed ideologies lack the integrity and the grace of the one they are exposed to in some detail on successive Sunday nights each winter. Outwardly, they may continue to reject the world the Crawleys have inherited, but inwardly, they envy it, and once a week at least, through the magic of television, they get to be part of it.

So in this reading, liberals actually love the show, but only because they wish they were conservatives. Well, when you spend years of your life telling people that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book, you may develop impressive self-convincing skills.

UPDATE 2. In comments, L Bob Rife: "Could someone wake me when the Acculturatniks lay claim to the 'Harlem Shake'?"

WHY DO ALL THESE TRANSSEXUALS KEEP SUCKING MY ATTENTION?*

Let's see what's going on at one of our favorite rightwing opinion factories, The Federalist:

How The Hypersexual Trans Movement Hurts Feminism

Hmm. That's --

...These carpet-baggers to womanhood are trying to prove to all of us that what it really means to be a woman is to pose in a playboy bunny outfit and make kissy faces at men. They reinforce this idea to teenage girls: go put on the miniskirt, honey, celebrate Jenner’s beauty, and try to exemplify it in your own life.

(Pause.) Let's try another story.

Bruce Jenner’s Transformation Is A Lose-Lose For Liberal Ideology

Huh. How ya figure?

...For years, a major aim of the sexual revolution has been to deconstruct gender differences as being “social constructs"...

This is the ideology that governs liberal sexual philosophy, and it collides head-on with major aspects of the transgender movement. Transgenderism is unavoidably based on a kind of gender essentialism...

Hey, look at the time. Let's see what else:

Bruce Jenner: Selfie Culture Hero

Great! I could use some light reading.

....As he adapted, he still was treating his body not as his own, but like a shiny new midlife crisis vehicle that came with a great rack worth flashing to his son...

Yikes.

Personally, I don’t care either way, and I wish him well, but I’d prefer we identify actions of bravery with real bravery...

Oh, so we're making too much of Caitlin Jenner, huh? The obvious solution is to continue talking about her.

So is the best response to Mother Nature’s cruel visual inequity more surgery for everyone and glam teams ‘til their outsides match their insides? If that is case, Jenner just won another gold medal in the vanity Olympics...

Aw snap.

Who knows, and who cares. That’s some silly discussion...

Come into the light, Federalist author!

...one that will make “Jezebel rain hellfire down on” you. What matters is how it sounds, how it makes you feel, and if it’s attractive. Silence is easier and more attractive when roving bands of social-justice warriors vociferously silence dissent...

Do these guys get bonuses when they work conservative persecution into stories?

Now that we dispensed with critical thinking and an honest debate of ideas, welcome to a world where what matters most is how you look. It’s a brave new superficial world that had no better launching location than the pages of Vanity Fair. We are a society that has fallen in love with its own reflection.

Please, no one ever show her a magazine rack from the past fifty years; she'll run into the street screaming like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Let's move on:

Bruce Jenner is Not Brave

Oh for --

In a few days, we will celebrate the anniversary of D-Day, when men stormed enemy-filled beaches and died by the thousands...

Jesus Christ, aren't there any stories in this conservative magazine that aren't about transsexuals? Okay, one more:

Taylor Swift Flirts With The Feminist Dark Side

I'll take it -- oh wait, it's full of Lena Dunham. Have you got a copy of Field & Stream?

(*Titular reference here.)

GET THE RAINCOAT OUT OF YOUR LAP, IT'S NOT THAT KIND OF SHOW.

Emily Esfahani Smith, whose ridiculous writing at Acculturated on how everything was better when people were repressed has been treated here, has been writing for The Atlantic too, which makes a pathetic sort of sense. Her latest contains a theater review:

The scene represents a normal sexual encounter between two students. There's moaning. There's orgasming. And yet, it falls flat. While the play wants to promote the idea that this kind of sex is hot and fun, in this scene, it is boring and banal. Erotic sex ideally involves mystery and an electric connection—longing—between two people. But the exhibitionism of Speak About It kills this mystery and longing—it leaves little to the imagination.

Speak About It, by the way, is a "variety of skits and monologues dealing with sexual consent, assault and misconduct, and bystander intervention" developed by students at Bowdoin and now used at other colleges. So it's basically a sexual hygiene play, and while it sounds it's no match for the one in Love and Death, I doubt electric connections and mystery were intended as part of the offering.

The rest is gabble about Allan Bloom, "the hookup culture," and oh Jesus kill me now Lena Dunham, who apparently still haunts these people's dreams.

The economy sucks but apparently there are a lot of jobs for rightwing scolds who tell readers they don't really know how to have sex and then offer them The Closing of the American Mind instead of the butterfly flick.

WRECKERS.

IFrom his previous ridiculous columns I reckoned Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review was wrapped a little too tight, but holy Jesus, I'm still stunned by his ragegasm over an OFA tweet promoting Obamacare because it contained a picture of a guy in pajamas who wasn't Don Draperly enough to suit him.

First, Cooke tells us this is part of a pattern of inappropriate stereotypes (that is, stereotypes not calculated to appeal to Charles C.W. Cooke) foisted on him by the Obama studios:

First, we had Julia, the creepy, eyeless, vision-of-horror from Brave New World whose life was run from cradle to grave by the federal government. Then, we had Adriana, the painfully neutral and carefully ambi-racial stock-model-from-everywhere whose face became so synonymous with HealthCare.gov’s hilarious launch that she had to be replaced with a graphic plugging an 800 number.

"Julia" was a series of silhouettes used as a graphic element, and only creepy if you come from a primitive culture which has no experience of representational art. As for Adriana -- I never knew her name before, but am not surprised Cooke did; apparently enough wingnuts had Special Feelings for her that the poor model had to flee for her life -- I can see why Cooke was pained by her "carefully ambi-racial" features; he probably hears the tyrant Obama crying THIS IS YOUR FUTURE every time her pulls her picture out from under his pillow.

And now, courtesy of Organizing for Action, we have Pajama Boy, a metrosexual hipster in a plaid onesie who wants you to spend your precious Christmas days talking to him about the president’s vision for health insurance. 

Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot. That is to say, Pajama Boy is staying over — priggish facial expression and all — and he won’t leave until you’ve relented.

This soft-invasion fantasy is no more than you'd expect from the folks who gave you "shoving it down our throats." Indeed, the queerfear is palpable -- Cooke says this advertising model, or something he represents, brings to mind a "Queer Students Assocation," and would go for "a 'dialogue' about the evils of 'heteronormativity.'" Cooke also marks the model as a "vaguely androgynous, student-glasses-wearing, Williamsburg hipster," which means maybe he only looks gay, which is still bad enough. Also, "part Chris Hayes, part Rachel Maddow, part Lena Dunham," etc.

Cooke does not threaten to beat the model's homo ass, for he is an internet, rather than a real, tough guy, so instead he expresses satisfaction that "Twitter rather predictably exploded with derision," and that others information workers of his political persuasion endorse his sentiments (Cooke's work is one of the few places where you will read "of 'Iowahawk' fame" and know it is meant seriously). His final movement is essentially a luxuriation in the difficulties of Obamacare -- you know the style from countless wingnut thesaurus-reading contests exulting over the "train wreck," "debacle," "smoldering ruin," etc.-- except Cooke's signifiers tend toward this: "All the women were sluts; all the men were idiots; all the girls were playing extremely violent sports."

He does stick in stuff about Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh and his preference for "adults' clothes," though, so you'll know he, unlike his various real and imaginary nemeses, is a serious adult.

This is where the Obamacare argument is right now. No one really expects it to go away; it will either get better or it won't. Cooke and his crew hope for the latter, indeed are actively working on preventing it from getting better, which is why most of their essays on the subject are just concatenations of slurs -- they don't have anything else, certainly not a health care solution other than the traditional Pay or Die. They don't have anything to explain or defend, and so can expend such creativity as they have on polishing their act. Which wouldn't be so bad if they had a better one.

BRING BACK THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS.

I thought Trump was merely whining when he predicted last night's debate would be "very unfair." I should have known something was up when Mollie Hemingway pre-propagandized the debate with a lengthy hit on the liberalmedia credentials of CNBC moderator John Harwood.  Sure enough, when the event transpired the candidates were bitching about the liberalmedia not only after but during the debate. Talk about message discipline!

Conservatives gushed about it afterwards; "WHO HAD THE BEST ANTI-MEDIA SLAM OF THE DEBATE?" reads Newsbusters' Tiger Beat-style header over videos of the GOP's Bad Boys denouncing the liberalmedia. (For some reason they didn't include Ben Carson getting the crowd to boo when he was asked about the shady pyramid schemers Mannatech, which he insists he didn't work for despite documentary evidence including video. Truth is no defense when the charge is media bias.)

The punch line is, there will be plenty of other GOP debates this year (327, I think at last count) on networks that regularly wind up on Accuracy in Media's shitlist. Republicans will not boycott these events, nor redirect them to ideologically simpatico outlets like PJTV, because they're hoping someone besides the Foxbound will see them. But now that the precedent's been set, any GOP candidate can derail any line of questioning in any debate by crying bias -- and, given the nets' learned helplessness on this subject, they won't do anything about it. In fact, some of them may sweeten the deal by withdrawing their regular moderators and having actors dressed as rightwing boogeymen come up and take a punch -- for example, have Steven Crowder reprise his Lena Dunham bit (WARNING: VIDEO) and ask in a simpering voice, "Why won't you awful Republicans let me kill my baby?" Then, boy, the totally-unscripted zingers that would ensue!

The nets should give these shitheels the same treatment Sam Spade gave Joel Cairo and advise them to take it and like it. Failing that, they should bring back the League of Women Voters to run these things. Those ladies were tough enough to say no when necessary and might be able to turn this weak shit around.

UPDATE. It's happening already:

Republican presidential front-runner Ben Carson told reporters Thursday that he was reaching out to every rival campaign to lobby for changes to future debate formats.

“Debates are supposed to be established to help the people get to know the candidate,” Carson said at a news conference before a speech at Colorado Christian University. “What it’s turned into is — gotcha! That’s silly. That’s not helpful to anybody.”

MODERATOR: The first question is yours, Senator Paul. What's your favorite Reagan saying?

RAND PAUL: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

MODERATOR: I think it was actually Admiral Farragut who said that, Senator.

RAND PAUL: You people are always doing this, I claim media bias.

OTHER CANDIDATES: You tell 'em, Randy! Yeah, damned MSM! Look at me, I'm crazy! etc.

MODERATOR: I'm so sorry, Senator, you now get five minutes for zingers.

RAND PAUL: Boy, that Hillary Clinton, what a bitch, huh?

REINCE PRIEBUS, in control booth: Now we're getting somewhere!

NICE PANTS NERD. The election's tight, so the racket is to yell "we're winning" in a loud voice till the votes are counted. (And if you have a little lung power left over, bitch about the liberal media.) We that have free souls, it touches us not, and we take our pleasures where we can. I'm enjoying the brethren's reaction to Obama's Rolling Stone interview -- especially the Ayn Rand bit:

[Obama:] Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a "you're on your own" society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

Yeah, you can guess. Let's start with Katrina Trinko, National Review's current delegate from the Youth of Today:

Sure, there’s a few libertarians who would love to abolish the safety net and slash government programs. But that’s not the party platform, or what Romney is setting out to do. Not to mention that plenty of conservatives would rather establish a safety net more concentrated, not in individuals’, but in other types of community: church, clubs, extended family.

You know, like in the Middle Ages.

What if Obama had faced Ron Paul or Rick Santorum? If this is your rhetoric against Mitt Romney, what the heck do you have left for those who hold positions even further right?

AKA the "hey, you should see the nutjobs we wanted to nominate" argument.

One last question: isn’t this an extraordinarily lame cover outfit/pose for the cover? 

For perspective, this appears on the same page as Kathryn J. Lopez telling Lena Dunham Republicans aren't "super uncool," she's super uncool, infinity. Man. They all still dream of being backup posers in a heavy-rotation video starring Alex P. Keaton and Der Ahnold, don't they?

Of course at libertarian stroke book Reason Brian Doherty is furious adjusting his spectacles:

Obama Thinks Ayn Rand is For Teens (For Predictably Childish Reasons)

Correction --  furious adjusting his spectacles with one hand, furiously retucking his shirt with the other.

There is nothing "narrow" about Rand's vision except in that it created moral boundaries in which most of the functions of Obama's government would be seen as illegitimate, because they use threats and violence against non-aggressors to achieve social goals.

New to America, are you, Brian?

Nathaniel Branden, Rand's ideological lieutenant in the 1960s, sums up well the problem with most people trying to blithely critique Rand as Obama does. It can be found quoted on page 542 of my book Radicals for Capitalism...

Page 542! So that's why I never saw anyone reading it on the beach this summer.

Hilarious as this is, it's not a patch on what the non-heavily-Koch-funded libertarians are dishing.  The Objective Standard argues with Obama's interpretation:

Rand utterly rejected the notion that one should live an isolated life. She recognized that a crucial way we “develop ourselves” and pursue our rational self-interest is by building strong relationships with other people, whether in business, friendship, romance, or any other kind of life-serving relationship. Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don't it? It's like the Garden of Eden, except that Adam, having rationally decided that the weakling Eve is just slowing him down, kills her, wears her skin for warmth, and then demands that God produce another, worthier partner for him because this is what the genius of the marketplace demands, whereupon God decides the whole thing was a horrible mistake and obliterates the universe. Ah, what might have been.

But listen, it's not all deep analysis. Look at what I found at Objectivism for Intellectuals:

Just because they stim instead of laughing doesn't mean they don't have a sense of humor.

THEY'LL DO IT EVERY TIME. I enjoyed Tbogg's roundup of conservatives enraged at Lena Dunham's ad (and was surprised to see that, even after eight weeks of strangling a sex doll with Elizabeth Warren's picture taped to its head, Professor Jacobson had enough jam left to contribute). But it was missing a crucial element -- the element of overt Ooga Booga -- which RedState has been kind enough to provide:

There seems to be no low to which President Obama will sink in his desperate attempt to win reelection. One has to wonder, is there any point at which the main stream media and the public get some self-respect and toss out this loser? First he asked for your wedding gifts, then your yard sales and now he has asked for your daughters.

One pictures the brethren holed up in a shack under assault by the forces of Barack Obama, ready to dash out the brains of Lillian Gish ere she be breached.

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:

All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?

Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

POST-TRAUMATIC ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME.

At The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord has one called "Jihad Blows Up the Liberal Utopia" and as you may have guessed, it reflects the growing rightwing consensus on Boston, which appears to boil down to Since you fuckers won't listen to us on any other topic, let us win you back with Terror! 

But as we saw in my recent Voice column, these guys also appear to have lost the self-discipline required to focus exclusively on the war-drum -- as one imagines they would if they were really serious about it -- without breaking into a tom-roll of talking points unrelated to the subject. It's like they want to go back to the Bush Years (now under new management and rehabilitation -- watch this space!), and they want to go now -- so rather than wait for Terror to soften the sheeple's minds, they just yell "Boo!" and then start yelling about deficit spending.

So after starting on-topic with "The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder" (I didn't say reasonably, I said on-topic), Lord veers, telling us the jihad has also blown up the Liberal Utopia of Social Security, Medicare, War on Poverty, etc.

He reaches what I would say is the nadir here, on the subjects of gun control and the apparent successor to Lena Dunham as the right's favorite female hate-object, Gabby Giffords:

Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences. 

Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor?

In case you're wondering if you imagined it: yes, he did just ask why a woman who was shot in the head is more interested in gun control than abortion.

If their movement ever acquires a leader, I suggest for starters he or she should pass out some Ritalin.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the firing of Bill O'Reilly and the end of Lena Dunham's Girls and the strange secret they share!

I refer glancingly in the column to two of our favorite terrible writers, who join a few others in running away from the now-toxic O'Reilly as fast as possible. “I have lots of conservative friends in my age cohort who complain about the effect heavy Fox watching has on their parents,” says Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. “The general complaint is that their folks have become a lot more opinionated about political issues, and a lot angrier and more bombastic.” You can see how this puts them out of phase with a conservative movement whose most successful proponent is President Donald Trump. (Dreher adds, "If I had cable TV I would definitely watch Tucker Carlson’s show, because he’s fresh and unpredictable." Yeah, that's some Next-Gen shit right there.)

And at National Review David French laments that O’Reilly was steeped in “a toxic culture of conservative celebrity, where the public elevated personalities more because of their pugnaciousness than anything else,” leading to “a loss of integrity and, crucially, a loss of emphasis on ideas and, more important, ideals” — which, near as I can figure it, means that O'Reilly is no true conservative because true conservatives don’t act like that.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.

Sad news from Culture Warsyltucky:

As of January 1, 2018, Acculturated.com is no longer publishing new content. Our archives will remain available. 

Thank you to all of our readers, who inspired us to think about the many ways pop culture matters.

I still remember back in 2012 when, seemingly spurred by Ole Perfesser Instapundit's call for rightwing ladymags (but funded by Lord knows who), this outpost began tossing (but gently! And underhand, like a lady!) little Kultur bombs like this one about how feminism is alright but Downton Abbey showed you how the old-fashioned idea of womanhood was in many ways better, particularly if you were rich: "One side of me envies the women of Downton ever so slightly," thrilled Ashley E. McGuire. "Envies the thought of my husband referring to me as 'her ladyship.'" (I can't help but think of some slobby guy in a soiled t-shirt yelling from the kitchen, "Yer meatball sub is ready, yer ladyship!")

For five years, Acculturated gave us this and more; here are my few clips from their era which may be the only memorial some of their great works will ever have -- were it not for me, who would remember McGuire's "Is Ivanka Trump America's Kate Middleton?" or that ideas like "Drugs are ruining EDM" or pseudo-academic thumb-suckers like "'Fuller House' and the Disappearance of Marriage" were once entertained by presumably straight-faced editors before being released upon an apathetic public.

Acculturated also gave an outlet for Mark "Gauvreau" Judge, a Kulturkampfer with a long history in the movement that includes a 90s attempt to spread conservatism though swing dancing ("in the revival of swing dancing, [Judge] detects a model for cultural renewal," blurbed his publisher); without Acculturated, we may have missed such late Judgean gems as

When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.”

I confess, I worry for Judge; in our low, mean, Breitbartian time, what conservative publisher will accommodate his daintily daffy style? I worry less for the many, often three-named junior misses who filled many of Acculturated's pages; consider, for example, McGuire's resume:

She has appeared on CNN, CNN International, CBS News, Fox News, PBS, The History Channel, HuffPo Live, ABC/Yahoo News Live, EWTN, and the BBC, and her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, and the Huffington Post, among others...

Like many a pundit maudit before me, I have a soft spot for lunatics and whackadoodles, and Acculturated's Bizarro analyses often came close to appealing to that part of my nature. But that was always spoiled by my awareness that when all was said and done, Acculturated was just a wingnut welfare warm-up studio, and instead of clawing their way out of incompetence or, like Ed Wood, apotheosizing it, these writers were just going to get kicked upstairs and given tighter briefs ("Nice idea about 'Fuller House,' honey, but howsa 'bout you dumb it down for National Review into something like, 'Why Lena Dunham Is a Whore'?"), and over time whatever mad effulgence they had would cool and harden into careerism, and they would still be shitty writers. Well, there are plenty of real mad geniuses out there to fuss over.

UPDATE. Comments are a gas, by which I mean part of the toxic miasma that has poisoned Western Civilization and which Acculturated sought in vain to dispel -- but funny! BigHank53 offers a clue as to why the site's doilies-and-dogma anti-feminism became unneeded in the modern conservative paradigm: "Today, of course, everyone has realized you can just walk up to those same women and grab 'em by the pussy." Pere Ubu remembers, apparently, and obliquely refers to one of the racier wingnut-ladymag articles I've covered, posted at The Federalist because (presumably) it was too hot for Acculturated: "6 Reasons to Sext Your Husband" -- which, despite the impression its title may leave, was meant to get the wife of said husband to sext him, not as a taunt; nonetheless it did contain the deathless phrase, "skin bus to Tuna Town." Top that, Peggy Noonan!

Oh, and I found us all a treat -- the Acculturated Pinterest Page! Sample:

Back in the early 60s nobody got depressed or syphilis because they had cocktails, sexism, and Jesus; also, if you get a high-and-tight you can tell the "cool chicks" you joined the Marines. Sigh, it was fun while it lasted, guys...

SISSY FUSS; SHRUG.

Some people are dealing with the age of BlackLivesMatter worse than others. At City Journal, which usually disparages cities only insofar as they allow black people to walk around free, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson of the Mexican-Stolen Chainsaw is allowed to disparage cities in toto because they are filled with sissy liberals, whereas the country, where he lives part-time, is filled with chesty men of noble purpose:

Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.

That's how Jonah Goldberg got so conservative -- harvesting Cheetos in the noonday sun! Hanson seems to hope his message will spread far and wide and reverse a trend, which he notes with alarm, of Americans moving away from red-state garden spots like Fritters, Alabama and into the debauched Democratic cities. But, as Steve Allen altered the old song years ago, how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm? And Hanson doesn't have a lot of tools for the job, alas (perhaps because they were stolen by Mexicans): he is dependent as usual on hoary wingnut tropes, in this case Sandra Fluke, The Life of Julia, and even that most risible of reactionary tropes Pajama Boy to get his story across:

Pajama Boy’s smirk and his message of arrested development and dependence, even if a con, offered a damning portrayal of what millions of urbanites now see as cool: getting up late, staying undressed, and sipping childhood drinks. America’s Marlboro Man he wasn’t.

No childhood drinks for VDH! And apparently no socialistic public water service either -- only pure well water replenishes his precious bodily fluids: "At my house, I worry constantly about whether the well will go dry," he tells us. "I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 PM, I go to the door armed." Guess Mexicans must be after his water, too.

One wonders why he spends half his time in the urban wastelands at all  -- perhaps, like many of the sissies he disparages, for the money? Or maybe it's a psychological issue. Attend this plaintive passage:

Half the week, when I live in downtown Palo Alto, I have no idea who else lives in the high-rise apartments—and no interest in finding out. I could be a felon or a saint and no one on the street knows or cares. That the rest of the time I live in the same house on the same farm where my great-great-grandparents lived is of no interest. I could dye my hair green and pierce my nose and the reaction would be “so what”—not “Old Victor Hanson out there on Mountain View Avenue finally went crazy.”

You can imagine Hanson walking the streets of Palo Alto, the heedless sea of humanity coursing around him, and thinking, "I could dye my hair green, pierce my nose -- no one would say a word!" Who knows what else he could do! That saloon he just passed is full of harlots, with only liberal sissies to keep them company. And in the alley, bums who would not be missed if they wound up in the river. If he can just get to the lamppost and back without succumbing...

Hanson also has one up at National Review inspired by that study of white working-class people in trouble. Of course he blames the "'hands up, don’t shoot,' Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set," and takes care to let us know that black people get all the breaks:

As a professor at California State University, Fresno, over some 21 years, I had hundreds of conversations with working-class white kids from Merced to Bakersfield, who had stellar academic records in the humanities and who wished to go to top law schools or Ph.D. programs. I ended up offering them roughly the following caveat: “I’m afraid the chances of you as a white male from Fresno State being admitted to a top program are almost nil.” I was being neither alarmist nor nihilist, but simply reflecting the experience of my own lobbying efforts for brilliant students to gain admittance to top-ranked graduate programs.

Which is why university faculties and corporate boardrooms are chock-full of black people, while whitey must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Unless he has a sweet half-the-week-in-the-city gig.

ASS MAN.

Professional scold Rod Dreher is on a tear. Here's one called "The Myth of Islamophobia":

The truth is that [journalists] loathe ordinary unenlightened people more than they fear jihadists. There is always this great unwashed mob of right-wing lunatics just looking for an excuse to carry out pogroms against Muslims in the wake of Islamic terrorism. The fact that these Muslim-bashing episodes are always just that — episodic, I mean — never seems to change their minds.

Come on, Muhammad, it doesn't happen that often! Jeez, you guys are as bad as the blacks.

Remember the fear in the media prior to the release of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie — that the film would set off anti-Jewish pogroms around the country? Didn’t happen, did they? The concern within media circles was real; I remember it well. And yet, it was absurd. I knew that at the time, as did just about every Christian.

See, anti-Semitism is bullshit, too. Except in France, and whenever it's convenient to say so.

But this one's the jewel. Dreher starts out about how France suffers religious maniacs like the Hebdo assassins because it doesn't respect the authority of organized religion of the right kind anymore. Then:

I thought about that this weekend when I saw a photo of a blasphemously anti-Christian cover that Charlie Hebdo once published (it depicts the Holy Trinity having three-way anal sex). It would not occur to me that anyone should lay a hand on the Charlie Hebdo artists or editors who produced that filth...

But...

Yeah, you knew there'd be a but (and its homophone! Keep reading!):

...But the decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press.

Why a greater threat? Because it belittles religions other than the One True? Ha ha, kidding! On and on about the horrible atheists and various Dissolutions of the Monasteries -- "This is what the party of Charlie Hebdo has done to France since 1789: murdered its Christian soul, and called it progress" -- until Dreher's agon reaches, or rather suddenly collides with, its logical conclusion:

Scrolling my Facebook feed last night, I found this New York magazine feature about the season premiere of HBO’s Girls, which featured a scene in which a man performs oral sex on his girlfriend’s anus. It turns out that this is a thing in pop culture now.

"In pop culture"? Please, nobody tell him. Also, Dreher has "an Orthodox Christian friend" who feels the exact same way about things: "He talks about how his parish is pretty faithful," says Dreher, "but so many of the kids raised in it still get sucked in and away from their faith by the culture of Lena Dunham, of Charlie Hebdo, and the rest." Sucked away! Christianity is licked! These two should do a podcast while Wachet Auf plays in the background, or vice-versa.

In the end, all the stupid atheists join ISIS and Rod is ascended into heaven in divine recognition of his faithful mopes. Four stars! (h/t Will Menaker)

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:

Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).

The very next goddamn sentence:

But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.

This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:

I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 

lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 

Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 

(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)

Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done. 

DNC DAY TWO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT YOU REALLY NEED IS TO MEET A NICE GUY. LIKE SCOTT WALKER!

At National Review, Mary Eberstadt denounces "jailhouse feminism" -- that is, feminism acting all mad and pushy, you know, like guys. Her examples include Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham NO DON'T RUN AWAY YET this is actually funny. Eberstadt starts with the feminist reclamation of  the world "slut," which inspires this Rotary-Club-dais-joke-slash-non-sequitur:

Of course this approach takes for granted the sexual revolution’s first commandment, which is that any such act ever committed by any woman is by definition beyond reproach.

Hm, I don't remember that one. Ladies, when did that go into effect? And when was it repealed?

...Even so, something deeper is at work here than ideological tussling over a word that no halfway-civilized person would use anyway. The promiscuous slinging of “slut” is only the beginning of the obscenity- and profanity-saturated woman-talk these days, from otherwise obscurantist academic feminism on down to popular magazines and blogs.

Previously the word was only used by fathers toward their daughters if they didn't like how they were dressed,  by accused rapists' lawyers in court, etc. But now ladies (even the obscurantist ones) are using it, and also "the b-word," which is grounds for concern.

The interesting question is why. A cynic might say it’s just smart branding. After all, sex sells; women talking about sex sells; and even women talking about women talking about sex sells, too. Everyone knows that slapping a salacious word into a title will pull more eyeballs to the screen or page. Maybe it’s time the objects of exploitation got some of their own back. Why shouldn’t enterprising modern women perform some commercial jujitsu exploitation, via the promiscuous use of “slut” and other rough talk, to sell their stuff? A play called “The Private-Parts Monologues” would have folded on opening night

Same thing with Slutwalk. You think it's about preventing rapes, but these women are actually just trying to make a fast buck by working blue!

But there's something deeper going on behind this, says Eberstadt:

All of which leads, finally, to a sad and monumental fact. Beneath the swagger and snarl of jailhouse feminism is something pathetic: a search for attention (including, obviously, male attention) on any terms at all.

[Blink. Blink.]

If that means being trussed up like a turkey, so be it. If loping about on TV in your birthday suit does the trick, so be that, too. And if getting smacked around from time to time...

Whoa, some segue!

...is part of the package — if violence is what it takes to keep an interested fellow in the room — that is a price that some desperate women today will pay.

See? Feminism caused Fifty Shades of Grey, twerking, and assault -- or rather, feminism happened to be standing around when a culture cop needed to make a collar on thousands of years of abusive behavior and attitudes toward women, and so why not pick her up? It's not like they haven't pinned lots of men's crimes on feminism before.

There's more -- endlessly more -- but I'll just leave you with some key words and phrases: "ethos of recreational sex," "decline of the family," "draconian speech codes on campuses," "the defunct Pussycat Dolls," "Amanda Marcotte," "Jessica Valenti," etc. (Maybe I should have put these up top -- but then you never would have read past them, and I would have been lonely. Now we suffer together!)

Oh OK, one more pull-quote:

The result is that many, many women have been left vulnerable and frustrated. That’s why a furious, swaggering, foul-mouthed ideology continues to exert its pull. Jailhouse feminism promises women protection.

Like butch dykes in those women's-prison movies! See, we told you this would happen if you started wearing pants.