FOREVER CLENIS. Bill Clinton makes a ton of money and some of it goes to charity. But he lives in high style and has some sleazy friends. And a lot of people think he's been screwing around, maybe even with Gina Gershon and Eleanor Mondale, though none of these people have any evidence to offer Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair, nor will they go on the record.

Well, that's close enough for blog and roll. Right Pundits says, "I have to say that these women are much more attractive than the women that have acknowledged having had …. relations …. with him. There may be a reason for that, but I won’t go there." At NRO Jim Geraghty says, "I guess if you have dirt on the Clintons, you might as well use it now. No point in otherwise giving juicy details on the marriage of the junior senator from New York." Dirt and juice ensues. "He's always been this way," says Rightwing Sparkle, speaking of Clinton's "sociopathic behavior." "Vanity Fair used to worship BJ the same way it now worships Nobama. Socialism is the opiate of the mass media - which makes it a religious experience for them - and BJ is the worst of all heretics," says Bill Quick. (No, I have no idea, either.)

If you like it highbrow, Ross Douthat of the Atlantic points to his own previous circulation of Clenis rumors, tells us "if you'd asked me nine months ago to list the major roadblocks to Hillary's near-inevitable nomination, I would have put her husband's possible tomcatting right up there with her Iraq War vote," and does not scruple to "suggest a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media."

With the Hillary Clinton campaign winding down, you may think these guys are just welcoming a ripe opportunity for one last shot at their ancient enemy. But they will never, ever get over the Clenis. He'll always be the One That Got Away, and their blogs will always reserve a little corner for RPG do-overs of the impeachment.

I hope Bill gets all the pussy, props, and provender he is owed by a grateful nation. I only find in him one fault: that he retains his old habit of using too many words in self-defense. Maybe, when some new version of this story runs many years hence (FIRST SENIOR: WHO IS CLINTON'S NEW "NURSE"?), he'll have learned to leave it at "Kiss my rich, two-term ass."

COLOR BLIND.

A couple more black people just got shot by cops for what appears to be no good reason, so it's time for conservatives to trot out their usual weak-ass offers of conditional solidarity only so long as nobody mentions the R word in which case everything's off. At National Review Charles C. W. Cooke:

The officer could have been squarely in the wrong, and that would not necessarily render the incident “racist.”

In the same locale, Jim Geraghty:

But for some reason, some will point to this and say, “ah-ha, more evidence that cops are racist and murder with impunity!”

At The Federalist, Rachel Lu really strains to get the dopes who visit her site to accept that maybe not every person of color shot by the police has it coming, starting with the title, "You Don’t Have To Be Black Lives Matter To Support Police Accountability." Well, that's a relief! In 2,000 words, she mentions racism exactly once:

We understand how easily cops can become scapegoats for progressive liberals with an agenda. They deal daily with the grim effects of social breakdown, and when those confrontations take a tragic turn, liberals would much rather blame the “racist” police than acknowledge the bitter fruits of the sexual revolution and the welfare state.

So many innocent people of indeterminate race gunned down, and it's all because of LBJ and Hugh Hefner. Well, I trust we've learned a valuable lesson here; question, if you must and very gently, the police, but never question how good we are to You People.

NO RACIST, NO RACIST, YOU'RE THE REAL RACIST!

How far has National Review come since its days as an explicitly segregationist magazine? Well, they have no fewer than three columns on Starbucks' admirable decision to hold a day of diversity training in response to a well-publicized racist incident in one of its stores. Want to guess how they feel about it? Here's David French:

There is near-universal consensus that the Starbucks employee’s actions were racially motivated. Starbucks apparently agrees, and given that the company knows more about its employees than I do, I’m not going to question its conclusion.

Sounds pretty sulky, doesn't he? Can't blame him -- everyone's bought into this racism-exists madness, even the big corporation -- and they're supposed to be on his side! French is pissed that Starbucks is "forcing more than 175,000 employees to undergo 'racial bias' training" (yeah, I bet those baristas are real upset they have to sit on their ass and get trained for a day) but especially that their training will address "so-called unconscious bias," which French calls "Orwellian junk science." Imagine -- thinking people might be prejudiced without even knowing it! Next you'll be telling him about all that stuff the eggheads say we do without knowing about it, like Freudian shits.

Starbucks is a private company and as such it has a right to make this mistake. It can shutter its stores for a day and re-educate its employees. But to the extent it’s teaching them about unconscious bias, it’s teaching nonsense, and when it comes to the fraught issue of American race relations, nonsense always inflicts a measure of harm.

French doesn't explain, but from his previous writings I guess he means if you try to make people less racist, they just naturally get more bigoted and vote for Trump, so you see it's really your fault for hassling them, you Orwellian junk scientists.

Let's see what NR's Kyle Smith has to say:

At a glance, what happened at that Philadelphia coffee shop last Thursday looks like racism. But there’s little context. Does the manager also routinely call the police on white people who loiter in the shop? If a white manager called the police on two white guys hanging around a coffee shop, it wouldn’t make the news, much less become a national obsession.

This guys are really suspicious about the incident that everyone involved agrees happened. Maybe Starbucks and the liberals are in cahoots to make people think racism exists!

The incident is making people unhinged. When the “racism” circuits in our brain get activated, we stop thinking clearly. We go out looking for someone to chastise, and one low-level staffer isn’t enough. We want a larger target suited to the strength of the frenzy. It affects our judgment the way being drunk does. This is your brain. This is your brain on race.

And you sheeple thought racism was bad! Nothing's as bad as anti-racism, except maybe drinking.

Now, Jim Geraghty:

I suspect you can trace the country’s unexpected path to this mindset on racial controversies by following the twists and turns in the career of Al Sharpton.

Shorter version: This Starbucks thing reminds me of some famous black guy I don't like.

Not content with this trifecta, National Review has chosen also to run this:

Enoch Powell’s Immigration Speech, 50 Years Later

I shit you not -- they do indeed mean the "Rivers of Blood" speech, which I believe was last celebrated in NR's pages by John Derbyshire, not long thereafter defenestrated for Making It Too Obvious. If you're guessing this new review is less obvious but highly sympathetic, collect your prize at the door. There are some mealy-mouthed qualifiers, but nothing the typical NR reader can't see through -- when author Douglas Murray says "some portions of [the speech] cannot but induce an intake of breath and a considerable wince or gulp" -- referring to the more overtly ooga-booga passages about "pickaninnies" and so forth -- you know conservatives for whom "politically incorrect" is the highest possible accolade will take it as a recommendation (and so, I assume, does Murray). And anyway, says Murray, none of these PC drags talk about the good parts -- why, "some of the questions [Powell] addressed are questions that understandably gnaw away at us still" -- f'rinstance:

...some of the issues he raised — however well or poorly — remain so pregnant. 

As I wrote in my latest book, imagine you had been a speechwriter for Enoch Powell in 1968, or an adviser or friend. And imagine if you had said to him then, “I have an idea, Enoch. Why not use your speech to say that if immigration into the U.K. goes on at these rates, then in 2011 the official census will reveal that people who identify as ‘white British’ will be a minority in their capital city of London.” Had this been said, Powell would most likely have dismissed the person as an inflammatory madman. Yet that was indeed one of the things that the 2011 census showed. And the news came and went as though it was just another detail on just another day.

London's full of sooties and wogs; the man was a prophet! Ahem, I mean "questions remain."

Welp, looks like National Review's capitulation to Trumpism and its corollary -- that conservatives can be elected with zero support from black people, so why even bother -- is complete. But then, they never really had that far to go.

I KNOW WHO LET'S BLAME!

Shorter Jim Geraghty, National Review: It's 2014 and race is still a problem in America. This is clearly the fault of the black guy in the White House.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson on America's recent wave of police-and-race demonstrations, which he seems to think have more to do with Michael Brown than with Eric Garner -- well, it's all the same to Hanson; that Trayvon Martin was a thug, too, and anyway what the protesters really want is a lawless Negrocracy in which cops cower before the dusky hordes:

Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs...

Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted?

You white liberals will be sorry when the oogaboogas steal your latte money! Beyond this Afro-6 vision, there's the usual black-on-black-blahblah ("That 5,000 to 6,000 African-Americans are murdered each year, the vast majority by other blacks... is not so important as the single death of Michael Brown"), and how come there's no riots when black people (who are not cops) kill white people, etc. Also, Hanson invokes Al Sharpton three times; maybe he thinks it's like Beetlejuice and it'll free him from this mixed-race netherworld before they remake Clash of the Titans with Morgan Freeman and spoil all hope of escape.

THEY EAT THEIR OWN.

Byron York knows which way the wind blows. While assuring us that "I worked for National Review from 2001 to 2009 and know, like and respect many of the people involved in this matter," he nevertheless doubts his old buddies are qualified to moderate the National Review GOP debate (formerly known as the Telemundo/NBC/National Review GOP debate, before the Republican candidates went on the warpath against the Lame Stream Media and made Reince Priebus kick 'em out). Why not? Because National Review writers have been mean to the Republican front-runner, and might ask him impertinent questions -- just like those bastards from CNBC!

Trump is of course not the only candidate NR writers have criticized; just ask Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and others. But it's fair to say Trump is a special case, and he has been on the receiving end of unusually strong invective from NR. 

Lowry says that won't be a problem come debate time. "We obviously have strong opinions and don't hide them, but that won't keep us from being tough but fair with everyone," he told me in an email exchange.

That's what they all say, Mr. Media Bias.

The underlying problem here is that some of the networks have leaned so far left in the past that the RNC felt the need to insist on including someone who "speaks conservative" among the debate panelists. But some of the best conservative speakers are prominent figures at opinion publications who are 1) appalled by Trump, and 2) unconstrained from expressing their feelings about him. That makes for a lively public conversation, but is it a good idea for a presidential debate?

This is even more delicious than NR's Jim Geraghty having to explain to readers that noticing Ben Carson was running a supplement scam and lying about it isn't the same thing as working for the enemy. As I've said before, in these guys' world truth is no defense against accusations of media bias.  I'm not sure the Trump juggernaut can endure long enough to panic some of them into a Strange New Respect for Il Douche, but it would almost be worth a Trump Administration to see it. I mean, the country's fucked anyway, right?

NERDS. Jim Geraghty wants to know why "lefty bloggers" are not attacking the Motion Picture Academy for failing to give Fahrenheit 911 an Oscar nomination. "I just find it interesting that web personalities who one would think would be big Michael Moore fans are collectively shrugging their shoulders over this," he says. The Ole Perfesser indeeds, and Roger Simon takes the idiocy to breathtaking levels by suggesting that Million Dollar Baby, Sideways et alia got the top slots instead because "Most people in Hollywood now see, although maybe they won't admit it, that democracy in Iraq is extremely important."

Others have offered reason-based responses, but let me just add that only nerds with wads of toilet tissue in their underwear think the universe ebbs and flows according to their political tastes.

Jesus Christ. Imagine needing the comfort of popular approbation so badly that you would voluntarily comb through movie award nominations in search of comforting zeitgeist pellets! Yet these guys do it all the time. They sit around figuring out which movies are conservative. Hell, they'll even tell you what sorts of paintings and unread-gift-books are conservatively correct.

As their mania accelerates, I expect they will start identifying conservative desklamps, picture-frames, hubcaps, and brands of dental floss. Maybe they should start a tab at National Review Online called "What's Right, What's Blight!" I will offer the first squib:

TALL COFFEE CUP LIDS VS. FLAT COFFEE CUP LIDS: Time was, sober, utilitarian flatties dominated the conservative crowd's coffee cups. But since Rod Dreher boldly busted out the cup-crown for his morning soy lattes, righteous righties 'get' that these hubristic waves of plastic cresting their java perfectly match our Administration's national-greatness rhetoric. So skim those tired toppers right onto the ashheap of history, and re-educate your coffee cart guy to start stocking America's Coffee Cup Lid!

UPDATE. James Wolcott has mo' and, as usual, better.

THE BLAME GAME BECOMES THE NAME GAME.

I have opened up the latest Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue, with lyrics from the new Battle Hymn of the Republic, to be sung by the people protesting for their right to spread coronavirus in defiance of the fascist heath inspectors.

Conservatives will do anything to deflect the whole thing onto their traditional enemies. You all know that Trump has been trying hard to shift attention from his disastrous mishandling of coronavirus by blaming China and calling COVID-19 the "China virus" (which is so gross his own CDC director condemned it).

In this Trump has plenty of help from the usual suspects. Josh Hawley role model Tom Cotton has been weaving conspiracy theories about Chinese germ warfare and Jim Geraghty, who was probably sad his junior high career fair didn't have a "propagandist" track, does the Just Asking Questions bit at National Review:

A few people sometimes ask whether it really matters whether this virus originated from someone being less careful than they needed to be with a bat in a laboratory or biological material from the bats. I assume these are good faith questions, and not some sort of effort to preserve the good name of the Chinese government.

LOL fuck you buddy.

...But if we want to ensure nothing like this happens again, we need to know how this virus first got into humans.

The irony is that every possible transmission path paints the Chinese government as incredibly reckless and unconcerned about the risk to human life. 

If it originated from a person eating bat or pangolin at a wet market, then we need to take steps to ensure that bat and pangolin consumption and trade stops everywhere in the world.

See, he's just being thorough.

...The Chinese government is incredibly reckless and unconcerned about the risk to human life because they keep the wet markets open. Put another way, right now in your community, you’ve got to stand in line six feet apart to get into your local supermarket, but Beijing won’t even shut down the exotic animal butchers.

I assume the next wave of nutcakes hollering outside state capitols will be carrying signs denouncing wet markets, illustrated with drawings of slanty-eyed pangolins wearing Red Army hats.

Speaking of the ChiComs, nomenclature is an important part of the propaganda. The Epoch Times -- a worthy successor to the Washington (Moonie) Times as America's #1 fucked-up far-East wingnut disinfo disseminator -- actually has a house style (not even kidding, go read their stories and see, though I warn you they'll harvest your email) requiring it be called "the CCP virus" or "the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus." And you'll see cagey locutions at places like Ben Shapiro's Daily Signal ("As the world continues to battle the terrible COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan, China...")

But as longtime readers know, the mainstream media outlets that like to class up the ravings of their rightwing pals will always be a bit smoother. At the Washington Post Josh Rogin tells us that Trump saying Chinese virus "is simplistic but technically accurate" but nonetheless he's willing to accommodate you snowflakes. "Accuracy is not the only consideration the president should take into account," Rogin says, and some people might get the wrong idea, so he has a workaround:

Let’s stop saying “Chinese virus” — not because everyone who uses it is racist, but because it needlessly plays into the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our attention from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the “CCP virus.” That’s more accurate and offends only those who deserve it..

Rolls right off the tongue, don't it? Definitely using a neologism that has not filtered up through common usage, but has rather been cooked up in a lab by propagandists, will not seem awkward -- and it's an easy way to show patriotism in a time of crisis -- you know, like freedom fries!

(Oh, and of course stage 2 is a Beijing Biden drive -- which has alliteration going for it, I'll grant, though given all the love Trump's shown the Chinese dictator, only his most brain-damaged troops will take it up.)

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about conservatives convinced a "coup" against Trump is happening, and how that has less to do with any evidence thereof than with the black swan event of Republicans losing a Senate election in freaking Alabama (thanks to their increasingly obvious prion disease) and the panic it has sparked among the brethren.

One good thing about the whole get-Mueller movement is that maybe the dimmer bulbs will finally abandon the comforting fantasy of anti-Trump conservatism. At National Review -- onetime NeverTrump HQ, you'll recall! -- we currently have Jim Geraghty laying the groundwork, in his usual smarmy way,  for Mueller's ouster; that a new investigator (probably a former Trump hotel pool boy) "would be able to continue Mueller’s work without the perception of partisan bias," he claims, is an argument Trump can win "in the court of public opinion" (in which court he currently enjoys record-low approval ratings). Also at NRO, Charles C.W. Cooke devotes a column to blasting Jennifer Rubin for being seriously anti-Trump instead just throwing out the occasional "oh my word, how uncouth" while rubbing one's hands and dreaming of the day Trump can replace Ruth Ginsburg with Godwrath Darkykiller on the Supreme Court. Their above-it-all act is just another con.