2018: THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART 1.

[See Part 2 and Part 3 as well.]

© 2014 Sean P. Anderson used under a Creative Commons license

10. The (Blessed) Silencing of Alex Jones. Remember that brief moment last summer when Alex Jones became the new John Peter Zenger because Facebook and YouTube "censored" him and all the top wingnuts nailed their colors to his escutcheon? You don't? Well, maybe that's because after a brief inital burst of caterwauling they all fucked off and left him to rot in his (still highly visible and lucrative) exile.

Here in December 2018, it's hard to imagine that conservatives were blubbering over Jones' removal from platforms that did not want him aboard. National Review's Theodore Kupfer did the old unintended-consequences thing: "Facebook can’t make Alex Jones go away; banning him might add to his support and further radicalize his fans." Others cried lefty censorship: "This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right," declared Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. All agreed Liberals were the Real Fascists.

Reynolds' prediction, alas, has not come true, and there are still rightwing nutcakes all over the damn place -- and while claiming they've been unpersoned or deplatformed has become a rite of passage for them (see Laura Loomer chaining herself to Twitter HQ), even bigtime conservatives have for the most part stopped playing along. You don't see many REMEMBER ALEX JONES memorials on the Right.

It's easy to see why: As it becomes increasingly clear, especially since the midterms, that relying on only the nuttiest Americans to lift them to victory is not a repeatable strategy, conservatives are not as eager as once they were to be represented by crackpots and carny clowns. Speaking of which: keep an eye out because their abandonment of Jones will probably serve as a model for their abandonment of the ever-less-popular Trump.

© 2018 Mark Dillman used under a Creative Commons license

9. OMG AOC! I know the "Fill In The Blank Derangement Syndrome" template has been going since the Dawn of the Clintons, but look: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is merely a freshman Congressmember from a safe seat in New York City, yet conservatives have gone ballistic over her. In fact they've been deranged since she beat the stand-pat Democratic incumbent for the nomination in July. Back then they were rattled that she was an unashamed Democratic Socialists of America member -- notwithstanding that a lot of other DSA candidates have been winning elections. (Which may be part of the reason for the syndrome -- a glimmer of awareness on the Right's part that Trump has made conservatism so toxic voters will run further to the left than Hillary Clinton ever dreamed of going.)

But even worse from a rightwing perspective, this socialist is popular: AOC is good on the stump and has fired up thousands of fans, which makes attacking her kind of a "this thing everyone likes is bad" proposition. Here's Virginia Kruter at The Daily Caller -- "YES, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ ‘INSPIRED’ ME. NO, NOT IN THE WAY SHE THINKS... So, Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez, you did inspire me... You inspired me to fight the creep of socialism with everything I have. And you inspired me to raise my children to do the same." That's totally the kind of argument winners make.

Also, AOC is cute, Hispanic, *and* unafraid to clap back at dull-witted wingnuts, which attributes, taken together, probably ring at least a dozen psychosexual bells for conservatives. Did you see how she smacked a Washington Examiner facotum for his "creep shot" analysis of her walking down the halls of Congress in a dress? Imagine being a rightwing player accustomed to treating young women like chattel getting that kind of lip from a young Puertorriqueña with a House seat as thousands cheer.

Not only do liberals talk about how AOC drives conservatives crazy ("Why conservatives love to hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" -- Jane Coaston, Vox) --  so do conservatives ("Conservatives Keep Giving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Exactly What She Wants" -- Jim Geraghty, National Review). It's like they figure there's nothing they can do about it except sluice off some of the clickbait.

My favorite in that genre is Kevin D. Williamson trying to turn it around with his traditional snotty patter -- "Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist," he quips, "a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word 'socialist' means." There is only one thing worse than being witty, and that is not being witty. But even this notorious troll seems to sense it isn't working and finally goes full corncob, telling his fellow conservatives "if they were smarter, they’d be grateful [that]... this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer." That should be some comfort as she continues to kick their sorry asses.

8. The Kavanaugh hearings and the end of the Roe repeal boom. When SCOTUS "swing vote" Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in July, wingnuts cheered the imminent end of the right to abortion. "The central mandate for the man or woman who will take his seat, and for all the justices," Glory-Hallelujah'd the Washington Examiner, under the unambiguous headline "Repeal Roe v. Wade," "is to wipe away a disgrace that ranks alongside Dred Scott, and overtun [sic] Roe and Casey.”

As Trump replacement Brett Kavanaugh was exposed as a groper and a goon (and, I was shocked to learn, a buddy-pal of longtime alicublog figure of fun Mark Judge), we heard more talk about all the women Kavanaugh didn't rape, and about how it was actually someone else disguised as Kavanaugh who tried to rape that lady, and less about how he was going to make rape victims bear their rape-babies. Theocons like Ross Douthat have kept the faith, but other conservatives have been tucking their hands in their pockets, whistling, and walking away -- and since Kavanaugh appeared to help Planned Parenthood in a recent SCOTUS decision, we're even seeing headlines like "Brett Kavanaugh is not the pro-life savior you're looking for" at the Washington Examiner.

It was fun to dream of damning women to unwanted children in the fall of 2018 -- but with elections and polls showing Republicans becoming even more unpopular, the idea of a sexual batterer repealing Roe v. Wade is suddenly less attractive to them. We don't know what the asshole will do in the clutch, but we do know he's not committed to anything so much as his career -- and probably the goodwill of the assholes who probably let him know they made him and can break him. So in one sense, at least, the Kavanaugh hearings may have done some good.

7. The Rod Dreher "Reader" "Mailbag." This is not a matter of national interest, but of my own desires (which are... unconventional), so give the blogger some: There's so much to enjoy about Benedict Option author/hyper-holy-roller Rod Dreher -- his racism, his gay panic, his love of fascist dictators. But my favorite Dreherism is his use of "mail" from "readers" to back up his points. These missives are often from a Democrat who now hates Democrats, a liberal who now hates liberals, or a Wiccan who now hates Wicca -- all of whom express themselves very clearly in a similar tone of voice.

One of 2018's great pieces of "reader" "mail" was the one in which the proud daughter of a "Scots-Irish 'clan'" laments that her family is being "torn apart" by an "LGBT bully" -- that is, a gay cousin "who publicly shames family members on Facebook." (Though this woman calls the gay cousin a "terrorist" she didn't say how or why his Facebook posts do so much damage. My guess -- assuming, for the sake of argument, that these people exist -- is that he described some family sleepovers.)

Another is from a "reader" who reports the nice young fellow down at the store was transferred to a distant location as punishment because he said he'd be uncomfortable using "transgender pronouns." I tell ya, it's a gulag out there ("there are some very obvious common threads between what happened in the early Soviet days and what we see today") for folks who want he-shes to know their place!

But here's my 2018 favorite:

I’m certainly not a typical Trump supporter — I believe in climate change and America’s responsibility to take policy steps to reduce our contribution to it, I’m anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest the Republican Party generally... 

But leaving the nuclear issue aside, the Left’s behavior in the last year has pushed me steadily more and more in the direction of being willing to vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)...

Soon Brother Rod will notice those Beto-Bernie fights that currently inflame the internet and propose the Virgin Ben as a unity candidate. You read it here first!

Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3 over the next few days.

17 YEARS ON...

...conservatives aren't sure what to do with 9/11. Back in the day, it was a great bludgeon to bully everyone into line: Wear your flag pin, support the troops, watch what you say, torture's too good for 'em. Thousands of American lives, untold numbers of other lives, and trillions of dollars later, it all seems insane. Actually it seemed insane to many of us at the time, but over the years others, including even some conservatives, appear to have caught on, albeit sullenly, that the general response to the event was, shall we say, counterproductive.

The biggest warmongers, like Glenn Reynolds, still claim everything went great except Obama fucked it up. Maybe he thinks tinfoil will defend him from the judgment of history. True Muslim-haters like Bruce Bawer and Frank Gaffney generally hope Trump will make things right but take a "jury's still out" approach -- that is, they know he's the kind of callous thug who wouldn't mind bombing Iran, they're just getting impatient for him to actually go on and do it.

Most of us are content to treat 9/11 as our era's Pearl Harbor, a day of forgetting as well as remembrance; we're as far from the WTC and Pentagon attacks as Americans were from the day of infamy in 1958. (By then we were already buying Japanese transistor radios.) But this hindsight, like the mania that preceded it, is evanescent. Some conservatives today have been telling us that the terror is all but over, implying that it was our bloody, expensive wars that made it so. "Oh, some analysts say al-Qaeda won?" says Jim Geraghty at National Review. "I notice Osama bin Laden didn’t make it to the victory party." Geraghty has nothing if not nerve, and I mean that literally. "Al-Qaeda’s not even the top 'brand name' in Islamist terrorism anymore," Geraghty fist-pumps. "ISIS turned into the big name in the headlines, the preeminent threat, the most feared producers of those nightmare-inducing videos. And the Islamic State has been reduced from a sprawling terror-nation the size of Britain to a bunch of guys making their last stand in Hajin, a town of about 60,000 people." Wow, problem solved! Go look at the news from Afghanistan (e.g., "Dozens killed and injured in suicide attack at Afghan protest") and Iraq (e.g., "Water shortages to cut Iraq's irrigated wheat area by half"), or better yet go to Iraq or Afghanistan and see how it looks from there. We fucked those countries up beyond recognition and Geraghty's hauling the Mission Accomplished banner back out.

Faint as the memory of the war-whoops may be, so too, soon enough, will be the memory of the reckoning, and when Trump declares war on Iran -- or Venezuela, or North Korea, or Canada -- it'll be Johnny Get Your Gun all over again for a lot of people. We'll see then how much we have and haven't learned.

Meanwhile, all honor to the memory of the dead. It was strange, sad time to live through in New York; I have no prose poems or weeping eagles to offer. Here's a little something I wrote in the immediate aftermath.

JUST BLOW ME.

I suppose you guys have seen the sad stories of saps snipping their swatches over the Nike ad with the Bad Man in it -- which subject is treated at greater length in my subscription newsletter *--  but in future, when I look back on this week's outrage, I shall always first recall, not the reaction of President Trump, but how it was handled by the Conservative Pets twitter account:

Doggos and ressentiment -- it can't miss! Except Nike seems not to be suffering from the wingnut tantrums over Kaepernick, so this one joins previous conservative blubber-boycotts against French wine, the Dixie Chicks, Germany, Starbucks, Kellogg's, et alia, that went nowhere, but over which wingnuts beat their chests. And, as with those failed boycotts, conservatives are still declaring victory, confident that their followers don't actually follow the market or read the papers and won't realize that their oafish opposition doesn't mean shit to a company that markets to young people rather than to aging rednecks who only buy athletic gear to burn in YouTube videos. 

You can tell how badly the boycotts are doing by the Wall Street Journal, which engaged Adam Kirsch to lament "The Destructive Politics of Pseudo-Boycotts," taking care to remind us that it's a bothsides problem because, while rednecks burned their shorts without hurting Nike sales, liberals boycotted The New Yorker's festival because white nationalist Steve Bannon was headlining -- and got Bannon disinvited, which just goes to show how awful boycotts are. There's even a paragraph about the Montgomery bus boycott in the thing, which suggests to me Kirsch was prepared to file a more favorable column until the sales figures came in.

But the top propagandists are still throwing Hail Marys. I went above and beyond by watching a Ben Shapiro video on the subject -- or at least as much as I could stand. Within the first 10 seconds I heard this: "Nike in a viral piece of marketing decided it was deeply necessary to reward Colin Kaepernick." Whatever they're paying his ghostwriters should have gone instead to ESL classes. Shapiro also knocked Kaepernick's athleticism -- "He was a garbage quarterback, he's one of the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL," quoth "Crossfit guy" Shapiro -- and reported Kaepernick was protesting "police brutality or some such nonsense." By the one-minute mark, when Shapiro brought up that hardy wingnut perennial, Kaepernick's pigs-as-cops socks -- "there's legitimately pictures of pigs with cop hats on them!" --  his adenoidal, mosquito-on-meth burble was giving me a migraine and I had to bail. I guess that's the secret weapon with which Shapiro DESTROYS liberals. 

The clearest sign that it this is all bullshit is conservatives like Thom Loverro of the Washington Times, Jim Geraghty of National Review, Stupidest Man On The Internet Jim Hoft et alia pretending they care about Nike running sweatshops. I mean, even Trumpkin Reddit forum r/The_Donald has a page called "MUST WATCH. Very Powerful NIKE Sweatshop Documentary" -- previously these guys were only interested in sweatshops as a source for mail-order brides. When you find wingnuts agitating for workers' rights, you know you've hit rock bottom. 

Meantime, I see conservatives have taken up another sports issue -- Serena Williams getting docked a game at the U.S. Open for arguing with an umpire -- and are uniformly siding with the ump. Think it's because they're astute connoisseurs of tennis? Here's a hint: "Whining Serena Williams is tennis’s Hillary Clinton," says rightwing pencilneck Roger Kimball. "Funny How Serena Has Trouble With Referees Only When She's Losing," says Adam Rubenstein at The Weekly Standard. And if you want a good look at the conservative id, check the responses to this MAGA choad's Serena Williams tweet (sample: "I do not take anything Williams says seriously. Her own sister was murdered by the Crips street gang... yet she did the Crips Walk after winning a tournament"). I can see all of these assholes holding an old loving cup like the Coach in That Championship Season and moaning "basketball is no longer the white man's game." 

* that's right, folks, now that the Village Voice is dead I must bring my begging bowl to the web, and offer you premium content wholly distinct from my alicublog stuff for just seven bucks and month and seventy bucks for a year via my newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Apply within. 

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.

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.

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM, MOTHERFUCKER.

I've said more than once that the "culture war" is a war on culture but, as pithy an aperçu as that is, it doesn't draw the whole picture of what's wrong with culture warriors. Sure, many of them are brutes who are frightened by the power of art and think it must be some kind of ordnance liberals possess that they should try to steal. That's why they're so excited by the Harvey Weinstein thing  -- not because they give a shit about sexual harassment, but because they think it's an angle they can use to break Hollywood's alleged spell over the masses and grab it for themselves; you can hear it in the exultations of Kyle Smith ("Hollywood’s image of itself as a morally enlightened congress of tribunes of the people has been destroyed") and Jim Geraghty ("Hollywood, you don’t get to lecture us about anything anymore") who seem to think this has been achieved.

Sometimes I think this ties in with Trump's war on the NFL; Trump clearly envies the violent passions football excites and hopes, by portraying it as traitor-infested, to transfer that passion to himself.  For conservatives of the modern type, the ideal state would be one where citizens are driven away from sports and movies and, indeed, any traditional form of recreation, and instead spend their leisure hours on megachurch services and MAGA rallies.

 But there's also the aspect of culture war that's sad as well as weird, because it shows just how damaging it is to the warrior. Get a load of an article by Theodore Kupfer at National Review called "Conservatives Should Reconsider Their Opposition to Hip-Hop." It begins:

Most conservatives don’t like hip-hop. The typical conservative case against the genre amounts not to music criticism, but to...

Ha ha but come on, though, you didn't really think they'd cop to it?

...the charge that it promotes dangerous behaviors in the culture.

Well, the dog heard it. (Another thing about these guys: With them it's always "the culture" instead of culture -- just as for Putin it's always "the Ukraine" instead of Ukraine.)

Kupfer says his fellow wingnuts, apparently on the strength of a 30-year-old N.W.A. record, believe "most rap... feeds the violent loop that mars inner cities, whose residents scorn the justice system and settle scores outside it." But Kupfer -- look at him, the fightin' conservative who knows how to rap with the kids! -- begs to differ.

The first track on Straight Outta Compton is a clue that the critique might be wrong. The song begins with the sobering reminder that, “When somethin’ happens in South Central Los Angeles, nothin’ happens. It’s just another n**** dead,” letting that last word echo before the music kicks in. In other words, N.W.A., which became infamous among conservatives for glorifying violence, began its first album by noting how pervasive such violence is in their hometown, and how little anyone seems to do about it.

Sure, they talk about violence -- but they think it's bad! And they clearly don't think the state is the answer -- why, it's just a short leap from that to support for enterprise zones.

It goes on like that -- Nas has a tune about how much he loves his son, and we're all about family values, right?  It might be touching coming from a prep school student trying to explain to his ofay teacher what rap is, but at National Review it's just some young "Fellow" trying to make conservatism a little more millennial-friendly -- NatRev and chill -- and the comments section reveals that actual National Review readers aren't going for it  ("97% of it is garbage and probably an even higher percentage is liberal").

But him being a clueless honky isn't the big thing. It's the ending that gets me:

This remains an unfortunate blind spot for a political movement with a checkered record on race. Reform-minded conservatives have convincingly argued that the path up from white-identity politics runs toward a civic nationalism that is pan-ethnic, one that celebrates the shared cultural and artistic achievements of all Americans. If they’re right, then the conservative mind ought to rethink hip-hop, a sometimes-great and always uniquely American art form.

What is "the conservative mind" and why should it be argued into liking a form of music? What has one's tastes or desires got to do with being "reform-minded" or "a civic nationalism that is pan-ethnic"? You might just as well write an article about why, on the strength of recent trends in The Movement, conservatives should embrace sweet potato pierogies. And Kupfer's if-you-believe-this-you-should-enjoy-that formulation implies that conservatives are hypocritical not to like rap. This isn't like opposing gay marriage publicly while picking up men in toilets privately -- this is music, and it is beyond dispute.

I have friends who don't like rap, and/or country, and/or other musics I love. Hell, my wife can't stand most of the music I like. But that is, to those of us whose minds have not been turned to glue, the way of the world and something we can live with, if we have attained a certain very basic degree of perspective. Imagine being the kind of person who felt the need to argue someone into enjoying the music they liked. Sure, the famously ugly John Wilkes said that when he was trying to get laid he could talk his face away -- but, well, he was trying to get laid. What's Kupfer's excuse?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Tweedy maybe leaned minimalist a little too much here, but they still got some funk on it.
•   It would be not only wonderful but also hilarious if the Harvey Weinstein controversy actually did put a crimp in powerful men using their clout to exploit women. I say hilarious because conservatives are betting they can turn it to their political advantage.They're currently using it to beat up on women as hypocrites because they didn't speak up sooner. Their attacks on Clinton for having accepted campaign donations from Weinstein because "everybody" knew about his crimes are already old news; now we have wingnuts doing the same witchfinder-general routine on actresses like Jane Fonda ("‘Found Out About Harvey About A Year Ago’ And Didn’t Say Anything" -- Daily Caller), and Meryl Streep ("Sophie’s choice was between her career and her conscience, and let’s just say she didn’t agonize over her pick" --  Kurt Schlichter). That the actresses who get the most heat are outspoken liberals is no accident; the whole wingnut play is that Hollywood is corrupt because it's lefty, and vice-versa, and this scandal rejuvenates all their old Hollyweird slurs; that's why you have guys like Jim Geraghty at National Review crying "Hollywood, you don’t get to lecture us about anything anymore" -- they have no interest in sparing women workplace indignities, they just want their ancient prejudices and those of their readers validated, and a source of opposition funding neutralized. The fact they can't admit, to their suckers or to themselves, is that it was wealth that insulated Weinstein, not political orthodoxy. That's the part that's most Trumpian about the whole affair -- not so much the simple, shameless hypocrisy of President Pussygrabber's fans decrying Weinstein as the blithe misdirection of outrage from the actual perps onto whomever one needs to smear. However, if the thing blows up like it seems it might, conservatives might find whirlwinds aren't so easily steered. I can understand why they think they're protected; they got their chief predator elected president, and another big one is making his comeback after just a few months offstage. But if their wall of white women voters shifts with this wind, it'll be something, especially since they won't notice (because they don't listen to them) until it's too late.

• As to Trump's gut-stabs to Obamacare, conservatives are of course thrilled. So far the most interesting reaction has been Peter Suderman's at Reason, which may serve as a template for conservatarians who'll need something to shout from the scaffold once Trump's yokels realize they've been had. Written apparently after the association health plan decision was announced but before the subsidies decision was, Suderman's post describes the political difficulty with undermining the ACA:

There is something clever, almost cunning, about Obamacare's policy scheme: It requires unequivocal political support from an administration in order to avoid accusations that the law is being undermined. It is a kind of joint political-policy trap, in which the only solution to the law's failings is to bail it out.

Insidious -- a policy that, like Social Security and Medicare, makes people angry at you if you "reform" it! All Trump's really trying to do, Suderman says, is offer people who've been forced to buy essential health benefit coverage even though they'll never get sick "less regulated, less expensive alternatives" that will cost them little and, if they get hit by a car, send them Mercurochrome and a bill. "The order is less a direct attack on Obamacare and more of an attempt to escape its failings," he says. "Yet the reaction from defenders of Obamacare has been to accuse the president of undermining the health law." By defenders he must mean the American College of Physicians and all the other experts I've seen who say this is an invitation to a tailspin. Suderman admits okay maybe that'll happen, but the important thing is, if it does it's not Trump's fault -- the thing is, we have to do something and anything we do kills it, so I guess the thing is doomed:

This would be true, however, of practically any effort to create more insurance options outside of its regulatory scheme. The law effectively requires total buy in, from market participants and from political overseers, in order to function. The result is situation in which the only way to avoid undermining the law is to prop it up. Obamacare is built to allow no alternative and no escape.

There was an alternative -- a repeal and replace plan, three crap versions of which Republicans threw in with a towel before running off to the woods. They weren't serious about killing Obamacare because they have constituents who would turn them out if they did so; Trump, senile and vicious, can imagine no such outcome for himself, and knows only that the black bastard can't get away with it. Enablers like Suderman have their own motivation -- something they call liberty, which always involves great sacrifice, in this case the sacrifice of even a hint of the decent coverage that Europeans take for granted. They better pray that the hint wasn't taken.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Former colleague Rob Harvilla made a great case for Twenty One Pilots; They make a great case for themselves here.
• Here's your new talking point, wingnuts: The San Francisco Court of Appeals! Reliable propagander Jim Geraghty at National Review:

For Trump Foes, San Francisco’s Court of Appeals Is Cloud Nine
The Trump administration’s loss in the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit — it might as well just be called “the San Francisco court” — isn’t surprising, and the tone of the decision isn’t really a surprise, either...

Cuz they's Sanfrancisgy sissy-men! Jeanne Kirkpatrick, greybeards may recall, got a lot of mileage out of "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. A few things have changed since then -- notably, Russia's the Republicans' buddy, and the number of people you can set off with Cisco as a perjorative has declined drastically -- in fact, that population may overlap substantially with the readership of National Review.

• So much of my humor is of necessity grim these days, so how about a genuine ray of sunshine? St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones is running for mayor, and as is customary was offered an interview with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which she declined, sending instead a letter which she shared with the St. Louis American, and oh boy:

Two weeks ago, you used some of your ink to outline what questions you would be asking of mayoral candidates. You complained that “decades of sustained, abject neglect by city leaders have allowed a bombed-out graffiti-covered, war-zone image to prevail.” You said you were afraid to walk your dog at night and you called for a plan to “address blight and abate the graffiti that’s killing our city.”

You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet. And graffiti is not what’s killing it.

What is killing our city is poverty. Since you’re new and you live in a great neighborhood, you probably don’t know that the poverty rate doubled during Mayor Francis G. Slay’s 16-year tenure.

What is killing our region is a systemic racism that pervades almost every public and private institution, including your newspaper, and makes it nearly impossible for either North St. Louis or the parts of South St. Louis where African Americans live to get better or safer or healthier or better-educated...

The whole thing is good and may just bolster your faith in the future of this country.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It was better before, before they voted for What's-his-name.
This must be the new world.
•  Even among the other freaks, thieves, and mountebanks Trump has been hiring, the name Katy Talento, slated to advise The Leader on health care policy, stands out. First, she's a contributor to The Federalist, which as regular alicublog readers know is a bad sign right off the bat. One of her posts on the subject of health care is called "Ladies: Is Birth Control The Mother Of All Medical Malpractice?" and in case you're wondering, she thinks it is (h/t Jason Millman). Romper and Talking Points Memo do a good job of debunking her physiological ideas, but even laymen may gape at her connection of birth control with "economic and relational devastation that has left women and children abandoned by men who now feel entitled to consequence-free orgasms." This nut is telling Trump about women's health care and Congress is defunding Planned Parenthood. So much for the Trump third way, huh? But at least Julian Assange is happy!

•  At National Review, Jim Geraghty:

The worst among us do not represent us as a whole, thankfully. William Calley doesn’t represent men and women in uniform. Ward Churchill doesn’t represent professors. Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t represent chocolate factory employees. Aaron Hernandez does not represent the New England Patriots. 

Most of us know that. Most of us understand that it’s unfair, inaccurate, and a smear to take the worst individual in a group and contend that all members of a group are “like that.” James Holmes is rare among gun owners. Eric Rudolph is rare among abortion opponents. Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik are rare among Muslims.

Come let us reason together! When have you ever seen a wingnut show charity toward Ward Churchill before this? But then Geraghty takes a graf-long detour for a Seinfeldesque didjaever-notice "authorities keep acting like they never want to admit that a mass shooter is Muslim?" and with a weary Not this bullshit again we are reminded that Geraghty is not a healer but a propagandist and his show of reasonableness is a ruse to soften white readers up for his energetic flame-fanning over those black guys in Chicago who tortured a white guy. It's a typical Trumpian "there's-something-going-on" routine -- encouraging listeners to stretch a specific incident into a general indictment without the assistance of logic. Geraghty also links the usual pull-your-pants-up bullshit from David French, whose dogwhistle is nearly split from overblowing; for one thing, the title is "Chicago is Breaking" but the URL is "black-thugs-torture-white-disabled-man-speak-truth-leftists." For another, French finds room in the middle of his customary Obama's-Chicago ululation for this:

Outlets such as Buzzfeed — ever vigilant in the quest to hunt down and expose celebrity Christians who might actually believe the Bible — write fawning articles about hip-hop celebrities who write and produce some of the most vile music imaginable.  

It’s all part of underlying liberal squeamishness about attacking anything that can be labeled authentically “black.” Music “from the streets” is worshipped, no matter its content.

The relevance of French's jungle-music criticism to a crime (the perpetrators of which, I remind you, have been swiftly apprehended) is not immediately apparent unless you're on the same Ooga Booga wavelength as French and his colleagues -- which is just one more reason why it was always a sure bet that, for all their #NeverTrump bullshit, the NROniks would fall in line with The Leader: Game recognize game. Proper conservative clubmen they may be, with good manners and manicured nails, but deep in their shriveled hearts they're delighted to have the cruder Trump and his deranged apparatchiks reverberating their slurs.

THE LONG-AWAITED END OF #NEVERTRUMP.

So Il Douche went to Mexico, couldn't get them to pay for the wall, and slunk back home -- and changed from being a fearless advocate for America in the Trade Wars to an advocate for our "hemisphere."

Seems to me like just another olio in the Trump vaudeville -- but look at the heretofore Trump-skeptical conservatives who think it was fantastic:

I mean, sure, you expect auto-sellouts like Byron York, who got on the Trump train last year, to suck up ("Mexico Gamble a Huge Win"). Ditto Hindrocket from Power Line ("TRUMP'S TRIUMPHANT TRIP TO MEXICO"). But what about Legal Insurrection's Kimberley Kaye? Back in January she was trembling like Lucy in The Searchers over the Trump invasion:

Watching the rise of this new populism, one of my many concerns is whether the charlatans wearing the cape of Conservatism will damage its value, diminish its meaning, and in general, confuse those who know no difference. But then I see people like Sen. [Ben] Sasse and I’m somewhat relieved.

Today Kaye's a lot more fair-and-balanced ("WATCH LIVE: DONALD TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION SPEECH... Did they talk about the wall or didn’t they? THE MEDIA WANTS TO KNOW" -- haw haw, that stupid media!), and her commenters are even easier to read ("I can hear the Jacobin Rags head exploding now").

Let's visit Erick Erickson -- surely this #NeverTrump leader ("it is important to go on record now, while he can be stopped, that we will play no part in his rise") sees through this nonsense?

Two Things Donald Trump Got Absolutely Right

GTFO.

First, Donald Trump and Mike Pence went to Louisiana. In the midst of terrible devastation, while President Obama was on vacation and Hillary Clinton was fundraising, Team Trump went to Louisiana. They drew positive media exposure and looked Presidential.

The Play-Doh that Proved a Presidentiality!

Second, Trump went to Mexico and Hillary did not. I think the positives of the trip outweigh the negatives. The Mexican President’s refusal to contradict Trump on stage about whether they discussed the wall only made him look petty and meek afterwards.

Clearly in a Presidential runoff between Trump and Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump has the edge.

Trump’s speech this evening has, I think, done him no favors outside his base, but going to Mexico today worked.

To paraphrase Sam Houston, Erickson has all the qualities of a prostitute, except hard limits. But surely there's someone at erstwhile #NeverTrump HQ National Review who can at least face up to Trump's failure? Not so far! Jim Geraghty:

Part One of Donald Trump’s busy Wednesday is complete and the meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto went pretty well...

The headline is that Trump and Pena Nieto discussed border security and building a wall, but didn’t discuss Trump’s frequent pledge that Mexico would pay to build the wall. But the brief press conference between the two men was cordial, and no shoes or rotten fruit were thrown. Trump may have read aloud his prepared statement with all of the sincerity and comfort of a hostage tape, but all in all, it looked like any other meeting of an American leader at an international summit.

In other words, Trump didn't seem to know or care what he was saying, but we grade Republicans on the curve and that gets a "P" for Presidential! Also, why would Geraghty acknowledge that Pena Nieto called Trump a liar?  It's not like they're paying him for updates.

I know there are still a few poor minor-league souls out there acting like resistance is anything but futile, but let's face it: There is no #NeverTrump movement left to speak of. Not that you'll see any "I was wrong about Trump" essays from them -- at the moment they can afford, and would understandably prefer, to spare one another that embarrassment -- unless Trump gets elected, in which case they'll start accusing each other of apostasy and some will be forced into ritual confession.

And to think, just months ago we were talking about them as if they might have some principles! Well, you always want to be scrupulously fair to them, despite all experience. Otherwise you might as well be a Republican.

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.

MY FRONT-RUNNER IS YOUR FAULT.

Every time the flames from the Trump garbage fire rage another ten feet higher (just like that wall Il Douche keeps promising!), we get another round of "Trump is the Fault of Everyone Except the People Who Keep Voting For Him" stories. At the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens tells us "Trump is Obama Squared." Obama and Trump, he says, are "two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken." Imagine, seeing America as fundamentally broken! By the way, earlier this month Stephens wrote a column called "The Return of the 1930s: Donald Trump’s demagoguery may be a foretaste of what’s to come." At the top of that column appeared a photo of Mussolini.

As for the narcissism, Stephens hauls out the whole "cult-of-personality" thing Republicans tried on Obama in 2008, which looks pretty played out after eight years unless you're a propaganda junkie confident that one more twist of the  rag will yield a fresh dose. Also, Obama doesn't want to be the world's policeman and neither does Trump. They're practically twins, or maybe triplets with Scott Walker.

Even worse is a thing at The Intercept called "THE CULTURE THAT CREATED DONALD TRUMP WAS LIBERAL, NOT CONSERVATIVE." The idea here seems to be that rich liberals run the liberal media and they put Trump on TV and in the papers, so they're responsible for him ("He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo"). I'm reminded of Reagan celebrity TV specials and all those Nancy Reagan magazine covers -- and, come to think of it, wasn't Ronnie himself in the movies? So maybe the liberal media is responsible for Reagan, too. Wheels within wheels!

But there's nothing that can't be made worse by National Review's Jim Geraghty, who nods energetically at the Liberal Trump shtick: "If he’s so self-evidently unsuited for the presidency… why has the national media spent a full year dissecting his every move?" he asks. Actually they've only been covering him obsessively for eight months, because for eight months Trump has been THE REPUBLICAN FRONT-RUNNER FOR PRESIDENT; also, their coverage has been, shall we say, less than kind. But believe it or don't, this isn't the dumbest thing in Geraghty's column. He notices that The Intercept listed Spy among the media outlets responsible for Trump, and responds, quite reasonably, that Spy was Trump's glossy-print nemesis. But then:

There was one glaring flaw in the magazine’s approach: the sarcastic cynicism of Spy more or less targeted everyone – including National Review and William F. Buckley at least once — meaning that there was no good in their perspective, few if any examples of people worth emulating. Rereading Spy today is fascinating, but after enough issues, it begins to feel like comedic nihilism – everybody’s terrible, everybody’s shameless and out for themselves, everybody’s the worst ever. And if everybody’s the worst ever, nobody stands out as particularly bad – and there’s no point in expecting anything better.

I should have expected that no National Review columnist would have the slightest idea what satire is, nor understand that it implies values every time it mocks that which contradicts them; but even after all this time it still amazes me how eager these guys are to volunteer their ignorance.

ANNALS OF THE AGE OF TRUMP.

The long sad march of rightwing writers through the Slough of Donald continues. At National Review Jim Geraghty takes offense at something Bill O'Reilly said:

Last night, Bill O’Reilly offered an odd defense of the GOP frontrunner: “The reason I think Trump won in Florida is because he comes across as more authoritarian. Not authoritative, authoritarian"... 

There is nothing less American than authoritarianism. This nation was not founded on blind submission to authority. If we wanted a “concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people” we would have remained a colony of the British crown.

The people do not get to elect an authoritarian who will ignore the Constitution. An authoritarian is never the right solution.

Somewhere in hell, Jeane Kirkpatrick is laughing her ass off.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg interviews sad sack Matt K. Lewis. He has a whither-conservatism book out, and seems even under friendly prompting to grope blindly for a solution. Inevitably he comes to that last refuge of a scoundrel, The Culchah:

I think, as I wrote in the book, I would really encourage conservative donors to take the money they’re giving politicians and find a way to sponsor talented people who have a conservative worldview who want to engage in the arts. And maybe that’s sending them to college, maybe that’s sending them to art school, whatever.

You know, whatever those artsy types do -- put on a leotard, paint their faces white, go to the park and pretend to walk against the wind, whatever. Come on, Koch Brothers, pretend you have a thousand sons who don't want to go into the family business and own a '57 Strat they don't know how to play! Eventually Lewis has to come up with a more concrete idea of what these artsy conservatives would get into:

If you follow food blogging or the sports world, all of these sorts of niche audiences — I say niche, there are millions of people who are foodies, who follow it very closely. And they’re really dominated by liberals, like heavily so. And of course, thankfully, they don’t spend all their time on politics, but it has an impact.

Countering Commie sportswriters does not seem an urgent task -- National Review's "Right Field" went down swinging after four years, probably because no one could tell the difference between that and a thousand other sports blogs. But food bloggers, that's a different story -- they were the thin end of the wedge on immigration, weakening our resolve against Aztlan by addicting Americans to chipotle and chorizos, and if they get us on garmi and sardi, thus falls the Republic!

Finally, over at Commentary, Matthew Continetti has a new argument with which to woo wingnut readers away from Trump:

What would Donald Trump’s most devoted supporters do if they learned that ultra-rich liberals living in New York City are behind his campaign?

Continetti buried the lede -- what if they find out Trump's a rich New Yorker himself? Then the scales will really fall from their eyes.

...It’s a virtuous cycle for Trump and the press barons. Trump benefits from earned media. The networks benefit from high ratings, which allow them to charge more for advertising. And all of the campaign ads and Super PAC and issue-advocacy spots desperately trying to stop Trump guarantee additional revenue...

Here’s the good liberal [CBS chairman Les] Moonves boosting the candidacy of a man whose politics and character repulse him, even as he acknowledges that what he is doing is bad for the country. And why? Profit.

That's capitalism, comrade. Maybe you'd like to phonebank for Bernie?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

My buddy Bob -- fine fotog BTW -- sent me this.
I don't normally go for twee retrofittings but this is very well done.

•    Olde-tyme alicublog fans may remember that, back when Smallville was a Thing, I envisioned a goopy WB-style show called Riverdale ("'Are you proud of me now, Dad?' [Jughead] cries, forcing down another burger"). Later Point Blank Creative did a fake trailer for a similar imaginary program. And now I read in the trades: 

It’s fair to say that we here at ComicsAlliance are very excited for The CW’s upcoming Archie adaptation, Riverdale and its promises of a weirder, more adult version of our favorite characters including a hunky Archie, emo Jughead and adderall-addicted Betty.

Watching the world play out your fantasies is one of few advantages of old age. When they finally get around to that Lockhorns movie, I can finally let go of life!  Or maybe I should hold out for Dinesh D'Souza's Mallard Fillmore, done in the manner of Howard the Duck.

•   I'm kind of loving the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Cruz movement -- especially since, in contrast with other hold-your-nose movements, this one is actually headed by Cruz supporters. They love Cruz' religious-mania-infused hyper-conservatism, but recognize that nobody else likes anything about him -- indeed, many voters are willing to entertain the possibility that he's the Zodiac Killer -- and so go out hat in hand, explaining why their candidate's repulsiveness shouldn't matter. (Even National Review's official endorsement admits, "We are well aware that a lot of Republicans, and even some conservatives, dislike the senator and even find him unlikable.") From his email newsletter, Jim Geraghty:

Fairly or not, there are a lot of people who just don’t like Cruz. There’s a reason most Republican officials endorsed Cruz’s rivals and there’s a reason it’s taken so long for most of the Republican party to come around to Cruz. It’s not just that they’re all Georgetown cocktail-party elitists who see Cruz as too principled and a threat to their smug status. 

What’s fascinating is the number of people who completely or almost completely agree with Cruz on the issues who still openly talk about him like they can’t stand him. Ben Carson apparently is angry enough about the alleged Iowa rumor-mongering that he’s willing to endorse Trump, the man who compared him to a child molester...

In the end Geraghty tells readers that they should look past their feelings and face their patriotic duty: "Is Cruz really so unlikeable that everyone is willing to send the conservative movement, the GOP, and the country through the chaotic damage of a Trump nomination or presidency?" The problem with this is like the problem with Trumpism in general: These voters have been living on a thin gruel of Republican ressentiment for decades -- lots of hate, few results. Now someone's turned them on to the harder stuff. Why would they go back -- especially when the pitch involves a Call to Duty? When 9/11 went down, George W. Bush told them to go shopping; the promise that they wouldn't have to bestir themselves on behalf of other people (let alone a common purpose) was a big part of the sell. So why would they give up the best high of their lives for Ted Cruz?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hey Beyonce: How about this next year at the Super Bowl?

•   There was a GOP debate last night and, as you would expect, the whole National Review chicken coop is clucking its disapproval of Trump, though they've at least learned their complaints don't mean anything; Rich Lowry ends his Cruz blowjob, "This was Trump at his worst, although past debates have established that outrageousness doesn’t hurt him because for his supporters it’s part of his appeal." I would enjoy the betrayal of Lowry by his conservative "base" more if I thought it was actually hurting his feelings. But Lowry's a pro, and I suspect he's already drafting Strange New Respect stories about Il Douche for the coming war with Hitlery. Eventually he'll turn up at Mar-a-Lago, dancing and singing "the best campaign dinners are no campaign dinners" like Ed Begley Sr. in Wild in the Streets.

•   The real howler at this morning's National Review is Jim Geraghty, who has the tough job of explaining to his readers that while war crimes like torture are supported by his colleague Andrew McCarthy and are therefore no big deal, the war crimes Trump was proposing -- killing terrorists' families and so forth -- are Beyond the Pale. Give him credit: Geraghty came up with what, outside of a seance with Reagan, would seem the gambit most likely to sway a National Review reader:

If this argument feels familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this before. It was on 24, season two...

The sudden reveal that Jack Bauer wasn’t willing to kill an 11-year-old in order to extract information, was one of the most important moments of the show; to have the protagonist, who we’re supposed to root for, kill a child would be passing the moral event horizon. Jack Bauer might be the most relentless and ruthless fictional federal agent in history, a man willing to behead a murderous child pornographer who’s a federal witness – “I’m gonna need a hacksaw” – but he always has enough moral clarity to recognize that certain acts can never be morally justified. That’s not what the heroes do, that’s not what the good guys do. And, the show’s creators were telling us, that’s not what Americans do.

Sorry, Jim: They've already seen 24: The (CIA) Director's Cut, and if the sequel doesn't deliver even more blood and guts they'll be disappointed.

•   Well, with the Republicans melting down, surely it's time for yet another Libertarian Moment, eh? Doing his part: Daniel Payne at The Federalist:

Girl Scout Cookies Prove We Need To End Child Labor Laws

I could and probably should stop there, but I will add that Payne wishes to do away with Big Gummint's "baffling and ridiculous slate of prohibitions" on child labor. For instance, did you know the statists won't let your kid do "outside window washing" -- even though Francois Truffaut showed us in Small Change that babies can survive steep falls? Plus think how much the Makers would save if their roof-rigs and descent chairs only had to hold a child-size payload.

The end result of these laws is ultimately not child protection but prohibiting children from using their innate potential to earn their own money.

If it weren't for these cursed laws, Daniel Payne would have been able to start his career as a propagandist much earlier, and maybe gotten that Times column before Douthat. Now look at him! Life is unfair, especially to Galtian supermen.

STRANGE NEW RESPECT.

One thing I didn't make too much of in this week's column (though I teased it out a bit here) is the rush among conservatives to defend Donald Trump's ravings about Muslims. Instapundit stringer Ed Driscoll pushes the line that, though there mmmmmaybe weren't "thousands and thousands" of Muslim-Americans cheering 9/11 in Jersey City, Muslims were cheering in the Middle East, which proves media bias, therefore Trump is right where it counts -- that is, he could, in Driscoll's estimation, beat Hillary Clinton (to whom Driscoll compares Trump, in the fine, incoherent tradition of modern conservatives eager to tar their opponents by free-association):

Both [Clinton and Trump] in their own way are prone to speak in outrageous hyperbole because they have little fear of serious repercussions from their wild utterances. But as Steyn writes, given a choice between two crazed exaggerations — one where “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on September 11th and another where “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” and given our current president’s ongoing escape into fantasyland, who would you count on to keep you safe in the coming years?

Sounds like Driscoll's thinking the once-unthinkable about Candidate Trump. Oh, and guess who else is? National Review's Rich Lowry, who once teased Trump that Carly Fiorina had cut his balls off, has a column up called "Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate." "Jacksonian" is wingnut code for "white people who don't give a shit who has to die to keep their asses in Barcaloungers," and Lowry is downright respectful toward its new avatar:

Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.

It is tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.

Cutting your balls one minute, sucking them the next, these people.

This Strange New Respect for Trump owes much to the temper of the times: Since the Paris attacks, conservatives have been doing their damnedest to re-instill in voters the 9/11 fear that stood them so well in the Bush years. Though they have had their problems with Trump in the past, Il Douche is great for fear-mongering and projecting an image of Making Things Happen By Being Rich and Barking Orders (or, as conservatives know it, strength).

But I think there's more to it than that. Even Trump's non-fans are being extraordinarily gentle with him. Others have noted how media outlets are reluctant to call Trump a liar even when he self-evidently lies. At Commentary, John Podhoretz talks about all the "entirely impressionistic memories" that went on around in New York shortly after 9/11 (though I vas dere, Cholly, and don't recall anything like that), and compares Trump's Jersey City cheering-Muslims bullshit to that:

So, to sum up: There were many hysterical and made-up stories afoot in New York City during that week and the weeks after. People believed anything they were told, and others simply made stuff up... Which suggests not so much that Trump deliberately told a lie in order to rev up a crowd – but rather that he’s very, very gullible.

Actually, Trump claiming to see something that reflects outrageously badly on Muslim-Americans when it didn't actually happen is the opposite of gullibility -- it's mendacity counting on the gullibility of others. It's not even like Podhoretz is covering for some idiot relative with a penchant for story-telling -- he's defending Donald fucking Trump with this well-ya-gotta-understand guff.

I think they've tipped over from Trump-can't-win-if-we-all-growl-at-him to this watery state, soon to be followed by "What sort of President will Trump be?" articles. There are only three things that motivate these people to this kind of behavior: love (ha); fear (def); and money (or the promise thereof in the Treasury-looting Trump Administration).

UPDATE. Allow me to quote me! From Nov. 4, after the CNBC-was-mean-to-us scandal:

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?

UPDATE 2. Jim Geraghty is trying to preserve some plausible deniability on the Jersey City Jihad thing. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds has his own, rickety spin:

JIM GERAGHTY: Why the Facts of American Muslims and 9/11 Matter. “We cannot be a party or a movement that gets its understanding of the world from chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo.” 

I dunno, it worked okay for Obama. And I think anger at that fact is why so many people don’t care about Trump’s various excesses. You want no rules? Okay! No rules it is! That’s not good for the country, of course, but then, few of Obama’s legacies are.

Not only is Trump Obama's fault, so are "chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo." But this is of course an old racket for both Geraghty and Reynolds.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers's mortal enemies, the Syrian refugees, and why what looks like pangs of conscience in their xenophobic columns are actually the rhetorical equivalent of gas pains. The apparent agreement of ordinary citizens with their anti-refugee gush is depressing for a  number of reasons -- not only because it represents a shameful reversal of the best American values, but also because it recalls the engineered panic of the Iraq War run-up. If this groundhog sees his shadow, we get ten more years of war.

As usual, due to my meticulous attention to compositional integrity, some corkers had to be left out of the mix -- like this stop-the-presses headline from Fire Andrea Mitchell:

Syrian refugees coming to US automatically put on welfare

They could crawl up out of the surf, watch their hair in a public toilet, and get straight to a job interview, but no! Coddling's what I call it.

Also, there were more apparatchiks than Byron York and John Hinderaker weeping over poor Donald Trump and how the media was trying to make him look like some kind of Nazi -- e.g., PJ Media's Michael van der Galien, "CNN Selectively Edits Donald Trump's 'Muslim Registry' Comments to Make Him Look Like an Anti-Muslim Bigot" (presumably written before Trump kept agreeing with what he was allegedly tricked into saying, but with this bunch who knows), and National Review's Jim Geraghty who, like Hinderaker, admitted it was weird that Trump claimed stadium-size crowds of Jersey Muslims were cheering the 9/11 attacks, but then shifted the blame to "certain conspiracy-theorizing liberals" who "offered a nonsensical charge" that Muslims, or at least some sort of Arabs, were not cheering... in Jerusalem. So see, both sides do it -- Trump says Muslim-Americans cheered out of hatred of America, liberals say Palestinians didn't, so let's split the difference and invade Iran.

Anyway, column's up for your delectation.

UPDATE. Wow, Hinderaker's going all-out in his defense of Trump, harassing the Washington Post over the relative meanings of "a number," "several," and "thousands." Maybe Hindrocket's bucking for a job in the Trump Administration as head of the Department of Bullshit. He should stay alert -- I expect Glenn Reynolds will nose his way to the front first.

UPDATE 2. Ann Althouse thinks Trump may have seen thousands of Muslims, even though others didn't, because he had access to a "high-floor penthouse in Manhattan" where "I presume he has telescopes to gaze out upon the glorious long views." Trump did say he saw it "on television," but maybe he had to stand on his television set to get to the telescope. Anything's possible, right?

The racket is this: Pretend Trump slandering Muslim Americans is really just a misunderstanding, instigated by the liberal media to further their evil pro-Muslim agenda. Their fans already believe the media is evil, and probably already hate Muslims, so it's an easy twofer.

Oh, and later on, write thousands of words about how students are only pretending racism exists.