SEX MAD.

A few people have asked me about that Ross Douthat "Redistribution of Sex" column but there's not much to say. His tropes are tedious as usual. For one thing, he tries to hitch a ride on the contrarian zeitgeist by saying that the dull, middle-of-the-road types -- that is, people who found Robin Hanson's "Incels Have a Point" essay to be creepy and misogynist and creepily misogynist -- are old and tired, and that the real truth is only known by "the extremists and radicals and weirdos" -- that is, guys like Hanson.

Then Douthat pulls what he no doubt imagines is a fast one -- another enlightened weirdo, he posits, is Amia Srinivasan, whose thoughtful essay on changing attitudes toward and standards of sexual desirability he (to be polite about it) reinterprets as something about "revolutionary architects" grimly working to ensure that comes the Revolution "sex would be more justly distributed than it is today." That is, he's trying to draw a parallel between the masculinity-poisoned killer virgins and people who are sexually adventuresome -- those who believe "the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated" -- just so he can say, see, you liberals want sex with fat people and cripples to be sexy because you're into "diversity" sex, well what if my revolution is I want to have sex with robots or prostitutes?  Because all you liberals (Douthat took a poll) believe that "sex work is work," maybe Douthat will dress a prostitute like Less Chunky Reese Witherspoon and do, ugh, whatever Douthat does with women -- and there's nothing you can do about it!

Douthat's upshot, as always, is to suggest we'd all be better off under a theocracy where sex is policed by the Church, while everyone else suggests we'd be better off without Douthat.

But Douthat's the least of  it. Rod Dreher:

I want to share with you the most disturbing thing I have read in a very long time. You need to know about it. 

I learned about it via the Twitter feed of a UK radical feminist. In Britain, radical feminists, including TERFs (Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists) are taking an insane amount of abuse from transgenders and their allies. But on that issue, they’re right. This particular feminist has uncovered something shocking — beyond shocking — about how pedophiles intend to use the same strategy that worked, and is working, for LGBTs, for the sake of legitimizing pederasty.

And then he quotes at length from a document these people purport to be this pedophile group's blueprint for legal kidsex, in which they say things like "In truth, access to the media is what you need most. Without the help of liberal and progressive Hollywood, there will be no campaign." In other words, it's very obviously The Protocols of the Elders of NAMBLA -- bullshit meant to jack up people like Rod Dreher.

And oh my brothers and sisters, the updates:

UPDATE: A couple of you have written to say that this document sounds like a right-wing fake. It might well be. But for the sake of argument, how would we respond if some pro-pederasty groups and individuals adopted this proposed strategy? You can’t say, “It will never happen here.” It absolutely could. The sexualization of children and the removal of sexual inhibitions via popular culture is happening...

A few hours later:

UPDATE: Re-reading it, I doubt it’s authenticity. For me, the “tell” is how the author writes about the media. Still, the fact that even some liberal readers here are not sure that it’s real or fake tells us something about the current cultural moment, and what has become plausible...

Very like the Douthat strategy -- some of you liberals (or whatever kind of liberals hang out at Dreher's site) sorta believed this caricature I swallowed hook, line and sinker, so in a way I was onto something! But with more whining.

SENEX IRATUS OTD.

Flatus Maximus Victor Davis Hanson saith the sooth on equality, which (you will be unsurprised to hear) he is against.

Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to select their own type of health insurance, purchased on their own volition to best match their own assessments of their particular needs. Obamacare — the federal government’s redistributive effort to equalize health care for all — sought to destroy the liberty of many millions in order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all.

Similarly, years before most of you were born, Americans were unilaterally stripped of their freedom to dispose of sewage in their own way. No more just throwing your shit into the river, or on your lawn; fascist protObamas enforced a wearying state-directed sameness of sewer pipes, and thus our liberty was flushed forever!

Also mentioned in the lengthy ululation: "mandated equality," "Sidwell Friends," Obama's "Malibu supporters," "the French Revolution’s grandees, the Soviet nomenklatura, and the EU elite." Plus Hanson compares California to "the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe."

I'm beginning to think the old gasbag is hipper than he looks, and composes these things from cut-up pieces a la Burroughs.

HAVE A MISERABLE NATIONAL REVIEW CHRISTMAS!

National Review has a holiday-themed front page today, and by holiday I mean "War on Christmas," the title and topic of Jonah Goldberg's contribution. I have long maintained -- and a plurality of Americans now seem to agree -- that the WoC is a ridiculous scam. But Goldberg insists it's a clear and present danger and it's all liberals' fault.

Alas, today’s “war on Christmas,” which has become for cable news an annual ritual, is merely another one of those metaphorical wars, like the wars on women, poverty, cancer, global warming, history, energy, religion, and science. (I’m sure I’m leaving a few dozen out.)

Of course “metaphorical” doesn’t mean “fictional.” The “war” on poverty is — or was — a real thing; it just wasn’t a war. 

And yet the metaphorical wars have the capacity to elicit as much outrage as actual wars... 

Oops, sorry, I left in some of his column-padding gibberish (more plentiful than usual -- maybe this is how they keep him busy so he won't eat the turkey before it's cooked). Let's get right to the something-resembling-a-point:

But the war on Christmas represents a special kind of passive-aggressive jackassery because the aggressors deny they have declared a war. They simply take offense at Christmas cheer. They cancel Christmas pageants. They leave baby Jesus in a cardboard box in the church basement, but see nothing wrong with celebrating the Winter Solstice as if that’s a more rational thing to do. 

No explanatory links, of course, but it seems Goldberg's confusing the ACLU's mission of defending unpopular Constitutional rights (say, wasn't that what the Tea Party was all about?) with the rest of us walking around not giving a shit whether someone says Merry Christmas or not. Also, Goldberg thinks, as conservatives often do, that liberals trick him and his Fox News buddies into being psycho about it:

And then, when people complain about this undeclared war on Christmas, the aggressors mock and ridicule them for paranoia and hyperbole.

We don't even declare our War on Christmas. We just go around singing our satanic Solstice carols and pissing them off. It's so unfair! MERRY CHRISTMAS KILL CLOUSEAU!

Also at NR:

•  Kevin D. Williamson, best known as a rageclown who thinks women who have abortions should be executed and a bunch of other crazy shit, does his version of an inspirational religious story. Shorter: There are people who run soup kitchens and AA meetings, therefore Christ is real. At times it sounds like he's at least heard of Christianity --

The boy grows into a man, and the question of family is always at the center of His thinking. “Who is my mother, or my brethren?” He asks. “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.” He tells of hated foreigners adopting the wounded and the vulnerable of His own nation as their own, and shames His own people with that story of alien kindness...

-- and then you remember that he's against accepting Syrian refugees because he's scared they'll kill him ("Where there is Islam, there will be Islamic extremism, Islamic supremacism, and murder") and you realize he's even more full of shit when he pretends to be religious as when he doesn't bother.

•  Speaking of immigrant-haters, this is from Victor Davis Hanson's contribution:

Many Americans oppose illegal immigration and want to slow down legal immigration not because the most welcoming nation in the world is suddenly xenophobic, nativist, or racist, as cheaply alleged. Too often, immigrants assume that America owes them rather than they owe America — sort of like an uninvited guest moving into the house of the host and berating him over the menu and accommodations.

How could we have guessed Hanson would spend Christmas bitching about furriners? Guess he never got over the loss of his chainsaw.

•  Mona Charen is Jewish, but she was shocked to find -- after apparently not having been downtown on Christmas in many years -- "not only were all the restaurants open, they were also packed." And this is a big deal because --

I had pictured my Christian friends and neighbors at home, gathered around the table Norman Rockwell–style, eating goose or ham or whatever gentiles eat bathed in the twinkling lights of decorated trees. In fact, I liked to think of them that way, and finding crowds treating Christmas Eve as just another night was almost a sacrilege.

Well, maybe you should have asked your "friends" what they were doing for Christmas.

Americans have long resisted the secularizing trend of Western Europe.

Ugh, yes, you see it coming: We are becoming Godless, which is just what the Democrats want, so repent and make Marco Rubio president.

There's plenty more and worse, but this is not Easter, when we celebrate redemption through suffering, but Christmas, when we celebrate Darren McGavin and a lamp that looks like a leg. So have yourself a merry little Christmas (THERE I SAID CHRISTMAS) or whatever winter orgy you choose to celebrate.

EGYPT ME, EGYPT YOU. Al Jazeera, whose live feed you can see here (thanks Skinny John!), is reporting that Egyptian cops are beating up reporters. And they're on their way up to the Al Jazeera studios in Cairo. ("I will stay on the air as long as I can... until we are forced off the air.")


It's almost curfew time, so this should be interesting.

UPDATE. I'm so old I remember the Iranian Twitter revolution -- which achieved little concrete political change, though it did lead in an uptick to avatar modification -- so I'm not making any calls on this. I do notice that some conservatives are worried that the uprising, should it take, may not be to America's liking*. But the mainstream play for conservatives is to act enthusiastic about it, as they did with the Orange Revolution and the Cedar Revolution. Remember those? Many medals were given out then for supportive blogging! But the world seems not to have gotten much freer because of them.

UPDATE 2. State media reports Army's been ordered into the streets to put down the protests, says AJ. Just saw a bunch of protestors flip over an armored personnel carrier.

UPDATE 3. *At National Review, Michael Rubin really wants it both ways: "A reader points out that while Biden’s 'Mubarak is not a dictator' comment is risible, the vice president was correct that Mubarak should not step down, because what comes next — a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship — could be worse." There's a man who knows how to spread his chips!

And would you believe it, the situation reminds Victor Davis Hanson of In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Stop Loss. And Michael Moore! It's become a major Hanson tic. He'll be applying these topics to world events at his rest home, assuming perhaps unfairly he's not in one already.

UPDATE 4. "GOOD NEWS," says Atlas Shrugs, "EGYPT ARRESTS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS." Apparently Mubarak is cleverly engineering just who will chase him out of the country and take over. Probably he's working with the most pro-democracy faction. What a patriot!

Good continuing coverage at Mother Jones.

DEFINING VICTORY DOWNWARD. Last September Michael Totten wrote "Don't Abandon Iraq," agreeing with Victor Davis Hanson that a premature departure from Iraq would lead to Mogadishu Saigon Etcetera.

I guess Iraq must have shaped up quite a lot in the past 10 months (despite outward appearances), because now Totten is open to an early exit; something to do, for all I can tell, with some rope-a-dope strategy of depriving the rebels of a target, and the eerie persuasive powers of Donald Rumsfeld. (Victor Davis Hanson doesn't see it the same way, of course, but he is not a famous moderate, to say the least.)

No word yet as the whether this calls for another "Mission Accomplished" banner, but as word of the new reality spreads it will be interesting (and fun!) to see who lines up and who doesn't.

AND ANOTHER THING... Victor Davis Hanson today comes out shaking the same fist as usual at Old Europe (which collectively suffers, in his fevered imagination, from "post-Cold War teenager syndrome") and all Arabs everywhere. But toward essay's end, he finds a new and heretofore unsuspected enemy -- the Mexicans:

And if one wishes to find real anti-Americanism, there is no need to go to Brussels or Damascus. Simply peruse the Mexico City newspapers, read what Mr. Fox says to non-Americans, or listen carefully to la Raza (a blatantly racist term analogous to the old German concept of a pure Volk) dogma in the southwest. Papers in Mexico often mirror those in the Arab world — blaming the United States for Mexico City's own failure to address self-created pathologies...

One wonders why Hanson does not devote his energies to support of the U.S. space program. Clearly Americans are too good for the planet.

What a sour way to look at things -- believing that everything you do is wonderful, and that everyone should love you for it, and that those who don't are just fools requiring correction ("r" rolled as Grady does in the film of The Shining). I slip into that kind of thinking myself sometimes -- often enough that I have to pay close attention to the tendency, lest I become too moody and anti-social. But I know there's something wrong with feeling that way -- and (thankfully for all concerned, I guess) I don't have the ear of a suggestible President.

HIPSTERS DONE STOLE-OR-BULLIED MAH YARD SIGN!

Shortly after his last effulgence of fame as the guy The Atlantic hired and then fired when they found out he advocated execution for women who had abortions, Kevin D. Williamson returned to National Review, where he has been honing his performatively nasty style. This week he's applying his method to a couple of rightwing classics. For one, there's the Sissy Liberals Who Are Askeered to Live With Black People. I've had this shtick pulled on me in the past: A troll once asked me why I didn't live with black people if I liked them so much. I was living at the time in Harlem and told him so, whereupon he immediately responded, "Why don't you go live in East New York." If I went to East New York I expect he would have demanded I move to the Central African Republic. Anyway, here's Williamson:

As I have mentioned before, I live in a pretty assertively lefty neighborhood (big cities in Texas are a lot like big cities in the rest of the country) surrounded by diehards who are not going to take the “Beto for Senate” stickers off their Audis. (Forgive me for quoting myself: “We admire our neighborhood for its diversity: There are white people with Audis, black people with Audis, Latino people with Audis, Asian people with Audis, gay people with Audis . . .”) But they are mostly nice people, and we rarely talk about politics. Sure, all that “Black Lives Matter” paraphernalia does sometimes give one the sneaking suspicion that these nice white progressives are trying very, very hard to elide the fact that they all live north of the street that forms a socioeconomic Berlin Wall between our neighborhood and the poor and largely non-white one to the south, that they’re all over here with the nice restaurants with vegan options and the new coffee shop and the National Review guy rather than a few blocks away with The People.

You have to wonder: Are the Audi-driving black people in Williamson's and the liberals' neighborhood also supposed to feel bad that they're not living in the really black part of town? Or maybe it's a Mexican neighborhood, or an Asian one  -- you'd think he'd tell us, so that his black and white neighbors could know before whom to abase themselves.

Come to think of it, why isn't Williamson living in that neighborhood, if he has such contempt for liberals who don't (and, it would seem, nearly all of his current neighbors)? I guess when he avoids it, it's on principled conservative grounds, like the Right of Free Association, whereas when liberals do it it's hypocrisy.

Williamson also does the one about the goddamn liberals who are sissies -- "eye-rolling dopes spilling a fair-trade almond-milk latte on my Kentucky 31" (Williamson names his grasses, that's how butch he is!) -- yet somehow also capable of bullying a Trump supporter. Williamson makes a point of showing us how tough he is, personally, at least in patter:

Random bearded hipster pedestrians passing by pointed out my neighbors’ Trump flag to denounce it. With my mouth I said, “People like what they like,” and with my heart I said, “Keep walking, hippie, and don’t slow down.”

Maybe I should have said "in patter in his heart, such as it is." Anyway, there was also a Trump sign on one of the local lawns that later vanished: "I do not know what happened to it, but it is gone," Williamson testifies. Then the aforementioned Trump flag disappeared. The evidence is clear to Williamson: "I assume somebody stole the flag or that the neighbors were bullied into taking it down."

Assume? You'd think a John Wayne type of guy like Williamson would saunter up to the Trump houses, knock on their doors and ask these salt-of-the-earthers if them-there he-shes and simps was givin' 'em any trouble and cancel-culturin' them into takin' down their Trump tat. But Williamson says:

(I haven’t had a chance to ask and haven’t really gone looking for one. Good emotional fences make good neighbors.) 

I guess the only way to keep the liberals' mind-rays from making one betray one's principles, yard-sign-wise, is by refusing to talk to them. Thereafter he gives us a lecture on neighborliness and anti-racism and ugh.

It just occurred to me what this reminded me of: Victor Davis Hanson's stolen chainsaw and the liberals he blamed for it! He and Williamson are kindred spirits.

FRENCH TWIST.

David French is on fire this week, by which I mean more ostentatiously nuts than usual. (Can you blame him? Strategery Presidential candidate Evan McMullan seems to be making some progress in his bid to take Utah and, if the prognostications of Josh Gelertner mean anything (spoiler: they don't), throw the election to the House. French, who rejected the Billy Kristol Party presidential bid earlier this year, may be eating his heart out over what might have been.)

One French post is about the depressed viewership of NFL games on TV. French naturally blames Colin Kaepernick and other protestors:

While it’s difficult to explain the behavior of millions of people by reference to any single cause, I’m dubious of the NFL’s attempt to rule out player protests as offering any explanation for the ratings drop. The NFL isn’t the NBA. Its fan base isn’t as clustered in progressive urban centers but is far more equitably distributed across the country.

As the Coach says in That Championship Season, basketball is no longer the white man's game, so You People in your urban hoop-ghettos can protest all you want, but we white men out here in the Big Suburb demand you calm your black folk down or it's bye-bye Pennzoil ads.

Thus, it plays a doubly dangerous game by embracing the social justice left. It stands to alienate more fans than it attracts, and it’s in bed with a cultural force that ultimately despises the league itself. Social justice warriors hope to destroy football. They don’t want what’s best for the league or the sport. Instead, they want to use it until they kill it.

The National Football League -- betrayed from within! You fellows in the executive suites are deceived -- Those People aren't your friends, they're trying to kill you. In NFL, pass-catcher mau-maus YOU!

Sometimes I think modern conservatism is just one long riff on the word "nigger-lover."

Elsewhere French gets into the pussy tape, and echoes Trump agent Betsy McCaughey and others with a oh-yeah-well-you-libtards-love-sex defense. Remember, this guy professes to despise Trump, so this shows how insanely devoted to culture war he has to be:

This is one for the Vox record books. The liberal site — which purports to “explain” the news...

Impudent liberals! Only Jesus can explain the news!

...— is now trying to explain why some conservative Christians are sharing Beyoncé lyrics and passages from Fifty Shades of Grey in response to the Trump tapes. Their explanation? Christians view dirty words and sex assault as basically the same because, well, read it for yourself...

French argues theology with the Vox quotes for a while ("all sins are certainly not 'equally' bad in their moral gravity or their earthly consequences") before proving their main idea right:

Second, regarding pop culture, it’s not that pop culture is just crass — it celebrates perversion. Fifty Shades of Grey seems to describe its own sexual assault. Here are key passages, via Rod Dreher:

Imagine David French and Rod Dreher examining the evidence! "Look, Rod, have you seen this?" "Wow! I don't even know what that is and I'm gettin' a boner! [stabs self in leg with penknife]"

I’m not even going to attempt to quote Beyonce’s lyrics. They don’t describe sexual assault but instead a quid pro quo-style sex relationship where she grants all kinds of favors to men she has sex with — the kind of relationship that women have forever rightly condemned as sexual harassment.

You libtards say you're against sexual assault but she took his ass to Red Lobster -- according to the Bible that makes her both a whore and a whore-monger!

At the heart of the conservative critique, however, is something very real — calling out a Left that has helped sexually debase our culture to such an extent that only one moral norm remains, and even that’s truly optional in the right context. All the Left cares about anymore is consent, but its icons (like Bill Clinton) get a pass even then, and if a novel gets popular enough — like Fifty Shades of Grey — then it exists in its own exempted, subversive category.

David French answers your "consent" argument with unproven allegations and fiction! Now who's a dirty bird?

Heather Mac Donald says it well:

Ugh. All you need to know about that is Mac Donald has taken time out from her usual job -- warning white America of the national Negro uprising -- to explain that women are whores ("Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels...") and parse Beyoncé and Jay-Z with a Talmudic intensity seldom seen outside a Black Studies seminar or the writings of Victor Davis Hanson. Mac Donald is also mad at Amy Schumer: "She confesses to a 'weakness for orgasms.'" In short, the Clenis and Hollywood made everything badsex and we need to get back to "the chivalric ideal that gentlemen should treat females like ladies," which comes with permanent inferior status for women but, on the bright side, maybe marginally fewer rapes, at least outside of wedlock or the manor.

Imagine a normal person reading these posts, and you'll see why their movement is in trouble.

TRAWLING THE BACK CATALOGUE. Michael Rubin at The Corner:

Obama Still Flailing for the Clenched Fist?
Iran’s Alef News and Jahan News are reporting that the Obama administration sent the Iranian government another letter in the past couple days, reportedly with regard to the three detained Americans. The newspapers report that the Iranian government has yet to respond.

Maybe they should try sending them a cake in the shape of a key.

(See also Hanson, Victor Davis: "I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists." Sometimes, despite all evidence, I think he's trying to be funny.)

IT'S THE NEW STYLE. Every once in a while I come across some young rightnik and wonder what he's been up to. James Poulos we last considered here in his role as interlocutor for a Jonah Goldberg video fart-fest, from which no one could come out smelling good. Well, Poulos has been spreading his seed, lately with this article in Foreign Policy. I found it so unobjectionable that I had to wonder whether I'd misjudged him and everything else. So I went to his First Things blog:

With the recent death of Steve Jobs we should applaud the expansion of the use of technological i-devices he provided, in that we are more and more connected. But out of wedlock births seem to be on the rise nonetheless.

Okay, I feel centered now. (Update: Poulos didn't write this one, apparently; someone named John Presnall did. So hereafter I'm changing the proper names. Poulos actually quit PMC over a year ago. Maybe he's gone legit! I'll look into it.) Presnall isn't like those total internet madmen you shy your kids away from when they come stumbling down the bandwidth -- he's more like parfait crazy; there'll be a sweet, foamy layer of stuff about the problems of constant, empty connectedness in the internet world, and then suddenly BAM, flash mobs, technocrats and JOE PATERNO:

Meanwhile, people die. These dying people still care about sports—even college sports. They may be stupid in their concern, but the immense amounts of money that college sports generate for the apparatus of colleges and universities gives prestige to such important things that the tenured genii of the future provide for humanity. Or at least that is what I saw on the commercial advertising the greatness of any given particular school during the typical televised football game. The TV ads showed multicultural pictures of scientists dressed in lab coats and safety glasses.

All this reminds me of Pascal’s observation regarding the dress that the nobility must don in order to maintain their authority—their nobility is secure in their purple and ermine, i.e., sterile white lab coats with beakers in the laboratory background. ...

You know -- oh wait, gotta get this in:

But I am a product of all his “higher education” nonsense, and as a teacher I am pressured to perpetuate it.

Yeah, thanks, Professor. Postmodern conservatism, like postmodern anything else, is a great racket -- while Jonah Goldberg is attempting things that resemble arguments, however superficially, and embarrassing himself in front of anyone who can grasp their inferiority to other actual arguments, including those held by Ralph and Alice Kramden, Presnall doesn't have to bother -- he can just throw up signifiers of discontent with our lousy liberal society, where an accused child rapist enabler proceeds naturally from scientism-multiculturalism. Or is it vice-versa? Whatever.

Or maybe they're all doing that. Come to think of it, Victor Davis Hanson may be the granddaddy of the postmodern conservative mash-up. Curse these tenured radicals!

HOW YA GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM...

Apparently our urban hellholes are safer than God's Country:

Large cities in the U.S. are significantly safer than their rural counterparts, with the risk of injury death more than 20 percent higher in the country. A study to be published online tomorrow in Annals of Emergency Medicine upends a common perception that urban areas are more dangerous than small towns ("Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the U.S.?")... 

Analyzing 1,295,919 injury deaths that occurred between 1999 and 2006, researchers determined that the risk of injury death was 22 percent higher in the most rural counties than in the most urban. The most common causes of injury death were motor vehicle crashes, leading to 27.61 deaths per 100,000 people in most rural areas and 10.58 per 100,000 in most urban areas.

Now it's time for Victor Davis Hanson, Rod Dreher, and their pals to tell us the blacks are driving their welfare Cadillacs out to the sticks to run over white people.

UPDATE. Hee hee -- Whet Moser at Chicago Magazine: "Welcome to Cook, One of America’s Safest Counties."

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

Conservatives are making big promises about the downfall of their enemies (i.e., all rational people) and their own coming Reich; see, for example Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's "Liberalism in Ruins" -- boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one! Byron York is no exception. Now that the HNIC is leaving the White House, he says, blacks will stop voting Democratic, as will those other pesky interest groups to whom his Nubian charm appealed:

First the coalition: Obama's powerful appeal to minorities, women, and young people propelled his decisive wins in 2008 and 2012. But those voters didn't show up at the polls in 2010 and 2014. 

Some Democrats are confident the coalition will be back in 2016, when interest in a presidential race is far greater than during midterms. But will it return in the strength it showed in '08 and '12? Or will Democratic voting return to pre-Obama patterns?

So, this is a great time for the GOP to appeal to and pick up these stray black, Latino and female voters and shore up their legitimacy as a national party, right?

Don't be silly. York has no advice on that, because even Washington Examiner readers wouldn't understand why he was bothering. But white people -- that's another story:

"Given its sheer size, the working-class white population in the U.S. is of keen importance to politicians and strategists on both sides of the aisle," Gallup wrote recently, noting "the complex set of attitudes and life positions which … have pushed this group further from the Democratic president over the past six years." 

If Democrats don't find a way to connect with those "attitudes and life positions" of working-class whites in coming years, they'll have a big problem...

In the end, no single group will mean defeat for the Democrat and victory for the Republican in 2016. But President Obama's troubling legacy — a weakened coalition and growing ranks of alienated white voters — could mean a serious post-presidential hangover for Democrats.

"No single group" is a nice evasive harrumph-harrumph, but the message of York's column is clearly that women, youth, and minority votes can only be lost -- like some kind of gas that escapes, evaporates, and is seen no more -- whereas white votes are something you can win by appealing to their "complex set of attitudes and life positions." Normally, based on his previous writings and conservative history, I would assume York considers these to be the usual hatred of minorities, contempt for the poor etc., but his column suggests he's at least dimly aware that the most effective thing conservatives can communicate to white people is that they are to be taken more seriously than anyone else.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the situation in Ferguson and the related rightblogger identity crisis: Should they let their lipstick libertarian experimentation go beyond the vanilla stuff, and into kinky places that might outrage Jennifer Rubin? Questions remain!

Lots of excess material here: In the section about rightbloggers claiming Ferguson has something to do with Second Amendment rights -- as if America would tolerate black citizens open-carrying en masse; forbid it almighty Reagan! -- I'd hoped to include this Tim Cavanaugh rant at National Review, in which Cavanaugh is so enraged that Tom Toles alluded in a disparaging manner to the NRA in a Ferguson cartoon that he starts emitting stank from every hole -- calling Toles "The Worst Cartoonist In America," snarling about "cheap and half-baked premises" and "barnacle-encrusted clichés," comparing Toles to "monstrous dictators," saying he "keeps his finger right on the pulse of 1979," calling his draftsmanship "visually repulsive" (not aurally repulsive, I guess)... it's so unhinged that Cavanaugh's lack of a coherent point doesn't explain it. Maybe it's a Nast/Tweed or a Goebbels/revolver thing?

UPDATE. If you want some idea of how the Ooga-Booga Squad is whipping the Lipstick Libertarians among conservatives, look at The Corner at National Review this morning. Samples:

• "Ferguson Protester to Cop: ‘F*** You, N*****’." (The protester is black and the cop is white, so you can imagine how this will enrage your typical NatRev reader.)
• Victor Davis Hanson: "The gratuitous looting and street violence, the almost instantaneous rush to blast the police by soon to be presidential candidate Rand Paul; the arrival of the usual demagogues — Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson ('state execution'), and the New Black Panther Party... so reminiscent of the Trayvon Martin Case..." If you're playing the Racist Pundit Talking Point Drinking Game, that's four stiff shots right there.
• Jay Nordlinger: "Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops." Once again white people get the short end of the stick! Also: "Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting" -- which is to say, from Nordlinger's perspective, not at all.

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND.

Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson tells us there were men in those days, by God! Not like the lily-livers we have now! And the only way to pay them proper tribute is in third-rate press-agent prose:

The greatest generals are tragic heroes. Take again George S. Patton — the man who was needed to instill a 19th-century martial audacity in an untrained army of conscripts reliant on superior logistics and material supply. Yet Patton was singularly inept in adjusting to the necessary politics of an allied effort, and indeed to the cultural parameters of modernism itself — thus his crackpot talk of reincarnation and manly essence.

Driven mad, nobly mad, by the tempora and the mores -- victim of the modern age, poor poor General!

To cut as much of the bullshit as is possible while still addressing the subject, Maximus has learned a few things about John Ford (from the sound of it, almost certainly from David Brooks), and sees a link to antique heroes, and their need to be obliterated in their agon for the good of all -- something Maximus would certainly consider socialistic if cowboys and Romans weren't so dead butch. Maximus says we need such a man now to save America -- from itself!

Could there be a tragic hero in the 21st century? Might a candidate reform the tax code, balance the budget, recalibrate entitlements, return the U.S. to a meritocratic and self-reliant society, and understand that he had to be hated for doing what might save us? “I shall end agricultural subsidies entirely and cut Food Stamps back to 2009 levels,” a heroic president might thunder as he welcomes a single term as the price for that defiance.

Maximus is catching on, slightly; he knows we all hate him and his fellow wingnuts. And while at first glance it might seem as if he's forgetting that you have to be elected before you can become our hated leader, I give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he knows his preferred candidate will either steal the election or lie his way in.

But what man is fit for the laurel?

Mitch Daniels has the standoffishness...

Quit laughing! Let him finish!

...and a sense that what has to be done would be near politically intolerable for the most of the public. But does he have the spirit, over familial objections, to turn the buckboard around back to Hadleyville before High Noon?

Well, considering how quickly he crapped out back in 2012, when with the support of Maximus Super he could have saved us from the blackamoor tyrant Obama, I'd say Daniels prefers a heavily air-conditioned McMansion to any buckboard, especially one headed into battle.

Chris Christie is the antithesis of the current metrosexual president, as unconcerned with his appearance as Obama is prissy and compulsive in his manners and grooming. 

What's Latin for "faggot"?

But while Christie’s bluster shows signs of tragic unconcern, is it matched by a spiritual unconcern for what the presidency might do to him if he were to try to save the country?

Depends. Might the presidency try to make him eat a salad?

Perhaps things must become even worse to cause a tragic hero to emerge — for someone to speak the truth, offend the majority, and, when the successful effort is over, to lose.

Two thoughts: 1.) Sarah Palin isn't going to run, Maximus. When the Republic goes down in flames, she'll be running a theme park called Triggworld or some shit, and counting every penny from the moose-ear cap concession. 2.) I hate to call anyone else a drama queen, but this dream of non-consensually forcing Liberty onto America and then dying nobly downstage may be something you should share with your shrink, not yell out the windows. Some of your comrades might want to win an election someday.

SITUATION NORMAL... The Democratic backpedaling on Guantanamo sucks, but provides a lesson in practical politics. Jennifer Rubin says Obama's plan to close the place is "hugely unpopular." That's not true. But the Republicans have framed the issue cleverly as bullshit about, as the numbskull Rick Moran puts it, "Not wanting terrorists released on American soil," as if Obama is going to help them off the back of a truck onto Main Street, USA. There is no indication that actual citizens think maximum security prisons are unable to hold terrorists (if they do, they should rethink their current accommodations for rapists and murderers), but the gutless Senate Dems are preemptively capitulating.

We'll see what Obama does next, but having been around the block a few times, I wouldn't be surprised to be disappointed -- the fantasies of Mary Katharine Ham and Victor Davis Hanson notwithstanding. They imagine people who voted for Obama will be shocked and demoralized to find their one-time candidate trimming. This is one of the comforts of exile, for which they prepped well back in the late campaign with all their yak about The One and Lightworker. In fact these people were talking about Obama as "Bush's Third Term" as far back as July and even as they were warning against his election. It was a psychological insurance policy, on which they are now making claims.

Most of us, however, were voting for someone who would deliver us from the imbeciles who had been mismanaging the country for eight years. We got that, along with some idiocy, both fresh and vintage. 'Twas ever thus. Reintroducing sanity to our governance was always going to be an uphill climb.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...Part 2 of my 10 Dumbest Rightblogger Ideas listicle. I know, but it had to be done and I was out of cat pictures.

UPDATE. I was running long, and so much could have been added, particularly from National Review, which seems to have gone in big-time for insane gender-based gibberish lately. There's the outraged report that "[Rachel] Maddow is part of the new matriarchy running NBC News behind the scenes," for example;  Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's extremely weird paen to reality-show stars ("A big gut can add gravitas to the moonshiner’s biceps in a way impossible to achieve at the gym"); and David French telling his no doubt receptive readers that liberal males are all pussies "walking on eggshells, dating women and living in cultures that are constantly calling out any kind of behavior subjectively perceived as 'male' or oppressive... liberal men often lack a distinctively masculine purpose." If National Review gets any more butch it'll turn into the Ramrod.

UPDATE 2. In comments, JennOfArk: "Nah. I've seen those guys. If anything, National Review is the Mine Shaft, not the Ramrod."

POINT/COUNTERPOINT.

From January, Victor Davis Hanson:

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn't the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up? 

To play the old "what if" game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers...

From the Grammys last night, Kendrick Lamar:


Kendrick Lamar Grammy Awards Performance 2016 from Jamie Apps Media on Vimeo.

Take a fuckin' seat VDH.

UPDATE. In comments, a very worthwhile reaction by dauwhe:

I'm the worst kind of music snob, listening only to Jazz for the last three decades. Curiosity lead me to Kamasi Washington's "The Epic," which bothered many of the critics, but on first hearing had me dancing around my living room in a transcendent state. Many of the same musicians contributed to Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly." And so I ended up with a CD in my house with a parental warning (Thanks Tipper!). I'd never bought a rap album. I don't listen to the radio... Yet Kendrick Lamar blew me away. Staggering ambition, searing emotion, musical genius at the smallest and largest scales, and a dramatic political statement—I feel lucky to have experienced this music. I can only surmise that VDH did not listen, or did not recognize the profound humanity and intelligence of the music and its creator. His loss.

Yeah; it must suck to be so committed to an ideology that requires constant blinkers and earplugs.

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Victor Davis Hanson:

One thought in this context. It is of course true that the surge is working and our soldiers are far more sophisticated than in 2003. But in all the places one visits, there are reminders everywhere — pockmarked walls, rubble, memorial photos in bases — of all those killed during the worst ordeal between 2003-6. When one walks through these former battlefields, there is an eerie melancholy, a ghostly archaeology, a sense that now unnamed and largely anonymous Americans paid the ultimate price in those years to allow the opportunities we witness today. And that’s why we must continue and finish the job they started.

Charlie Brown no longer needs Lucy to pull away the football. He will drop back to punt and fall on his ass unassisted.

SHOWTIME. Michael Ledeen takes in a Toby Keith concert;

It's great to get out of the Washington culture of narcissism and spend some time with the rednecks, a.k.a. real Americans. And it's simply great, as the encores end, and a downpour of red, white and blue confetti covers the crowd, to see Toby say "don't ever apologize for your patriotism," and then lift the middle finger of his right hand to the skies and say, "F*** 'Em!"

Which, after a week of disgusting anti-Americanism in Washington, nicely summed up our feelings.

You ought to try it. Does wonders for the spirit.

Oh, if only his colleagues would take him up on it.

JONAH GOLDBERG: (through a mouth full of hot dog) CURRSSY VUV VUH RID WUHN BLUH!

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: He is a modern Simonides singing of Thermopylae! With the biceps of a Greek god!

JONAH GOLDBERG: And the hair of a young David Hasselhoff!

PETER SUDERMAN: I find his vulgarity so liberating that I don't even mind the large number of children in attendance!

STANLEY KURTZ: Not to worry, Peter! This shows a healthy uptick in white procreation!

CLEM: Which one a' you funny boys got Cheeto dust in mah beer?

Then they can blame the ensuing beatdown on antiwar protestors.

NO MASKS, PLEASE, WE'RE PATRIOTS.

Even with the departure of Jonah Goldberg, there remain some spectacularly awful writers at National Review like Victor Davis Hanson and David Harsanyi. But in these days of desperate last-ditch Trump defense, the less spectacular, more shoulder-to-the-wheel propagandist Jim Geraghty deserves more attention.

Geraghty had of late been working the popular conservative trope that protests are causing the COVID-19 spread. He may have tumbled that this line isn't working, because earlier this week he seemed to back off, saying protests "may not be the primary factor spreading the virus around the U.S. in recent weeks, but that doesn’t mean they were not a factor at all," an obvious intermediate step to dropping the claim entirely.

Geraghty's got a lulu today. First he plumps what he calls "Maybe the Most Jaw-Droppingly Good Jobs Report in U.S. History" -- a pitch for the hometeam crowd, certainly, since Americans are starting to look at job reports the same way they look at the stock market: "Good news" that does not seem to reflect the reality they're actually living.

Perhaps sensing this, Geraghty gets right to work on bothsidesing the coronavirus catastrophe:

You can point to no shortage of policy mistakes made by President Trump, or governors such as Andrew Cuomo of New York, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

If that doesn't have you convinced that the president who kept telling America the virus was no big deal and stole PPE from the states is no more guilty than three leaders whose COVID curves actually went down (though Michigan's has recently ticked up a little), Geraghty has something else to sell you -- The reason the virus is out of control here is actually America's greatness: 

Some countries may have responded to this virus better than we did, but they are generally smaller, less populous, had experience with a previous serious virus, and/or have populations that are more trusting of their government and more inclined to obey strict rules and to assent to government monitoring of their movements and activities that Americans are unlikely ever to accept.

We're self-centered assholes who know the leaders we elect will screw us -- that's why we can't perform the simple public health measures that are saving the rest of the civilized world! [Pounds chest] We're "a country literally founded by people who violently rejected the existing legal and political authority when they deemed it unjust or draconian," says Geraghty, and that's why we don't need no stinkin' masks, whattaya say to that, Karen?

Having failed to dispel our Springtime-for-Hitler stare, Geraghty changes tack, seeking to convince us that lockdowns killed George Floyd who you liberals say you care about so much:

If the economy had not been shut down in Minnesota, would George Floyd have been out of work? Would he have allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill and then been in that particular place and time where former police officer Derek Chauvin would arrest him and hold his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes?

In fact, there wouldn't be any protests at all, Geraghty seems to say, if the lockdowns didn't have the kids so darned bored:

I don’t think we fully appreciate how much the still -- ongoing protests are, for young people, the only game in town. Just what else is there to do in still-heavily-locked-down America? They can’t go to the movies. They can’t go to a ballgame... 

In a normal summer, how much of young people’s mental energy is spent on enjoyable leisure, from the NBA to pickup games of sports to Marvel movies and other summer blockbusters?... 

Why are we shocked that young people are flocking to house parties and bars at night and protests during the day? What else have we left them to do?

Ah youth -- when summer is one long roundelay of partying in bars and then yelling "all cops are bastards" out in the warm sun! I expect National Review's geriatric subscribers, whose idea of protests haven't much evolved from Students Wildly Indignant about Everything, will buy it. And isn't that the important thing? At this point it's not like conservatives are trying to convince anyone but themselves.