FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT.

Sad news from Culture Warsyltucky:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOW LIFE HAS KILLED THE DREAM I DREAMED.

Weep for Megan McArdle. She's been hurt so many times -- first by the Supreme Court failing to kill Obamacare in 2012: "my day lilies are still blooming beautifully," she said then, bravely, through shaking lips and tears; "...I assume that we're all looking forward to seeing Obama campaign on his large middle class tax hike. Pass the popcorn!" As if Obama's reelection a few months later weren't worse enough, she has lately had to sit through a couple of other disastrous repeal-and-replace attempts; but when last week Republicans' hopes revived for Graham-Cassidy, so did McArdle's, and she dared to dream of a future where the rickety Rube Goldberg ACA version of national health care lay in ruins and the Democrats must beg for socialized medicine in the streets:

The left can pass another Obamacare, or some different, more expansive plan. But to do so, they will have to go through the whole painful process of passing Obamacare all over again: soothe or pay off all the anxious interest groups; find the extra tax dollars to fund it; reassure voters who have good insurance that they will not lose by the new plan. 

This task will be immensely harder in Round 2 than it was in 2010. By the time they get around to it (in 2020, soonest), Democrats will be forced to scavenge for new sources of funding at the same time as every predator on K Street is scouring the landscape to feed our existing defense commitments and rapidly growing entitlement burden.

That'll show those scavenging moochers! So engrossed was she in her vengeance fantasy, she lapsed into that hoary Peggy Noonan passive-aggressive shtick, counseling Democrats to win big by being Republicans:

Can Democrats win back states they’ve lost by marching into 50 capitols and proposing single payer? Certainly not. But they may be able to win back those states by designing local solutions that fit the local politics, economy and cultural values, while pushing those places a little closer to progressive ideals. And in the process, they might bring some political diversity into their own party, which would be good for Democratic electoral fortunes, and good for America.

Well, today Graham-Cassidy collapsed, and mainly for a reason McArdle could never bring herself to even acknowledge: That no Senator who absolutely didn't have to attach himself or herself to this bill would do so, because the bill was as popular as cancer (just one of the many diseases that under Graham-Cassidy would have bankrupted and/or killed many more Americans than before). Even Trumpkins hated it because, as much as they may hate Colin Kaepernick and people who can read and write, they hate even more the idea of dying just so some rich fuck can be richer still.

And this has been the problem with all the repealreplacements -- Republicans have to show voters they're serious about getting rid of the black guy's health care thing, but can't even pretend to fill the gap with something that won't straight-up kill them, let alone something that would actually improve their lives. Anyone who could be held responsible for such a bill's passage would be hunted down by his or her constituents, as the President is fond of saying, like a dog. So they do these little Kabuki shows that always end with them hanging their heads in front of the microphones and pledging to do better next time while Trump raves on his golden toilet.

Because that's all they can do. It's so plain it takes a pundit not to see it.

I'm not a sentimental fellow, but when I imagine McArdle having to confront the fact that the sole remaining health care bill before the Senate now is Medicare For All,  and that even chucklehead outfits like Politico have to admit single payer "is fairly popular — at least in principle" (their strangulated way of saying it won their poll 49-35), well, I can hardly keep from laughing.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Often, when one is king of the divan, one just has to go for the easy lay-up, n'cest pas?
• It's nice that they let McCain be the maverick this time! But don't forget: Republicans are a zombie death squad, lumbering forward at the behest of sociopathic Randroid donors. Don't imagine that any of them mean you anything but ill -- and that includes the so-called moderates. I know a lot of intelligent people like John Kasich, and are juiced that he was against the skinny repeal. But let us look at his premises -- from his New York Times Op-Ed, July 19 [emphases mine]:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Washington’s approach to health care over the past decade is yet another example of our lawmakers’ increasing distance from the rest of America. First one party rams through a rigid, convoluted plan that drives up costs though unsustainable mechanisms that are now unraveling. Then the other party pursues fixes that go too far the other way — and again ignores ideas from the other side.  

Neither extreme is cutting it, and the quick opposition that doomed the Senate plan reflects how unacceptable its idejas are to so many.

As a responsible centrist I'm opposed to this inadequate response to the Big Gummint Statist Commie Health Disaster. But unlike that baaaaad man in the White House, I'm a nice guy and will soothe your aching health care needs with “tax credits” and “transitioning to a block grant or per-capita cap.” Oh, and:

After two failed attempts at reform, the next step is clear: Congress should first focus on fixing the Obamacare exchanges before it takes on Medicaid. If we want to move Americans off Medicaid, there must be somewhere stable for them to go.

This is hilarious. "Fixing" the exchanges just happens to have been Mitch McConnell's announced Plan B for when the repeal-and/or-replace plans failed to pass. And I suspect if Kasich and his less-"moderate" buddies actually "move Americans off Medicaid" -- the heart's dream of generations of wingnuts -- the "stable" surface they alight on will be the pavement. Fuck all of ‘em; we won't be safe till the last hard-liner is strangled with the entrails of the last moderate.

• Speaking of people who seem to be your friends and aren't, Peggy Noonan stamps her foot and says, know what the problem is with that awful Trump fellow? He's not an old-fashioned movie-star sort of man like Ronnie Reagan!

The way American men used to like seeing themselves, the template they most admired, was the strong silent type celebrated in classic mid-20th century films—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Henry Fonda. In time the style shifted, and we wound up with the nervous and chattery. More than a decade ago the producer and writer David Chase had his Tony Soprano mourn the disappearance of the old style: “What they didn’t know is once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings they wouldn’t be able to shut him up!”

She had a clear shot to cite someone that her sub-70-yr-old readers might have heard of to support her love of antique butchness, and she picked Tony fucking Soprano.

The new style was more like that of Woody Allen. His characters couldn’t stop talking about their emotions, their resentments and needs. They were self-justifying as they acted out their cowardice and anger.

 Man, she's channeling Life magazine circa 1969. These hippie film stars with their pot and their whatchacall new-roses! Just shoot the fucking injuns, kid!

But he was a comic. It was funny. He wasn’t putting it out as a new template for maleness. Donald Trump now is like an unfunny Woody Allen.

Who needs a template for how to be a man? A lot of boys and young men, who’ve grown up in a culture confused about what men are and do. Who teaches them the real dignity and meaning of being a man?

I bet Noonan thinks that now when she talks about how those lads in the ghetto lack positive male role models, hipsters and black folk won't make that shut-up-old-white-lady face, because they'll know she's talking about Trump -- everyone hates him! And no one will remember what long, luxuriant tongue-baths Noonan was giving Trump up until, oh, a few weeks ago--

Mr. Trump is taking a clear stand against the kind of gauzy globalism and vague multiculturalism represented by the worldview of, say, Barack Obama and most contemporary Western intellectuals, who are willing, even eager, to concede the argument to critics of the West’s traditions.

From Bismarck to a bum, in as short a time as it takes for Noonan to lick her finger and put it up in the air.

PEGGY'S ON A BUMMER.

Peggy Noonan:

Near the end of the campaign I wrote a column called “Imagine a Sane Donald Trump,” lamenting that I believed he was crazy, and too bad. Too bad because his broad policy assertions, or impulses, suggested he understood that 2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in America, and that the country was going to choose, in coming decades, one of two paths—a moderate populism or socialism—and that the former was vastly to be preferred, for reasons of the nation’s health. A gifted politician could make his party the leader toward that path, which includes being supportive and encouraging of business but willing to harness government to alleviate the distress of the abandoned working class and the anxious middle class; strong on defense but neither aggressive nor dreamy in world affairs; realistic and nonradical on social issues while unmistakably committed to protecting the freedoms of the greatest cohering force in America, its churches; and aware that our nation’s immigration reality was a scandal created by both parties, and must be redressed.

You could discern, listening to his interviews and speeches, that this was more or less where Donald Trump stood.

Really? She got that from Trump's belligerent yammerings? I suppose you could also "discern" from them that he was the seventh son of the seventh mother, or Death Destroyer of Worlds, if you had taken enough Diviner's Potion at P.J. Clarke's.

Well, 70 days in, Noonan has decided oh my, this Administration is not going well at all. And you know what the problem is? No, it's not that a pack of cheap grifters seized the White House and, in furtherance of its crimes, allows rightwing psychos to destroy the country -- It's the servants!

His staff has failed to absorb the obvious fact that Mr. Trump was so outsized, colorful, and freakish a character that their primary job, and an easy one it was, was to be the opposite—sober, low-key, reassuring. Instead they seemed to compete with him for outlandishness.

It's sort of like Benson, if the Governor were a vicious psychopath.

As for the President himself, Noonan can only shake her head and wonder what went wrong:

It amazes me that in his dealings with the health-care bill Mr. Trump revealed that he has no deep knowledge of who his base is, who his people are. I’ve never seen that in politics.

Honey, he has no deep knowledge of anything except ways to separate suckers from their money.

...But Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t like the bill. If they had wanted a Republican president who deals only with the right, to produce a rightist bill, they would have chosen Ted Cruz. Instead they chose someone outside conservatism who backed big-ticket spending on infrastructure and opposed cutting entitlements, which suggested he’d be working with Democrats, too.

As I have noted many times, Noonan is all kinds of disingenuous and will sometimes play dumb to look cute, but these days I'm genuinely beginning to question the arterial flow to her brain. She seems to think voters carefully weigh multiple policy vectors -- "hmm, Trump says 'Ahma gunna kill Obamacare Ahm so great' in such a way that I expect my particular health care needs will be met" -- instead of just going "Big TV Star yell at Messicans, Me hate Messicans, Negro eat T-bone steak, me like way he yell," etc.

But of course Noonan has to pretend that, because to admit that the Trump tide is an id monster would be to admit that the electorate, or at least the new Republican section of it, is beyond her prissy ministrations and passive-aggressive bullshit; they won't be swayed by tea-cakes now they've tasted blood. Being prudent, she now has to prepare for a possible anti-Trump backlash -- but instead of portraying them as a mob turning on its master, she has to suggest they were misled -- by Hollywood!

...Their sense of how a White House works came from news shows and reading, and also from TV shows such as “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president. I don’t mean that in the nice way. Those programs don’t convey how a White House is an organism demanding of true depth, of serious people, real professionals. A president has to be a serious person too, and not only an amusing or stimulating talker, or the object of a dream.

Yes, somewhere along the way the yeoman farmer was corrupted by premium cable. I wonder how she'll react if, whatever happens with this administration, she must confront the fact that her people no longer feel the need to even act as if they care about her good opinion.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the "normalization" of Trump, and the rightbloggers' resistance to any indication that Trump is anything but normal (or superhuman).

In the column I noted Peggy Noonan pretending to be mortally offended by Trump's multiple conflicts of interest. Had I room I would have also treated her later, even worse column, "What to Tell Your Children About Trump." I should mention here, for readers who have not long followed the woman I used to call the Crazy Jesus Lady, how absolutely full to bursting Noonan is with shit. In an earlier, post-election column, she whimpered that "Donald Trump doesn’t know how to be president" and implored the citizenry, "Help him," as if the practiced grifter would not cheerfully help himself every chance he got.

Then came the column I cited, professing to keep an eye on the fellow lest he (inadvertently, no doubt) rob the Treasury. "What to Tell Your Children About Trump" probably came after many cocktails and/or stern warnings to get normalizing if she knew what was good for her. It came with this peculiar illo:

The attempt to make the vicious, hate-faced Trump look avuncular in this image is, amazingly, even more repulsive than the actual Trump's real-life rictus when clutching horrified children, because it shows a more benign countenance than Trump has ever managed to show at any time; it's as if he had died, and had his face wrestled by an undertaker into a cheerful, Uncle Toby grin for the casket, and then someone thought it would be nice if, before he was planted, he could be crunched into a seated position, then surrounded by children who have been promised $10 not to scream in terror while the scene was photographed.

Even more artificial is Noonan's historical analysis. "The legacy media continues its self-disgrace," she claims, because they aren't showing Trump the proper deference -- "Any journalists who are judicious toward Trump, who treat him fairly or even as a human being, are now accused of 'normalizing' him." And what could be abnormal about a crooked grifter elevated to our highest office? Instead, decrees Noonan, the media should "respect" the "happiness" of "60 million people" who "haven’t taken to the streets... they haven’t broken car windows..." which I guess is Noonan's way of saying they're all white, though they are in a sense a minority.

Then comes the kind of Noonan bullshit that makes you proud to be an American, where even the most unbelievable I-walked-with-an-immigrant bullshit can net you seven figures:

Five days after the election I met an Ethiopian immigrant on a street in Washington.

"Hello, drunk white lady! Let us share our stories."

We got to talking. He spoke of how bad it was in his old country, all the killing. He’d been here 15 years. “I love America,” he said. “It gave everything to me.” But he was deeply concerned by the election. He has two sons, 8 and 6. The younger got up Wednesday morning, saw the TV and burst into tears. Trump won! The boy calls Trump “the mouth man.” How could a bully be president? “He wept,” said the Ethiopian. “How do I explain it to him?” 

I thought. Finally I said, “Tell him to trust America.” Tell him that we are the world’s oldest democracy, that we are a good people, that we’ve been through shocks and surprises, and that we have checks and balances. “If it turns out good,” I said, “we’ll be happy. If it turns out really bad, America has a way of making your stay in the White House not too long. But tell him to trust America as you did, and it gave you everything.”

Later Noonan tells us about what a lovely chat she had with Trump -- "how charming, funny and frank he was—and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble," and I see the people who can afford a Wall Street Journal subscription nodding and thinking, of course, he addresses the crowds as the idiots they are, but when he speaks to one of us he is probably as charming as I am when I joke with my caddy about his inferior genes!

I wonder if she'll get to share this touching story with the Ethiopian before he's thrown out of the country to make a swing-state honky feel better about his employment prospects.

Meanwhile the Next Noonan, Megan McArdle, says for Thanksgiving you should be nice to people different from yourself. No, not liberals, silly -- they're scum! But:

...the first thing I’m choosing to be grateful for this year is the strangers I’ve met who were nothing like me, but nonetheless did me some extraordinary kindness. The people who hate everything about my politics, but who have reached out, again and again, to wish me well and even offer me money or expert help when I was going through some sort of crisis. Those people I’m grateful for, and America, you have a lot of them.

Someone offered McArdle money? Did her Thermomix break down?

(Do read the column, it's pretty good.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Bob Luman was a little much, but I've always loved this. Check that piano!

•   Holy shit, in the event Trump gets the needed delegates, conservatives are really up for stealing the nomination from him. I mean, I've thought so all along, but now they're coming close to saying it out loud. At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson (now credited there as NR's "roving" correspondent, which must be a misprint), reminds us for the second time this month that this is a republic not a democracy, and denounces Trumpers who think "'We the People' are getting screwed by 'Them'" as unconservative  -- though this has been conservatism's selling message to the rubes since World War II. And so:

Yes, there are people in power maneuvering to frustrate the will of “We the People” on a dozen different things, ranging from economic and national-defense policy to the specific matter of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That is prudence and patriotism, and the constitutional architecture of these United States is designed to prevent democratic passion from prevailing. Have your talk-radio temper tantrum. Have your riots. Our form of government, even in its current distorted state, was designed to handle and absorb your passions. You may dream of a dictator, but you will not have one.

That's telling the rabble, buddy. Also interesting: The despairing John Adams quote Williamson uses here (“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes...") was previously used by him to blast President Obama in an article calling Obama "the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics... For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally... he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law," and other such standard-issue rightwing ObamaHitler crap. Yet in this new article, Williamson says Trump threatens "a presidency a thousand times more imperial" than Obama's. That's some mega-imperialism right there; to come up, I guess Trump will have to revive NASA and colonize the solar system.

•  Meanwhile Williamson's colleague David Harsanyi is even more forthright:

The GOP Should Steal the Nomination from Trump 

...Voters don’t decide the nominations; delegates do — preferably in smoke-filled rooms where rational decisions about the future of a party can be hashed out.

Failing this, Harsanyi would be content to see a True Conservative third party, of which such as Erick Erickson dream, elevate a sacrificial nominee who would "sink Trump and elect Hillary Clinton," on the theory that "electing a weakened and corrupt Democrat that Republicans would unite against in Congress is a far better reality than allowing a charlatan to hollow out a party from within." Republicans united against a Democratic President! That's bound to lead to better results than the love-fest we've got going on now! I begin to wonder if someone (perhaps super-tyrant Trump) is putting something in these guys' drinking water.

•  Tell ya how bad anti-Trump fever has gotten at National Review: Heather Mac Donald is actually complaining that a white guy (Trump) is getting a pass that black guys (Obama, Sharpton) would never get. That's right -- Heather Mac Donald! Don't worry, though -- John Derbyshire's still hanging in for Trump and racism. And I'm sure Mac Donald with go back to her old ways forthwith -- hell, even Marco Rubio wasn't pro-cop/anti-BLM enough for her.

•  Peggy Noonan is trying to talk reason to that bad boy Trump! With a talent like his, why must he resort to hooliganism?

Why does he speak so carelessly and irresponsibly about things such as violence and protests at his rallies? Does he not understand American politics is always potentially a powder keg? 

He has enough imagination to have invented Donald Trump. Why doesn’t he have enough to understand the potential impact of a leader’s remarks? Does he understand the power he would have if he were a person of normal comportment?

After blowing her off Trump will get home and find she managed to tuck her business card into his jacket pocket. Meanwhile Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has gone full Stormtrumper on a David Brooks doll:

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

You'd think Reynolds would be too smart for this guff, but Trump really has him feeling the feeling: In an adjacent post, Reynolds actually revives an Obama "lightworker" gag from 2009. I can imagine him smashing protesters with a club and yelling BOO-YAH! UNDER THE BUS! (On his holodeck, of course.)

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers and the Iowa caucuses. This was interesting to write because, as I sort of mention in the column, while political reporters are by and large just hoping to get reads and keep their jobs, rightbloggers are more hubristic: they really seem to believe they can make a difference in national events by the perfection of their logic, the shrillness of their vituperation, or the capitalization of random words. Look at Erick Erickson, who demands purges at the drop of a hat, and all the political illiterates who talk electoral strategy from their Barcaloungers and make Mark Penn look like Clausewitz. In a way it's touching, and in the last ditch I guess I prefer them to working propagandists like George Will and Peggy Noonan, who may know a little more than the bloggers but use that knowledge to perpetuate ignorance because it pays. But then, some of our worst columnists used to be bloggers (latest installment: If I define "decadence" low enough, maybe someone else will help me obsess over it)...

Ah, screw 'em all. Anyway, here's my version of horse-race journalism, and I didn't have to stay at a Motel 6 in Keokuk to write it. My editor took out my joke about Ted Cruz' bad breath -- in fairness, I've probably cost them a fortune in lawsuits already -- but there are still few good ones left.

UPDATE. Just days after their big anti-Trump issue, National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponurru are already trying to adjust to life in the joint:

Through the Goldwater revolution, the party became newly oriented around limited-government conservatism, and eventually a better politician than Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, came along to represent the new dispensation and get elected president.  

Maybe Trump could serve roughly the same function. 

Sorry, laughed so hard I sprained something.

He could lose badly this year and yet give rise to a future GOP that takes enforcement of the immigration laws seriously, reduces low-skilled immigration, and does more to represent the less-schooled wage earner, while also rejecting fantasies of mass deportation.

I see a conference room session, like the old Erhard Seminars Training except everyone wears Trump clothing and thinks he's in charge and must assert his authority at all times or be crushed. The participants are all hoarse from screaming at each other. The sign outside the locked room reads REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION 2022.

Those gains would, however, come at a fearful cost that conservatives should strive to avoid.

Pssssh. Like they wouldn't take it if it meant more elbow room at the Big Trough.

UPDATE. Looks like Cruz came in first, and National Review is partying like it's November 8; on Twitter Lowry is thanking Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and (get this) Glenn Beck, and declaring, "My tally of top four finishers in Iowa: Conservatism 60%, Trumpism 24%." If it had been Conservatism 57%, Trumpism 27%, of course, they'd all be hiding under desks while Il Douche goose-stepped up and down Main Street. I think Trump has a few kicks left in him, but as I said last month, he was never going to be the nominee; he is what he has always been, a symptom. When he goes dormant, the sickness will pop out somewhere else.

I'm not going to stay up to see if Bernie Sanders will pull it off; the arc of history bends toward justice, but it's long.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hard to pick a favorite Nilsson song but this one has been giving me chills for 43 years.

•  I've been telling you guys that the longer Trump hangs in there, the greater the dilemma he presents for mainstream conservatives -- they have to disown him because he presents such an ugly picture of their real beliefs, but they also can't disown those beliefs. This is breeding some fascinating fleurs du mal. Attend Peggy Noonan today at the Wall Street Journal, who has gone further faster in that direction than even I would have expected. Noonan is a master of lipsticking the pig and silk-pursing the sow's ear, and here she goes all-out:

What a year of wonders. For a good portion of it there were three Republican presidential candidates who, if you added up their polling numbers, had the support of more than half the voters—and they had never, not one of them, won a political office in their lives.

You and I see Carson, Fiorina and Trump as malevolent clowns merrily stomping the reputation of the Party into the mud with their elongated shoes, but Noonan sees them as sunny populists. And she's not sweating a Trump nomination -- she thinks it could be great. She fantasizes a future headline: "Trump Expands the Base—Trump Grows the Party!” (I'm so sorry she wasn't around to tell us about the miracle of Wendell Willkie.) And if "Mr. and Mrs. Longtime Republican in the suburbs" don't like it, says Noonan, then "they’d better get ready to press the viable non-Trump candidates to stay, and all others to leave." Sound advice! Will eeny-meeny-miney-moe work? Oh, and get this:

Jeb Bush, by stepping down, could become what he wanted to be this year -- a hero, a history changer, a man who enhanced his own and his family’s legacy.

In the Hall of Bushes, Jeb!'s statute will be inscribed, "I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives... I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me..." Then Noonan tells us, gosh, Democrats aren't like they used to be, i.e. losing:

This is not like the Democratic Party! It was once a big brass band marching through the streets—loud, dissonant, there. “I’m not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” For generations Democrats repeated that line as a brag. They knew disorganized meant vital, creative, spontaneous, passionate—alive. 

Now that party acts like this tidy, lifeless, fightless thing, a big, gray, dead-hearted, soul-killing blob. “I have the demographics,” it blobbily bellows, “I have the millennials.” Maybe it doesn’t have as much as it thinks. It is no honor to the Democratic Party that it is not fighting things through with a stage full of contenders this epochal year. 

The Republicans are all chaos and incoherence, it’s true. But at least they’re alive. At least they’re fighting as if it matters.

In 1984, when the Democratic primaries were contentious, the New York Post ran a front page with a picture of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Walter Mondale under the headline BEST OF ENEMIES. Parties love it when the opposition is in disarray. But in the last ditch, Noonan tells us the Democrats should be so lucky to be fractured and led by an unstable demagogue! She's got them right where she wants them!

•   A cautionary tale:

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. 

The glitch? 

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?

If you made it up it would be too on-the-nose, eh? And I don't mean about driverless cars. I have long believed, with Bob Dobbs, that we Americans suffer from a lack of slack. I say this not only out of personal preference (or, as some might say, laziness), but out of longtime observation of what happens to humans who are deprived of it. We see the endless and pernicious efforts to take up and tighten slack at every level of society, from the illegalization of the homeless to the prosecution not only of legal behavior but of legislation itself -- it's as if we all have to be on guard all the time, lest society collapse. (Nothing typifies this better than the professionalization of just looking for a goddamn job, which gets more absurd all the time.)  Now we have these driverless cars which, at first blush, would seem to be a slack-enabling devices that would leave us free to chill in the car like we would at the bar. But because they are not gifts from a beneficent society, but part of the usual slack-averse bullshit, they have created this problem -- the automatons can't behave like humans -- they can't draw outside the lines -- they have no slack in the nature. And now the scientists are trying to find way to emulate it, presumably with an algorithm. You know what comes next, right?



What life could be if we were just allowed to be human.

•   Speaking of automatons, at National Review Stephen L. Miller bitches about SJWs and that Star Wars thing the kids are all talking about. Apparently people on the internet are speculating on the sexuality of that little ball robot, talking about the black guy in the white whatchamacallit suit, etc. Killer finds this intolerable, and imagines other people find it intolerable too. Key passages include, "We can surely expect our celebrity president to weigh in as well," and "the scourge of Social Justice Media tempts us to give in to our anger and aims to tear us apart." "Can Star Wars survive such an onslaught launched from the Social Justice Media’s veritable Sarlacc Pit — more commonly referred to as Twitter?" Miller asks. Yes, but can your underoos survive this wedgie?

DAWN OF A NEW AGE.

Some days back I wistfully mentioned that a once much-esteemed member of the alicublog rep company, Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters, had moved on to Fox TV commentating, and since it's a mug game (or Media Matters') to scan that shit for gold we weren't having him anymore, and would move on to new hypermacho nutjobs like Kurt Schlichter.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Ol' Blood-'n'-Guts has found a way back into print:

Fox News analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters did not mince words when expressing his displeasure with President Barack Obama Monday morning, saying on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. that he was a “total pussy.”

Maybe fans will start watching more faithfully for him, as they once did for Howard Beale.

Peters was moved to obscenity by Obama's Sunday night speech, in which the President tried to be reasonable. (He did talk a little about killing people, but not enough to qualify as a Fournier-grade leader.) I see Obama also caused some lady on Fox to also make a swear:

"His speech was an epic fail," [Stacy] Dash said on the Fox News Channel show "Outnumbered." "It was like when you have to go to dinner with your parents, but you have a party to go to afterwards, that's what it felt like."

Watch your back, Peggy Noonan.

"I did not feel any better. I didn't feel any passion from him," Dash said. "I felt like he [couldn't] give a s--, excuse me, like he [couldn't] care less. He [couldn't] care less."

I don't know what's the bigger outrage here: Stacy Dash's swears, or that Newsmax corrected her perfectly acceptable colloquial use of "could care less."

I like to think this is the beginning of a new era of conservacursing. Obama's trying to keep the lid on, and conservatives have been trying to pry it off with belligerent talk about killing everybody and their wives and children with a third-time's-the-charm Middle East invasion. It must be frustrating to have that much rage dammed up inside without the near prospect of an armed conflict to relieve it. So I can't wait for, say, Mike Huckabee to go, "Jesus fucking Christ on a crutch, when the fuck are we gonna nuke these cocksuckers?" on live TV. Then maybe we'll finally get a full run of "Ow! My Balls!" and handjobs at Starbucks, as was prophesied.

UPDATE. The Washington Free Beacon put up a collection of Peters' TV work, confirming my original instinct -- while it is provocatively stupid, it lacks the the keening nuthouse poetry of his prose efforts.  Well, he wouldn't be the first artist ruined by television.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the San Bernardino shooting and rightblogger attempts to wrest benefits from it. The War on Whatchamacallit angle was expected since the assailants turned out to be Muslim, but the "prayer-shaming" bit was something new and unexpected. I mean, it fits their classic template -- since they lost their 9/11 juju rightbloggers have perfected the rhetorical soccer dive, and Lord knows they like to pretend they're oppressed because of their Christianity, as we saw after the gay marriage ruling. But whereas their gay-marriage victimhood claims were based on the possibility that The State would make them do something -- bake cakes for gay weddings, for example -- the prayer-shaming shtick is nakedly about people making them feel bad. Adding to the jest: Many of the complainants, like Peggy Noonan, simultaneously denounce college kids with their trigger warning as budding fascists. Self-awareness would be a positive liability for a conservative columnist these days.

Anyway please read the column, it's got two Jonah Goldberg references and some jokes even.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Maybe I should see them tonight? Everything I've heard is good.

•   I recently noted Ross Douthat's attempt to portray the Donald Trump phenomenon as a boon to reform conservatism (i.e., the latest rightwing nerd jobs program). It appears the longer this thing goes on, the more slide-rule boys rush to offer their services. At the Weekly Standard, after some pro-forma yak about what a boor Trump is, Christopher Caldwell tells that Trump's "economic critique" -- yes, he's talking about Trump's brayings, to which he'd referred a paragraph earlier as "talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are" -- "fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance." Not sophisticated itself, mind you, but it fits into something sophisticated, just as Trump himself may be fitted into a $5,000 suit. Then, at Slate, Reihan Salam has all kinds of exciting ideas for Trump. Apparently inspired by single-issue candidate Larry Lessig's praise of Trump as a campaign finance reformer, Salam suggests Trump embrace Lessig's program, as this "would add intellectual heft to [Trump's] populism, which would force his media detractors to give him at least some begrudging respect." I don't know what's funnier: the idea of Trump's campaign acquiring "intellectual heft," or that of Trump showing respect for an egghead like Lessig who doesn't have his own private jet and probably eats in a school cafeteria like a schlub. Funniest of all, perhaps, is the idea of these pencil-necks hovering around Trump, telling themselves that if only they can press their policy papers into the paws of the Strongman, the Golden Dawn may be hastened.

•   And what can make Trump talk worse? Peggy Noonan! Today she explains Peggy Noonan through the avatar of that Non-Partisan Nameless Friend:

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”?

Hope so -- it'll be easy to beat an imaginary constituency. Also, Hispanics love Trump, Noonan's friend "Cesar" from the bodega tells her:

Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you..." 

I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.

Take Peggy Noonan's word to the bank: Your neighbors from the DR, Trinidad, Sudan, Chile, Vietnam -- they're all raring to vote Republican so long as the party nominates a suitably aggressive TV clown.  Morton Downey Jr. gazes on this from the Hereafter and sighs at what might have been.

•   Stella Morabito, the craziest shrink since Robin of Berkeley, is back to tell us how PC is destroying everything by preventing sensible conservative discourse, like how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is:

A perfect example is how the transgender lobby has saturated the media and pop culture with its talking points through Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and incessant Hollywood shilling. Suppression is the PC practice of quashing ideas that compete with the PC message, usually through speech codes, shout-downs, or smears... The twin processes of saturation and suppression, if diligently applied, can produce the illusion of a public opinion shift, or a “cascade.”

Fans of Morabito's work will understand that these "cascades" are bad because they make you accept homosexuals:

Consider how the Left’s propaganda machine manufactured an “opinion cascade” on the issue of same-sex marriage, by first using “surprising validator” conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, polling pundit Michael Barone, and especially David Blankenhorn, who was one of the most persuasive and powerful supporters of organic marriage until he broke down and published a recantation. Not surprisingly, stealth conservatives—particularly those who work in increasingly politicized professions such as psychiatry, social work, teaching, or the arts—have enormous potential if they come out as surprising validators.

Amazing what how much gay-PC we've accomplished thanks to stealth conservatives like Dick Cheney, eh? (Though personally I think it was the recantation of David Blankenhorn that really turned things around for us.)

Anyway Morabito bids her readers go out and make their own cascades:

So conservatives, engage in those polarized, gridlocked places—like the neighborhood picnic, the local swim club, the farmer’s market, the student union, etc.—and engage one on one. Come out to a neighbor or a classmate.

Oh boy! Is this where we say "I hate faggots" and wait for everyone else to do the same, like Spartacus?

Don’t bother with talking points, because the purpose is not to win the argument but to simply to put a human face on your beliefs. 

Just be who you are and be friendly. In today’s PC-saturated culture, that’s the only way to draw out the lonely like-minded person or to influence a fence-sitter. It’s also the only way to water down PC stereotypes of conservatives. Ultimately, it’s the only way to start those ripple effects that can create cascades of truth.

Wait a minute -- your war against PC is to be nice? I gotta tell ya: 1.) If that's the plan, every other anti-PC conservative I've seen has definitely got the instructions upside-down; and 2.) If your goal is to get people to like you, maybe dispense with the hysterical columns for starters?

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY.

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review:

Believe it or not, the article is about charter schools. Liberals don't like them, and some of them say it's because they're a racket but the real reason is liberals are communist tyrants:

The Left’s heart is still in East Berlin: If people want to leave your utopia and have the means to do so, then build a wall. If they climb over the wall — as millions of low-income parents with children in private schools (very commonly Catholic schools) do — then build a higher wall. If they keep climbing – and they will — then there are always alternatives.

Also liberals are George Wallace:

But then, standing in the schoolhouse door when the poor, the black, and the brown want to enter is an ancient tradition for Democrats.

And you know what else is CommieWallace?

It’s a funny old world when being “pro-choice” means that people who object to abortion will be forced at gunpoint to pay for them. But that’s progressivism: a purportedly secular movement with a whole lot of “Thou Shalt” and “Thou Shalt Not.”

In rightwing world, some of the brethren endeavor to advance arguments to which outsiders (or at least credulous editors who wish to be considered even-handed) might respond. But there seem to be fewer of these all the time. Maybe it's because that particular budget is all eaten up by high-end, big-ticket pundits like George F. Will and Peggy Noonan; maybe organizations like National Review no longer believe the arguments can travel very far outside their own circles. Whatever the reason, Williamson represents the future of the movement: Not evangelists, but jeerleaders.

UPDATE. Speaking of which:

Well, at least it's a nice break from them calling him Hitler.

UPDATE 2. If it isn't out of keeping to mention the ostensible topic of Williamson's column, it appears charter schools aren't doing so hot:

Underscoring the risk to bondholders such as Nuveen Asset Management, two New York schools are set to shut at the end of this school year after their charters were revoked this month for academic shortcomings. The closings represent a default under terms of the $15 million bond deal that financed the land acquisition and construction of Brighter Choice’s middle schools for boys and girls, which opened in 2010 under the same roof. 

While charter schools are gaining popularity across the U.S. as an alternative to local systems, their default rate reached an all-time high last year of 5 percent of outstanding issues, according to a biannual study by the New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corp. That’s up from 3.8 percent in 2012.

Look on the bright side, citizens --  you're not losing your money to a Big Gummint grift, you're losing it to an honest, privatized grift! (h/t Atrios)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

"I got drugs to take/and a mind to break"

Thanks to Chuck Gilligan for steering me -- these guys do Britain & Mike Skinner proud.

•   After that last post I hate to subject you good people to a Megan McArdle streak, but this is irresistible:

Fans of Tbogg already grok the internet tradition of conflating McArdle's conspicuous-consumerism with her crap political views, but I  think anyone can appreciate that she's seriously miffed Canada has $1.4K Thermomixes but America does not (guess the one she was kvelling about in 2011 got a dent in it or something), and gets her editor to indulge her in speculating at 1,400-word length on the Economix, e.g. "QVC's 'gadget' price point seems to top out at 'Dyson vacuum cleaner,'" tee hee. If they haven't sent her a new "test" model by now this isn't the rotting corpse of a Republic I grew up in.

•   It's clearer than ever that Obama consciously trolls rightwing idiots as a hobby. I'm not sure what to think about the universal voting proposal, but it has elicited some choice gibberish from Peggy Noonan:

Most of us are moved by the sight of citizens lined up at the polls on Election Day. We should urge everyone to care enough to stand in that line. But we should not harass or bother those who, with modesty and even generosity, say they are happy to leave the privilege of the ballot to those who are engaged.

How dare we refuse their generosity by demanding they participate in our stupid "democracy"! Next we'll be demanding they pay taxes! (I wonder what the Crazy Jesus Lady thinks about Ben Carson's request at CPAC last year that conservatives drag their grandparents to the polls even if they say, “I’ve given up on America, I’m just waiting to die.”) Oh, and here's Noonan explaining her apparently brand new idea that Presidents named Bush are bad (except the next one -- he'll be swell!):

George W. Bush broke his party after his 2004 re-election, in part with his immigration proposals and the way he advanced them, with aides insulting his GOP opponents with insults—“nativist,” they said—and, in the end, by two unwon wars.

That's up there with "He dressed badly and was not a good mixer,  in addition to being a serial killer."

•   Remember the Oppressed Children of Sperm Donors whose lamentations I covered a few years back? Well, they're back at The Federalist, where two anti-donor activists rally support for those Dolce & Gabbana guys who called test-tube kids "synthetic children." The authors note that some people were upset about this because they had donor-enabled offspring, nephews etc., and here's the authors' stern rejoinder:

It is important to note, however, that infants, toddlers, and all of these “miracle” beings are too young to protest their own objectification.

I hear ya, sister -- I didn't ask to be born into this fucking world, but my mother got knocked up in a time before abortion rights. Rough luck all around! Oh, and also:

I am indeed a human being. My liver, heart, hair, and enzymes all work the same. I’ve discovered it is my psychology that is different and not-quite-right, due to my conception.

No comment.

•   Since it's nearly the weekend, here is your latest installment of What Is Rod Dreher Whining About Now?

UPDATE: I’m all for praying with the body. We do that all the time in the Orthodox Church. But yoga is a Hindu discipline, not a Christian one, and the syncretism of mixing yoga with Christian worship is troubling.

This has been What Is Rod Dreher Whining About Now?

CRAZY JESUS LADY'S CRISIS OF AUTHORITY.

Peggy Noonan has reanimated Robert Taft so that he may opine on the recent shutdown. I gotta tell you, folks, I hardly know what to do with this thing. Back when Noonan created a monologue for Paul Wellstone, for example, in which the recently-deceased Democratic Senator basically told people to vote Republican because Wellstone supporters were assholes -- well, that was so spectacularly evil and vicious that one could almost admire it, especially as it came wrapped in that cloying Crazy Jesus Lady manner that convinced readers (at least those whose ears had been trained by Bob Bartley's Mighty Wurlitzer) that Noonan only meant the best for everyone.

She seems to want to do something similarly sneaky with this latest necro-ventriloquist act, with "Robert Taft" speaking from the other side to convince the Tea Party crowd there's nothing wrong with the Grand Old Party that some wisdom from a long-dead party hack can't fix. It's about as successful as Jeff Goldblum's final transformation in The Fly. I mean, get a load of this:

What is the purpose of a party? 

"A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can't drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who've known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don't want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece."

If "Taft" were delivering this at a Kiwanis dinner, when he got to telling them that institutions were driving the car that is the Republican Party, the hosts would be getting nervous -- and around the time "Taft" was giving these instructions to the Tea Party, they'd have cut his mike and dragged him from the dais:

Get smart about this. Don't let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don't, stick with him but stiffen his spine.

Jesus Christ, sounds like Spencer Tracy's closing speech from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as performed by James Lileks. It also conjures a vision of deranged Birchers in tricorners and knee-breeches gang-tackling Mitch McConnell as "Taft" nods sagely; when McConnell escapes they chase him, brandishing a metal pipe to ram up his ass.

But the weirdest, and slightly sad, thing is the spectacle of Noonan selling Washington authority to the kind of people who think Ted Cruz is Presidential timber. She brings up Allen Drury -- Allen Drury, for chrissakes! Couldn't she have at least lightened things up with Art Buchwald? -- as if it'll mean something to them. (If she'd picked None Dare Call It Treason instead, she might have stood more of a chance. Their past is not Bourbon-at-Clyde's, but fluoride-in-water.) She figures the upstarts want power, just like the Brash Young Comers in old movies, and like those characters they will respond to a salutary scolding so long as the scold is an old white man in a suit. At one point she even has "Taft" say, "Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You've arrived and you know it." That's like telling Castro, "OK, kid, Batista has heard you and he's offering you a nice suite at the Hotel Nacional. Try not to screw up!"

She thinks the Mau Maus can be converted, but she's just catching flak.

Plus there's this, from "Taft"'s Epistle to the Establishment Men:

Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them?

I suppose you could say there is genius in it, as there is absolutely no one else on God's green earth besides Noonan who talks this way or thinks anyone else does.

DUMBER AND DUMBERER AND DUMBERERER.

The GOP Congressional tantrum continues, and from National Review comes this stop-the-presses item on how the Democrats are really losing this thing:

Scenic Overlooks not Overlooked by Obamaites 

Driving down the George Washington Parkway outside Washington, D.C. today, I noticed that the two scenic overlooks that offer drivers the chance to admire the beauty of the Potomac River below are closed for the government shutdown. These overlooks are just cut-outs from the highway, providing a few parking spaces. That’s it. No little National Park Service kiosk. Nothing. It’s just a parking area that holds maybe 6 cars at a time.

To close them required someone to come and put up barricades, thus costing taxpayers money.

Is there anyone in the Obama administration with common sense? Do they not see how petty and over-reaching this makes them look?

How petty and over-reaching they look, lol. The punchline: This post is bylined "The Editors." ("Come on, Jonah, you drew the short straw!" "No way! People will think I'm stupid farrrrt.")*

Further down David French wasn't so smart as to leave his name off this, but maybe he was hoping to win a prize for the stupidest WWII Memorialgate post. If so, he's got my vote!

I’m hopeful that the manifest injustice and obvious malice of the memorial closings will be a clarifying moment for the American people. It’s not 1995 any longer, and we don’t have to depend on the mainstream media to tell the truth. At the ACLJ, we’re considering litigation, but litigation will be unnecessary if there is a sufficient — and proper — public response.

You hear that, Mr. and Mrs. America? Better turn those poll numbers around or David French will sue!

At PJ Media Zombie is incensed that government furloughs also apply to places like the Cliff House in San Francisco:

The fact that the federal government twisted the arm of a private business to intentionally and unnecessarily inconvenience its customers (and lose money while doing so) proves that the Obama administration will stop at nothing to maximize the drama of its political brinksmanship.

Fuck those deadbeat cancer patients at the NIH, we had a good thing going here!

If this keeps up, the next concession Boehner demands will be a new identity and a cabin in Idaho.

UPDATE. Mild edits for clarity. Also, commenter "calling all toasters" calls my attention to radio shouter Mark Levin's schtick: "If You Lay One Hand On WWII Vets, I'll Bring Half A Million People There." How many half-millions will he bring if we knock over his garden gnome? Jesus, these people love to make threats.

Oh, and if you're in the mood for some "Both Sides Do It" bullshit, unsurprisingly Megan McArdle has you covered:

The ability to understand that the other side is people, with regular people feelings and their very own thoughts and motivations, seems to have been almost completely erased over the last decade or two. My Facebook feed is filled with liberals saying how they just can’t understand why Republicans are so determined to take health insurance away from poor people … as if that could be the only possible motivation to oppose Obamacare.

The punchline: She never tells us what an alternative motivation would be. I see her sitting with a notepad that has "1. Because freedom" and nothing else written on it; the pad is pushed to one side and McArdle is using her pencil to make decorative borders on artisanal cupcake liners.

UPDATE 2. Sorry, had to add this from Crazy Jesus Lady Peggy Noonan:

The political problem: The president is failing to lead.

This she derives from a conversation with -- get this -- James Baker! I'm sure sub rosa his take was, "Fuck the poors, they don't vote for us." Also, much blubbering over how ol' Ronnie and Tip sorted things out back in the day. Of course, if O'Neill had demanded the top tax rate be returned to 91% or the government shuts down, the memories would be less misty and water-colored.

*UPDATE 3. National Review finally put Mona Charen's name on this post. Guess she lost a bet.

AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE/I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE.

The latest Obama ragegasm from Peggy Noonan is as horrible as you'd expect, but one section deserves special mention, concerning "two things that have weakened the Obama presidency and haven't been noted":

In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans. 

This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.

They try all sorts of things to deny that they got beat in an election by a sitting President with a 7.8% unemployment rate, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try and tell me that Joe Blow of Middletown has been retroactively demoralized by the cold technocracy of the 2012 Democratic campaign. Wait till someone tells him about Karl Rove!

Noonan's other weakening point -- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better -- is merely the sort of bald-faced denial of reality that we've learned to expect from her. But the one about how Obama doesn't have a mandate because he's too good at politics is something special; it's so self-refuting it's almost a Zen riddle.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN:

When I think of you godless media criticizing my Church, I think of a severed head -- yours!

UPDATE. Our commenters are carrying the freight to a greater extent than usual. "I normally ascribe Peggy Noonan's incoherence to the fact that she's plastered," says sharculese, "but I'm pretty drunk right now and I'm still not getting this." smut clyde noticed something in the Longer:

words like “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” and phrases like “irrelevant to the modern world.” But when they just prattle on with their indignant words—gender, celibacy, irrelevant—

One of those words in the first list has disappeared from the second! How can this be?

A couple of folks also notice Noonan's surly reference to the Mohammedans, in which she complains of the media-that-is-not-Peggy-Noonan:

They think they’re brave, or outspoken, or something. They don’t have enough insight into themselves to notice they’d never presume to instruct other great faiths. It doesn’t cross their minds that if they were as dismissive about some of those faiths they’d have to hire private security guards.

I thought the whole you-don't-have-the-guts-to-make-fun-of-Mohammed thing had long since passed into wingnut oblivion, along with "Democracy Whiskey Sexy" and "That Andrew Sullivan is one of the good ones," but I guess under stress these guys tend to revert.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE. Here's a further development on the "Alinsky! I'll show you Alinsky" theme, taken up by conservatives who realize they have an image problem and will accept any crazy explanation for it except their own actions. It's from J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. He thinks conservatives don't know how to do "the dark arts of image manipulation" (Bob Haldeman chuckles in Hell) and don't fight back when mocked by liberals. Also, traitors like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks sell them out, etc. That's all SOP, but this bit is, so far as I have noticed, an innovation:

...the third major class of response, that of embracing the stereotype, of taking it on as a kind of costume, and even pushing it farther than the left themselves. I knew a noted spokesman for one of the major conservative media organizations who used to appear at public lectures with two heavy-set young men standing at either side of the lectern wearing camo fatigues and sunglasses, thus turning himself from conservative spokesman into Benito Mussolini. This same kind of behavior can be found at all levels of the movement from comment threads all the way to the top. Rush indulges in it all too often. Ann Coulter has made a career of it. While definitely a crowd-pleaser, it is, in the end, self-defeating. These stereotypes were constructed by the left for a reason -- to manipulate the public at large, ignorant of political subtleties and unfamiliar with doctrine, into certain visceral reactions to conservatives and their ideas. They were created to destroy conservatives. Why play along with them?

Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are playing into liberals' hands by feeding conservatives red meat on a daily basis and making millions of dollars off it. I like to imagine Coulter and Limbaugh reading this, becoming guilt-wracked, and returning to the sober, Cambridge Union Society mode of discourse they used to do, back when it was all about the music.

Mainly I want to know who the Mussolini guy was. I'm guessing Michael Fumento.

Oh, give Dunn credit for offering the brethren practical Alinksy-fu lessons:

Calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" merely generated sympathy for her. Turning her into a clown uncertain what to do with a condom if one was handed to her would have shut the whole campaign down in short order. (How about the Facebook "Sandra Fluke Condom Support Group"?)

The next four years are going to be awesome.

GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012. I'm busy all day, alas (why do they make me work? Can't they see I'm a national treasure?) but I wanted to quickly note the passing of Gore Vidal before my elegiac tone is marred by exposure to rightwing grave-pissers (well, to more of them, anyway). For me the big thing about Vidal was his ability to write popular fiction (he was madly popular for years, despite constant, bipartisan efforts to marginalize him) in the late 20th Century that came up to the standards of literature without straining for them in the sententious way of many best-seller list-climbers. He clearly wanted fame and attention, and knew he was entitled to them, but he wouldn't toady the muses to get them, nor anyone else.

He wrote with the easy grace and supreme confidence of an aristocrat -- which he sort of was, too, being kin to political royalty. There have of course been many aristos who wrote very well; Vidal had some of their qualities, and you could see them in his work. (Such as the aristocrat's sense of inviolability, which mirrors the imperviousness an artist must develop if he is to survive.) And it was fortified by his less ermined experiences, too, such as serving his country in the Army during World War II (which is more than many of the idiots who liked to call him a traitor could manage) and as a politician, and hacking for Hollywood, which I must say he handled like a champ -- no Barton Fink whining for him; he got some great stories out of it.

I hope to have more later. Meantime, read Burr or Palimpsest or Dark Green, Bright Red or anything by him, and make sure you have a copy around of United States, his collected essays, to remind you of what American writing can be when nothing is holding it back.

UPDATE. Changed "Navy" to "Army" -- thanks, commenter robo, for reminding me that Vidal served on an Army supply ship. I offer my apologies, and also these old alicublog links: A passage from The Best Man of which Peggy Noonan reminded me;  a review of his 2000 novel Washington, D.C.; and a parody of his later novel, The Golden Age, done with love.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Roger Ailes: "Gore Vidal made Michele Bachmann a Republican, but Marcus Bachmann made her a woman!"

HIP TO BE SQUARE. I mentioned in my most recent Voice column Jonah Goldberg's typically incisive response to the whole alleged issue of Obama being too cool:

I wish the ad had at least one or two really solid clips conveying how despearately Obama wants to seem cool, which is always the great coolness-killer. It would have helped set the tone of the ad much better. What would those clips be? I'm not sure, but then again I'm not making the ad. Michael Moore seems to find a way to find that kind of footage pretty easily, and I have no doubt it can be found in Obama's case.

If only we had a picture of him with poop in his pants, holding a commie flag, everyone'd know what a poopy-pants commie he is! Faart. Yet it appears someone took not only this ridiculous subject but also Goldberg's thinly-veiled bleg seriously. At her internet Sunday school, The Anchoress prowls the aisles with a metal ruler and tells you what's cool and what isn't:

Have you heard the news? Barack Obama is cool!

He’s not just cool, he’s way cool; the coolest thing ever!

Too bad she forgot to link to a citation; I'd love to know what idiot said that.

Never having been “cool” myself (or desperate enough to seek its conferral upon me by people I always found to be rather sad trend-followers)...

While you so-called cool kids were friggin' and frugin' in your discos, The Anch was pretending to be a nun. That's totally Goth!

Coolness does not need anyone to define it, but allow me to try.

How much time we would save if only The Anchoress could occasionally remember the thing she said just before the thing she said.

The quality of “coolness” contains within it an attitude of discrete detachment, which is not the same as aloofness. It suggests an intellect attuned to a different frequency—perhaps to a higher muse—but still comfortable sharing the ground with the rest of us. Its muted confidence is so supreme...

On and on goes Sister Malizia's cool lesson, and just as the boys and girls are about to nod off she pulls out the visuals:

Come to think of it, by these definitions, one could safely opine that the “coolest” leaders currently athwart the world’s stage are still England’s Queen Elizabeth II, who recently crashed a wedding simply to wish a bridal couple well, and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who takes the daily piñata beatings that come his way in stride, and answers with a blessing.

Somehow I don't think this will get the kids to throw in their porkpie hats for mitres and crowns, much as I would enjoy that.

Meanwhile Ole Perfesser Instapundit uses reader mail to explain how uncool Obama really is:

My theory is Obama represents the supremacy (however short-lived) of the beta-male. The only people who think he’s a hep-cat are hipster betas and 60′s radical-nostalgia dopes (also perennial personal-risk-averse betas who never did anything bold on their own). It’s all projection, much like the rest of the way that demographic operates

The thing about the "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members" attitude is, it's more impressive when Groucho Marx says it than when some guy who writes letters to Instapundit says it.

How hard this all is for them -- because once upon a time, they were cool. Back in the 1980s Reagan was everyone's daddy, John Paul II did a world tour and danced with the kids, and everyone dressed and wanted to be like characters from Dynasty. Fashions fade, though, and you're left with the enduring values behind what made your heroes cool. In their case that's tax breaks for the rich, endless wars, and persecution of homosexuals. We already had a retro revival of that:

I'm not sure the time is right for another. But who knows? Show biz is tricky.

UPDATE. "Weren't these the same guys who insisted that George Bush calling people 'Stretch' and 'Pooty-poot' was a veritable laff riot?" asks Doghouse Riley in comments. mortimer reminds us that Lisa Schiffren wrote "an entire, very wet column" in the Wall Street Journal about how "she and her soccer mom friends" found Bush "'hot' as in virile, sexy and powerful." Not to mention proto-Anchoress Peggy Noonan's swoon over both the President's testicles. Chacun à son ghoul.