IT'S ALWAYS PROJECTION.

Both at The Federalist -- first:

Farewell To Jon Stewart, The Left’s Donald Trump

and:

But Stewart is no more an honest newsman than, say, Donald Trump is a serious presidential candidate.

Meanwhile:

Jeb: Trump's rhetoric 'reminds me of Barack Obama'

Of course Bush is not smart enough to make this up himself -- earlier:

Marco Rubio Says Obama Is Like Trump

 No round-up of dumbasses would be complete without David Brooks:

...bumper-car politicians thrive. Bernie Sanders is swimming with the tide. He’s a conviction politician comfortable with class conflict...
The times are perfect for Donald Trump...

Over t'England they have a forthright Labour candidate and guess what:

Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn are two of a kind

The one thing wingnuts can't admit is that Trump is their own id monster, so they have to tell themselves and anyone else who'll listen that he's actually the same thing as other people they also don't like, for reasons that don't make any sense.

If this travesty goes on much longer the name "Donald Trump" will take its place with "9/11" and "political correctness" as terms that used to mean something but, thanks to overuse by conservatives as fake synonyms for "liberal," no longer mean anything at all.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

Trump’s rise is, like that of his Democratic counterpart Bernie Sanders...

They have so much in common. For one thing, Sanders "once wrote that women dream of gang rape," or at least his writings can be thus willfully misinterpreted. Plus Sanders is "an avowed socialist." Why, it's like they're twins -- no wonder you always see Sanders hanging around at Trump's casinos,  goosing the cocktail waitresses! Further, Reynolds says,

Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential [?-ed] essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation...

Those of you familiar with Codevilla's and Reynolds' schtick will know their standard solution for this is the election of  rightwing Republicans -- a groovy anti-ruling-class revolution that surprising coincides with the goals of the RNC. (The "country party" of true sons of liberty, Codevilla writes, "in the short term at least... has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party." Trust us, comrades, once we cut taxes on the rich it's on to Jerusalem!) The Tea Party act with its knee-breeches and triconers has gotten a bit long in the tooth, though -- maybe this time they should cosplay 60s radicals instead, and march around dressed as members of S.W.I.N.E. What the hell, they're led by a tenured radical.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been a while since we had any Uncle Dave.
• There's a corner at The Federalist for lonely nerds embittered by the liberal provenance of old science fiction franchises who shake their fists and choke back tears every time a black or a chick does something in a Star War. One such is Robert Tracinski, author of "Why They Can’t Ruin Star Wars," "Why Mixing Harry Potter And Politics Ruins Them Both," "All An Ayn Rand Hero Really Wants Is Love," etc. Here's his latest:

Last week, I wrote about how those of us on the right can be Star Trek fans despite its supposedly “progressive” politics.

Dry those tears, kulturkampfers!

Partly, this is because good art is about a lot more than a didactic political message.

!!! Baby steps, Bobby.

But...

Uh oh.

...it also struck me how much of the message of Star Trek is consistent with the values of many of us on the right. The original series was not “progressive” but “liberal” in an old-fashioned sense, celebrating freedom and individualism and opposing censorship and conformity. This means that Trek also turned out some cautionary tales that are relevant today — and surprisingly prescient — about the conformist agenda of big tech companies like Google.

Baby faw down go boom. I'll spare you, but he's on about the one with Landru -- " Just substitute, 'Are you woke?' for 'Are you of the body?' and you’ll get the idea" -- and thinks Political Correctness and Google are making us "sit down and shut up while in the presence of someone woker." Next he'll be telling us Jim Kirk is really a symbol for Trump because he's brash and a shitty actor.  God, wait'll someone tells these dorks about real life! You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?

•  Rightwingers are saying that if Roseanne Barr should be fired for calling a black lady a monkey, Samantha Bee should be fired for calling a Trump lady a cunt. Everyone with any sense seems pretty clear that Roseanne's racial slur is categorically worse than Bee's genital insult -- in fact, The Federalist's Ellie Bufkin goes as far toward acknowledging it as can be expected of a rightwing factotum:

While calling a white woman a “feckless c–t” doesn’t have the same racial charge as comparing a black woman to an ape, it was plenty ugly and absolutely uncalled for, particularly as it was in reference to a photo of Ivanka and her toddler.

But Bufkin stops just shy of saying a white-on-black racist slur is worse than a girl-on-girl genital slur, because 1.) she's working for The Federalist so, I feel comfortable assuming, she doesn't think it's worse, and 2.) if she did acknowledge the genuine difference, she'd blow up her whole column, which is devoted to insisting the two comments should be treated the same way:

Barr’s tweet was completely unacceptable, and ABC was absolutely right to sever ties with her over her awful comments. Yet why aren’t television executives considering the same consequences for Bee? True, referring to a woman as a “c–t” isn’t racist, but it is plenty hateful. To dismiss this as her creative right is to truly embrace that we live in a time of a media double standard.

One's racist and the other isn't, but since the one that isn't is still "plenty hateful," we have to treat them the same -- otherwise it's a double standard. Well, when you're just writing propaganda, erasing logical distinctions is most of the game -- and give Bufkin credit for nerve, if not the skills to back it up, because she ends with an attempted free speech defense:

Simply put, if saying unsavory things about a person with a particular political affiliation gets someone fired, then the same should be true in reverse. Of course, if we could actually hold every person in the media to an equal standard, frying someone over a belligerent comment would soon leave us in a very vanilla world where few would feel safe or comfortable exercising their right to speak freely.

No chance of us living in a vanilla world, lady, with the President himself calling women cunts on the regular. What's more likely is, wingnuts will keep on demanding liberal misdemeanors get treated like conservative felonies, and keep working the refs to rachet it down -- sure, our guys said black people are sub-human, but some black guy said Jared Kushner had white privilege, we demand you fire him, you're the real racists, etc. Well, fuck that; I made my position on this clear a long time ago.

JEAN JAURÈS WAS A VERY, VERY BAD MAN. Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin asks "Why The Debate Over Socialism Isn't Over." Oddly, he waits till the end of his post to note that "I use the term 'socialism' to refer to government control of all or most of the means of production, not to more moderate departures from the free market, such as welfare statism or government regulation of industries that remain privately owned." For blogospheric purposes this seems to take the juice of out the whole thing, though many of Somin's commenters miss that bit and rave as if straight-up socialism still had a chance in the good old USA.

There have been a few elected Socialists in America. One, Jasper McLevy, was mayor of my old hometown, Bridgeport, from 1933 to 1957. All my dear old mother remembered about him was his policy on snow removal from city streets: "The good Lord put it there, the Good Lord can take it away." That's mainly what Wikipedia remembers about him, too.

You may wonder why a pretty big American city countenanced a Socialist mayor, however denatured, for so many years. Bridgeport was a working-class town that had several large factories which employed many working men and women (Mom was one of those) who wanted for themselves and their families what the labor leader Gompers prescribed: "More." (And in the Depression, when McLevy first took power, that meant "Enough.") The blue collar Bridgeport electorate, and my Mom, didn't give a shit who stood for them so long as he stood firm. That's why they liked McLevy. He embraced the New Deal more forthrightly than his Democratic opposition (which he denounced as "a group whose only interest is to exploit the wage-earner to the last ounce"), put in civil service reform and a Housing Authority, and engaged the capitalist enemy, so to speak, by working with factory owners to rehabilitate the city's finances. He was a roofer before he got into politics and he was less concerned with doctrine (his attachment to socialism was sentimental and Bellamite) than he was with sound management and protecting his constituents from those who would screw them. His 1938 slogan was "Don't let the raiders raid you." Everyone knew what he was talking about.

America has treated socialism the way it treats everything else: as something to be assayed and extracted according to the rigors of common sense. A quick glance at our history will show that some socialist ideas -- trade unionism and social insurance among them -- got traction with working people and were (once moneyed interests had no other recourse) woven into our capitalist system. The rest was chaff.

These are part of our lives now. As for the countries that Somin brings up in his denunciations, they haven't had so good a social laboratory as we. "Hugo Chavez's political success in Venezuela is an example of how some of the most disastrous socialist policies can be successfully sold to the people if combined with nationalism," he writes, "a lesson first taught by Hitler and Mussolini." I assume Somin did not trouble himself to consider the social and economic chaos out of which any of these polities birthed their tyrants, nor how these crises might have been averted.

So he reverts to the method of South Park schoolteachers: the umpteenth replay of "Hitler Was a Very, Very Bad Man," with Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il inserted in the lead roles. He wonders why "we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through [socialism's] heart." He might ask Cartman, or any citizen who has seen in our era capitalism redefined as an ever-worsening deal for the non-rich. The Democrats, for all their faults and foibles, seem more interested, as the redistributive notions some of them are peddling show.

Conservatives often wonder why we don't join them in their nonstop pep rally against Communism, Socialism, etcetera. They say, and seem to believe, that it is because we are actually Communists, Socialists, and etceterists. I'm sort of an etceterist, myself, by which I mean I'm against all forms of political correctness, including Somin's. It warms my heart when Americans show interest in health care policies associated by conservatives with socialism -- not because I am a socialist, but because it shows a shrewdness in our people that ranting lectures about socialism cannot dispel. In a real marketplace of ideas, the idea of national health care would provoke not waves of bluster, but a serious counterproposal. Maybe if we sweat 'em a bit more, we'll get it.

WELCOME, ROSEANNE, TO THE INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB.

You guys know how I feel about this stuff: Until you're ready to protect fast food and daycare workers from being fired for their social media speech, I'm not here from your blubbering over celebrities like Roseanne.

That's not a rhetorical offer, by the way, but a sincere one. I don't give a shit if the Hitler Channel wants to run Roseanne's Heil Hitler Racist Comedy Hour, where its sponsors and supporters can be noted and shunned, so long as ordinary citizens can flip off Trump and put it on Twitter without getting fired for it.

But they can't. So fuck her.

Even the usual suspects have, for the most part, looked at the facts and decided this was not the fake free speech hill they wanted to lie on. Rod Dreher, as you might expect, runs with the pack but can't even do that right:

“But,” you say, “that’s all the NFL owners are doing with the mandatory National Anthem rule: protecting their business interests.” You have something of a point, but the comparison is faulty. A quiet political protest is not the same thing as calling a black person an ape. Colin Kaepernick’s pig socks are in that ballpark, certainly, but the NFL kneelers on the whole aren’t wearing pig socks.

Like Moses, Kaepernick is denied entry to Dreher's promised land because of his pig socks.

It is a sign of civic health that someone who is making a fortune for a TV network can still lose her position when she indulges in disgusting rhetoric like that. Some things you can’t say in public without consequence. Where we draw that line will always be under contention, but we ought to all agree that Roseanne Barr crossed it.

I'll bet Dreher thinks the Beatles should have been driven from our shores after John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus.

Others among the brethren find new ways to embarrass themselves -- Anthony Scaramucci, the erstwhile Trump mouthpiece who encourages people to call him "The Mooch," complained of being discriminated against as an Italian-American ("When I was called a human pinkie ring and a goombah while in the @Whitehouse that was deemed acceptable comedy. Double standard"). That's even better than when mobster Joe Colombo's Italian-American Anti-Defamation League went after The Godfather.

And rightwing pencil-neck Roger Kimball does the ooh-such-po-li-ti-cal cor-rect-ness simper-strut at The Spectator:

Uh oh. Was the tweet in bad taste? Indubitably. Was it racist? Yep. Was it the worst thing ever in the history of civilization? According to ABC, which hosted her new, extremely popular show, the answer appears to be, Yes: nothing so awful has ever besmirched the escutcheon of humanity.

You liberals act like racism is the very worst thing in the whole entire world but what about World War II, or that time a black guy glared at me?

Yes, it was in bad taste. So what? There was a time when bad taste was not a (professional) death sentence. Under the reign of political correctness, that time has passed.

Does one of you have the patience to explain to Kimball for me the difference between, say, the race jokes in Blazing Saddles and calling a black lady a monkey?* Best part:

I do not watch television, so I never saw Roseanne Barr’s show. I understand, however, that it was a breath of fresh air, not so much conservative as simply independent.

Percy Dovetonsils doesn't sully himself with idiot box emissions, but knows this show must be good because Trump likes it and the star is a racist.

UPDATE. *I thought everyone knew this, but apparently there are law professors who don't know, or affect not knowing, that calling black people monkeys is like Racism 101:

Yes, the problem of likening humans to apes, an interesting variation on the age-old resistance to the notion of evolution. We are primates, all of us, the same order as the apes. Bush was "Chimpy McHitler," and let's not forget that time Trump sued Bill Maher for joking that Trump was the son of an orangutan.

Speaking of law perfessers: "ABC hands midterms to Trump, GOP," says Instapundit Glenn Reynolds. Maybe they can get Tim Allen to call Michelle Obama a coon and get fired -- that'll really excite the base! Then they can all tell us that lots of different people are compared to raccoons, isn't that what Michelle Wolf did to Sarah Huckabee, you're the real racists, etc.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...at least until advertisers get it pulled. This one's sort of a recap, since the column was down for a year, and assesses the behavior of the conservative movement and the GOP's Unholy Three in light of the Umpqua shooting.

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for your generous comments.

As to the mainstreaming of Trump to which I allude in the column, National Review has just provided an excellent example. NR is in the main anti-Trump and the feature article by Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry is, too, sort of  -- but what large concessions they make to him:

But while Trump is not a conservative and does not deserve conservatives’ support, Republicans can nonetheless learn from him. Most politicians cannot hope to match Trump’s flair for the dramatic and should not try to compete with him in displays of narcissism or contempt. But politicians have been known to cultivate excitement and glamour — think of Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Obama. These qualities have been missing from Republican politics for a long time. Republicans could, without going the full Trump, stand to be a little less apologetic and defensive under media criticism.

But didn't the Republicans already have someone "less apologetic and defensive under media criticism" -- i.e. a practiced asshole -- in Chris Christie? There's a reason Trump displaced Christie, and the authors' confusion about this is evident in the paragraphs just before and just after this one. First:

Trump responds to this kind of criticism by casting himself as a brave dissenter from political correctness. Here, too, he discredits a worthy cause. Conservatives and some honorable liberals have stood up against the oversensitivity and censorship of legitimate political viewpoints that has spread from college campuses over the last three decades. Trump appears to confuse simple decency with PC. Republicans should not embrace this confusion by cheering him on.

But they are cheering him on, possibly because they too "confuse simple decency with PC" and don't appreciate either, but certainly because they appreciate Trump's panache -- which is where he blows Christie away: Christie at least makes a feint at being interested in the non-vendetta aspects of governance -- Trump clearly doesn't give a shit, and that's much of his charm, as it were, for the Republican voters who endorse him. This is a point that Lowry and Ponnuru sail right past in a later paragraph:

For weeks, Trump simultaneously stayed on top of the polls and promised to raise taxes on rich people. His eventual proposal on taxes bore no resemblance to that promise, which is a good thing: The federal government needs to slim down, not be given more sustenance. But the fact that Trump’s polling did not suffer even a modest drop after his soak-the-rich comments should tell other Republicans that the priorities of the donors they meet at fundraisers are not the same as those of the voters whose support they need. Cutting taxes is generally desirable, but Republicans need not base all their economic and budget policies on slashing tax rates on the highest earners.

They're pretty much admitting that it's all about bullshitting the electorate and making them like it. But Lowry and Ponnuru are so bought into the conservative program that there's no trace of the nod and wink that would have humanized their own bullshit. Clearly Trump still has much to teach him!

THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.

Ben Shapiro's TruthRevolt reporting from CPAC some days back:

[Dr. Ben] Carson spoke about the need for small government, but warned that the tactics of progressives come straight out of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." They are not trying to have a conversation with you, he said, because that will humanize you. Their ultimate goal is to demonize you...

Then they quoted Carson:

And then recently, I said that in Nazi Germany, people do not believe in what Hitler was doing. Most of them did not. But did they speak up? Did they say anything? Absolutely not, and look at the atrocities that occurred. And of course the left said, Carson says that they are changing American to Nazi Germany. Of course that is not the case, but that is what they do. They repeat these lies over and over again because they cannot argue the actual facts...

At TruthRevolt today:

Dr. Ben Carson: U.S. is Like Nazi Germany

Again they quoted Carson:

I mean, [we are] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe. And it’s because of the PC police, it’s because of politicians, it’s because of news...

In a few more days TruthRevolt will cover Carson saying the left lies about him saying "they are changing American to Nazi Germany," and then a few days after than he'll compare America to Nazi Germany again, and a few days later...

You get the idea. So does Carson. He's caught on quickly to the secret of conservative political success: Say something offensive, then complain that liberals are misrepresenting you.  It's like writing a book called Liberal Fascism, then saying "the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people." Not everyone's dumb enough to buy it, but the ones who are you can get coming and going.

UPDATE. Paul Ryan's pretty good at it too.

WHO'S NEXT.

The end of O'Reilly's TV show means nearly nothing to me. Big-ticket rightwing rageclowns like him are like blockbuster movies and reality shows, just gargoyles for gawkers, and we who have free souls it touches us not.

I'm more interested in the conservative pseuds who try to explain it all on the internet, and so far their take seems to be that the preferred viewing choice of your aged relatives who send you pictures of Obama with a bone through his nose doesn't have anything to do with conservatism.

"He Was a Centrist, Not a Conservative," claims Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart. But look where Pollak's baseline is, via his approving quote of some wingnut chin-stroker:

What if we could magically remove the metaphoric glass and see, face-to-face, the average American, once his political views are no longer distorted by media bias? What would we see? 

The answer, basically, is Ben Stein.

Tell your aged Obama-hating relatives that their avatar is Ben Stein and they'll smack you. I won't even accept that slander on them! Hell, if the average American were the chinless Stein, we'd have receded into the primordial ooze years ago. (Try to imagine Ben Stein without money. He'd be raving next to an overpass. Or at least whining loudly.)

The others are worse. I include the worthless Chuck Todd who, seeking to impress Hugh Hewitt for some reason, "agreed" with him according to this Daily Caller report that O'Reilly wasn't a real conservative, that is, not a fancy intellectual like Hugh Hewitt:

“He was — to me, what he did — he was the tone-setter,” Todd continued. “He was sort of that anti-political correctness.” 

[facepalm]

“He was the opening act that brought the crowds, but he became almost more fun to watch than the concert itself, sometimes, but he was the entertainer, probably more entertainer than any of the others.”

Similarly, gameshow buffoon Trump isn't conservative either -- he just pumps out rightwing policies self-identified conservatives eat up, but he ain't got good taste so when the smart guys stand around in cigar bars with snifters and talk about the Glooory of the Mooovement & Burke & Hayek &tc they shove Trump into a coatroom and blame the smell on the dog.

Plus there's Mark Judge at Splice Today -- "The left is cheering the demise of O’Reilly, but liberals have nothing to boast about," he says, because someone got raped at Occupy and what about that bitch who said she was raped but wasn't, huh libs? And Scott Lehigh at the Boston Globe: "Bill O’Reilly types aren’t just a conservative problem," because all those liberal TV hosts are sexual harassers too and the only reason we don't have proof like with O'Reilly is because chicks lie to protect libtards to keep their precious abortions.

At National Review Ian Tuttle tries a variation: Sure, the old-fogey conservatives go for O'Reilly, but we youngs are modern and a-go-go and we think O'Reilly's trad, dad:

This rough-and-ready genealogy might even include a third generation, emerging now — one whose world was shaped by September 11, Iraq, economic recession, and the hyper-partisanship of the Obama years. These conservatives are not Bill O’Reilly; they’re Ben Shapiro, Mollie Hemingway, and Mary Katharine Ham. Their media are podcasts and Twitter, and while they’re certainly combative, they are more interested in a savvy, cosmopolitan conservatism that goes toe-to-toe with progressivism on its own turf (consider Shapiro’s popular campus-speaking events) than in the countrified, bigger-government, populism-tinged conservatism embodied by Mike Huckabee.

"Ben Shapiro, Mollie Hemingway, and Mary Katharine Ham??" cry the youth of today. "That's all I needed to hear. Direct me to the scene of their symposia, where I will vape, denounce socialism, and maybe beat up some antifa chicks!"

At least Tuttle's got enough sense to be ashamed, but not enough to see that O'Reilly isn't the problem. You still need someone; that someone could be younger, and maybe even female (sexual harassment is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have for this gig!) or non-white (the murderous psycho Sheriff David Clarke might even do). But you will need someone to summon the clans, and he or she will have to be a scumbag -- and, since this is the age of Trump rather than the age of Reagan, that person also has to let the slavering masses know he or she is a scumbag. Because St. Ronnie wouldn't make it today; they'd see through his unctuousness right away and despise him for thinking them dumb enough to believe he's a nice guy. Shit, even conservatives don't believe in "trickle down" or "law and order" or any of those magic words anymore -- you can imagine what the marks they've been bilking for decades think!

No, for them only the Savage Messiah will do. And if the prissier among the Movement Conservatives have to stand off the side, look as innocent as their careers as childhood snitches taught them, and say oh no this is not what we meant at all, well, they can afford to pretend it's strategy instead of self-deception -- after all, they still get paid.

TANTRUM. Ann Althouse's recent webcam performance has been, I think, widely misapprehended. To say she "loses it" in the video, as C&L does, is technically correct but misleading. That is, we may also say that a badly-brought-up child who throws a tantrum has "lost it," but this implies that the child is thoroughly and helplessly victim to his own passion, when experience teaches that kids milk their shit-fits in hopes that they will cause the relevant adults to change the rules in their favor.

Professor Althouse's whole online career, as has been tediously documented here, may be seen as one long series of tantrums, thrown to remove from herself the responsibility of making logical arguments on behalf of her crack-brained ideas. She constantly commits the most egregious offenses to common sense -- as when, after ceaselessly decrying political correctness in others, she decided Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks made his movies retroactively ungood -- and, when challenged, says that her opponents just like to argue ("link only for the things they disagree with"), that their "political vision... feels like depression," and other such non-sequiturs.

In other words, as soon as things start going any way other than her own, Professor Althouse resorts to behaviors usually seen in the as-yet-unsocialized. So let us not deceive ourselves that the Professor was showing us anything new when she blew up at Garance Franke-Ruta. Her video tantrum only looks different from her written ones because, confronted with a live commenter whose words she could not delete, Althouse resorted to a more physical form of her usual schtick -- that is, yelling and making faces.

And she got what she wanted -- Franke-Ruta backed down like Alan Colmes with a shy bladder. I think that's too bad, but I suspect that even if Franke-Ruta had come roaring back, Professor would have done something else as evasive -- sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "Yellow Submarine," perhaps.

And the same people would notice, and the same people would fail to notice.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the ooga-booga race-baiting stuff coming out of the rightwing talkshops these days. I've been discussing the phenomenon here at alicublog, but in the Voice piece I tried to tie the whole thing together efficiently for folks who aren't as familiar with the brethren and their peculiar ways as you Real People are.

In composing it, I was struck (not for the first time, but more forcibly than usual) by how much racist bullshit even A-list rightbloggers like Robert Stacy McCain spew without raising an outcry -- I mean, McCain's gotten more shit from Patterico on that score than from mainstream (let alone liberal) media. I think this speaks to the weird marginal-yet-prominent status of political blogs in general; they're like the off-off-Broadway or indie hit of the moment; they're usually short of actual patrons, but generously covered in ink and pixels, which gives them influence and credibility far beyond what their drawing power would by itself afford. The rightbloggers' yapping about big bad black people doesn't reach too many actual people, but is read by commentariat, and eventually will influence David Brooks sufficiently that he will tell us in the pages of the New York Times, gosh, there seems to be a lot of chatter about black crime, which indicates an influence far beyond what you might see in mere statistics (which lie!), etc. Thus crackpot ideas enter our national debates, as they have done for decades.

UPDATE. Commenters have noticed that the Voice column has attracted the attention of race-obsessed people, probably sent by Bill Quick, who thinks that by pointing out historic crime rate drops I'm covering up for black people.

That Edroso, wrapped in the outdated intellectual shroud of lefty political correctness, still tries to cover up this unsettling fact, only betrays his own unconscious racism: since most of the victims of this black crime wave are themselves black, what he is really advocating is ignoring the depredations of criminals in and on the black community.

As usual, I'm the real racist, and the African-American community's best friends are internet commenters who go around saying that black people are irredeemable criminals. I suspect Quick's solution to black crime is to be very afraid and vote Republican.

UPDATE 2. Half Sigma's in on it too:

According to the liberal who wrote the article, crime has been dropping year after year (which is true), and therefore there can’t possibly be a new crime wave happening.

Just because crime in general is down, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a certain specific type of crime can’t be on the increase. But arguing with a liberal is useless.

With arguments like that, I can imagine why he'd think so.

ACE'S HIGH! I've been pretty lame about posting lately. The play takes a lot out of me: though I have only a supporting role, my incompetence requires me to work extra long hours just to achieve mediocrity. (The rest of the cast is phenomenal, though, as are the direction and the play itself. So go! You can do a crossword puzzle or turn on your iPod while I'm stinking up the joint.)

But I'm never too busy to notice when some fellow scribe is absolutely on fire, and I have to give it up for Ace of Spades, who is having a great run.

First, he notices what even the dullest rightwing hacks cannot ignore: that Fox's new funny-conservative show looks a little shakey. Now, here Mr. Spades does something that, so far as my memory reaches, he has never done before: he gives the appearance, however briefly, of heading toward a defensible point -- that the show's writers ought to focus on being funny rather than on hitting the approved political targets. But apparently Mr. Spades' ignorance has a defense mechanism of its own, and it pushes him out of this territory and into all kinds of huh-what. There's a rant about Tina Fey ("liberals went ga-ga over her for her relentless didacticism"), an allegation that Greg Gutfield's show is actually funny (having seen some clips of that thing, I can assure you, it looks like someone just left a camera running in the break room at Dorks R Us), and finally an allegation that the failed funny of the Fox show is a liberal plot:

Material so weak, in fact, that one suspects the writers are all liberals deliberately sabotaging the show, or so horribly out of touch with conservative opinion as to have no real idea what a conservative might find funny, or -- likeliest of all -- convinced conservatives are abject morons who will not get a joke unless it's seltzer-down-the-pants woca-woca-woca sledgehammer obvious.

But wait, there's more! In an update, Mr. Spades, maybe after a visit from The Boys, says the show isn't really that bad. Then he starts pitching ideas: "The one good joke in the segement -- Barack Obama's 'A Life In Politics: My 18 Month Journey' -- could be expanded into a Ken Burns style documentary on his eventful life, with letters back and forth to his wife about just making it to the Senate floor in time for a bill to increase public awareness of the American cod fishing industry, for example. Playing into the Obama Messiah thing." I'm laughin' already! Does the wingnut welfare department have a branch office in Television City? We'll soon find out!

This post is reason enough to stand up and cheer, but thereafter Mr. Spades outdoes himself with a veritable Tourette's seizure of commentary:

• On how no one likes Valentine's Day except "the frigging feminists" (by which I guess he means "women," or perhaps "women who won't fuck me even if I buy them dinner").
• On how the real lesson of Tim Hardaway's anti-gay remarks is that "Blacks have been given a pass" from liberal political correctness because no one in the Librul Media is reporting those remarks except, oh, more than a thousand news outlets at this writing. And also, "there was an incident in the NBA about ten years ago when some New York Knicks said..." Way to run down a source, Mr. Spades.
• On how Mr. Spades is really funny if he does say so himself. "What I realized in writing this was that there were a couple of parts to a sketch. The premise -- obviously, you need that..." Aristotle can rest easy.
• On how when a black guy rapes a white girl, liberals don't care.
• On how Christians make liberals cry ("... jaw hanging in disbelief, eyes welling up with angry tears...") with their Christianity because liberals are little girly girl types. (Of course, if you're an actual girl and you just laugh at Christers, you're a man-faced bitch). This one goes on for hundreds of words. Then Mr. Spades says he wrote it in defense of what sounds like an extremely tight-assed Muslim guy. Whoa, psych! Looks like Dinesh D'Souza isn't the only one who just has to give Islamic fundamentalists credit at least for hating the same people he does.

I could go on, but really, Mr. Spades shows no sign of slowing down -- or maybe of coming down... but let's not cheapen a historic run of asininity by suggesting it has been pharmaceutically enhanced: we all need our heroes, and somewhere a little boy who can't stop talking and thinks all the grownups around him are really stupid and has learned to like playing with army mens all by himself is only a mouse-click away from validation.

A SIMPLE DESULTORY PHILIPPIC (OR HOW I WAS ANITA BRYANT'D INTO SUBMISSION).

These are great days for conservative paranoia. All days are, of course, but in the past after each bitter moan about liberal fascism there has usually been a concomitant mood-swing into delusional grandeur. Lately, however, it's all slave narratives from conservatives crushed under the heel of ObamaHitler. Yesterday we had the PJ Media guys telling us scientists are censoring them in furtherance of a liberal plot, and today I found a wild one in Stella Morabito at The Federalist, one of the right's shinier new meth labs.

In "Cults In Our Midst: Patty Hearst And The Brainwashing Of America," Morabito starts by lengthily recounting the horrible Hearst story: kidnapping, isolation, repeated rape, and "a coarse Maoist style program of indoctrination and re-education" in which she was told "that 'Amerikkka' was a racist and evil society, repeatedly calling her a privileged 'bourgeoise bitch' and her father a 'pig' of the 'corporate fascist state,'" which broke Hearst and turned her into Tania.

Regular readers will have already guessed that Morabito connects the closet-rape-Maoist-Amerikkka-fascist state program to mainstream Democratic values. Ah, but how she does it, that's the thing! Her first move is to link Hearst's brainwashing to that time "the White House launched a 'behavioral insights team' assigned with the task of 'improving policies' through insights into human behavior." I covered that "nudge squad" thing last year -- if that's mind-control, then so is advertising. Norabito seems to anticipate that normal people might feel that way, and so goes for the neckrub-that-becomes-a-headlock rhetorical twist:

We take as a given that political persuasion is part of public life. But likewise we take as a given that deliberate government manipulation of the populace using the techniques of unwitting or coercive persuasion represents a grave threat to our freedoms.

Tomato, to-mah-to. Later Norabito lists Margaret Thaler Singer's "six conditions that create an atmosphere conducive to coercive persuasion":

• Keep the person unaware that there is an agenda to control or change the person and their thoughts
• Control time and physical environment
• Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency
• Suppress old behavior and attitudes
• Instill new behavior and attitudes
• Put forth a closed system of logic.

And guess where she sees them at work:

The frightening realization is that these techniques work on mass audiences as well. We can see hints in the phenomenon we call “political correctness"...

No, wait, it gets better:

The seismic and manufactured public opinion “shift” on same sex marriage in the past several of years is a glaring example of how coercive persuasion works.

That's right -- America has been brainwashed gay-friendly. And you thought Will & Grace was just a funny TV show!

Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a "hater," a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

I hope she'll follow up by telling us how the same techniques turned a brainwashed nation against racial segregation. I mean, it can't have been anything else, right?

Conservatives are presently inclined to attribute any election they lose to America's majority of "low information voters." But Norabito points in a new direction: Maybe now when they lose, even in opinion polls, they'll tell themselves it's not because voters are stupid, it's because they're brainwashed! The real fun will come when try deprogramming the voters.

UPDATE. In comments, Roger Ailes and satch confess their gay brainwashing started with The Hollywood Squares. "Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly were not only funny," says satch, "but persuasive, making them early 'Choice Architects.' Damn those subversive game shows!!!"

Similarly, says coozledad, "I was a conservative until Hawkeye Pierce made Frank Burns look like an asshole."

Meanwhile mortimer finds a Morabito essay on Cosmos. Excerpt:

This is propaganda of the crudest sort, reminiscent of how Stalin’s Soviet Union characterized non-communists, or how the Hutus of Rwanda characterized the Tutsis, or, most famously, how the Third Reich characterized Jews.

I'd say, "I'll have to start following Morabito," but I fear she wouldn't accept I meant this in the traditional sense of reading her work as it comes out, and assume that I was tailing her for ObamaHitler.

PC FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE, PART 5,292,339.

OK, so what's the latest "waah, everyone's politically correct" glurge... oh Christ, it's Bruce Bawer. First he bitches about how Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Chelsea Handler are all making fun of Republicans when they should be, I don't know, marching around in prison stripes going "Rawr, I'm Hitlery Klintoon and I killed Benghazi." (I'm kind of shocked at his focus on female comics -- I thought beating them up was a straight wingnut obsession. He even goes on about "the odious Lena Dunham," normally a tell. Maybe he's had conversion therapy? Or perhaps he just knows what his audience craves.)

Then he gets to the meat: He used to like this English comedian Jimmy Carr because "he seemed utterly indifferent to audience sensitivities and wasn’t remotely political." Sounds good to me too! So Bawer went to see him in Oslo, and at the show Carr got into the local Muslim situation. But to Bawer's dismay:

Carr’s line was that Norwegians are being inhospitable [to Muslims]. Sitting there listening to this, I couldn’t help reflecting that in his own country, the kind of policies he was promoting have made things even worse than they are in Norway — they’ve quashed speech freedoms, turned more and more urban areas into no-go zones...

Yeah whatever buddy. But here's the worst part:

I was appalled by Carr’s glib, PC drivel. But I was pretty much alone. Almost the entire audience, which consisted not of the kind of ordinary, hard-working Norwegians who oppose mass immigration but of affluent-looking, snappily dressed, patently urban 20-somethings (I didn’t see a single non-white face)...

An all-white audience in Oslo! There's a switch.

...laughed and applauded lustily.

They were laughing at something Bruce Bawer didn't agree with! That's double PC!

Plainly, these kids were the spawn of the privileged, pro-immigration left-wing elite and will soon join that elite themselves.

I don't know why Bawer didn't climb on stage like Kenneth Mars in The Producers and yell "You are the victims of a hoax!"

(Carr, I surmised, has advisers at his tour stops who know his demographic and know exactly what kind of material will get them going.)

Wow, he does material he thinks the audience will enjoy. And him a comedian! Is there no end to the PCness?

Eventually Bawer pretends he has an aesthetic case against Carr too ("instead of the tight, snappy sets I’d seen on TV, what I saw was terribly padded-out, including a lot of uninteresting back-and-forth with audience members...") but really he's pissed because they weren't making the jokes he likes -- you know, like that Achmed the Dead Terrorist Guy. But Jeff Dunham is still touring with Achmed -- why not go see him, or Larry the Cable Guy? Why so pissed that other people like different jokes?

The answer is that the people who yell the loudest about political correctness think "other people being open-minded" means "other people agreeing with me." And nothing makes these pecksniffs madder than to hear people laughing and find out that the joke's on them.

WHAT SCHOLARSHIP LOOKS LIKE TO A PROPAGANDIST.

Daniel Henninger starts his Wall Street Journal column with a description of the Memory Hole from 1984, and regular readers know what that means: Liberals are once again forcing citizens to listen to lies such as "humans cause climate change," "the Iraq War was a mistake," "homosexuals have civil rights," etc.

This time Henninger's villains are the so-called "teachers" who are doing the latest revision of the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum for the College Board. (Apparently they revise the thing every couple of years. Parson Weems and the Pledge of Allegiance aren't good enough for these tenured radicals!)

 "The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive," says Henninger. (And why might that be? Sounds like some little pinkos have a guilty conscience.) These pencil-necks are deaf to the "pushback" to the revise that has "emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia," the intellectual jewels of our nation, and to the 56 real "professors and historians" who have signed a petition against it. No, they bask instead in the approval of something called the American Historical Association, which sure sounds like a union to me. And New York magazine and "one liberal newspaper columnist" have had the audacity to make fun of these good Americans; why, that's double Orwell with a side of Alinsky!

There's more, including a quotation from a non-committal press release from the historians (to give Henninger's readers that got-'em-on-the-run feeling cultural warriors crave) and a tear for fallen comrade Lynn Cheney. But after all that, these are the examples from the actual revision plans Henninger picks to show us how Marxist is all is:

An example: “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs..."

This is in direct contradiction to the "dancing darkies" and "funny drunken injun" view favored by conservative historians.

Or: “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century..."

 Market capitalism doesn't "influence," libtards -- it heals, it soothes, it liberates!

And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”

Apparently, even worse than acknowledging that slaves and conquered Native Americans had it tough is acknowledging that they had feelings and human interactions at all.

Maybe as soon he wrote these down Henninger realized he had nothin', because immediately he goes for the bullshit totem of the hour:

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness...

See, it all adds up! A pattern is emerging in all their P.C. hoo-hah: Their ideas fail, and they blame censorship rather than acknowledge that a growing number of people are figuring out they're full of shit.

UPDATE. In comments, whetstone points out that I missed Henninger's coup de horseshit:

At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous.

Try and guess how Henninger will prove their disingenuity. Give up? Here:

From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.

The history teachers are disingenuous, see, because they claim to believe in debate, yet who's going to debate their assertion that slaveowners and conquerors believed they were superior to their subjects? The only possible reason is Orwell! Perhaps Henninger and his buddies should publish a study guide to prepare students to contest this point of view; better still, a video;  even better a Vine, showing Brad Pitt being nice to Chiwetel Ejiofor, then a card that says YEARS PASS, and then a clip of Ben Carson at CPAC.

P.C. SCHMEESEE. Michael J. Totten sympathizes with a scriptwriter who thinks her screenplay, which contains Arab terrorists, is being suppressed by the evil Hollyweird liberals. Totten takes the opportunity to launch into a diatribe against "Political Correctness," clearly hoping to activate the balloons and claim the door prizes awaiting the ten millionth columnist to address the subject.

This reminds me of Lenny Bruce's Comic at the Palladium, who, when his material provokes a frosty reception from the toney London crowd, snarls, "Lotta squares here tonight!" I wish I had a nickel for every artist who lamented that his work was too real, too honest to get play. Hell, I wish I had a nickel for every time I've lamented that!

You have to wonder why the scriptwriter hasn't contacted Rupert Murdoch for funding. We all know what his political orientation is. Yet his film arm produces stuff like Kinsey, which has the fundies in an uproar. "'Fox has a schizophrenic personality,' [Director of the conservative Culture and Family Institute in Washington Robert] Knight told the newspaper. 'Conservatives appreciate Fox News Channel for bringing balance, but the Fox entertainment network, on the other hand, has clearly been the leader in driving TV into the sewer with its non-stop sexual emphasis.'" Maybe Murdoch doesn't discuss the lively arts with Brit Hume and Tony Snow, and so doesn't know any winger filmmakers. Or maybe, just maybe, it all has something to do with money.

Well, she can always try Sun Myung Moon. It's been a while since Inchon and maybe he's ready to get back up on the horse.

UPDATE. Totten's commenters on this topic are, true to form, mostly addled, but a real doozy can be found among the responses to Stefan Kanfer's relatively innocuous Hollywood article at OpinionJournal. Kudos to Harry Mathis of Round Rock, Texas for a unique solution to the "Why Do They Hate Us?" problem.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, NEW-STYLEE. A perfectly reasonable objection, and good for her, from Michele Catalano, to a new Hollywood blacklist (yes, in so many words) proposed by some guy. "What a soundly terrible idea," she says. "It mocks everything America is about, as well as gives credence to the left's mantra that conservatives and/or Republicans want to crush dissent and block free speech."

As you might imagine, though, some of the comments are hilarious. Here's my personal "Courage of His Convictions" nominee:

There are some actors and directors whose work I simply won't patronize. Michael Moore, Robert Altman, Alec Baldwin, and a few others are on the "won't see no matter what" list, and Viggo Mortenson is on the "won't see except for LoTR" list.

Second place winner: "Like, Robert Altman's a gibbering moron through and through, but I really like the old Combat television show, and I plan on buying the season sets on DVD. I'll probably skip his commentaries, though."

The guy behind AllahPundit writes in with this:

Let me make one more point, Michele. I'm sure you realize that there are more than a few employers in and around New York City who would pass you over for a job because of the political opinions you've expressed on ASV. In my case, I realize it well enough to leave "Allah" off my resume. So you and I, for all intents and purposes, are on an informal, unwritten blacklist maintained by leftist business owners.

So that's why no one puts BLOGGER (11/01-present): Numchuck.com, a journal of random thoughts on terrorism and Buffy ('A must read!' -- Clayton Cramer) on their resumes -- to keep under the radar of those evil hippies who run corporations! We've all been in those interviews, haven't we:

LEFTIST BUSINESS OWNER: As you know, young man, the purpose of Greenbelt Securities is to redistribute our clients' wealth to the black, Latino, and trangendered community.

FREEDOM-LOVING BLOGGER DESPERATE FOR WORK: C-count me in, comrade! More power to the people.

LEFTIST BUSINESS OWNER: (narrowing his eyes) Your voice... I've heard it before... yes... in a .wav file distributed by the Central Committee! (Stands, points, makes 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers noise.)

Some responses, however, are downright spooky:

If I misuse my Second Amendment rights I LOSE THEM. If I drive irresponsibly, I LOSE THAT RIGHT. Same with every other right Americans have... except one. That one, you can abuse and misuse and willingly use as a tool to damage your country and endanger your fellow citizens- with no comebacks at all, and people will line up around the block to defend your ability to do so.

What do you call a right with no responsibility attached?

The First Amendment.

(Insert Dragnet theme here.)

I suggest these guys use their time more constructively.

BIRDBRAINS OF A FEATHER. Andrew Sullivan again: "A classic limo-lib comment from Joan Didion, former prose master, now, sadly, another generational scold..."

In Sullyworld, your artistic credentials are stripped when he notices that you disagree with him.

David Horowitz, as usual, goes him one better (or worse) by turning on a comrade who agrees with him on the big issues but does not share his bughouse assessment of Bush ("belongs in the rare circle of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as wartime leaders").

Horowitz allows that Paul Berman is an "intelligent man," his book Terrorism and Liberalism is "excellent," and his take on the War is "clear." But because Berman has assailed Bush in the Times, Horowitz goes bipolar on his ass:

Berman is afraid to look in the mirror and see a man who has praised a defender of American capitalism and a man of faith or to give him his due. This is the perfect image of the narrow-minded, self-righteous, arrogance of the political left...

...it would jeopardize the moral superiority he feels as a "progressive" that allows him to look down his nose at those who don't agree with him, shut his his mind to their arguments and close his heart to their humanity. Apparently this is the only way the champions of an idea that has been discredited by a century of misery can maintain their illusions that they are still in the vanguard of history.

Funny, isn't it, that a couple of guys who are always caterwauling about Political Correctness are so sensitive to deviations from their own party line?

ABOUT LAST POST AND ABOUT LAST NIGHT. As recently observered here, there is a lot of silliness on both sides of the political divide. I do get more annoyed at the stuff on the Right because, well, that's not my side. And I get very annoyed when conservative commentators are forever challenging liberals to say something bad about ANSWER or Al Sharpton or even the more obviously bad actors like the old Politburo. For one thing, that sort of thing is just hectoring -- instead of Say You Love Satan, it's Say You Hate Stalin, and who needs it?

For another, noting these outrages are what NRO and Instapundit and a zillion other, similar outfits are for. I know speech codes are bad. You know speech codes are bad. But rather than put my shoulder to that already well-advanced wheel, I prefer to talk about Daniel Pipes and the other loons who want to regulate the content of college cirricula they suspect of anti-Americanism. Political Correctness was a cover subject in Time years ago. So sue me if I choose to join the ten or twelve guys on Pipes' case instead.

You know who my favorite web conservative is right about now? Terry Teachout. God knows he's pissed me off in the past, and will again I'm sure, but his About Last Night weblog gives me great pleasure. Sure, he's from the Right. But he's a very astute cultural observer, he knows his subjects, and he writes well.

Recently he did a long bit on Shostakovich and one of his interpreters. There's a lot in the piece about the horrors of the old USSR. That's a popular bloody shirt in some circles, and in lesser hands often causes my eyes to glaze over. But it's absolutely appropriate to Teachout's point, and he writes feelingly about it. I have to say, he ain't wrong.

It's always good to see someone pushing words together toward a greater purpose than the old nyah-nyah. Hell, I might try to do a little more of it myself.

MLKKK: HAVE A RIGHTWING MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY!

Conservative MLK Day tributes are always hilarious. This year the brethren seem to have coordinated on the theme that King wasn't really as interested in winning rights for black people as he was in helping conservatives defeat social justice warriors.

A few wingnut outlets go old school: "Does Martin Luther King Day Honor a Communist?" asks a thing called Headline Wealth (one of the Senile Rageaholic Grandpa sites I used to cover), and avers that it does, because the ex-communist Stanley Levison gave him money, supporting "FBI claims that King had told Levison that he was a Marxist." They also repeat the FBI claim that King watched a guy commit rape and laughed, which has also been circulated by more prominent conservative outlets, who always act as if the vile charge were undisputed. 

But most of the brethren realize outright demonization of King is no go, and so try to portray him as one of them, or at least the enemy of their enemies. "The woke Left vs. Martin Luther King Jr." editorializes the Washington Examiner:

The cultural Left’s intersectionality crusade has separated the country into different corners: White people are not permitted to address racial issues, and men are forbidden from speaking about women’s matters (i.e. abortion).

This is exactly what King feared.

If a guy can't advocate white and male supremacy without getting yelled at, MLK's Dream is over.

...it's important also to acknowledge that those who claim to be carrying on King's struggle for justice in modern times have strayed far from his dream..

Instead, they have embraced an identity politics that veers from merely fighting against all forms of discrimination, to carving people up by race, gender, sexual orientation, and placing those distinctions above all else...

Imagine MLK coming back today and seeing people fighting for Latino, immigrant, and gay rights! Boy, would he be mad. The Examiner also says MLK sided with Israel against "Arabs" ("Asked about the argument advanced by a black editor who viewed Arabs as people of color and thus supported them against Israel, King was dismissive"), without noting that, in the very same interview the Examiner cites, King said "peace for the Arabs means the kind of economic security that they so desperately need" and called for a "Marshall Plan for the Middle East, where we lift those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder and bring them into the mainstream of  economic security," which is the opposite of what both the Israeli government and American conservatives endorse for Palestinians.

At GraniteGrok, Steve MacDonald:

Today, equality, when invoked from the left, is about silencing free speech or ideas with which the Democrats disagree.

They empower their quest by calling it hate speech, bullying, bigoted, or even supremacist. As if there were a form of supremacy higher than using the power of the state to deny human beings the right to express ideas of which it disapproves.

Martin Luther King Jr. had plenty to say about that.

There follows an MLK quote in favor of free speech, which MacDonald interprets as a wicked burn on "The Democrat party, some in the media, the white tower, and more than a handful of street thugs" who "work diligently to deny you free association and expression even your right to free press –- as a creator, curators, or consumer." Again, if you have to go on Gab because Twitter won't publish your Nazi propaganda, the Dream is over.

The New York Post:

We suspect [King would] also be distressed by the hypersensitivity and growing political correctness of today’s discussions about race — the near-impossibility of honest dialogue and the insistence by too many to label any who disagree with them as racists...

And, while hailing the beautiful prose of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, he’d be saddened by their pessimism about the possibilities for true and full racial reconciliation.

Picture King shaking his head at Coates: "Brother Ta-Nehisi, you have to give the white man a break. How can we achieve true equality if Stefan Molyneaux can't use Mailchimp to send his white supremacist newsletter?"

Maybe the best is by Jeremy Lott at The American Spectator:

About 30 years after King delivered his speech, a young white high school student in Tacoma, Washington, delivered fragments of that same speech over the school intercom. He did so by mimicking Reverend King’s great, deep voice, which apparently rubbed a few black students the wrong way. A friend warned him, “Do you want to get your ass kicked?” He was bumped into a few times and nudged up against a locker. He left by a different route than normal to avoid such a conflict.

That naive student was me, of course. It wasn’t the huge deal it could have become. Things didn’t escalate into the Great MLK Day Throwdown, thank God. By the next day, folks had let it go. Looking back, it’s really amusing. Still, it helped to reinforce in my mind an important lesson: dreamy idealism will get you only so far in life.

The message of Martin Luther King is boy, those black people are touchy!

UPDATE. Meanwhile in Richmond at the big gun fetishist flex,

Interesting argument pic.twitter.com/gYIDJW5xSI

— Jonathan Myerson Katz (@KatzOnEarth) January 20, 2020

 Won't someone please think of the militias?

UPDATE 2. I thought National Review's MLK tribute would be utterly anodyne, the magazine having been in a confused defensive crouch since the dawn of the Trump era. But Roger Clegg turns in a honey. He spends the first half of it praising Donald Trump, and eventually gets to the black people:

Black Lives Matter and Michelle Alexander’s polemics to the contrary notwithstanding, the reason there are a disproportionate number of African-American prison inmates is not because of racist laws or law-enforcers: It’s simply because a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by African Americans.

Um, Happy MLK Day?  Here's his wow finish:

Now, I said that Americans really aren’t hopelessly divided with respect to foreign policy, capitalism, and our constitutional structure: Am I exaggerating when I assert that there is such a division with respect to law, work, family, patriotism, and God?

Well, no doubt there are plenty of people who voted for Hillary Clinton and like at least a couple of items on that list. But I do think there is more of a division here, and certainly it’s more reasonable for a lot of Americans to perceive it here. In one way or another, the Left derides them all — and one major political party is unwilling to challenge the Left, because its politicians and leadership are afraid to.

I’ll end by saying that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while not blameless in his entire legacy, did not intend to reject any of them.

So King was kind of a shit, just like the Democrats, but at least he did his damage unintentionally. Well, no black people read National Review, so no harm no foul.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I had the great pleasure and privilege to see Harold Prince's

stripped-down version of Candide on Broadway in 1974 and still 

appreciate its crispness, but I just love the original version of this song.  

•   I think I made the right choice to skip the debate and go see Loudon Wainwright III last night. He opened with "Double Lifetime" and "Heaven," which set the tone -- death and jokes! Wainwright seems to have repurposed some of his material from his Surviving Twin thing about fathers and sons -- in fact he not only prefaced some of his songs with bits from his father's Life magazine columns, he even performed one of those columns as a  comic monologue. I wanted more songs but it made an interesting point of comparision: LWII's stuff is pretty good for magazine work; it's well-crafted and has the old-fashioned, better sort of middle-class attitude toward the big issues -- that is, a becoming gratitude for one's privilege, and respect for the mysteries of love and death and the inadequacy of privilege before them. It strikes me that his son picked up some of that, and though he likes to be more irreverent and playful that's still his grounding. Which may really be the reason he never got to be a big star -- not because of the "novelty-store garlic gum" bitter surprise lyrics I blamed when I wrote about him years ago, but because his truths are literally old home truths, a hard sell to a pop music audience (unless of course you lie about the truths).  Concert highlights: A song for his upcoming Alaskan family boondoggle called "Meet the Wainwrights" ("Rufus used to be a tit man/Now he checks out pecs at the gym"), and a really good "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House," a song that sounds pretty mature considering it debuted in 1971.

•   Tell you why else I think I made the right call: I saw the video clip where Donald Trump excuses calling women "fat pigs" on the grounds that "this country" doesn't have time for "political correctness," and I have to say he exceeds even my satirical gifts. I also see that the mainstream National Review conservatives, who were pissed when Trump began hogging attention, are starting to love him for it.  A month ago Jonah Goldberg was calling Trump a fraud -- now he says, "[Trump] makes the debates entertaining and his competitors look more serious and responsible -- what’s so bad about that?" which suggests that they could have gotten the same effect with the Iron Sheik, who I understand has a higher Q rating. Jim Geraghty crows that Trump "killed with that 'Only Rosie O’Donnell' line" (in re women as fat pigs); he's slightly more protective of Megyn Kelly, which is perhaps just his way of showing that there's no principle of chivalry at stake, he just like fat jokes about lib chicks. I wonder what election this is meant to win? These guys already had date rapists and gamergaters locked up. On the plus side, Ben Carson mentioned Alinsky, thereby alerting whatever normal people may have been watching to this weird conservative secret handshake, which ought to help them decide how seriously to take the Republican Party as presently constituted.

UPDATE. Gack:

"[Megyn Kelly] gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions," Trump said in a CNN interview. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"...

How will the Trumpenproletariat react? Let's see what Breitbart.com commenters have to say about it:

The more toffee-nosed cons protest: National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke sputters, "Trump has no attractive qualities at all. He's not a conservative, he's not a good politician, he's not eloquent, he has no experience." Which seems a harsh thing to say about his party's front-runner.

TOUGH CROWD. Ladies and germs, says the MC, please welcome to the Pajamas Media stage Mr. Dan Miller:

The Obama administration is destroying many things intrinsic to the United States.

[Crowd mills restlessly as Miller details the crimes of Obama. Simpsons reference fails to relieve tension. Is he pulling an Andy Kaufman?]

The loss of national pride and national direction are bad enough, but we are also losing our sense of humor.

[Ah, he's doing Kaufman. Crowd waits for it.]

I can’t seem to recall any time during the past sixty or so years when bitterness and seriousness were so deeply rooted and laughter so restrained. Even the “gallows humor” which prevailed during our wars seems to have been lost.

[Crowd leans expectantly, hoping for examples of "gallows humor"; gets more Obama crimes instead. ]

I’m waiting for some congresscritter, a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, to offer legislation replacing the eagle with the dodo bird as the country’s national emblem.

[Delayed reaction: was that a joke? A few barks. At least he's trying.]

In his later years, [Bertrand] Russell came to be regarded by many as “a very intelligent old silly.” Still, he has much to offer; he had a grand sense of humor and was able to laugh not only at those with different views but at himself.

["Tell one of his jokes!" someone yells. Laughter in the back.]

True, comedians still exist and some make lots of money. The jokes about Governor Palin during the recent presidential campaign produced laughter, and those about former President Bush and Vice President Cheney did as well. However, they and the laughter they produced were largely grounded in — and promoted — bitterness and the associated hatred. The few jokes directed at President Obama were much the same; there were then and there are now very few, because of the racism charges almost certain to be thrown at those making and laughing at them. Those accused, even wrongly, of racism are generally punished severely. “Code words” are found, and even unspoken and unintended words are heard subliminally and apologies must be forthcoming, even though they are not generally accepted.

[Even Kaufman couldn't have gotten away with this. Is he going to take us out for ice cream?]

Political correctness, from which all suffer to some extent in the United States and in Europe, has played a major role in this. It teaches us not only to avoid giving, but to take offense. More of us are easily offended than at any time I can remember.

At this point Miller is drowned out by hecklers and removed by the hook, but Pajamas Media provides a full transcript of his routine. You will not be surprised to learn that Miller mentions a former law associate who "was nearly always able to break the tension in a negotiation" with jokes, but declines to repeat any of them.

You can't blame Miller much; most of his crowd were out heckling Letterman. Only their complaint was that Letterman is funny, which is not their primary qualification for a comic.