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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POINT/COUNTERPOINT.

From January, Victor Davis Hanson:

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

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

From the Grammys last night, Kendrick Lamar:


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

Take a fuckin' seat VDH.

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

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

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

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Victor Davis Hanson:

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

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

SHOWTIME. Michael Ledeen takes in a Toby Keith concert;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they can blame the ensuing beatdown on antiwar protestors.

NO MASKS, PLEASE, WE'RE PATRIOTS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUCKLEY WAKE UP -- THEY HAVE GONE MAD. Just lookin' around the internet, seein' what the wingnuts are up to...


In the immortal words of Curly, "Ngggnnyahh!" Seems the Obama European Tour has brought out the best in Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who defensively explains:

This is about artistic tone. The profile view. The serious expression. The shading. When I saw the Obama flier picture, my mind immediately called up this Hitler image and I was struck by how similar they are in feel the color choice differences aside. Unnerving really.

In comments Clouthier is compelled to explain even more:

I did not say Barack Obama and Hitler are anything alike, just that the imagery is startlingly alike. It would be one thing for a flier in America in English called to mind that imagery, but when Obama is going to the very place Hitler spoke at and chose as the capital of the world under German supremacy, it’s alarming.

The only possible conclusion: Obama is trying to make himself look like Hitler to win votes.

But don't worry, not all conservatives are obsessing over Barack Hussein Hitler -- or even angrily comparing him, as Victor Davis Hanson does, to those other famous Nazis, James Dean and the Beatles, in defense of the new rightwing talking point that Obama is too popular. Some are hard at work firming up that John Edwards sex scandal story ("This story seems extremely strong. Given that it was the National Enquirer... most media outlets wouldn't touch it, but it is good to learn what appears to be the real story"). Others are following the Pope and lamenting that his healing presence came too late to save Jamie Lynn Spears and her bastard.

Meanwhile, a local government gives tax breaks to a local group that's bringing a whole lot of out-of-town business to the city, and conservatives won't defend it! But how can that be? Haw, haw, haw. You caught on, didn't you? I'm not as hard to see through as I think.

Thus do they fill their days in between Ghost Dances.

UPDATE. Just in from the rightwing semiotic squad: The Anchoress finds the flag on Obama's plane too small, and the preponderance of his campaign logo cause for grave concern: "It's starting to really make me uncomfortable. Obama is clearly trying to send a signal that he is a 'citizen of the world' type before he is an American." What -- like Diogenes? Or, even more sinister, Arthur Ashe?

Do these people even know how crazy they look to folks who don't spend all day looking for signs, symbols and portents in every goddamned little thing?

POPULISM WITHOUT POPULARITY. The perfectly sensible point that the rich, well-born John McCain has got at least as many elitism points as Obama reaches perfectly mad Victor Davis Hanson, who responds:

Even adroit spinners and handlers can't manufacture elitism; it is not necessarily connected with wealth. The very wealthy Bush no doubt was brought up in greater splendor than was Kerry; but fairly or unfairly, he was more at home at NASCAR and Texas than wind-surfing. And the people sensed that even without Karl Rove's ads. John McCain in a wet suit seems unimaginable.

J. Pierpont Morgan is also unimaginable in a wet suit. But if he were living today and had a set of image-handlers, they would teach him to drop his g's and dress him in cheap windbreakers, and tell plain folks how much more old J.P. has in common with them than has that too-skinny glamour boy, Tom Joad. This would not, of course, change Morgan's business and political interests, though it would make them harder to see. Elitism isn't body language, but a way of looking at the world.

Liberals and progressives are far more vulnerable to charges of elitism, since they are prone to the additional charge of hypocrisy. Right-wingers, as the catastrophic election of 2006 showed, are more easily exposed as hypocrites when they preach family values and are caught in Rev. Haggard-like positions, or abuse drugs and drink. But liberals, 'two-nations' men and women of the people, who rail against the unfairness of an uncaring system and the perniciousness of wealth and privilege, far more readily suffer charges of elitism when their populist rhetoric is contrasted to private jets, 30,000 sq ft. homes, or 11 mansions.

The problem here, of course, is that both candidates engage in "populist rhetoric." When John McCain visits a kitchen cabinet factory and promises to "keep jobs here at home and create new ones," or goes to a biker rally and says he prefers the "roar of 5,000 Harleys" to the cheers Obama received in Berlin, or talks about "lobbyists and special pleaders" and comes out against lavish CEO salaries, he might as well be Huey Long. McCain's own campaign advisor calls him a "populist." This is categorically different from conservatives making fulsome "values voter" pitches and sermonizing on sexed-up Democrats while fucking prostitutes and harrassing teenagers on their cell phones. The latter is hypocrisy, the former is parity.

Personally I think it's a good thing that people are pointing out that both candidates are rich. It's a good first step toward some real populism.

NOT A DOG IN THE BUNCH.

Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar -- which site I for some reason never had on my blogroll before now -- has done his annual great job of collecting 2015 blog posts chosen by the authors themselves for the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. You should go sample some -- you might find a genius or two you hadn't seen before.

You'll also find one by me there --  that riff I did on Ben Affleck's family tree problems in April. Which reminds me: As much fun as I had with the Village Voice rightblogger round-up last weekend, I believe it was missing something -- namely, shameless self-promotion! To follow are my 10 favorite posts of 2015 by my favorite author, me! If you missed 'em before, it's not too late. Happy New Year, all, and don't drive drunk -- stay home and finish that keg yourselves.

A Week of Shorter Rod Drehers. In which I chart America's favorite Xian drama queen, post by post, for seven days ("4/6/15, 5:35 pm: The gays are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 12:05 am: Facebook and the gay drag queens are oppressing us Christians. 4/7/15, 5:08 am: Buy my book...").

It Can't Miss. A memo from the Central Committee to the Brethren on how to handle the Bruce Jenner thing ("The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays").

Have a Miserable National Review Christmas! A look at what America's premier conservative magazine chose to present to its readers on Christmas Eve ("How could we have guessed [Victor Davis] Hanson would spend Christmas bitching about furriners? Guess he never got over the loss of his chainsaw").

My Advice for the Republican Party. What I told them they should do with their first debate, but they didn't listen, the idiots ("just say to hell with decorum entirely and flood the stage with other joke candidates who will distract from [Trump]. Some possibilities: A Howard Stern fan who just says 'Baba Booey, Baba Booey'...").

What to Expect. Speaking of the first GOP debate, I had to miss it, so I just made one up for my readers and I must say from what I heard mine was better ("George Pataki will be found dead, his face pressed against the crack at the bottom of the door of the auditorium like Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer").

Heritage and Hate. An interview with Beauregard T. Dogwhistle, a member of the Fritters, Alabama city council, on the controversy over the Confederate flag ("Whah, suh, there ain’t no moah racism in thet requiahment o’ mah dignity than they is in mah flag, o’ mah unifo’m, o mah collection o’ manacles an’ slave collahs an’ such lahk, no mattah what them statist rapscallions at eBay say about it").

This Used to Be My Playground. Spurred by yet another essay on New York in the 70s, I talked about my own experience of that place and time, and why it was still interesting to people who weren't there ("I don’t think they thrill to it because they desire to be mugged; I think they like it because they suspect that the danger came with something they would want, but can no longer get on any terms. And they're right").

Season 7, Episode 14. The last of my Mad Men recaps ("Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists").

Au Revoir, Niedermeyer. A farewell to Presidential candidate Scott Walker ("I wouldn't say I felt bad for the guy, but it must be something to have pandered your ass off for months and then discover that it wasn't enough to be a bully -- you had to act like a bully, too").

Twenty Minutes Wasted with Goldberg and Murray. In which I did a scorn-language interpretation of a promo interview between two of the worst people in the world, Jonah Goldberg and Charles Murray ("'what [academia] looks like is people making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private sector,' that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only break a sweat during squash or rough sex...").

JUST WHAT MAGA V. TAYLOR SWIFT NEEDED: A LITTLE TOUCH OF DREHER!

It can’t last, so let’s all ride this MAGA Declares War on Taylor Swift thing to clicksville while the iron’s hot, shall we? Here’s a rare midweek freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, with a ripped-from-today’s-headlines account of the anti-Swift nerve center at Mar-a-Lago. Strictly for laffs! 

As I repeatedly remind you folks, conservative politicians and political writers have entirely abandoned policies and even normal constituent service in favor of lunatic culture war crap like this. Entertainers most of us think of as That Guy In that Movie or That Girl on Spotify are to them as demons sent to Make Everything Woke. This goes for the rightwing intelli-ma-lectuals like Victor Davis Hanson as well as humble clickbait farmers (“The Top 5 Most Overrated Liberal Comedians”), but also for bigtimers like the New York Times' David French, one of those conservatives who liberals simps think is OK, and author of a hair-raisingly weird Prince obituary (“For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience…”).

I didn’t think this Swift thing could get any nuttier but I hadn’t counted on Rod Dreher. I’d more or less stopped paying attention to him since his nervous breakdown and departure from The American Conservative, but my attention was called to his latest Substack item, “Among the Swifties” – and if you sense a reference of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs there, claim your prize because Dreher does indeed compare the young female fans of Taylor Swift to the soccer hooligans in Buford’s book:

Here is Buford himself, reflecting on what he learned about crowd dynamics by watching a thug leader he calls “Mutton Chops” at work…

This is interesting. It says that we cannot entirely blame Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or any other “leader” who holds sway over a crowd; the crowd’s latent desire for someone to create them manifested in those individual figures being propelled to leadership. Don’t misread Buford here; he’s not absolving crowd leaders of their actions…

Someone should ring Buford and ask him if he absolves Taylor Swift of her crimes. 

To put it in Buford’s terms: there was a huge crowd of young females who shared a common emotional experience (“the collective female unconscious”) that settled on Taylor Swift, a supremely gifted creator of pop songs, as their leader. Taylor Swift played her role, of course, but Buford would say that Swift was summoned by the latency within the crowd that would later become Swifties.

I bet Dreher imagines “Swifties” as rampaging Valkyries doing Wokeness to the innocent. The thing’s full of howlers, with patented Dreherisms like his regret that he cannot experience the “liberating pleasure of ego death” he imagines sports, Swift, and Trump fans enjoy – “The only time I’ve ever had that experience as part of a crowd was at the U2 concert in Baton Rouge…” The jokes just write themselves! Nonetheless I had a go at REBID, if you can use a chuckle, however mordant. 

UPDATE. Finally realizing that maybe this has all been a terrible mistake, some of the conservative Shuck Troopers are trying to turn it around. Washington Times:

We're not nuts, you're nuts! Well, on their readership it could work. Also Erick Erickson is trying his insufficient best:

Never mind that it hurts Donald Trump. Never mind that it makes the Republicans look deeply unserious. Never mind the political fallout. On a day that Cori Bush has been targeted by the Justice Department, a Democrat progressive targeted by Joe Biden's Justice Department, we're all having to talk about the Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce thing because of what these idiots have done online. 

Oh, I'm sure none of them will mind that the Swift Purge is distracting from the fact that the DOJ, which conservatives constantly accuse of being politically weaponized against Republicans just because they did some so-called "crimes," is investigating prominent Democrats like Bush and even charging Democratic Senator Robert Menendez as well. Screening out inconvenient facts is as important to their whole paranoid vision as the manufacture of lunatic fantasies.

UPDATE 2. Lol, I forgot that conservatives have been raging at Swift for at least ten years now. Here's my 2013 post on the Power Line proto-Catturd Hindrocket doing close analysis of Swift wearing a onesie -- is it a comment on Pajama Boy?? And get a load of all the anti-Swift articles at rightweing rat's nest The Federalist: Imagine going to an editor with a pitch like "Taylor Swift’s Disappointing Arc Is Generationally Representative" and having her slam the desk and cry, "THAT'S GOLD, JASHINSKY! GOLD!" Finally, lest we forget: Mark Hemingway's sad boomer review of Swift. Now that's funny! 

MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME. I have a whole bunch of reasons for the long silence. Which one do you want?

1. Fuck you.
2. The professional commitments I could handle, but I wasted a lot of time talking to people and dealing with their emotional needs. Pffft! Later for that!
3. I sold my posts to more popular blogs to buy medicine for orphans.
4. I... I don't know. What day is this? This calendar says 2007! No! NO!

To get back to sea level, I will take the lay of the land -- by which I mean Wingerland, a large but mentally-impoverished duchy:

Ace O. Spades has gone back to thinking that calling someone a traitor is more fun than calling him gay. For the moment.

Jeff Goldstein continues to redefine surrealism as what the French call "jokes without punchlines."

Why would ladies pay five grand to take writing lessons from a successful author, asks a NRO rookie hack, when the real question is, why would anyone pay $5000 to be set adrift in the North Atlantic with a bunch of madmen? True, the accomodations look nice, but when, after too many 7&7s, Mac Owens has got you in a headlock, Victor Davis Hanson is grinding his crotch against a broom-handle in emulation of Jim Morrison while bellowing Catullus, and Jonah Goldberg insists on "running some Liberal Fascism chapters by you" (i.e., farting uncontrollably), no cabin can possibly be large enough.

The reekage at InstaB-List is so rank even other wingnuts are noticing. Ann Althouse, we may be sure, is oblivious, being obviously high as a fucking kite approximately 100% of the time. (Her commenters, on the other hand and as evinced by this thread, seem to be surfing on methane fumes. My favorite: "BTW, Ann is not a conservative. Most who characterize her as that display their own liberalism.")

But Professor Althouse is still a piker when it comes to self-unawareness. Yesterday Jim Lileks actually complained about a newspaper writer who, he judged, was making too much of dogs dressed in sweaters. Jim Lileks! And mere paragraphs after he had sternly parsed the music selection at Starbucks!

I leave you with Fred Thompson denouncing Gandhi. Next week, Thompson takes on that faggot Jesus.

LAST GASPS. Obama leaves Trinity and the reaction is telling:

Obama can't stand the heat of a campaign without tossing aside his grandma, then his pastor, and now HIS WHOLE FREAKIN' CHURCH. One he'd been defending until NOW. One many leftists defended.

What a low life.

Unfit for the office.

Kerry had more class. At least he pretended to be honorable.

Later: "THE LEFT IS ALREADY SEEING OBAMA FOR WHAT HE IS. IT'S OVER. A NATIONAL NIGHTMARE AVERTED." In case you were wondering, this is not a disappointed former supporter, but one of the folks who were really counting on Reverend Wright to knock Obama out of the race and have just seen their last slim hope of it melt away.

Reliapundit is choleric under the best of circumstances, but the news is inciting strong language from even more temperate writers. "Thirty Pieces of Silver From the Pulpit," says RedState. "Why is he leaving all of a sudden? Is it because there is another untold story out there?" The author suspects shady in-church fundraising, based largely on his own experience as a perpetrator. (The post also contains yet another citation of Obama throwing someone, or being thrown, "under the bus," fattening that conservative meme for the winter, when its promulgators may need to live off it. )

Other make the best of the situation. "Now [Obama] is riding the whirlwind," writes Roger L. Simon. (Some whirlwind.) "Shocker... unbelievable!... UPDATE: Will Not Denounce Church!" says Gateway Pundit. Even the normally highbrow Victor Davis Hanson has to resort to all-caps: "So the question always arises-WHY?" he writes. "Is it because he didn't know the nature of his associates, OR is it because he finds their well-known messages suddenly as politically disadvantageous as he once found them essential in jump-starting his Chicago career?"

Most observers will guess the latter, and not be too exercised about it, as they are probably sick of hearing about Trinity Church and will welcome any development that puts an end to its coverage. It certainly will come up again, of course, but as a historical citation rather than as breaking news. By any rational analysis, the downside of this for Obama is very slight compared to the upside. But at the outrage factories where this sort of thing is stock in trade, it's as if one of their best-sellers were being recalled, so we can hardly blame them for making some noise about it.

UPDATE. Very interesting discussion in comments about how well or badly Obama plays these things in general. I'd say that he and his staff seem to do a lot of improvising, which is never a good sign from a political campaign. On the other hand, they improvise pretty adeptly; the "discussion on race" speech was good theatre and gave Obama a buffer against the Wright fallout. It wasn't a stopper, obviously, but it worked well enough to get him this far.

Tex, talking about the McClurkin episode, says "Well, it did cost him my respect. But he will still have my vote." Just so, and he's one of the few who remember McClurkin in the first place. We're well out of the time when naive enthusiasm was carrying the day for Obama, and into the difference-splitting part of the contest. This gives an advantage to McCain, who was never going to win an inspirational campaign; though his own improvisations haven't been so hot, the press hasn't belabored them nearly as much as Obama's.

It may be Obama will win or lose on his ability to play a game that has nothing to do with his advertised appeal as a healer. Right now, part of the opposition game plan is to reductively characterize Obama as a "Chicago politician" with old-fashioned backroom tricks up his sleeve. Well, he'd better be.

TRUMPISM WITHOUT TRUMP.

Remember the brave-looking stand National Review took against Trump and Trumpism last year? Ha ha, now look: their front page is devoted to articles like "Approve the Cabinet" by noted free-thinker Kevin D. Williamson and the Trump-flattering encomia of Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew C. McCarthy.  One imagines Trump in doublet and hose: "Was ever loser in this humor woo'd? Was ever loser in this humor won? Sad!"

Worse still are the NRniks who peddle Trumpism without Trump. Get a load of Ramesh Ponnuru's and Rich Lowry's "For Love of Country":

"Dark,” “divisive,” and “dangerous” were a few of the negative descriptors that critics attached to President Trump’s inaugural address, and those were just the ones that start with “d.” (A few threw in “dystopian” for good measure.) The critics took him this way in part because he depicted the last few decades of American life as a hellscape from which he would shortly deliver us: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” But the critics also had this reaction because the address had a theme — nationalism — that has itself long been assumed in many quarters to be dark, divisive, and dangerous.  

That assumption has never been justified and should now be discarded. Nationalism can be a healthy and constructive force. Since nationalistic sentiments also have wide appeal and durability, it would be wiser to cultivate that kind of nationalism than to attempt to move beyond it.

Just because Trump is a monster doesn't mean every ignorant xenophobe strongman has to be one! Surely someone someday might-could declare "Xland for the Xlanders" without the fascist chest-beating. Then comes the history lesson:

Fear of nationalism became very widespread, especially in Europe, after the world wars, and it remains a core premise behind the sputtering drive toward further European integration.

Hitler made nationalism ick,  at least to those sputtering sissies at the EU. They go on: "Nationalism has a bad odor even among some conservatives" because "economic conservatism, particularly as influenced by libertarianism, can come to see borders as barriers to free markets" and some are "influenced by the notion that America is an 'idea' or a 'proposition nation,'" but...

Ugh. You almost want some brute like, oh, Richard Spencer to bust through the flimsy premise of this essay like Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall and go TOUGH SHIT CUCKS I AM YOUR CONSERVATISM NOW! Because that would be cutting to the chase, and who wouldn't prefer it;  after the early, moony grafs about a "benign nationalism" that "includes loyalty to one’s country" and "the revulsion that most people feel when protesters burn an American flag" even the most sympathetic reader must realize this isn't so much an essay as a Country Time Lemonade commercial for NR's milky country-club conservatism.

Who would even read it all, besides me? Some nervy souls may hang in through the Roger Scruton and (Lord help us) Chesterton citations; some bravos may persist past the unexplained assertion that the European Union "has a democracy deficit and always will"; a stalwart few may endure copybook sludge like "the appeal to national pride has also been important to conservative politics"; the dimmer of the half-mad survivors, clawing through the crumbling logic and reek of special pleading, may be encouraged to find themselves washed up on the What's Wrong with Trump's Nationalism section ("He’s not a limited-government conservative, nor does he appear to be a religious man"), but the smarter ones will realize with horror that they've been conned -- the only meaningful difference between Il Douche and Lowry and Ponnuru is that the latter bother to use big words to make the animal appeal of nationalism sound to suckers like philosophy instead of gangster movie monologues. Only relatives and sycophants of the authors will get to the end undamaged.

Bad as it is by itself, this piece of shit has been glossed by Jonah Goldberg. His column is one long wind-tunnel fart and I haven't got the time, but this section will give you some of the flavor:

It is true that nationalism is part of the equation, but it is the less important part. And by mistaking the tail for the dog, we lose sight of what is important. Think of it this way. All, or at least most, marriages require some level of physical attraction, particularly at the outset — that is only natural. But any marriage purely based on physical attraction will struggle to last. No happily married couple I have ever met has confessed that the secret of their long marriage was mutual lust.

No comment. (Loser.)

Marriages endure for a host of complicated reasons, but among the most important is surely a commitment to an ideal, be it religious or otherwise. Nationalism is a bit like lust — a natural human passion that, absent proper channeling, is at best morally neutral and more often a source of unhealthy temptation.

Thank God the writers of National Review can always get some Trump-love on the down-low without violating their vows of intellectual celibacy! Meantime in the real world, Trump's-brain Fat Goebbels is mind-melding with Mencius Moldbug and other nerd-Nazis to create the newer new nationalism, so Goldberg et alia better pay attention so they know exactly how far away to stand -- and exactly where they're expected to be in, oh, six to twelve months.

HYSTERIC WATCH. Victor Davis Hanson:

At first I thought the standard Obama warnings about crowd fainting when he started speaking were just peculiar, as was the bit about oceans receding and the planet healing. Then I noticed he has plans to move his speechmaking at the convention to a large outdoor arena, to allow the 'people' the right to hear him en masse. Now he negotiates to address Berliners in Kennedy/Reagan style (but weren't they already presidents?) in front of the Brandenburg Gate? Next? No doubt the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

At National Review, at the moment, you can see Obama compared to both Hitler and Jesus. Surely this must be some kind of first.

DORKUS MALORKUS SPEAKETH. Attend Maximus Super Victor Davis Hanson as he sayeth the sooth! Well, it's soothing if you know how to take it. As is his custom, VDH bids us ware the Ides of March, then Delphically describes an America recognizable only to old cranks who spend their evenings with a glass of port and a volume of Heroditus open (in a place where visitors can easily see it), wailing that we are just like old Rome in her decline, except for our endless wars, which are great (though we really should be spending less money on them, and more plebes' lives).

VDH is full of stories, but sometimes he wanders:

Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last.

And this at the height of the Reagan era! We were told in those days that the kids had all become little Alex P. Keatons, high on trickledown and entrepreneurial as fuck. So either Maximus Super speaketh bullshit, or in '85 his young charges, having grown up under Governor Reagan, got an early whiff of the fraud and were opting out. (Or maybe they thought, "Jesus, if he can teach at a state school, I could be a fucking Dean!")

VDH also Sphinxes out some riddles:

Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet?

Answer "what's morality got to do with it, cloth-ears?" (rather than the correct "You got me there, Senex Gloriosus!") and VDH will not let you pass, but will block the hallway and forcibly regale you, no matter how badly you say you need the bathroom, with his proposed solution to our nation's low, mean state: Tax the Poor ("Their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich") and restore "a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess," presumably by throwing non-Christians to the lions.

On and on it goes, with awkward modern correlations ("the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians") and stretches of senile dementia ("In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos" -- what?). You may wonder how he gets published. Well, they can't all be bellowing goons like Chris Christie or Mr. Reasonables like David Brooks -- sometimes the avatars of the New Feudalism must have a schoolly look, so that the half-educated may look upon them and think, aha, the rage I feel when I see impertinent minorities and nubiles on TV is not just a gut reaction, but the judgement of history!

WE PLAY ALL THE HITS.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Now that it's painfully clear that nobody cares, let's have a Benghazi Bullshit clips show!

In other words: Since "Nobama and Hitlery murdered Christopher Stevens for Saul Alinsky" isn't catching on with normal people, it'll be repurposed as a mantra for conservative basement services until 2016, by which time it might be retro enough that people will find it cool.

UPDATE. May I quote me? From those days of Republican Hope and Change, when they thought Obama might be impeached over Benghazi:

"It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon's resignation in disgrace," said WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh. "Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012..." Unruh cited some prominent conservatives, including Mike Huckabee and Ted Nugent, who predicted Obama's impeachment. Plus in a separate column Unruh revealed WorldNetDaily's exclusive poll showed 44 percent of Americans wanted Obama impeached -- and that was back in March! The numbers must be off the chart by now...

"The last time something of this magnitude happened, a U.S. president stepped down," said Susan Brown of Right Wing News." "Is Benghazi Becoming a Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Both?" asked Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. "May be the biggest federal cover-up since Watergate," said his colleague Deroy Murdock. And in case the association didn't sufficiently excite, there was the all-purpose slogan: "Nobody died in Watergate."

Where are the snowjobs of yesteryear?

UPDATE 2. With Goldberg it never rains but it pours -- or, since it's him, I guess we could say it never farts but it sharts. He has a new Goldberg File column out (no link, I get the wretched things by email), in which he gets philosophical and explains how (I swear to God) Curly in City Slickers was wrong that you should find one thing in life that matters because life requires "balance." He makes several lunges at apposite metaphors for this, finally collapsing into the following:

As you get older you change the mix in your portfolio, in the same way people near retirement move more heavily into bonds and away from stocks.

There's a man from whom you want to take life lessons. But why did he even bother?

Now I could swear there was a real point I was building up to... Oh, right, politics isn't everything and everything isn't political.

This he demonstrates by telling us liberals suck:

The true danger of progressivism is that it is "one thingism" hiding in the camouflage of diversity talk. Every institution is free to do its thing, so long as its thing is defined in progressive terms and guided by the State. Diversity means lots of people with different skin colors and dangly bits, who all think the same way... For conservatives, diversity actually means different people, individually and in communities, pursuing different things. 

I don't know why he didn't just say "My name is Ima Liberal, I'm a big four-eyed lame-o and I wear the same stupid sweater every day." I guess prominent conservative intellectuals just can't use that kind of shortcut. Farrrt.

BY THE NUMBERS. Victor Davis Hanson has a long complaint against Julian Assange. Here are some of his key points:

•  Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."
• "Climategate."
• "Hollywood agents, producers, and financiers," and their product, Redacted and Rendition. [What, no Lions for Lambs?]
• "Harvard or Yale tenure committees."
•   George Soros.
•   The "let-it-all-hang-out Sixties."

His conclusion is that Assange is a narcissist, a term of disapprobation normally saved for Barack Obama, but his point, such as it is, is that WikiLeaks is like a lot of other things he doesn't like.

It doesn't matter whether it's a genuine domestic issue, or the actions of the foreign leader of a stateless group which have been denounced by the Obama Administration, or a lampshade or a hobby-horse. The Mad Libs never change, because the subject doesn't matter nearly as much as the intended audience, which apparently finds certain words as reliably funny as audiences of Hollywood comedies find swearing geriatrics and blows to the crotch.