WE'RE ALL TRYING TO FIND THE GUY WHO DID THIS.

The days are busy, and as full of bad faith and mendacity as they are I can’t keep up. (Though I make an effort at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Subscribe, cheap!) But sometimes a piece of pixelcrap emerges that I just can’t let it pass.

At the Washington Examiner Byron York writes about George W. Bush’s unfortunate moment during a recent speech at SMU, in which he meant to say "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine” but had to correct himself after saying "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” York’s conclusion seems mildly sympathetic to the old war criminal:

But most of all, Bush's words at SMU conveyed the sense of a man who made a career-defining mistake that still troubles him, two decades later. It troubles the country, too.

Boo fucking hoo. But the real howler for me is York’s portrayal of how support of the invasion and war went: 

The war in Iraq has roiled American politics for nearly 20 years. In the early years, opposition to the war became a litmus test among Democratic politicians. Two of the party's presidential nominees, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize the war as senators, while a third, Barack Obama, avoided the test because he was not in the Senate when the authorization vote was taken.

In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, candidate Donald Trump agitated the GOP when he openly described the war as a disaster. Trump did it in part to rattle his competitor in the primaries, Bush's brother Jeb. But Trump did, in fact, strike a nerve among Republicans who supported the war when it began but came to believe it was a mistake. Now, no one would be surprised if Trump at some point makes use of the new Bush blunder as new ammunition in Trump's battle against what used to be called the Republican establishment.

If you had missed the past 20 years of American history, you might get from this the (clearly intended) impression that the war was pushed through by GWB and the Democrats, and opposed by Republicans, especially the ones who would later become the MAGA movement. *

But that just ain’t so. Check Pew Research in 2011, when Obama announced that, as he had promised in the 2008 campaign, the U.S. was withdrawing from Iraq (which turned out not to be entirely true, unfortunately):

Since the start of the war, there has been a wide partisan gap on the question of using force in Iraq. In March 2003, with major combat operations ongoing, the gap was substantial: 93% of Republicans supported the decision to use force, compared with 66% of independents and 59% of Democrats. This gap persisted through the first year of the [war]. Across all surveys conducted in 2003, 90% of Republicans backed the decision to use force, compared with 66% of independents and 50% of Democrats.

Over the ensuing years, support for the war has plummeted among independents and Democrats plummeted, while Republicans have remained largely supportive. In surveys conducted in 2008 — the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency — just 17% of Democrats said it was the right decision to take military action in Iraq, compared with 73% of Republicans.  Since President Obama took office, support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has increased among Democrats.

However, Americans are ready to move on — 56% believe that the U.S. has mostly accomplished its goals in Iraq, and three-quarters of the public support Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011. (emphasis added)

Also a lot of us marched and otherwise made our anti-war feelings known, as Republicans pointed and laughed at the dirty liberal hippies. 

If you’re of a suspicious turn of mind -- and with York why wouldn’t you be -- you might think he’s trying to erase the cold fact of a massively liberal anti-Iraq-war opposition to make it easier to peddle Trump and his minions as Right From The Start. If that seems like a stretch, think what other fantasies MAGA, QAnon, and all the big Republican constituencies have accepted in similar defiance of evidence and common sense. 

* Oh, and in case you were wondering, York was a big Iraq War fan once upon a time -- see his June 2003 column, “The Truth About Bush’s ‘Lies’”: 

…if the administration's case was a lie, then everybody, including much of the political opposition, was in on it. Just as importantly, if it turns out that prewar estimates of Iraq's capabilities were incorrect, the Bush administration can say — truthfully — that it erred on the side of protecting American national security. 

And he seemed to think the war was a great success, as described in his December 2006 column, “In war-torn Iraq, unlike here, there’s optimism”:

Presumably without access to The New York Times, The Washington Post and television news, millions of Iraqis say their lives are better than they were last year, better than they were before the United States invasion, and will likely be better a year from now than today.

Among the measures of victory cited by York: “In 2003 (in another poll), 32 percent [of Iraqis] had a satellite dish. Now it’s 86 percent.”

ONE OF THE BOYS.

Well, it looks like the Republicans had good reason to have 65 women lined up to assert Brett Kavanaugh never raped them.

All honor to Christine Blasey Ford, who has no reason to lie, is certainly aware of what rat bastards the Republicans are, and may expect horrific abuse for coming out. Hey, look, it's already started -- Breitbart:

KAVANAUGH ACCUSER CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD DONNED ‘BRAIN’ PUSSY HAT FOR ANTI-TRUMP MARCH

Breitbart is suitable for this wet work, but the classier wingnuts have to play it cool. Here's the Washington Examiner's Timothy P. Carney on "The long silences of Christine Blasey Ford and Dianne Feinstein":

You don't know what happened in that bedroom in suburban Maryland 35 years ago. I don't know, either. Hopefully questions and answers in the next few days can help us have a better guess. But a bit off-center from the core dispute here are two questions about silence: the silence for three decades from Christine Blasey Ford, and the silence for two months from Dianne Feinstein.

Most of Carney's regular readers will have bailed at that point, making a point to hate DiFi even more than they already did, in addition to hating the lying whore whatshername.  Those who stick around will see Carney affect sympathy with Ford -- "It is perfectly believable, and frankly understandable, that a woman who went through what Ford says she went through would never want to talk about it." But the real villain in all this, Carney reveals, is neither Ford nor Kavanaugh, but Ford's fellow chick:

The silence of Dianne Feinstein is another thing. 

In July Feinstein heard this story from Ford. Yet she didn't act on it. She didn't ask Kavanaugh about it in committee, in closed session, in written questions, or in a one-on-one meeting. She presumably didn't ignore the letter. So there are three possible explanations for Feinstein's silence until now...

And if one of Carney's speculations are true, ladies and gentlemen --

...that tells us something about Feinstein--she is a dishonest politician playing dirty politics with a deadly serious charge.

To sum up, Carney knows it looks bad to come after Ford, but a leading Democrat makes an appealing secondary target, at least for the time being. There'll be time enough for "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" when they get something more than pussy hats lined up.

Meanwhile at misogyny central:

A lawyer close to the White House said the nomination will not be withdrawn. 

“No way, not even a hint of [withdrawing Kavanaugh],” the lawyer said. “If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Leave us cut to the chase. They can get any rightwing factotum they want on the bench. There's nothing special about Kavanaugh -- he's dimestore. Why not dump him and get someone else equally terrible? Because male supremacy is important to the GOP. They don't care if some Hollywood mogul or small-time pol gets skinned for harassment or rape -- but when it comes to one of their made men, they have to close ranks and show the bitches it's impossible to prevail against them no matter how credible the accusation. It's not like their base is voting for them based on policy.

UPDATE. The parade of conservative sexual assault apologists forms up. Myron Magnet at City Journal:

The Dems “Anita” Brett Kavanaugh
How low will they go?

...I didn’t believe Hill’s accusations back then, and now, having a clear picture of Justice Thomas’s sterling character, and having just reread the transcript of the Hill-Thomas hearings, I believe them still less.

Why am I not shocked. Magnet points to "the encomia on [Kavanaugh's] character from the many women whose careers he has fostered as a judge and professor, as well as from his colleagues," which you gotta admit isn't something every 20-year Republican functionary would bring to his SCOTUS confirmation hearings. But, in case it all goes south despite the ladies' auxiliary support, Magnet has a good-boy-made-a-mistake argument ready:

I strongly doubt that he did what Ford alleges, and what her allegation suggests was a rape attempt was, by her own description, nothing of the kind -- though, following the Hill playbook, she has already taken a lie-detector test and hired a well-known lawyer. 

That bitch!

But again, supposing it were true -- as I do not suppose -- he was 17 years old at the time. Do the Democrats really think that a single teenage indiscretion should have a place in confirmation hearings?

In an alternate universe, Black Brett Kavanaugh is being turned down for another, less-exalted job because the boss found out about the two years he did for sexual assault when he was 17. (Someone mentioned the case to then-USAF judge advocate Lindsay Graham at the time. "Only two years! Disgusting," remarked Graham. "No wonder crime is so high in Washington.")

UPDATE 2. Rod Dreher always makes everything worse.

Funny, when a 17-year-old got shot dead for trying to steal a Jeep, Dreher was less forgiving ("I have no sympathy for criminals like that. It would have been better had the Chicago fire lieutenant not shot and killed that thief. But I don’t really care that he did"). No points for guessing the race of the 17-year-old in that case.

I'm sure he'd approve of having those boys on the Supreme Court -- if they enjoyed bullying him, imagine how they'd treat those mouthy women who think they have the right to an abortion.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART FOUR.

(Here's the fourth and last installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Read 'em and weep!)

2. Germ warfare. It seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when a fatal case of Ebola in Dallas was portrayed as the harbinger of nationwide plague and doom. Yet it was only October when Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed, and besides him in the U.S. the virus has claimed… one life. This shouldn’t seem surprising, because this country has the illustrious Centers for Disease Control and thousands of dedicated scientists and epidemiologists with whom to fight Ebola. It also has wingnuts, alas, who did their best impersonation of a hayseed trying to keep a doctor from practicing his witchcraft on a young’un.

Listen here, they said, CDC’s just Big Gummint, and so-called “scientists” and epi-whatchamacallits are just a bunch of pointy-heads trying to get more o’ that Big Gummint money for their global-warming hoax, and fer t’ help out the coloreds in Africa! Besides, Obama’s in charge, so natchurly everything’s gotta be a disaster!

When CDC declined to seal America’s borders, citing the best science, conservatives declared this was part of Obama’s one-world agenda to unite the globe in disease and misery. (Heather Mac Donald of City Journal actually claimed the “public-health establishment” wouldn’t quarantine other countries because it was “awash in social-justice ideology” and “influenced as much by belief in America’s responsibility for the postcolonial oppression of Africa, and suspicion of American border enforcement, as it is by a commitment to public-health principles of containment and control.”) They ramped up their own custom science: Rand Paul told us you could get Ebola from being in the same room as an Ebola person. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, whose degree is not in medicine, wondered aloud “if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.”

At the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti actually wrote a column called “The Case for Panic… Incompetent government + corrupt elite = disaster.” Everyone knows you can’t trust Big Gummint, said Continetti, so if they say don’t panic, you should panic! It’s just logic! Plus the only reason Obama wasn’t quarantining everybody was that “doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate.”

Reliable everything-worsener Jonah Goldberg found a frame of reference for Ebola... in a disaster movie that showed millions of Americans dying. “We now have our own version of Contagion playing out in real time,” burbled Goldberg. Scientists couldn’t save us — “they keep telling us they know what can’t happen right up until the moment it happens,” shivered Goldberg. Time for pitchforks and witch-trials!

And of course there was the usual bullshit from Jim Hoft.

As fear started to subside, some of the brethren began whistling and trying to look innocent (“The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses” — Tim Cavanaugh, National Review). News cycles being what they are, people have probably already forgotten that a bunch of conservatives actually tried to promote a national panic during a medical crisis. But maybe by now they've done enough pants-wetting over Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and other alleged world-destroyers that their fellow citizens will at least begin to form an appropriate character judgment.

1. Cons, cops, and the end of the “libertarian moment." After eight years of big-government projects such as unfunded foreign wars and Medicare Part D under George W. Bush, conservatives took advantage of the Obama era to play at being anti-government again. The Tea Party, with its molon-labe watering-the-tree-of-liberty lingo, was the most visible example (hey, whatever happened to them?); some public officials even played with nullification of federal laws. The more intellectual of the brethren were pleased to call this flavor of conservatism “libertarian” for, though it does not promise freedom for all (women who want to get an abortion are excluded, for example), it does promote hostility to government, which has served the conservative movement well since the days of Reagan.

This theme reached a sort of climax in April at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where an old white rancher refused to pay his legally-owed user fees and, surrounded by armed supporters, defied federal authorities’ right to collect his property in restitution. Bundy was celebrated not just by survivalist nuts, but also by elected officials such as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, and by mainstream pundits such as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, in an essay called “The Case for a Little Sedition,” “Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition…” Lest his neckless readers accuse him of siding with a half-naked fakir, Williamson also compared Bundy to the Founding Fathers, not to mention the architects of the previous year’s government shutdown, in which “every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.” Moving barricades, pointing rifles at federal agents — same diff!

Power Line’s John Hinderaker cheered as “PHOTO OF THE YEAR” a picture of "Bundy supporters, on horseback and, I assume, armed,” telling “federal agents that they were surrounded and had better give back the cattle they had confiscated”; later, Hinderaker explained “WHY YOU SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TOWARD CLIVEN BUNDY” (basically because “you” share his typical rightwing resentments — “[The Bundys] don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps” — and disapprove any law, or enforcement thereof, that discomfits rich wingnuts).

Most of these rebellion joy-poppers sidled away from Bundy when he made some peculiar racial remarks — which is ironic, as conservatives next got to display their libertarian cred when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed in confrontations with police, and black people and their allies started complaining about the suspicious circumstances, the lack of arrests, and the regularity with which this sort of thing seemed to happen.

At first some of the brethren agreed that this, too, required a Bundy-style show of solidarity; National Review even ran a story called “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.” At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney said that, though there had been "guffaws" from "many liberals and a few conservatives" when the New York Times Magazine earlier that month suggested a new "libertarian moment" was upon us, the Ferguson case had brought needed attention to the growing militarization of police in the United States, and he expected a consensus across ideological lines against this "insane armament." He added:

There's another problem in Ferguson that calls up some wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives: When you consider the police shooting of Michael Brown, the riots that followed, the crackdown in response, and the heightened protests after that, the whole situation between the town and the police was one of Us vs. Them.

But the part these guys never got is that the protest over the killings had something to do with the troubled relationship between black Americans and the cops. Indeed, they probably can't get this, because for conservatives racism only exists in its reverse variety, engaged in by "race pimps."

Some of the brethren, reluctant to lose their libertarian props, looked for ways around this issue: many blamed the cigarette tax law Garner was allegedly evading (Big Gummint strikes again!) rather than racism or police overreaction.

The waves of protesters who rose in the wake of these deaths did not see it that way; when some nut killed two NYPD officers, even such expedients as this were abandoned. Most conservatives raged that the protesters, a small segment of whom had called for killing cops, were all “anti-police” and thus to blame for the murders — as was Mayor de Blasio, because he told his black son to be careful around police — and that America must now coalesce behind its Blue Knights and cease to complain about their tactics.

In this they agreed with the NYPD union leadership, with whose apparent encouragement City cops have affected a reverse ticket blitz, reducing their quality-of-life enforcement. National Review's Ian Tuttle applauded -- "when your mayor takes advice from Al Sharpton... it is hard to blame officers who might try to minimize the protecting and serving they have to do." Yes, a writer for a prominent conservative publication was cheering a municipal union work slowdown -- which should give you some idea of how important this was to the brethren. The meaning of "Us vs. Them" was becoming clear.

After a few feints at a personal-responsibility argument that the guy to blame for the murder was actually the murderer, not the protesters, Williamson, that friend of Bundy's "little sedition," got with the program — “The mobs in New York, Ferguson, and elsewhere are not calling for metaphorical murders of policemen, but literal ones,” he wrote, and proposed as a solution… more aggressive policing: “the reality is that what causes American murders is our national failure to adequately monitor, restrict, or rehabilitate violent offenders with sub-homicidal criminal careers…”

This particular libertarian moment, I think we can safely say, is over. especially with a Presidential election coming up.  But never fear: it wasn't the first such moment promoted, and won't be the last. Conservatives like to portray themselves as freedom-lovers when nothing’s on the line, but they know by instinct that their best shot when it's time to woo voters is straight, law-and-order authoritarianism. In fact, if the past fourteen years are any indication, it’s pretty much all they have to offer.

A SILVER LINING.

I know we're all a little leery of horrible conservative people from the Before Times getting graded on the curve by liberal simps just because they're not Trump -- and I certainly felt that way about George W. Bush and his statement on the protests, which sounds like it was written by his former lackey and con artist Michael Gerson in full treacle mode.

But like the other ex-presidents beating up on Trump, its relatively non-unhinged message was nice not only as a change of pace but because of how it hit Trump loyalists. The best example is from Byron York, late of National Review and now laboring at the malignant Washington Examiner.

York starts with some shit about how, well, whatever the coroner and your lyin' eyes told you, the medical examiner's autopsy "revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation," and York is surprised that Bush, like everyone else who isn't a cop, "appeared to reject the findings," and he must have some nefarious reason for doing so: "Perhaps Bush's writers liked the notion of saying that Floyd was suffocated and injustice and fear are suffocating the country. But the turn of phrase required rejecting the official finding of death."

Just so everybody knows where York's head is at. Then:

More remarkable was the fact that Bush said almost nothing -- literally, almost nothing -- about the riots, violence, and civil disorder following Floyd's death. At one point in the 507-word statement, Bush said, "Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress." Perhaps Bush's writer liked the looting-liberation alliteration. But to devote just nine words out of 507 to the nationwide convulsions after Floyd's death -- the very situation that prompted Bush to speak out in the first place -- seemed more than a little strange.  

What about the people who have died in the rioting? The businesses that have been damaged and destroyed? The fears of people whose homes and businesses were threatened by violent mobs? To say Bush gave them short shrift would be generous.

York's apparently mad because he and the rest of the guys on the payroll are pushing the "Protestors = looters and rioters" thing that's been working for them for decades, but polls show ordinary people are saying fuck that noise, and here's this RINO whose illegal war York and all the rest of them supported coming out against Trump's strongman bit -- just when authoritarianism needed a unified front and the Lawnorder Tinker Bell needed everyone to clap for her!

I'm happy to see citizens standing for equal justice under the law -- despite the fact that conservatives have conspired to make it a radical concept -- and pray for their success. But I confess I'm almost as happy to see this blowdried shit and others like him squirm over it.

UPDATE. Of course, Rod Dreher has to up the ante(bellum) -- here he reacts to former Trump SecDef James Mattis' denunciation of Trump:

Personally, I think it’s undeniably true that Trump does not try to unite the American people, but I find it insupportable to believe that the riots tearing apart America today are the culmination of Trumpism. What’s more, why did Mattis have nothing to say about the rioting? Not even a line? A military veteran friend says Mattis’s statement sounds more like score-settling than anything else.

Dreher's column is called "Trump The Girardian Scapegoat." Don't ask -- it's basically an intellectual way of saying "I'm no Trump fan but," The Oh you like Black Lives Matter well then you must like looting! shtick is all these guys have, now that saying who cares what happens to the darkskins is no longer cool -- thanks to the damn SJWs! I wouldn't be shocked if Dreher got in Black Bloc drag and started smashing Starbucks for the cause.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT.

Rightwing pennysaver the Washington Examiner will no longer be handed out at Metro stations to all comers every day, but instead become a wingnut weekly in which the street-level reporting and 87 employees are replaced by double portions of "commentary" on why Obama is Hitler.

The product will offer news, analysis and commentary on national politics and policy, and its targeted readership will be roughly 45,000 professionals in government, public affairs, advocacy and academia, Clarity said.

Yeah, the same 45,000 people who ask each other every week if they've read the new Cal Thomas column.

This seems to be the new reality for the conservative world of makework in the Age of Obama II; like the factota at The Umlaut and other feeder streams for thinktank babies, they have begun to abandon the idea that their work might make a difference.

It used to be easier to believe that it did. For decades now, the allegedly liberal media has actually been thick with right-wing voices, from the lofty George Will to the humblest rightblogger. Every newspaper, even the communist flagship New York Times, has its Douthats and/or Brookses, albeit in lower-rent versions. The papers are scared not to have them; otherwise who would they point to when someone screams bias? (Not that it stops the screaming -- conservatives will be screaming about bias until the last newspaper lines the last birdcage, and for years after -- but having them aboard allows the papers' management to feel they've done something reasonable, though I wonder if a few of them don't actually feel bullied.)

It never mattered how brutal or crazy these guys' ideas were, either; they were the serious opposition, and had to be granted perches from which they might be heeded. This enabled and emboldened them. They also seemed to understand that what had gained them their perches was no better credential than that they were different from the "politically correct" milquetoasts the public was used to. So they leaned on that. If liberals maintained, for example, that the least among us deserved protection from want, conservatives cried for them to be given less, ever less, lest the welfare queens and strapping young bucks destroy America. Not only did they get away with it -- they had an effect on the discourse and then on policy.

Things got even worse during the early days of the Iraq War -- happy anniversary, baby! -- when conservatives became so comfortable with their own increasingly loud and bellicose voices that they got a lot of non-conservatives to howl along with them. And this too had an effect on policy.

But since the economy collapsed, things have changed a bit. There's not much market for market worship these days. And when you run a presidential campaign based on how the producers know better than the moochers -- well, you saw how that worked out.

Conservatives aren't going away -- their long spate of affirmative action has firmly ensconced them in the public discourse. But the Examiner, at least, seems to have lost faith.  For a while they could at least tell themselves that by running a by-God newspaper with lots of that local stuff local folk love, they were getting into the hands and winning the hearts and minds of the common people. But now they're going to stop covering school board meetings and city council hearings, and just regurgitate propaganda for like-minded souls. This will achieve nothing in the way of political outreach, but it will achieve what I expect remains important to them: It will keep their jobs. Because someone is still paying them to do it -- just like someone is still paying for The Umlaut and Liberty Island and Bill Whittle videos and Acculturated  and PJ Lifestyle and many such otherwise pointless exercises.

If the Examinoids really believed what they affect to believe, they'd recognize themselves as the moochers they are, apologize to old man Anschutz for wasting his money, and seek honest employment. But they're what we might call cafeteria capitalists; they don't want the hard stuff; they won't sacrifice anything real on the altar of the Dollar. But they'll step right up when the celebrant hands around the bread.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

I just love it, okay?

•   Hey, it's almost time for the big game -- by which I mean the Oscars, a week from Sunday. Over at the newsletter (it's called Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, if you want to know what to ask for at the newsletter store) I've started my Best Picture nominee reviews. Last year I correctly predicted Green Book to win, so I'm feeling pretty damned cocky (though I only got 61% right overall). For those of you non-subscribers who want to get in on the tinsel and glamour, I've unlocked my reviews of Marriage Story, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Parasite, Joker, and Jojo Rabbit; -- the other three are coming soon. Oh, and as long as I'm here: Chiefs by 3!

•    I assume most of you are acquainted with the Rod Dreher "Letters to Repenthouse" shtick, whereby conservative operatives (compensated or not) pass him their "I never dreamed this would happen to me" missives and he posts them as Vox Populi. Here's his latest, in a post called "Actually, There Is A Christian Case For Trump"; Dreher explains that he's still only thinking about voting for Trump (LOL) but if he does it'll be for better reasons than those trashy not-artisanal Evangelicals have, and to back it up he dips into the ol' reader mailbag and finds a fellow who rails against "local, woke Democrats in positions like D.A., city council, etc. in cities." The rubes have a hate-on for cities these days, so you can see why Dreher picked it, notwithstanding its lack of relevance to Trump:

The ideology they are pursuing, of completely ignoring any quality of life related criminal behavior and deconstructing muncipal competence brick by brick, is horrifying. Decriminalization of theft, of open drug crime, vehicle break ins, public urination, etc. is turning our cities, and increasingly exurban towns, into absolute hell holes.

So far it's standard "Them there big cities what gawts fee-cees an' needles in 'em" boob bait, but how did our alleged correspondent come to know the horrors of city life?

These doofuses are bringing the medieval plague back to Los Angeles, where I recently visited my fiancee’s family. The stuff I saw there was shocking, and really sobering. It made me remember why I identify as a centre-right person to begin with, and why despite being a bit more on the Tucker Carlson side of view on markets, I will have no time for woke municipal governance.

I'm guessing the guy is a "centre-right" citizen of the Commonwealth. But couldn't Dreher have at least proofread his copy for Britishisms? They rather spoil the effect. The best part of the post is not from mailbag guy, but from Dreher himself on his big dilemma about voting for Trump:

If Bernie Sanders were a pro-life social conservative, I would strongly consider voting for him, even though I don’t like his economics.

If you don't like his economics, then why the hell would you be interested in voting for him? Maybe Dreher believes that bullshit about Sanders loving George Wallace.

•   One other thing: The Republicans laying down for Trump on impeachment is no shock. (Democrats will make it hurt for them in November, if they're smart, which, yeah, I know.) This is all Republicans are good at anymore. Here's a great example from the Washington Examiner, reporting that a "surge in meth could bring drug overdose death rates back up." This couldn't be good news for the god-emperor, especially coming after the Examiner recently said a 2018 drop in U.S. drug overdoses "offers President Trump a boost during his reelection campaign as Democrats criticize his administration for not going further in fighting the crisis." So here's how they spin it:

A top Trump administration health official is worried that meth-related deaths will counterbalance the progress the United States has made in reducing drug-overdose deaths

See, it's not that Trump isn't doing great against drug overdoses -- it's that his success has been counterbalanced by... failure. (Well, who could have guessed meth was a problem?) I'm going to try this at work: I didn't fuck up, my good work was counterbalanced! If only I had an entire political party willing to cover for me.

FROM THE "HOW COME THEY CAN SAY THE N-WORD AND WE CAN'T" FILES.

I've unlocked an issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today about the right's gamification of racism -- that is, the way they confront the overwhelming evidence of systemic racism in our society with whatabout stories of black crime. This is an ancient strategy, really, old enough that I recall it from my childhood when relatives would tell me how those people were animals, always robbing, raping, and stealing; I've talked about the internet-enabled version in my "ooga-booga" essays, which when published in the Voice always drew an avalanche of racist and sometimes threatening reader responses. 

But the show of black electoral power signified by the Biden and Georgia Democratic victories have terrified the brethren into more intense and higher-level reactions. As is obvious to pretty much everyone, the wave of voter disenfranchisement legislation Republicans are rushing shows how they've trying to reverse the effect; but increased conservative chatter about (and attempts to ban) "critical race theory" shows that they're also afraid the increased sensitivity of younger Americans to systemic racism will make this harder for them in the near future. 

Hence the gamesmanship, which increasingly resembles the racist taunts of my youth. For example, here's an article at the Washington Examiner by Eddie Scarry called "Joe Biden is about to lock up a lot of black people." Tee hee, what a fun headline! What's it about? Before citing several cases of black people beating up Asian-Americans, Scarry sets up his gag: 

The New York Times reported that part of Biden's initiative will be "prioritizing prosecution of those who commit hate crimes" against people of Asian descent.

I guess that's a good thing, but what happens when prioritizing the prosecution of anti-Asian hate crimes disproportionately affects the black community?

You can see he's enjoying himself.

It will. Anyone tracking the sporadic incidents of violence against people of Asian descent lately will have noticed a pattern. The attackers are almost exclusively black men...

True, there was the recent violent rampage in Atlanta wherein a young white man killed Asians and a couple of white people at some Asian-run spas, which he said he did because of some weird sex addiction. Lightning strikes every now and then.

But as we've seen, this isn't a matter of white supremacy. It's very much not that.

This is right off the playground -- you libtards care so much about racism, well what about black-on-Asian crime? Undoubtedly in rightwing publications like the Examiner it gives mirth and comfort to conservatives; I wonder what anyone else thinks. 

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter keta for unearthing this story on Scarry's other service to wingnut comedy -- creepshots of butts.  

SHORTER TIMOTHY P. CARNEY. There is a "small but growing trend toward free-market populism in Republican rhetoric, if not action" -- or, in plain English, a new line of bullshit. But it's important that I pimp this bullshit, because it will help elect Republicans, who will loot the treasury via favors to contributors, as per usual, while "we free-market populists take whatever drippings we can get," e.g. gigs with the Washington Examiner.

BEST IN SHOW.

There are different kinds of conservative reactions to the hilarious phenomenon of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. There are lofty denunciations from rilly smart conservative True Scotsmen like this one from Charles C.W. Cooke: "Trump’s devotees consider themselves to be the rebels at the gates," he sniffs, but "by their dull, unreflective, often ovine behavior, they resemble binary and nuancless drones, as might be found in a novel by Aldous Huxley or Yevgeny Zamyatin" yeah yeah whatever Limey Brainiac hey didja see Trump smack down that fat bitch Rosie O'Donnell?

Others just compare Trump to other things they don't like, or blame him, as conservatives do everything else, on Obama; for example, here's some guy at the Washington Examiner who understandably did not demand attribution, bidding us "imagine America with an older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version of Obama as its president, and you get some idea of what Trump is all about," though he doesn't explain how Trump differs from an "older, less knowledgeable, rude and charmless version" of, say, Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

And there are outright Trump defenders, generally small fry or once-major wingnuts who no longer have anything left to lose, like Ben Shapiro.

But in a category all by herself is D.C. McAllister from The Federalist. Like Shapiro, she's upset that conservatives are dissing The Donald, but for her it's intensely personal, and by way of explanation she chronicles her own feelings from 2009 to the present. First:

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I felt helpless as I sat in front of the television in the fall of 2008, watching Barack Obama become the 45th president of the United States.

If only we had elections back then! Happily for McAllister, then came the Tea Party, which she characterizes as a response to the "huge government bailout of the housing market," a popular but woefully incomplete rightwing theory that doesn't explain what the Tea Partiers themselves actually yelled at their rallies. Bliss it was to be alive then, but alas, the tricorn rubes were teabagged by Anderson Cooper and stabbed in the back by the Republican Establishment. This taught McAllister that Mitch McConnell was no different from Barack Obama -- they both believed in "Money. Power. Cocktail parties. Media incest." So McAllister did what any patriot would do -- she became a blogger. "I made friends," she tells us, "and I made enemies because I didn’t care about playing politics.... I didn’t have a fancy degree. I didn’t have a fancy fellowship," unlike all us other web writers who went to Breadloaf with Saul Alinsky and swim in Moscow gold.

One of the things she discovered during this journey of personal discovery was that the Republican base was "motivated by fear," an assessment she stands by today:

Some might not want to admit this fact. It sounds weak, maybe even naive. But fear in the proper context is anything but naive. It’s wisdom based on experience and knowledge...

And this, brothers and sister, is where things get weird:

Let me explain a little something about human nature. When someone feels oppressed and controlled and you continue to belittle them and push them against the wall, they get angry. They’re not going to be particularly rational at that point. They’re in a corner and they lash out—that’s human nature. They fight. They get angry. They grab hold of whatever weapon they can find to defend themselves. That’s what you mostly see with Donald Trump. It’s anger, fueled by fear and stoked by insiders who continue to demean the base, who refuse to listen, and who want to maintain the status quo... 

This reminds me of a toxic relationship between a man and a woman in which the man continues to control the woman, keeping her from speaking her mind, calling her stupid whenever she does. She tries to find ways to win her independence, to be heard, to be free, but he keeps pushing her back against the wall, telling her that she’s the problem. Over time, the anger swells within her. She’s afraid. She isn’t free, and she hates it. She’s powerless. Anytime she tries to stand up for herself, she is mocked and slapped down. Her fear resides. Her anger grows. Her hope recedes. One day, she just loses it. She lights a match and burns the whole house to the ground. Give me liberty or give me death takes on a whole new meaning in the context of oppression and abuse.

RINO-abused with John McCain, then with Mitt Romney -- what choice does a true conservative have but to BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! It's a good thing McAllister can afford mental health coverage.

AIN'T MY CRIME.

As you may have noticed, it seems every wingnut who's blaming the attempted assassination of Steven Scalise on ordinary liberal discourse has expressed a very different view of hard political language in the past -- e.g., "Pastor who demonized Obama as the antichrist calls for end to political demonization of Republicans." It's not just the snake handlers and Newt Gingrich either. Take William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting in 2011, he was talking about the "blood libel" that Sarah Palin's violent rhetoric and rifle-sight graphics had something to do with it, and telling David Frum, who suggested Palin reach out to Giffords, that showing too much sympathy would be a waste of time, indeed counterproductive:

Frum wants Palin to play on a the field drawn by vicious liars who never will be satisfied with any response from Palin. Any of the responses Frum suggests, such as going to Giffords’ office to lay flowers, would have ignited even more dishonest fury from the left-blogosphere and mainstream media.

Flash forward to Jacobson today:

While criminal culpability rests with the shooter, there also is no doubt that we are experiencing an unprecedented derangement from establishment Democrats, pro-Democrat media (which is almost all of the mainstream media), the entertainment industry and on campuses. 

We have been documenting the often violent opposition to Trump for over a year, but particularly since the election. The entire concept of “The Resistance” invokes violence...

We're hearing a lot of calls for civility from people who will do anything -- write bills to strip millions of citizens of health coverage under cover of darkness, portray a Shakespeare play as an assassination threat to rile the rabble, and press guns into the hands of every man, woman and child in America at the behest of their donors -- to get and hold power; that is, after all, why they not only tolerate but enable the grifts and grafts of Trump. I understand why six-figure TV news wankmasters have to indulge this hypocrisy, but I'm not having it. I'll go on pushing for a better, fairer deal for all Americans, and anyone who wants to call it incitement can kiss my ass.

UPDATE. Top comment from Shakezula: "'The entire concept of “The Resistance” invokes violence...' But the concept of Tea Party Patriots invokes harmless colonial cosplayers sitting down for a nice cuppa and some wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches."

Also, at the Washington Examiner:

Support for Southern Poverty Law Center links Scalise, Family Research Council shooters
...The Southern Poverty Law Center still lists FRC as an "anti-gay" hate group on the "hate map" Corkins used. "The SPLC's reckless labeling has led to devastating consequences," said FRC President Tony Perkins. 

The Family Research Council is, in point of fact, an anti-gay hate group. The SPLC is right to call them out on it; the truth is not an incitement to violence but a defense against it.  It makes sad and perfect sense that as wingnuts weaponize the the Simpson Field shooting, one of their first targets should be a group that labors to prevent hate crimes.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/10/23.

RIP Burt Bacharach. I love this one, which for all its
tricky syncopations is fresh and free and swinging.

The State of the Union is seldom intrinsically interesting; I do recall the first of Bill Clinton’s ass-breaking-long SOTUs showing his tendency to bury the opposition under an avalanche of proposals, but I have no memory of which if any of those proposals ever saw life. 

The same is true of the Biden 2023 edition, but it had a couple of amusing outcomes: First, it got the Republicans to scream (literally, in the case of the less well-bred Republicans in attendance) that Biden was lying when he said they wanted to fuck up Social Security and Medicare.  This was the easiest out in the world for Biden because every American, liberal and conservative alike, knows Republicans want to rip open both programs and spill their contents into the pockets of their major donors, and post-SOTU polls suggest they haven’t changed their minds.

Nonetheless conservatives sputtered like the parents in a 90s video that it was a dastardly ruse – “BS,” huffed Byron York at the Washington Examiner – notwithstanding the voluminous documentary evidence of Senators like Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson admitting as much, which the White House cleverly provided in an official “fact sheet.” Mitch McConnell effectively telling Scott to shut the fuck up was a sweet bit of lagniappe. 

But the weirder development, for me, is Peggy Noonan calling Biden’s speech “Trumpian” – which I wrote about in an essay at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m releasing to non-subscribers today. As it turns out, the Crazy Jesus Lady isn’t the only one trying that one. “Biden’s State of the Union address last night was conspicuously heavy on what could only be described as Trumpian economic themes,” said National Review’s Nate Hochman; Ross Douthat at the Times claims the speech’s “key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted — albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults — from Trump’s populist campaign.”

These guys are all bought into the idea that Trump is a “populist” despite his never having achieved the support of a majority of voters. To them the term seems to mean “acting like a vicious dumbass and pretending to give a shit about the proles.” Trump was always great at the first part, but I doubt anyone outside the deranged yokels one used to see at his rallies ever believed the second part, and if they did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with its massive giveaways to the rich, convinced them otherwise. 

Conservatives seem to think that the damage they’ve done to American institutions over the past several years is all to their own benefit – that by ruining faith in education, for example, they’ve brought to life the Florida Golem with his Don’t Say Gay (or Black) Laws that they expect to sweep the nation. They don’t seem to realize that while chaos may inspire the feral types of the Republican base to tear down what’s left of the rubble, most of us -- old folks who remember and young folks who dream – want government to, at the very least, do what it used to and insulate us from the caprices of the rich and the insane. The main difference between Biden and Trump is the former can call up that vision and be believed. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the imprisoned, immiserated immigrant kids and the Cult of Civility outcry that has ridiculously ensued. If you tried to explain to a normal person how a racist administration's notorious abuse of children and shameless defense thereof led our Guardians of Groupthink to admonish, not the guilty parties, but the liberals who mildly expressed their frustration to the guilty parties, he might not understand you, so I have tried to explain it for the masses.

I didn't have time to stick in other examples of woe-is-me snowflakery, like complaints over Seth Rogen rebuffing Paul Ryan ("The stoner comedy stalwart has built a career on playing the over-his-head everyman," foams Conservative Tribune, "...yet is shockingly clueless about everyday America in real life. During a recent appearance on Stephen Colbert’s increasingly leftist late-night program..."). Like Ryan didn't just assume Rogen was merely protecting his brand! They're both big boys.

As usual, Rod Dreher is ridiculous on the subject. He's mad that Maxine Waters encouraged people to give "anybody from that cabinet" a hard time. Trump's cabinet is basically a supervillain cabal whose members' only superpower is immunity from prosecution, so I can't fault Maxine; if we can't prosecute the bastards, let us at least tell them to go fuck themselves. But Dreher thinks this liberal Helter Skelter. He soothes himself by having a talk with some nice lady he came across in Boston:

“I’m only sorry that I wasn’t here long enough to have any Massachusetts oysters,” I said. “They’re the best in America.”

“You’re right about that!” she said. “My husband is in the restaurant business, and we both love oysters.”

I bid her farewell, and told her I look forward to coming back to Boston when I have time to eat. She smiled at me, wished me a safe flight, and went off down the street with her dog.

Boston being Boston, she’s probably quite liberal. She might have accurately figured me for a conservative, given that I’m from Louisiana. It didn’t matter. We had a lovely conversation about our shared love of dogs and oysters.

That is America.

Awwww. I wonder how the conversation would have gone if Dreher were the DHS Secretary, his agents had snatched the lady's kids and put them on a plane to God knows where, and Dreher was on record saying that's just what happens to people like her. Maybe it still would have been sunshine and lollipops!

UPDATE. I should note that Dreher quotes in support of his point a CNN received-opinion group grope as described by Mediaite:

RealClearPolitics editor A.B. Stoddard kicked off the CNN panel by pointing out that Waters is set to take over a highly important position in the House as chair of the Financial Services Committee — and "she’s doing everything she can to prevent her own promotion."

Gasp! It's almost as if Waters doesn't share the priorities of a bunch of careerist shits!

“This is beyond overreach,” Stoddard said. “It is so outrageous that she is trying to motivate voters on her side to be as divisive as President Trump...."

Only Trump can be divisive -- your job is to be a spineless wimp and go "gee, fellas, I don't know about these concentration camps," as Republicans stampede you en route to sacking and looting the country. It's in the script!

UPDATE 2. Now the shtick for conservatives is that they're ascared Maxine Waters and her liberal friends will kill them, so their factota circulate bullshit stories supporting this delusion. Hack of hacks Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

Trump aides urged to get a gun 

Facing a new wave of potentially dangerous threats, called for by a top Democratic lawmaker, legal and gun experts are calling on top Trump aides to get their concealed carry permit and back it up with a pistol, 

"There are simply not enough police in D.C. or Virginia or Maryland to protect all Trump officials at their homes and when they go out to restaurants. Getting a concealed handgun permit would be helpful to protect themselves and their family,” said John R. Lott Jr., president of the influential Crime Prevention Research Center.

John R. Lott -- possibly the most notorious lyin'-ass bitch among the gun nuts' pet scholars! Still, I endorse Trump officials following his advice and getting guns because, seeing what fuckups they are, they'll probably just shoot themselves with them. It's win-win!

HORSESHIT THEORY.

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review last May:

Horseshoe theory holds that at a certain point, the political left and the political right bend around and begin to get closer together again. You can see it on economic issues when Senator Josh Hawley is talking with Matt Stoller. I noticed it often among my fellow “restrainer” foreign-policy friends.

And here's Stoller himself on December 5, after Hawley "joined" (for some sense of the term) Bernie Sanders in requesting $1,200 checks for stimulus relief in the senate:

"Bipartisan cooperation a welcome sign on Capitol Hill" marveled the Boston Herald. "If our lawmakers can do it on stimulus payments," the Herald went on, "maybe there are other areas where the left and right can find populist common ground: criminal justice reform or paid family leave perhaps." 

"Josh Hawley, populism's philosopher-in-chief," swooned Charles Fain Lehman in a long, lubricious ode at the Washington Examiner that had Hawley denouncing the Pelagian heresy "that you can 'emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self'" and extolling "the original Populist Party" of the early 20th Century:

"It was a moment of significant social, economic, international upheaval, which we’re experiencing now as well,” Hawley said. “The late 19th, early 20th century was also a moment when the existing political coalitions were in a state of collapse and reforming, which is clearly what we’re in the midst of right now."

Populist and anti-Pelagian -- a 2024 dream candidate! Hawley also joined the more recent Sanders push for $2,000 checks -- even less likely to go through than $1,200  (and it hasn't), but a great way to keep the rubes paying attention. 

Well, today the horseshoe is on the other foot:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced Wednesday that he would object next week when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college vote, a move that all but ensures at least a short delay in cementing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Turns out the dreamboat is just another crackpot grifter like Louie Gohmert and Tommy Tuberville. Being a boring old-fashioned type of liberal I could smell Hawley walking in. Here's your humble narrator in June 2019 on Hawley's lionization at The Federalist as one of two "Brand-New Senators" who "Cast Light on the GOP's Post-Trump Future" (the other one was, lol, Rick Scott): "Josh Hawley's the young, hip kind of theocrat creep who's bound to appeal to hypothetical young people who think like Roy Moore."

About the only good thing about Hawley is that his horseshoe-y idea to make Federal workers decamp to rural districts so's to make everything more equal-like -- 'cause he don't like no "cosmopolitan elites" nohow! -- inspired me to my Gulchville, KY Winter White House series*.

But gratitude only extends so far. When we talk about Trump being succeeded in the hearts of conservatives by cleverer fascists, this is what we're talking about.

* BTW that edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down isn't the only freebie presently available to non-subscribers -- today's Twitter feud among leading conservative lights is also yours for the clicking. Consider subscribing before your company's Substack benefits for the year run out! 

UPDATE. Some people never learn.

After January 20 Tom Cotton will start referring to Biden as "the so-called president" and McArdle will wonder if he's a body double. 

LET'S NOT BICKER AND ARGUE ABOUT WHO KILLED WHO, PART INFINITY.

I've unlocked a newsletter issue on the latest propaganda gambit from the brethren: That it was actually the Democrats (and experts quoted in health stories) who were downplaying the virus at a critical time, probably in an attempt to kill innocent honkies -- look at all clips of de Blasio and Pelosi telling them to go to Chinatown! Chinatown, Mandrake!

This is meant to exonerate Trump, not by an actual comparison with his actual actions (which from the dismissal of the U.S. pandemic team onwards is pretty clearly disastrously inept), but by making it look as if no one was calling for quick, decisive action -- even though Trump was on TV for weeks insulting and bitching about the people who were calling for quick, decisive action.

They've been dishing out the talking points on Reddit, leading to various idiots on Twitter trying to disseminate them. (Many use the "I'm not defending Trump" shtick; you go to their feeds, and they either have four tweets or it's full of rightwing retweets.)

It's always interesting to see them launch a new product, particularly when it's an obvious Edsel. It will be even more interesting to see who falls for it.

UPDATE: Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner: "No institution has failed the public worse than the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic." Unsurprisingly, a huge part of his story is actually about China, with Adams condemning the press for writing about "whether it is racist to use terms such as 'Wuhan virus' and 'Kung flu'" -- as if noticing that Asian-American people are getting physically attacked by racists over the virus somehow impedes the fight against the virus. (It's becoming conservative orthodoxy that racism is actually an important weapon against COVID-19.)

But the smaller part of Adams' story accusing the press of telling people "the virus was not as dangerous or serious as it sounded" (evidence: A Vox tweet in January!) is even dumber. For decades, wingnuts have been telling people not to believe the Lamestream Media, and to listen only to authorities like Fox News and Republican office-holders -- who have been spectacularly stepping on their dicks over this (here's the latest example from Brian Kemp in Georgia). That these hucksters would now turn around and ask the same media why they didn't override conservative propaganda to warn the populace is really in parent-murderer-cries-for-mercy-because-he's-an-orphan territory.

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

My favorite AC/DC tune is "Back in Business," but there's no good video of it.

This'll do, though. What's your favorite? It's all streaming now!

•     Republican pundits (or should we say RINO elitists?) are panicking over Donald Trump's strong showing in GOP polls. Jim Geraghty attempts, unqualified as he is, to talk sense to his fellow wingnuts in a post called "Do Trump and His Fans Even Want to Persuade Others?" (something I ask about conservatives generally all the time):

I realize that if you’re a Trump fan right now, energized by his in-your-face combativeness with the media and anyone who disagrees with him... 

But let’s take Stephen Covey’s advice to “begin with the end in mind” — presumably that is conservative governance — and recognize that to achieve that, we need a Republican president. And as much as Trump may be rising in the polls of the GOP primary... let’s take a look at his numbers head-to-head against Hillary Clinton: 

CNN: Clinton 59 percent, Trump 35.

Fox News: Clinton 51 percent, Trump 34. 

Quinnipiac: Clinton 50 percent, Trump 32.

Some of you will see the problem right off. Wait for it...

(One caveat: That CNN poll had Hillary ahead of Rubio by 16, Walker by 17, and Bush by 13, so perhaps we can argue that it was a Democrat-heavy sample...

A Democrat-heavy sample! Or "perhaps we can argue" that Clinton is a revered name in American politics and the Republicans are running approximately 239 feebs, flakes, and nincompoops led by a racist blowhard clown. Wait, though, Geraghty's not finished:

...Most polls have these candidates trailing by single digits or tied with Hillary.)

Geraghty provides zero links to support this assertion, so I looked up keywords in Google News and got some results such as this from the Washington Examiner:

Ted Cruz is winning at Twitter, tied with Hillary Clinton on Facebook

If only elections were totes social media LOL!  Also, that was from December of last year.  Much more recent (June 26) was this:

Poll: Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Statistically Tied With Hillary Clinton In New Hampshire

Well, now it makes sense!

•     Jesus-con Alan Jacobs has a long more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger thing at The American Conservative about how all us gay marriageists and non-fans of the Confederacy are not merely expressing opinions he does not share, but actively trying to shut down debate with our Twitter feeds and our mean looks -- which schtick, I'm sure you've noticed, is a popular favorite among the brethren these days. "Survey and critique others, lest you make yourself subject to surveillance and critique," Jacobs characterizes his opponents. "And use the proper Hashtags of Solidarity, or you might end up like that guy who was the first to stop applauding Stalin’s speech." He himself, of course, is just trying to keep free discourse alive -- his post's called "The Value of Disagreement," see?  The first tell that this is bullshit is an opening quote from a particularly passive-aggressive post by P-A Queen Mollie Hemingway. But it's even more instructive to get in the Wayback Machine and read Jacobs' 2003 article called "The War in Quotes: Journalists who don't like the war -- and like thinking even less -- have a little trick they use to tell us how they really feel." There, Jacobs calls rightblogger whipping-boy Robert Fisk "the Krusty the Clown of journalism," and notes that when referring to the invasion of Iraq Fisk put quotes around "liberators" and "liberation," which seems to me like basic hygeine for handling government propaganda, but which Jacobs calls "punctuational Tourette's Syndrome." Jacobs also complains that the New York Times and other peace creeps are doing the same thing:

...the Times apparently can't bear under any circumstances to use that term, in the context of the Iraq war at least, without scare quotes. Thus my description of this practice as a tic or as disease: After a while it kicks in automatically, and one wonders what habitual users could do to keep it from taking over their minds.

Twelve years later, Iraq is wreckage and everyone knows the idea that we "liberated" it was always a joke -- and Jacobs, then so diligent about what he considered journalists' inappropriate use of quote marks, is now telling us that liberals are the real language cops.

THE UNWORTHY POOR. Remember that "Look, these so-called 'poor' have refrigerators" thing? In preparation for the Age of Mitt Romney, they're ramping that shit up. From the Washington Examiner:

As President Obama crafts a reelection income equality message aimed at punishing the rich and rewarding the poor, his own government finds that the 46 million living below the so-called “poverty line” live and spend pretty much like everyone else.

Forget the image of Appalachia or rundown ghettos: A collection of federal household consumption surveys collected by pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 74 percent of the poor own a car or truck, 70 percent have a VCR, 64 percent have a DVD, 63 percent have cable or satellite, 53 percent have a video game system, 50 percent have a computer, 30 percent have two or more cars and 23 percent use TiVo.

The new model conservative is a Victorian gent who would pity the poor, but has seen them dicing and drinking instead of acting out pathetic scenes from melodramas, and so cuffs them whenever they ask for change. Or a job. (The cheek! To think he would employ such as them in his sky garage.)

Here's the most damning evidence of all:

83 percent of the poor said they have enough to eat.

You want their sympathy? Show them some distended ribs!

The intended target, of course, isn't the poor, since no one in American politics cares about them. It's all those formerly or soon-to-be-formerly middle-class people who are with reason worried about becoming poor in this shitty economy. First, they want to assure you it won't be so bad: When you bottom out, you'll still be able to surf for porn and Tivo Toddlers & Tiaras. Second, they want to remind you of the public treatment you'll get if you become poor and complain about it. The Village doesn't like pauper ingrates!

Cars and VCRs, can you imagine? Charles Murray can't assemble his gang of upscale Belmont busy-bodies fast enough. Someone's got to get these wastrels reading the Bible and embroidering samplers that read ONLY MYSELF TO BLAME.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the brethren's reaction to the Trumpening. The focus is on the Trump skeptics who are now beginning their great suck-up. Some of them are pretending to be wary, but you know the old song: Their lips say no but their eyes say yes.

Watch what they do with Trump's appointment of Breitbart /alt-right kingpin Steve Bannon as chief White House strategist. Even wingnut rageclowns like Kurt Schlichter are complaining; Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson are cabinet material, but the pied piper of Nazi frogs makes the thing look bad.

But don't worry, Bannon's being normalized already. See Philip Wegmann at the Washington Examiner, who describes the struggle between the "establishment" and this crypto-Nazi creep as if it were a Hollywood catfight: "But if there's a fight, they will throw their weight behind the brawler from Breitbart," "the two champions have now entered the cliché Thunderdome," etc. The headline, "Tea Party bets big on Steve Bannon," refers to the Tea Party Patriots, a pack of grifters who skinned supporters so badly that, frankly, I've surprised they still meet even the drastically forgiving standards of the modern conservative movement.

So the brethren will come around, especially after the first time Bannon's strike force destroys (perhaps literally) some liberal who gives Trump a hard time. Then there'll be someone else to deplore -- maybe George Lincoln Rockwell IV -- until he makes his bones, etc.

The elevation of Bannon reminds me of the famous criticism Steve Jobs had of Xerox under John Sculley from PepsiCo:

So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. 

Conservatism doesn't do anything real for the American people anymore, so they're promoting their marketing people.

There were many outtakes from the column. I really wanted to fit in Reason magazine's podcast, “The Case for Optimism About Trump's Presidency,” in which Nick Gillespie interviewed libertarians on various Trump policy predictions.  One, Thaddeus Russell, was thrilled Newt Gingrich would be part of the Administration.  I know what you guys are thinking -- why is a libertarian backing an interventionist lunatic? True, Russell said, Gingrich is “a sociopath, generally," but he has “thoroughly repudiated neoconservatism and foreign military interventions generally” and admitted “the Bush Doctrine was a disaster.” And if you can’t trust Newt Gingrich to see the light, who can you trust?

Russell, who giggled nervously throughout his interview (and, whether it was nerves or drugs, who could blame him), also said in some respects “Trump’s foreign policy will be equally bad as Obama’s or worse” and that Trump will “let Putin have what he wants in Eastern Europe" but, on the bright side, “Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that claim that we have any moral reason to help anyone in the rest of the world,” so his foreign policy will be better than Hillary Clinton’s, which Russell had previously called “dangerously coherent.”

Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute was glad Trump wants to destroy Obamacare, but worried that Republicans might try to keep the ban on refusing people with pre-existing conditions, which Cannon called “price controls that prohibit insurance companies from charging actuarily fair premiums if people switch plans.” (“So it’s kind of like rent control for health care!”  a-ha’d Gillespie.) On SCOTUS, Randy Barnett predicted that Trump would appoint judges “more in the mold of Justice Thomas but perhaps even more so than he.” I tell you, the only thing that keeps libertarians from losing even their current tiny market share is the fact that no one besides me listens to these things.

Do read the column, though.