FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I found this wonderfully crabby Richard Lloyd interview and

it reminded me to listen to three hours of Tom Verlaine.

•   You may not have noticed because it's such a small state, but Lincoln Chaffee's performance Tuesday's debate has left Rhode Island mortified  -- from the Providence Journal:

Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination imploded on national television Tuesday night with a number of stunning gaffes, said several political observers Wednesday, and he’d be wise to bow out now or risk embarrassing himself. 

“I’m hoping that somebody he really trusts sat him down either last night or this morning and convinced him to withdraw, otherwise his candidacy will become a laughing stock if he remains,” said Joseph Cammarano, a political science professor at Providence College... 

State Democratic Chairman Joseph McNamara defended Chafee, to a point.
“I give him a lot of credit for participating and a lot of people who criticize him are people who have never stepped into the battlefield of public discourse.”

Still, McNamara said he was relieved Chafee didn’t bring up the advantages of the metric system, a point he raised when he announced his run. 

“I was afraid he would start quizzing the others about how many kilometers they had traveled.”

Now I don't know shit about Little Rhodie, so maybe the Journal has it in for Chaffee like the New York Post has it in for de Blasio, and one needs to go to the Woonsocket Call for the real truth. But I am beginning to feel for the guy. Not only did he put in a truly disastrous performance -- so bad that, on recollection, I'm not sure that when he referred to himself twice as a block of granite, it wasn't because the drugs had kicked in and he literally thought he was a block of granite -- but now he has to slink back to his small-town-with-Senators, headlines like "You thought his debate was bad? Wait till you see what Wolf Blitzer did to Lincoln Chafee" and "John Chafee loyalists anguished over Lincoln Chafee’s White House run" ringing in his ears. Also, since he seems to be a decent guy, he is probably capable of shame, unlike such Republican shitheels as Rick Perry, who responded to his national humiliation with four years of fundraising and fifteen minutes of campaign. If you care at all, politics is a hard dollar.

•   But fuck that noise. How 'bout them Mets?

•   Jonah Goldberg, man. The National Review legacy pledge claims that while Republican Presidential candidates got "tough" questions in their debates-slash-personal-marketing-events ,"The Media Tossed Softballs at the Democratic Debate." Here is literally the first question Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton on Tuesday:

You were against same-sex marriage. Now you're for it. You defended President Obama's immigration policies. Now you say they're too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the "gold standard". Now, suddenly, last week, you're against it. Will you say anything to get elected?

Some softball. Goldberg claims in evidence that Cooper never asked the Democrats questions like "would you be okay with Planned Parenthood then selling that healthy fetus’s brain and heart?” The simple explanation is that they're saving this kind of thing for the two-party Presidential debates next year, to heighten the element of surprise when the Republican candidate (odds-on favorite: a brain-damaged street preacher who will storm a demoralized GOP convention, speak in tongues, and be nominated by acclimation) screams MURDERER at Hillary Clinton and splatters her with a jar of goat's blood.

•   Maureen Mullarkey at The Federalist  thinks abortions happen because we want to live forever. The madness started, apparently, with organ transplants ("celebrated technical successes, born of biomedical refusal to accept mortal limits, encourage us to view our bodies as machines that can be rebuilt"), and now we're trying to cure Alzheimer's with dead babies.

This technical morality horrifies us when we see it at work on the abortionist’s operating table. Yet we want it both ways. We want to hold the moral high ground by condemning the “Moral Rot at the Core of Planned Parenthood,” as one headline shouted. At the same time, we assent to the spoils of advanced bio-technical research and those laboratory procedures that employ fetal tissue.

If it ever sinks in that they can't win without female and minority votes, I suspect Republicans will become the anti-science party in earnest.

THE LONG CON GOES ON AND ON.

In this week's Voice column I predicted the Ben Carson campaign couldn't last much longer, which was a gutsy move on my part since, for one thing, Carson's super-PAC (the guys who were advertising a Draft Carson movement back at the 2014 CPAC) raised $3 million in the third quarter. But what may really screw up my calculations is that Carson's who-gives-a-shit approach to running for President goes even further than his rhetoric: He's taking two weeks off from the campaign to do a book tour.

Carson's campaign staff will not travel with him while on tour, noting that it’s better to stay off the trail for fear of being accused of using campaign assets to sell books. 

“It’s a question of co-mingling from the corporate standpoint to the Federal Election Commission standpoint so it’s just better to avoid any bad appearance,” spokesman Doug Watts told ABC News.

I like to imagine James Madison taking time off from standing for President to tour in support of a deluxe, commemorative edition of The Federalist Papers (Bound in calfskin! Comes with a free slave!) -- except everyone believed Madison would be President one day.

So, on the one hand Carson could decide, screw this, politics is tiring, I'll just quit and take that Fox News sinecure. But on the other, he could just keep dipping in and out of campaigning as income-generating opportunities demand. It'll help keep the act fresh!

Here's my favorite part of this report:

The book proceeds are personal, and are not connected to Dr. Carson’s presidential campaign, however the campaign does note they are indirectly making money off the book and views its release during a time when he is polling so high as beneficial.

You have to appreciate the nerve. Once upon a time the ancillary merchandising of Presidential campaigns was left to hucksters who cranked out buttons, bumper stickers, and Teddy Bears. I think the killer sales of Dreams for my Father during the 2008 campaign (not to mention the money-making post-resignation career of Sarah Palin) changed the game, and that the kind of shitheels who are running the Carson scam would not only consider the merchandising more important than the Public-Service bullshit, but would choose to be open about it, so no one could say they were being sneaky about making beaucoup bucks off the poor saps who think Carson's serious about the leading the nation. It's proof that what Rick Perlstein called The Long Con not only endures but evolves to keep pace with our increasingly degenerate political culture.

MASTER DEBATERS.

Real quick, because I had to miss a bunch of this because of family stuff: Bernie Sanders grows on you. He's obviously not like the other candidates, in that he's not blow-dried or even (let us be honest) possessed of traditional political-theatrical gifts. But he handles very well the challenges thrown at him -- like the shady attempts to fault him on racial justice. His explanation on guest workers -- a solid laborite position based on the rights of both old and new residents -- was more granular and much, much more convincing than the other candidates' I am for a more generous and compassionate America bullshit. (Though when Clinton said let's stop and compare this conversation to what the Republicans are emitting, that was excellent -- as it was every time it happened.) I started by cringing at him, but after an hour I was looking forward to seeing him back on screen. You know why I think that is? Because he's honest. No, I'm not kidding. You don't see him changing the subject or scrambling to get around his own positions. He explained himself very clearly on gun control and it was to my satisfaction. Now, while I'm softer on gun control than most liberals, I'm not totally in agreement with his position --but at least I can respect his position because he respected me enough to tell me why he held it.

By the way, Anderson Cooper and his acolytes were very tough on the candidates -- and boy, what a difference from the Fox News tongue-baths the Republicans got! -- and while at first I was annoyed by the imbalance -- reminding me as it did of the old IOKIYAR dynamic -- over time I came to appreciate it. For one thing, it made Clinton defend her votes for garbage like, say, the Patriot Act -- and she did a lousy job of it. And that allowed Sanders to say, hell yeah, I'd get rid of mass surveillance, and make the case for it. It's nice, isn't it, to be treated with some respect as a citizen for a change?

Jim Webb has a hard time representing the Blue Dogs, but fuck him, he deserves a hard time; I'd hoped he'd try to invite the party toward a greater understanding of rural and exurban poverty and the voters Democrats are leaving behind because they can't figure out how to address it. But he wound up talking about how he'd fight the expansion of executive power and other crap Republicans who like to pretend they're smart complain about.  Really, fuck him. Lincoln Chaffee's a fucking idiot who isn't good even in the rare moments when he's right and should just kill himself.  Martin O'Malley has some good ideas but how the hell did he ever get elected to anything? Does he have gunmen working for him? Also he has a terrible habit of, whenever the others are talking among stuff like inequality, breaking in with WE NEED GREEN ENERGY!

All in all, any of these people, or their congenital fetuses in fetu, or the sweat off their balls, would make a better President than any Republican.

UPDATE. The National Review guys weigh in. Kevin D. Williamson:

The nurses all told basically the same story: They are doing fine for the moment, with a good union that secures for them good paychecks and good benefits. But they worry that the day after tomorrow something could suddenly change, that their hospitals and clinics will go under or be sold to evil hedge funds and that the terms of their employment will change radically for the worse, that their houses will for some reason be foreclosed on even though they’re current on all their payments, that college tuition will triple between now and the time their kids finish up at UNLV, that something bad is going to happen. That’s the Sanders voter, and, I think, the Democrat at large: terrified.

Stop and consider that for a moment. You know, because the author is conservative, that he thinks this is a knock on Sanders on his supporters. But really take a moment and focus on the fact that he thinks people with families who are in fear of losing their livelihoods, in a country where this can happen at the drop of a hat (or at the whim of a venture capitalist), are worthy of his contempt.

Now see with whom he compares them:

It isn’t just them. I was speaking with Sanders supporters almost literally in the shadow of a giant gold tower bearing the name “TRUMP” on the side—it is something of an achievement to create one of the tackiest things in Las Vegas—and the Trumpkins, like the Sandersnistas, are terrified: The big Mexican is gonna come and get them, the scheming Chinaman is gonna take their jobs, the surly Negro is leering at the white women. At both ends of the spectrum, we see terrified—terrified—Americans praying that Big Daddy will provide for them and smite their enemies. With sometime messiah Barack Obama having failed to deliver the goods, they’re turning to Government As God the Father Himself.

People who fear the loss of their jobs and therefore vote Sanders are the same as people who hate Mexicans and therefore vote Trump. Again, I ask: Do these guys even know any normal people?

UPDATE 2. In comments (which are great), a nice summary by ChrisV82:

Here's what we've seen after 1 Democratic and 2 Republican debates: Democrats are deeply committed to fixing climate destruction, fighting wealth inequality, and making sure people are not discriminated against based on superficial (skin color, gender, etc.) reasons. Republicans are Neanderthals who bang stones on the ground to celebrate the sky god and show deep concern that foreign tribes will attack under the glow of the war moon to steal their furs, burn their huts and rape their birthing wives.

Just go in and roam around, with special attention to erstwhile Baltimorean dex explaining O'Malley.

ROCKET TO RUSSIA.

At National Review Matthew Continetti says when it comes to Russia Obama's a pussy ("the problem isn’t our capabilities. It’s our lack of will," mrrowrr), so let's get back to a Reaganite foreign policy -- like for example arming battalions of psychos in countries we don't understand:

Except for sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the occasional scolding, President Obama has been uninterested in retaliating against imperialism and deterring further aggression. He holds the view that history will expose Putin as a pretender and fool, and that Russia will be bogged down in a Syrian quagmire just as it was bogged down in Afghanistan long ago. What Obama forgets is that the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan came about because the United States financed and equipped anti-Soviet forces — a course of action he has rejected since the Syrian uprising began in 2011.

What could go wrong?

Also, we should return to nuclear brinkmanship, because back when we were still doing that Wall Street was booming and America was in love with a dashing young man named Alex P. Keaton:

We forget we hold nuclear cards, too. This is a fact Reagan did not lose sight of. “The two strategic decisions which contributed most to ending the Cold War,” writes Kissinger, “were NATO’s deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)"... 

Not only would a revitalized and advanced nuclear force, coupled with increased funding and enlargement of strategic defense, assert U.S. supremacy, deter adversaries, and develop innovative technologies. It would also bring political benefits to whoever proposed it.

Political benefits! He buried the lede.

Quoting liberally from such unpunished war criminals as Henry Kissinger and Robert Kagan, Continetti's whole rant is rancid, but the ending's especially nuts:

“The Reagan Doctrine proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution,” [Charles] Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The grounds are justice, necessity, and democratic tradition.” Replace “anti-Communist” with “anti-authoritarian,” and what has changed? If we are to reestablish American ideals, American interests, and American pride, we must hurt the bad guys, and overtly and unashamedly revise the Reagan Doctrine for a new American century.

It's hard to believe that "anti-authoritarian" isn't an inside joke on Continetti's part. Anyone here remember Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who believed that in order to defeat totalitarian states like the U.S.S.R. we should tolerate authoritarian states like Roberto d'Aubuisson's El Salvador, Pinochet's Chile, and other factories of murder and torture that happily profited from and advertised our support? The idea of a neo-Reagan policy that's “anti-authoritarian" is absurd, though I can believe if Continetti and his buddies got their hands on power, they might revise Kirkpatrick's totalitarian-vs.-authoritarian formula into authoritarian-vs.-double-plus-nogoodnik or some shit.

Obama made a big mistake not calling Den Haag the moment he was inaugurated.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the unlikely candidacy of Dr. Ben Carson and the likely coming end of it. It would be nice to say that Carson's campaign will founder because Republicans will come to their senses and realize he can never be elected, but it's more likely that the outrages he keeps emitting will become tiresome even to the hometeam crowd. Unlike the mighty Trump, Carson doesn't seem in control of what he says -- it just seems to leak out, like the stuff your poorly socialized uncle starts muttering after a few drinks, or a Jay Nordlinger column. Plus he doesn't bellow like Trump, which among the brethren is a sign of authority. And at the risk of being The Real Racist ^® I would also guess that when the brethren do fully consent to a black Presidential candidate, that person will be a practiced politician like Mia Love or Tim Scott -- in other words, someone more like Barack Obama and less like Professor Irwin Corey.

UPDATE. This is very funny, from The Hill:

Donald Trump says he was ready to go after Ben Carson for questioning his faith, but decided to hold back after his GOP primary rival apologized. 

“I was all set to go wild, now I can’t go wild,” Trump said on Fox News’s “MediaBuzz” on Sunday. “I’m actually saying, ‘I wish he had hit me.’ No, he’s very smart. I wish he had hit me.”

Trump knows it would be good business to keep Carson around awhile. His schtick might pale faster if he were the only overt lunatic in the field, but with Carson out there, Trump looks like part of a larger nutcake constituency, one he's better equipped than Carson to serve as spokesman. I don't think Trump will be able to prop Carson up much longer, though.

UPDATE 2. I predict this guy will run in 2020.

KEEP F*CKING THAT CULTURE-WAR CHICKEN.

This is it! The break in the deadlock! A network show about fuck who knows has a character who thinks we should "'Hit reset' -- pound Raqqah into a parking lot." This is significant, Mark Tapson of Truth Revolt tells us, because it's on TV, and because Homeland has heretofore "largely wallowed in moral equivalence between the West and Islamic terrorism," but mostly because it's on TV.

He's not the only excitee -- feel the humidity from Ace of Spades:

For the White Urban Liberal Women who watch Premium Cable Dramas and otherwise don't really know what's going on in the world (except that Obama is Awesome and we're losing the #WarOnWomen), this character's assessment of the current strategy in the War on Terror -- that there isn't one -- will be pretty surprising. 

Haw, wait'll those bitches hear this! It'll be like a load of my hot cum in their faces -- in HD!

Worth a watch. "Hit Reset," indeed. 

Then again, maybe dumb people will assume that this is made up. Dumb people have a habit of assuming that true things are fiction, and fictitious things -- like Obama -- are true.

Comes the revolution, the CPAC Blogger of the Year 2012 has that Ministry of Culture job in the bag, man. IN THE BAG.

I wonder what would happen if, instead of talking all the time about Taking Back The Culture, these guys tried making culture. Say, that reminds me -- whatever happened to Bill Whittle's Declaration Entertainment, which back in 2010 announced it was going to do just that -- and sold subscriptions starting at $9.99 and proceeding to $100,000, to support what Whittle promised would be "a movement... a revolution"? Well, they made one movie -- and good for them! -- but they've decided to go another way:

...we have learned something during this process: making a feature consumes so much time and money that there is very little to show for it until it is finished. So rather than continuing a feature film company that also produces political videos, we are going to become a political video company that also produces feature films...

If you have an annual membership to Declaration Entertainment, we would be delighted to arrange to transfer your membership, with a bonus month, or we will refund the pro-rated balance, by check, on an individual basis.

Videos about how liberals suck -- well, they gave culture a shot, now it's back to a more traditional business model.

I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS!

At National Review, Jim Geraghty laments that President Obama is making Republicans look bad. I know, but hear him out:

Mickey Kaus characterizes the approach as “gaslighting” – giving your opponent a legitimate reason to get angry, then turning around and pointing to their anger as evidence they’re unhinged, obsessed, incapable of governing responsibly, et cetera.... 

Free community college? Hey, it’s never going to become law, so why not propose it and make Republicans look mean for not enacting it? Goofing around with a selfie stick? Go right ahead. Chewing gum at an international summit? Hey, what are they going to do, impeach him? 

In this atmosphere, it’s no wonder Republicans are furious. A midterm election victory that was supposed to constrain President Obama’s ability to enact his agenda has only emboldened and liberated him.

So, to sum up: Obama does things within the power of his office that his political opponents don't like. (Geraghty hints at "blatant disregard for [Congress'] roles under the Constitution" but, surprise, provides no examples, probably because he feels he's been laughed at enough for one day.) Also, Obama seems to have fun doing it. Wingnuts are therefore furious.

Jim, have you ever seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Yosemite Sam? Which of those characters do you think the audience is siding with?

Say this for  Sam, though -- he never resorted to anything like this:

The insanely imbalanced media landscape ensures that almost any expression of Democratic anger is portrayed as justified (or ignored if it’s too obviously outrageous) while almost any Republican expression of anger is portrayed as irrational, deep-seated hatred.

Imagine YS turning on the camera and snarling, "Quit makin' me look like a eedjit, yuh gol-durned liberal media!"

This is as good a time and place as any to enjoy one of my fa-vo-rite Friz Freleng numbers:

UPDATE. Commenters are fun; Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard says, given what's really pissing these guys off, Kaus should have called it "blacklighting." 

GIRL POWER.

In the last Presidential debate, Carly Fiorina thrilled anti-abortion Republicans with her audiobook version of Silent Scream and got a big poll boost. But what does she do for an encore? On all the other issues, the GOP mandidates are just as crazy as she, so her femaleness is no advantage.

What then to do? Brag on her sabotage, I mean stewardship of Hewlett Packard? Tell voters she'll deny benefits to the malingering poor as ruthlessly as she denied a final paycheck to the family of her dead campaign manager?

No, she needs something better, something that stirs conservatives as reliably as mangled fetus fan-fic. To the rescue rides Rich Lowry, a veteran GOP female fluffer who in 2008 proved his skills by professing his starbursts over Sarah Palin, and is ready to do his duty here:

Carly Fiorina is a no-nonsense former business executive who is showing she can play — and throw elbows — with the big boys in the Republican nomination battle.

Feminists have noticed, but their admiration is tinged with dread — and it should be. An eloquent, fearless critic of abortion, the latest outsider to climb in the Republican race is a clear and present danger to what feminists hold most dear...

Fiorina got the feminazis ascared! Come on, boys, isn't this everything you've been dreaming of?

The novelist Jennifer Weiner told The New York Times for a story about the conflicted feelings of feminists, “It’s so weird — she looks like one of us, but she’s not.” Another feminist writer said, “There’s an excitement and a horror.” The managing editor of the feminist website Jezebel tweeted the night of the debate, “I’m in love with and terrified of her.”

Yes, be afraid, very afraid...

Frightened femmies shrieking and running for their safe spaces -- gotta admit, for a certain audience (i.e., MRA creeps) it's a compelling story -- so compelling that after a few days Politico picks up the thread:

Carly Fiorina says she thinks she is "distinctly horrifying to liberals" because of the prospect that she could beat Hillary Clinton in a general election, hours after a poll was released showing her besting the Democratic front-runner in a hypothetical general election match-up in Iowa. 

A Clinton-Fiorina matchup! That's about as likely as a Carson-O'Malley one -- maybe the respondents took it in the appropriate Bon-Jovi-vs.-a-blade-of-grass spirit. Whatever, it's a hook, so:

During an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly on her Monday night show, Fiorina responded after Kelly read part of a New York Times story from last week in which one woman remarked of the former Hewlett-Packard executive that, "It’s so weird — she looks like one of us, but she’s not."

Jennifer Weiner again! She's got "four new books for adults and a middle grade trilogy" in the works, maybe she can do something with the publicity. The question is, can Fiorina? She'd better act fast: if the new PPI survey, which has her running behind such losers as Jeb Bush, is to be believed, her miraculous rise may be over, leaving her vulnerable to a challenge from Olivia Newton-John or The Lucha Dragons or the dog from Air Bud or whichever celebrity hasn't had his or her turn to run for the GOP nomination yet.

Maybe Fiorina's campaign team can troll Lena Dunham into making an answerable remark about her --  we know anything with Dunham ups the ante for the brethren. Of course, she could go an entirely different way and start talking about how female candidates are ill-treated by men and only taken seriously by them when they talk about so-called women's issues, and then only if they totally agree with them. But she might have to switch parties to see the benefit.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

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

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for your generous comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOTE FIORINA -- SHE DID THE BEST SHE COULD.

I'm still stunned that Carly Fiorina -- aka Wendell Willkie If He Sucked at His Job -- is doing so well in GOP Presidential polling. It's hard to imagine that many people saying, "That's who I want running the country -- someone who wrecked a big company and has an inspirational backstory."

I do understand her appeal to rightwing factota, though, as a female conservative in the Age of Hillary, so I'm not shocked that Fiorina campaign talking points would appear in outlets like National Review under reporters' bylines ("Secretariat also had what’s called the 'x-factor,' a gene located on the X-chromosome that causes an unusually large heart. Fiorina says she identifies with this").

But by and large these don't take a lot of effort -- just put the press release in the Hackit app and you're done!  Megan McArdle, bless her, seems to have expended some effort to explain why Fiorina's horrible record is no reason to count her out, and that makes it all the more poignant:

Critiques of Fiorina’s tenure seem excessively focused on the outcome.

Look, if you guys bailed right now, I wouldn't be upset.

People are far too prone to confuse outcomes with good decision-making. Surgeons who do everything right will sometimes see patients die anyway -- and many doctors who fail to wash their hands send a happy, healthy patient home at the end. The important thing is to know whether you followed a process that gives you the best odds, not what happened in an individual case. Too many of Fiorina’s critics pointed out that the company lost shareholder value, then settled back with a satisfied QED.

How can we ever really know whether bad outcomes mean bad decisions? By daring to judge her, we risk being unfair to this person who has never held elective office and ended her biggest job in the center of a flaming crater, holding a burnt match. Look at the situation from her point of view -- not that of a citizen whose future will be strongly effected by the outcome of a Presidential race. Think of someone besides yourself!

It's like that Iraq War thing: Just because McArdle was wrong and you were right ("...do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did...") doesn't mean you should be the Bloomberg columnist. Hmmph!

UPDATE. In comments (always read the comments! Here, I mean; elsewhere, never), mortimer2000 pulls out this bit from McArdle's column...

But there’s another point to be made, too, which is that I’m simply not sure how much this matters. Fiorina could be the best CEO in the world, or the worst, and that wouldn’t give us much insight into how she’d do as president.

...and asks, "So Fiorina is running for president based on her background and experience as what? A person?" No, silly, as a Republican. Credentials not necessary!

NOSTALGIE DE LA BULLY.

Regular readers will be familiar with the work of David French, National Review's current occupant of the Dreher Chair for God-Bothering. Today he's taking a little break from testifying for The Lord and the Confederacy to tell you how back when he was growing up in Kentuck, his teacher encouraged him to fight his fellow children --

"He said I hit like a girl," I told her. "Is this true?" She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. "Well then, you deserved it," she said. 

-- and that's why he's not a sissy like you liberals:

Raising boys to be whiny victims isn’t exactly new. When I first moved to the Northeast in the mid-1990s I noticed that many of the boys raised by the liberal elite weren’t “men” in any sense I could recognize. They were whiny, petulant, hypersensitive, and incapable of either physical self-defense or even the most rudimentary tasks of manual labor. 

It's hilarious in and of itself that the author of "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It" and other essays about how gays are oppressing Christians is complaining that other people are "whiny." But I find more interesting that French feels he was redeemed as a man by youthful homosexual panic. How many other people still feel this way, I wonder  -- that if a boy isn't constantly terrified of being compared with women, he won't be able to stand up for himself, or do manual labor? Maybe he doesn't believe it at all, but thinks trash-talking liberals' masculinity is an effective way to scare Americans out of their growing support for gay marriage. If only he can convince them that the gay wave will render us incapable of manual labor, and then we'll all be overrun by the Mexicans who've been imported to do it for us!

I think that must be it. He can't possibly take this butch talk seriously -- after all, he's one of the most outspoken supporters of America's most famous single mother.

ONE WOMAN'S STORY.

Sarah Jones in The Federalist:

I Went To Planned Parenthood For Birth Control, But They Pushed Abortion

Inadvertently omitted subhed: No one's gonna call me a liar like they did Carly Fiorina, because there are no witnesses!

I’ve always gotten an odd sort of pride from the response when I tell my Democrat friends I’m Republican. They’re always so surprised. I relish the “you’re not like the rest of them” comments that I receive...

Owens is one of those groovy libertarian conservatives; for instance, she finds seat belt laws "a personal affront that government would dare tell me I have to take a life-saving step that affects no one except for my own body." Fun! You may suppose that, unlike her colleague A.D.P. Efferson, Owens doesn't tell her Democrat friends they're all murderers -- but, record scratch:

Usually I lose my “cool Republican” card once I tell people I’m pro-life. It’s even shocked some people. The coolness evaporates once I note I do not stand with Planned Parenthood.

And that's when her Democrat friends start saying this to her:

“You don’t come across as anti-woman,” they say. “How can you have such archaic thoughts about women’s rights if you support personal rights so vehemently? PLUS, YOU’RE A WOMAN.”

She must have met these Democrat friends at a Mallard Fillmore cosplay convention. Anyway, flashback to Owens at 17; she wanted birth control and, being a free spirit, drove down to Planned Parenthood to get some, but they botched the job, she claims -- no exam, and the stuff they gave her "gave me awful mood swings and what I can only describe as rage." (Apparently she never recovered.) That's the kind of lousy customer service that would have put Planned Parenthood out of business if it weren't for Big Gummint! Well, at least Owens knew better than to ever go back oh wait one day she thought she might be pregnant and, instead of asking Nick Gillespie what she should do, she actually went back to Planned Parenthood, and of course they were monsters to her:

“Why won’t you consider abortion?” the representative asked. “You realize what a strain on your life parenting would be, don’t you?” I explained that abortion just wasn’t something I personally believed in. She scoffed at me before finally telling me I wasn’t pregnant. 

I left the office and cried...

If only she'd listened to those nice clinic protesters! To this day Owens is haunted by the memory:

What if I had been pregnant -- would she have been able to sway me? How many others have passed through those doors and were swayed to terminate, who felt the strain -- financial, physical, or mental -- that parenting might cause so decided it would be easier to just “fix the problem”?

Think about all those pregnant women who come to Planned Parenthood every day, never once expecting they'd hear about abortion!

Yeah, I know, it sounds unlikely, but what are you going to believe -- statistics, or the latest attempt of a rightwing propaganda mill to do that "personal narrative" stuff their advisors tell them works great on the suckers?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I didn't know so many Carole King demos were available online. 

Life in this modern world isn't so horrible sometimes.

•   I haven't heard what he has to say yet, but I can understand why John Boehner wants to GTFO. Who needs it? I'm more interested to see whether this actually dampens rather than exacerbates the crazy among the House Republican fringe. I mean, they won't have Boehner as the Establishment Daddy to blame for the eventual collapse of their zany maneuvers, and that may spook them; also, Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem like a Cromwell. What do you guys think?

•   I listened to the Hamilton musical score on NPR (there's now a crowdsourced lyric sheet, too!) and like it a lot. I am as regular readers know a sucker for this kind of musical pastiche. (Hamilton is mostly well-padded crossover rap, crossing further at times into pretty pop.) It's like the best Schoolhouse Rock ever, but with a genuinely interesting POV: that while the top-tier American Revolutionaries certainly had commendable ideas, they were also about getting over -- and in fact the getting-over was mainly where they lived, because there was just too much competition and urgency to play the philosophe much. It's kind of a nice joke, and also a relief, to see Thomas Jefferson portrayed as a cut-throat snob rather than the Sage of Monticello, and to see Washington's cabinet meetings played as rap battles. I can see why this excites people, and I agree with Frannie Kelly's conclusion on NPR about the coming high-school productions.

•   Need a laugh? Rod Dreher's always good for one. Today he's read something about a forthcoming authorized biography of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, in which the Eminence allegedly claims he was "part of a secret club of cardinals opposed to Pope Benedict XVI." You may recall Benedict resigned the papacy, so either Danneels is taking the piss a la Bill Ayers or this anti-Benedictine movement forced him out with footage of Ratzinger fucking a horse or something. But of course that's what I'd think -- here's Dreher's take:

This is the first confirmation of rumors that had been going around for years about Benedict being thwarted by a liberal conspiracy, one that eventually forced him out. These men — Danneels, Van Luyn, Kasper, Lehman, and Hume, at least — all preside over dying churches. And they killed the Benedict papacy. Danneels, you will note, was given by Francis a prominent place at next month’s Synod on the Family. 

I am glad this came out now. The orthodox bishops and others going to the Synod now know what a nest of snakes they are working with, and how high up the corruption goes. Poor Pope Benedict. My heart breaks for that good man.

Poor Pope Benedict! I wish I could be there when Holiness Emeritus Benedict steps his Prada shoes out of Castel Gandolfo and finds Dreher and his fellow nuts kneeling there, bewailing his martyrdom. 

THEY STILL CAN'T QUIT HER.

We all know from years of bitter experience how conservatives feel about Lena Dunham, right? Well, imagine how they'd feel about a Dunham/Hillary mashup in the form of an friendly interview. Feel the incoherent, seething hate from Breitbart.com's John Nolte!

Just months after recanting a phony rape charge against an innocent man and apologizing for making light of what many have described as the sexual abuse of her younger sister...

If you need it, here's an explanation of why "phony rape charge" and "sexual abuse" don't mean what Nolte wants you to think they mean (though regular readers will have already assumed that). Anyway, Nolte goes on churning these charges against Dunham -- in fact there's almost nothing else in the column but bitter froth -- until he brings it all back home:

If you think about who Hillary Clinton is married to, no one should be surprised she shrugs off charges of sexual abuse. She’s had a lifetime … of … practice.

Eccentric use of ellipses in original. One imagines Nolte reading it aloud to himself several times, trying to figure out what typography and/or punctuation best communicates his rage-stresses. Em-dashes? Boldface? Interrobangs?

And while we haven’t yet seen the full interview...

Talk about premature ejaculations! Well, sometimes the fantasy is enough.

UPDATE. On a daffier note, Ann Althouse reacts to Clinton's anodyne definition of feminism ("A feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights... It just means that we believe that women have the same rights as men") as if AT LAST SHE'S GOT HILLARY ON THE STAND WHERE SHE CAN'T WRIGGLE OUT OF IT!

Who writes the definition? We're still saying what X is "by definition" after all these years of scoffing at the anti-same-sex-marriage people who kept saying, tediously, marriage is by definition between a man and a woman? 

Even if we are still doing "by definition"-style arguments...

If you like logic puzzles that end in enigmas ("Put that way, the resistance itself [to calling oneself a feminist] sounds feminist to me"), just follow the link and God go with you.

UPDATE 2. Oh for fuck's sake: Bre Payton at The Federalist:

Clinton thinks it’s really odd when women think that it’s important they have the same rights as men, but resist the feminist label. Clearly the two don’t understand why some women are hesitant to associate themselves with some of the extreme aspects of feminism that the movement has become known for. 

Perpetuating fake campus rape statistics, insisting upon access to abortion on demand, and outright man-hating have become major attributes of the more vocal elements of modern feminism.

No supporting links, alas.

But those probably don’t bother Clinton or Dunham, as they both are huge fans of Planned Parenthood...

I'm seriously trying to envision the target audience for this, but I keep seeing wild, hairy creatures howling YOU MADE US IN THE HOUSE OF PAIN! NOT MAN! NOT BEAST! THING! It's like you're talking to people who think Pope Francis seems like a nice guy, but you're anti-Catholic so you go, "Clearly the Pope doesn’t understand why some people are hesitant to associate themselves with some of the extreme aspects of Catholicism that the movement has become known for." I mean, you may be right and you may be wrong, but you sound to a normal person like you're trying to put one over, or new to the planet Earth.

YOUR LYING EYES.

Remember at the last GOP debate, when Carly Fiorina described a Planned Parenthood video where evil abortionists threw living fetuses into a whirring blender, then drank it? Okay, so she described (as revealed by Sarah Kliff) some other bullshit that wasn't there. Anyway, to the rescue of her fantasy rides Jonah Goldberg:

And they have a point. The exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos. But anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina’s off-the-cuff account pretty accurate. 

It's fake but accurate, in other words.

Most of the center’s videos involve hidden-camera conversations with current Planned Parenthood managers, as well as interviews with veterans of the abortion industry, discussing the selling of fetal body parts for research purposes. The video Fiorina probably had in mind included eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a metal bowl, its leg kicking, to illustrate the witness’s recollection of seeing precisely that in another case.

Probably! She might be talking about "videos of fetuses moving and kicking" that "were not shot at a Planned Parenthood clinic," which Fiorina's staff sent Kliff in her defense. But there's no need to nail it down, because we're looking at a wider truth:

That sort of juxtaposition might not fly on the nightly news, but it’s the sort of dramatic device used in documentaries all the time. It’s akin to a documentary maker interviewing a witness to Cecil the Lion getting shot, and using footage of another lion getting shot as an illustration...

I know how that is. There was that documentary where I was described as being an asshole to people (which I freely admit I have been at times, I'm not proud of it), followed by that famous clip of an South Vietnamese cop shooting a guy in the head. I tell you, I got some shit for that! More than a few people said they were with me until that scene.

The larger problem is that people are talking past each other. Fiorina’s remarks — and these videos — are really aimed at the abortion industry and its Achilles’ heel, late-term abortions. None of these videos would strike a chord if the only images were of blastocysts.

Likewise, Roy Edroso, Asshole, wouldn't have stirred much interest if it merely contained my drunken tirades and pathetic attempts at fisticuffs, but throw in a summary execution and we're cooking with gas.

On Goldberg goes till the Otteresque summation (the abortion lies of Hillary Clinton are "a far greater distortion of the truth than anything Fiorina said") and the traditional fartcloud, and we are left with the inescapable conclusion that abortion is gross and shut up.

UPDATE. From comments:

Well, I'm convinced. I mean, look -- they're right next to each other. 

AU REVOIR, NIEDERMEYER.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel sorry for Scott Walker. He's a monster, best known for his scheme to destroy the Wisconsin teachers' union. Conservatives loved that about him, of course, because he was fulfilling their most earnest wish to humble those moocher cloth-ears who dared demand a living wage for work that didn't generate dividends or rightwing propaganda. Also he's been trying to get rid of tenure at the University of Wisconsin, which really sets their hearts on fire. And he loves Jesus and Reagan.

Many conservatives chose to imagine that ordinary people would love Walker just as much as they loved him -- though he always seemed to my unstarry eyes to be in a constant trance state and perhaps developmentally disabled. When Walker was caught eating some barbecue he'd just been serving to people with his latex serving gloves still on, it looks weird to some, but at The Federalist Peter Cook claimed it only looked weird to liberals because they never did an honest day's work -- unlike Walker, who once briefly did marketing for the Red Cross before entering politics. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review found Walker a perfect candidate for a "Return to Normalcy" campaign "with his homespun tales of one-dollar sweaters, his quiet Midwestern roots, and his down-to-earth everyman appearance..."

Did ordinary people see him that way? It now appears ordinary Republicans didn't even see him that way. Or maybe they did see it, but decided it wasn't enough. Walker was doing okay in the polls until Trump broke out. And suddenly there went Walker's whole reason for being. It turned out his dollar sweaters and latex gloves and his lack of schooly airs weren't what appealed to them -- it was his willingness to be mean to the people they hated; and if you want a candidate to be mean to the people you hate, isn't it much better to have one who seems confident about it? (And if you want one who seems to be in a daze, there's always Ben Carson.) What's the point of ressentiment in a minor key? In April, when Walker tried to excite the crowd by harshing on Mexicans and people found it offensive, National Review's Rich Lowry said, "Walker should take the shots as a compliment, and hopefully, the rest of the field will begin to think and talk about immigration the same way." This was before Trump started calling Mexicans rapists and sweeping the field.

Anyway, now the brethren are wandering away from the scene of the crash with their hands in their pockets, whistling. Byron York was a big booster back in the day. In January he said, "Scott Walker doesn't have to be great on the stump to do well," because  his union-busting was so electifying that "GOP voters will cut him a little slack in the charisma and oratory department." Now, York sees more clearly Walker's "limitations" -- first, there was his "lack of foreign policy chops"; then, said York, "an even bigger problem was domestic policy. [Walker] just wasn't very up on some of the key policy and political issues that a president has to confront..." That wouldn't seem to leave much. Trump doesn't know anything, either, but nobody cares because his ignorance is so dynamic.

Like I said, 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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The Ahmed Muhamed case got me thinking of Stiff Little Fingers, which got me thinking of The Undertones, which got me playing The Undertones all afternoon. Loov-ley. 
• Did you know Breitbart.com has a Doritos tag? And no, it's not there to get Jonah Goldberg to come over more often -- it's to denounce the homosexual menace of Rainbow Doritos packaging, which was created to celebrate Frito-Lay's partnership with the It Gets Better project. (Frito-Gay, amirite #c'monbrodon'tleavemehanging.)  It Gets Better was created to keep young gays from killing themselves, which is of course unconscionable in Breitbart world, so John Nolte demands Frito-Lay explain how they can support a project founded by Dan Savage, who has not shown proper deference to bigots, and another operative warns readers of other gay snack foods  so they don't accidentally turn Game Day into Gay Day and convert their beer buddies. (Breitbart.com also reports that the gay Doritos are "a variation of the standard Cool Ranch-flavored chips," which makes sense because they taste like cum.) But American Thinker does B-bart one better by giving an asylum window to one Ed Straker (h/t Will Menaker), who may be a Poe but so what this is awesome:

Furthermore, I think we should push other companies to launch pro-heterosexual campaigns. Perhaps we could persuade a hot dog maker and a hot dog bun company to do a joint effort promoting man-woman relationships. 

Until we try sexualizing food like the left does, we'll never know. And if we think like the left, we desperately need to find out.

Maybe he should marry a chalupa in protest of Obergefell -- or infiltrate gayism, then take it down from the inside. Politics is down-low of culture, comrade!

• It may seem weird to you that, while you look at the Texas clockmaking student's case (made a digital clock, brought it to school, got arrested) and see sad bigotry thwarting the admirable intellectual ambitions of a second-generation immigrant kid, some other people see unearned Muslim-American privilege (or, in the case of some prominent nuts, a conspiracy to let jihadis take over America). But remember, these guys are convinced that America has already been taken over by the Kenyan pretender Barack Obama, and that his seven-year reign of terror has so changed America that it no longer behaves in ways they're accustomed to seeing: Instead of siding with the authorities, people are siding with the powerless, dark-skinned kid. And not just people: MIT, Facebook, and other companies have all told him that, in effect, it gets better. It's interesting that conservatives have been crying because the kid who got suspended for a Pop-Tart gun and others similarly hassled  didn't get all this attention. But those cases actually did get attention -- not only from conservatives, but from the so-called liberal MSM, because everyone loves a bureaucrats-gone-wild story. And from all I can see, conservatives merely turned these teachable moments into more sour grievance to steep in; while supporters of Ahmed Mohamed have reached out to him, encouraged his scholarship, and made something positive out of the experience. Maybe that's why they're so pissed.

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT, PART 4,287.

I see conservatives are excited for their female Presidential candidate who will never be President because she pimped the Planned Parenthood videos, describing a grisly scene that apparently doesn't actually exist, in hopes that, like misleading movie posters and doctored critics' quotes, it may steer voters to view the bloody images they do have, and get them so grossed out they'll say, "alright already, I'll do it myself with a coathanger and a bottle of Lysol if you'll just shut up."

But just because they're eager to turn stomachs doesn't mean they've given up on winning hearts and minds. At The Federalist A.D.P. Efferson tells us:

Some of my dearest friends are pro-choice, and some of my dearest friends are pro-life. I have known these women and men to varying degrees over the course of my lifetime, and I can say beyond doubt that regardless of their political leanings, none is even remotely a monster.

Despite the incredible popularity on social media of polarizing people according to ideology to punish them, I’ve never felt an urge to maliciously single out my liberal friends to publically castigate them, even though their beliefs stand in radical, stark contrast to mine. Nowhere is this contrast more glaringly evident than in the abortion debate, because there is no suitable compromise on terminating a life. Either the baby lives, or it is aborted. 

I have engaged in numerous thoughtful discussions with pro-choice women about abortion, some very heated ones...

I'll bet.

...but have yet to find common ground on the issue of the rights of a woman superseding the rights of the infant, because ultimately there isn’t any...

We'll just have to agree to disagree, my baby-murdering friends! Meantime let Efferson explain why good people might do such awful things:

Shedding light on this idea is Clay Jones from Biola University, who has spent the last several decades studying the psychology of genocide.

Not even kidding.

His research exploring human depravity attempts to answer the hard questions about humanity, such as: Who are these people who commit mass murders? How do normal citizens slaughter their own countrymen without so much as a second thought?

We'll just cut to the chase: Yes, Efferson actually believes her friends are committing literal genocide, just like they did in Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags. But she doesn't think of them as monsters because... well, she's not clear on that. She does mention that her pro-choice friends "love their kids, they volunteer at schools, they attend church," etc., but she also quotes Jones to this effect: "When you read genocide studies you find that most murderers also did many nice things: walked the family dog, baked cookies, gave gifts..." Maybe what she's saying she'd be pals with Hitler if he was as much fun to hang out with these gals are.

One wonders whether Efferson ran any drafts of this essay by her baby-killer friends. Now those are the secret videos I'd like to see!

IS THERE A WORD IN KLINGON FOR LONELINESS?

Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I'm going to pronounce a few words. They're harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important. Try to understand what they mean:

"How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism."

"This essay appears in the Summer 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books."

5092 words.

You sure you have the guts? Alright, buddy, but once we're in we're not coming back till the mission is over.

The best expression of their spirit was John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, with its proud promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” 

This could have been declaimed by Captain James T. Kirk...

You weasel, get back to your position! Tie him down, Sliverberg; it only gets rougher from here.

Anyway, the author, Timothy Sandefur, tells us in the beginning Gene Roddenberry and his fellow World War II vets hated the Communists -- the Klingons -- and the hippies -- the Organians -- but then, for reasons no one can explain, in "The Apple"* ("Worst episode ever!" the fat guy cries), Spock spoiled everything by going multicultural:

Spock is more indulgent. “There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created,” he tells the captain, “the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres.” Spock insists he does not share their views, yet he secretly admires them, and devotes his considerable scientific skills to helping locate their paradise planet. Later, he tells one of the few survivors of the acid, “It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.” The skeptical, spirited Kirk could never utter such words.

Roddenberry, for some reason, was giving Spock the good lines! Had the Reds gotten to him? It could be that Gene and the crew knew it couldn't all be heroic Kirk speeches (especially after they got a load of Shatner), and needed some yang for his yin... but no, none of these trivial dramatic necessities occur to Sandefur, who ties Spock's moral relativism to "the New Left" (probably represented by some radical key grip who altered the script to follow the Stalinist line on his gold-plated overtime) and teleports his narrative in a huff to 1991,"months after Roddenberry’s death," so that Kenneroddenberry may remain in memory pure while beatniks trash his neoliberal legacy.

The weaker members of the crew scream "Nerrrrrrrrrds" as we pass these flaming rhetorical dung-satellites:

The dungeon in which Kirk is imprisoned in this film is on a par with Stalin’s jails.

[“Star Trek: The Next Generation"] featured false equivalency on a grand scale. The show premiered a year after feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding referred to Newton’s “Principia” as a “rape manual,” and a year before Jesse Jackson led Stanford student protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

The Ba’ku would have nauseated Captain Kirk. Here is a species that lives “The Apple” not as captives but as willing participants. They have given up growth for stagnation, which they have mistaken for life. Yet the audience is expected to admire this.

Etc.  In the end, Sandefur is retucking his shirt furiously, lamenting that “'Star Trek’s' romance with relativism gradually blotted them out until the franchise came to prize feeling over thought, image over substance, and immediate gratification over moral and political responsibility." And at no point does he betray any awareness that people watched the show, not because the Statist Overlords forced them too, but because they enjoyed it, and if there were a market for Star Hayek, someone would have made it. But the laws of capitalism never seem to apply to capitalists, and the way of the world never makes sense to a dork.

UPDATE. Comments are thus:

"Wait until Sandefur finds out that 'Laverne and Shirley' debuted a year after feminist author Susan Brownmiller declared 'pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,'" hoo-boys Jeffrey_Kramer.  Kordo sees my Star Hayek and raises with Burke to the Future. (Except Burke's not really conservative, see, because -- oh, hell, I guess I'm just a different kind of nerd.)

Sarcastr0 digs up a Sandefur guest-post at The Volokh Conspiracy in 2014 (pre-sellout), in which  he says the welfare state is unconstitutional and we should make it constitutional by amending the Constitution if we really want to have it, but psych, libtards -- "a constitutional amendment can itself be unconstitutional," because there's nothing in the Declaration of Independence about food stamps for moochers; also, "to the extent that the U.S. government operates contrary to those principles, its actions, too, are illegitimate acts of usurpation, and deserve to be treated as such." Wonder if the Kim Davis tsimmis has got him refurbishing his treehouse in anticipation of a Natural Law uprising.

*A few readers point out that Sandefur mistakes "The Way to Eden" for "The Apple." Gary Farber seems to think it was incumbent on me to correct him, but honestly, why would I fact-check a Star Trek reference? I wasn't arguing with his interpretation, which would require understanding of the references, but with the whole crackpot idea that old TV shows should be torn up for wrongthink by political operatives. I mean, most of the people who used to talk down the "Leave It To Beaver" view of family life did it as a joke, not as a 5,000-word essay.

THIS USED TO BE MY PLAYGROUND.

A few people have asked me what I thought of Edmund White’s NYT magazine essay, “Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?” — which title some youngbloods will probably impudently echo, in the manner of do we have to have leftovers again? I think White, a writer I admire, was doing a job of work here, and I suspect his catalogue of rough street scenes (“rats galloping underfoot or a stickup in broad daylight on busy Christopher Street”) and his Roll Call of Great Names ("the representative figures of this New York were Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, George Balanchine, Robert Wilson, Robert Mapplethorpe” etc. etc.) have more to do with packaging (see NYTM's “related coverage” photo features) than with Wordsworthian commotion recollected in tranquillity.

But I enjoyed it anyway, of course; I enjoy any summoning of the old town as it was in my youth. I don’t get up to New York much anymore, mainly because I miss it too much to even look at it -- it just breaks my heart to be reminded that it goes on without me. But pre-gentrification New York, that’s something that does not go on, but remains as it was. It can be viewed as a gutter-glittering object of exploitation, in simulacra like that crappy CBGB movie and (I assume) the upcoming Scorsese thing and so on. But it also lives in the sustaining blood of old guttersnipe hearts like mine.

As to the question: Why do we still talk about it? I have spoken on this many times before. But allow me to make one or two more points on the subject:

One reason we talk about 70s New York is because there’s not much else to talk about. I’m sure there are plenty of exciting things going on in New York right now. I read, for example, about those painted topless ladies in Times Square, and recognize and admire their place in the time-honored New York Circle of Hype: First, someone aggressively pushes a right, and then someone else exploits that right for money (and the New York Post exploits it as part of their “Democrats bring back Son of Sam” horseshit, and so on).

All well and good. But if we are talking about the arts, and the developments in New York life that cause them to not only survive but also thrive and coalesce into movements that inform and uplift American and even world culture, someone will have to explain to me how the current era is ever going to make that happen. Mind you, that may not be the era’s fault; we are in a famously atomized social media environment, where it’s not as easy as it once was for a few critics and artists to bum-rush the show. But when your idea of the Next Big Thing is not, say, punk rock, which is still happening (albeit in a debased form) decades later, but artisanal hobo bindles from Williamsburg, then you have to at least consider the idea that the problem is not the tide of history, but you and your buddies. (Then again, maybe it is history -- they don't make that like they used to, either.)

Bigger than that, though, in the imagination of a public that still swoons for The 70s City whether they were there or not, is the freedom, I think. They don’t usually mention that in the essays and the biopics. What do you mean, freedom? Isn't safety the first freedom? Aren't we much safer in our lovely gated communities than in any city?

But when ordinary people look through the peep-show glasses at the dirty streets and the sketchy characters of 70s New York, 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.

White alludes to the fact that you could live cheap in New York back then: “…would-be writers, singers, dancers could afford to live in Manhattan’s (East, if not, West) Village, before everyone marginal was further marginalized by being squeezed out to Bushwick or Hoboken,” he says. “Face-to-face encounters are essential to a city’s vitality, even among people who aren’t sure of each other’s names, for the exchange of ideas and to generate a sense of electricity.”

To get at why we really still talk about New York in the 70s, let’s look beyond what that meant for artistic critical mass, and at what that meant for day-to-day life. Because not everyone I knew back then was an artist, but everyone I knew back then — people I befriended at CBGBs or at after-hours coke bars or in public parks or in ill-lit little apartments with the music turned up — was living where I was and as I was, and we all knew the deal. When I went to New York with some promises of couches to sleep on and $20 in my pocket, I knew I was making a trade: I would be endangered, and in some unimportant ways constrained, but I would be free. I took the trade. The first place I had of my own was a railroad flat on 11th Street between First and Second; it was so roach-infested I had to get a friend who worked in a factory to slip me some industrial foggers (the place smelled of bug spray for months after I used them, but never saw a roach again). Because all the windows were on one wall, which made fans nearly useless for drawing air through the place, and because I couldn’t afford an air conditioner (and it was on the top floor of a six-story walkup), on summer nights I would douse myself with cold water sprayed from a rubber hose in the tub in the kitchen, and immediately go lay in my single bed sopping wet. Some nights I had to get up once or twice and do it again.

It sounds like poverty, and it was — I had a job as a busboy and I still qualified for food stamps, and I didn’t have a lot of walking-around money. But it was an old-fashioned kind of poverty — the kind you could actually work your way up out of (or at least, up into a more self-sustaining kind of poverty) — and still get your kicks. I got that busboy job within ten days of coming to New York. And I was able to save money — cash from tips that I stuck under the cushions of those couches — to put down a deposit on an apartment. And that railroad flat? $125 a month. I think the monthly electric bill was like $12. I’d go to CB’s, have a few beers, go to the Kiev for pierogies after, and be down less than $20 on the night. And when I had a day off, I didn’t have to make plans — I was in New York City. I could walk out my door and be on the best vacation ever. Someone might get me high. Someone might fuck me. Someone might kill me, true. But you took the good with the bad.

This reminiscence sounds highly personal, but really, hundreds of thousands of people at the time, and millions in the aggregate, had a pretty similar experience, and I lived not just in my own private pleasure but in the jet-stream of everyone else’s. The place Edmund White describes was not just a stage on which the 70s art heroes built their careers. It wasn’t just Richard Hell’s and Chuck Close’s and Susan Sarandon’s New York. It was mine. And it was anybody’s who wanted it, pretty much, because it barely cost anything beyond the guts to live it. Maybe it’s too bad that we can’t have another punk rock scene, but it’s a fucking disaster that we can’t have that.