BRING BACK THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS.

I thought Trump was merely whining when he predicted last night's debate would be "very unfair." I should have known something was up when Mollie Hemingway pre-propagandized the debate with a lengthy hit on the liberalmedia credentials of CNBC moderator John Harwood.  Sure enough, when the event transpired the candidates were bitching about the liberalmedia not only after but during the debate. Talk about message discipline!

Conservatives gushed about it afterwards; "WHO HAD THE BEST ANTI-MEDIA SLAM OF THE DEBATE?" reads Newsbusters' Tiger Beat-style header over videos of the GOP's Bad Boys denouncing the liberalmedia. (For some reason they didn't include Ben Carson getting the crowd to boo when he was asked about the shady pyramid schemers Mannatech, which he insists he didn't work for despite documentary evidence including video. Truth is no defense when the charge is media bias.)

The punch line is, there will be plenty of other GOP debates this year (327, I think at last count) on networks that regularly wind up on Accuracy in Media's shitlist. Republicans will not boycott these events, nor redirect them to ideologically simpatico outlets like PJTV, because they're hoping someone besides the Foxbound will see them. But now that the precedent's been set, any GOP candidate can derail any line of questioning in any debate by crying bias -- and, given the nets' learned helplessness on this subject, they won't do anything about it. In fact, some of them may sweeten the deal by withdrawing their regular moderators and having actors dressed as rightwing boogeymen come up and take a punch -- for example, have Steven Crowder reprise his Lena Dunham bit (WARNING: VIDEO) and ask in a simpering voice, "Why won't you awful Republicans let me kill my baby?" Then, boy, the totally-unscripted zingers that would ensue!

The nets should give these shitheels the same treatment Sam Spade gave Joel Cairo and advise them to take it and like it. Failing that, they should bring back the League of Women Voters to run these things. Those ladies were tough enough to say no when necessary and might be able to turn this weak shit around.

UPDATE. It's happening already:

Republican presidential front-runner Ben Carson told reporters Thursday that he was reaching out to every rival campaign to lobby for changes to future debate formats.

“Debates are supposed to be established to help the people get to know the candidate,” Carson said at a news conference before a speech at Colorado Christian University. “What it’s turned into is — gotcha! That’s silly. That’s not helpful to anybody.”

MODERATOR: The first question is yours, Senator Paul. What's your favorite Reagan saying?

RAND PAUL: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

MODERATOR: I think it was actually Admiral Farragut who said that, Senator.

RAND PAUL: You people are always doing this, I claim media bias.

OTHER CANDIDATES: You tell 'em, Randy! Yeah, damned MSM! Look at me, I'm crazy! etc.

MODERATOR: I'm so sorry, Senator, you now get five minutes for zingers.

RAND PAUL: Boy, that Hillary Clinton, what a bitch, huh?

REINCE PRIEBUS, in control booth: Now we're getting somewhere!

RES IPSA LOQUITUR.

Front page at National Review:

How the GOP Can Appeal to Black Voters

Right next to it on the front page:

The Spring Valley Arrest Video Isn’t Disturbing: Here’s Why

UPDATE. At Twitter, @AndrewWoods sees what they're saying here -- African-Americans "must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the fold."

NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT NOT TO BE CRITICIZED.

On Saturday Hillary Clinton said, apparently in response to Bernie Sanders, "I haven’t been shouting, but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting." Maybe you think the jape is right on; maybe you think it's pure quasi-feminist campaign cheese. If you're National Review scold Ian Tuttle, though, you think it's a violation of your rights:

If unfettered debate about public policy is to be vouchsafed, it requires being able to criticize public officials without those criticisms being reflexively labeled “racism,” “sexism,” etc. That is a necessary condition for self-government. If getting a woman/Hispanic/transsexual into the Oval Office comes at the expense of the freedom to criticize that person without being accused of sexism/racism/transphobia, then that’s not “progress” worth making.

Sorry, buddy, there's no "freedom to criticize that person without being accused of" anything. I prefer to believe, like any other other internet blowhard, that anyone who criticizes or characterizes me negatively is wrong. But I never think -- it never would even occur to me -- that if someone calls me racist, sexist, SJW, cuckservative, totalitarian, milquetoast, Albigensian, ne'er-do-well, feller-me-lad, or any other names that I find unfair, they have made self-government impossible, much less trampled on my freedoms. Because I'm not ten years old or a conservative.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Benghazi-hearing Hillary and (in keeping with the Warner Brothers theme) the status of our friends the rightbloggers thereafter:

One thing I didn't get into much was the committee's Sidney Blumenthal fixation. As I noted Friday,  even Byron York called it a "near-obsession" because "his name was mentioned 60 times — before the first questioner had even finished." Yet Blumenthal's name was mentioned five times in York's own 865-word column, where York called him "notorious for his role as a Clinton acolyte... a provocateur and master of misdirection" -- as if to say, well, can you blame them?

Blumenthal's up there with Saul Alinsky now as a demonic figure whose name conservatives jump out from behind a bush and yell as if it will scare the voters, most of whom don't know who the hell they're talking about. Why did the committee fall for it? In part because rightbloggers made Blumenthal part of movement mythology -- hell, your grandma who gets those emails from scamsters with "Liberty" or "Freedom" in their titles has probably heard more about Sidney Blumenthal than you have.  And when it was revealed Blumenthal had an interest in a military contractor that might get work from a future post-Gaddafi government in Libya (where currently you're more likely to make money selling tourniquets), National Review announced that Blumenthal was "using his close ties to the then-secretary of state to profit from the 2011 American intervention," as if he were seen running from the scene of the crime with bags marked "$."

It's weak beer, and somewhere Dick Cheney is laughing his ass off; but guys like RedState author Moe Lane take it very seriously and, in their role as tribunes of the sheeple, demanded the committee react:

This is, in the end, about people dying. And not just Americans; Sidney Blumenthal allegedly profited off helping to start a civil war. The Democrats are focused on the absolute essentials in this situation: do the same, or you will lose. And you will have lost stupidly. We have no more time for stupid. 

Thus commanded, the committee manfully marched into the guns of derision, then went home to tell the boys they'd done their duty and collect campaign contributions. Don't forget to read the column.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Am I the only one left who loves Hank Thompson? He's ridiculous,
and this song is just absurd, but it fills me with delight -- especially 

"None of the animals had a clock/But everybody knew it was time to rock."

•    Byron York -- one is tempted to call him "poor Byron York" in this instance, but fuck him -- does his best with the exploding cigar that was the  Benghazi hearing, but his best is a passive-aggressive sulk that will convince nobody except other conservative Pity Partiers. First, in order to avoid being laughed out of all cognizance, York has to acknowledge up front that things worked out better for Clinton than for the Republicans. Then he starts making excuses: "The Benghazi Committee has made incremental advances in the public's knowledge of the circumstances of the death of four Americans in Libya on September 11, 2012," he claims. "But incremental advances — nuggets of information — don't make for dramatic hearings." Of course I, like any other subscriber to wingnut publications, have been getting BENGHAZI BOMBSHELL emails for years -- e.g., from high-end vendors like from Sharyl Attkinsson at the Daily Signal ("Benghazi Bombshell: Clinton State Department Official Reveals Details of Alleged Document Review") to "BENGHAZI BOMBSHELL COMING OUT ANY DAY: THERE IS BOUND TO BE A TREASON CHARGE!" -- so there was always drama aplenty if you consider Clinton to be Snidely Whiplash.  Similarly, York admits that the committee members' "near-obsession" with Sidney Blumenthal was a little weird, but then rushes to remind us that Blumenthal is pure evil -- indeed, "a master of misdirection" who is "probably happy to be the villain of the day, to the extent that it ensures Hillary Clinton will not be the villain of the day." See, he set it all up himself to make Republicans look bad -- O why won't anyone believe us! York finally says "the committee did find some good nuggets..." Again with the nuggets! This is exactly how you would expect someone who considers the hearings a serious inquiry into the death of four Americans to portray it. Well, on to Congressional hearings over the harsh treatment of Marine Todd.

•    Bonus Benghazi: Clinton sent out a fundraising letter based on the hearings, and at National Review Jim Geraghty sniffs this is "in poor taste." Where to begin...

•    It's at National Review and it's by Mona Charen, which is two strikes right off the bat, but I thought you might enjoy the first graf:

"It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”

Hot stuff indeed! But wait for the punchline:

Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View is author of the above comment.

Siddown! The rest is the usual Marriage-Makes-You-Rich gibberish, with only a few Charen pratfalls  to brighten it up. e.g.:

Life ain’t fair, and cannot be made perfectly fair. But it almost seems a conspiracy of silence among the college educated to keep from the working class the key secret to their success.

Rich Liberal 1: Isn't being married just the best?
Rich Liberal 2: I know! Look at this Tesla I bought with my marriage coupons!
Rich Liberal 1: They weren't going to let us refinance our mansion but I just slapped that marriage certificate down on his desk and dude was like why didn't you say so?
Bum (sidling up): Hi guys whatcha talking about.
Rich Liberal 1: Umm, Hillary Clinton.
Rich Liberal 2: Yeah we like her.
Rich Liberal 1: Def not about being married which sucks.
Rich Liberal 2: Yeah don't even man.

•    Speaking of Congressional hearings, yeah, this'll work great.

ALL IT LACKS IS A REFERENCE TO LIBERAL ELITISM.

This is the sort of thing you can just see David Harsanyi writing on a bet. "David," says his friend over the brandy and cigars at the Club, "you know how everyone wishes it were still possible to make a good living in this country with your hands and without having degrees out the yin-yang? $1000 says you can't write a column that'll convince them they don't really want that."

Sure thing! says Harsanyi:

For starters, isn’t it a bit archaic to act like assembling a car is more honorable or useful than being a teacher, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, or an engineer; working in finance; or making a living in the service industry? Perhaps there’s something about the tangibility of seeing a widget being put together by a line of workers that offers voters some affirmation that, indeed, things must be going well. But it doesn’t work that way...

Maybe he thinks the folks clamoring for these jobs are all hipsters looking to dabble in manual labor during their gap year.

In the 1950s, these kinds of jobs may have offered the security and pensions that people sought — considering the other options. Today, Americans have easier access to education and far more vocational diversity. There is no need romanticize a far less dynamic time in American history...

You may not be able to afford to send your kid to college or a new car every five years like your grandfather did, but he didn't have dynamism!

When politicians says we’ve outsourced manufacturing jobs, they mean the labor has become too expensive. Most voters probably understand that China, Mexico, Malaysia, “steal” jobs because American workers can’t compete with someone making a dollar an hour...

At least not yet!

Fact: robots are better than humans at assembling things...

It is over, puny humans! Do not struggle!

We have no clue what new industry will emerge a decade from now. The more we innovate, though, the more it seems we need human creativity and ingenuity — at least until the post-scarcity world of singularity.

When they can finally upload my brain into a globe I won't need food and shelter -- too bad for you flesh-and-blood suckers!

I can see Harsanyi handing this to his friend and asking, "Do I win?" and the friend pulling a sheaf of C-notes from petty cash and saying with a gentle smile, "Well, I'm convinced."

HEIMAT ASSHAT.

At National Review Kevin D. Williamson says there are racist nationalist parties, and there are non-racist national parties, but it's all good because they're all nationalist:

I’m not sure how I feel about the Swiss People’s Party. Some of their advertising and rhetoric makes me think that they don’t seem like an entirely splendid bunch of guys: Their most famous poster depicts a bunch of white sheep literally kicking a black sheep over the border. One detects some nasty undertones. But are they wrong for liking the Swissness of Switzerland? I like it a great deal, and it seems strange to begrudge them the same feeling about what is, after all, their country.

"Swissness" means "whiteness," apparently, and who could be against that except someone who isn't white or what mah pappy used to call a nonwhite-lover. Williamson also compares love of Swissness to the desire of the Japanese not to have Frenchness get in their Japaneseness:

If you were to visit Tokyo and go looking for some Roppongi-style adventure and maybe one of those weirdly delicious curried cutlet things or a visit to a Shinto shrine, but arrived to find nothing but sallow men in black turtlenecks sipping espresso in smoky cafes and reading Baudelaire, nothing but pate and baguettes and Gothic cathedrals and everybody speaking French, you’d surely be feeling that something had been lost, and that that something was Japaneseness.

So that explains the Japanese skinheads! Well, as long as they keep the stink of Gauloises out of the Shibuya Crossing.

Williamson also predicts that he will be called racist for this, which these days is a badge of honor among his kind, to which he is welcome, though I think his problem is more an overeager and ill-considered contrariness, i.e. being an asshole.

UPDATE. Booman thinks I'm being too generous, and he's got a point:

The Swiss and the Japanese don't have the same history with immigration [as the U.S.], and they haven't historically had the same labor needs. But, here's the key, if they need immigrant labor then they need to adapt their cultural expectations rather than form nationalist parties based on the idea of preserving their cultural identity. It's okay to be proud of your Japaneseness or Swissness or Frenchness, but once your country has to become diverse for economic reasons, you lose the right to expect that everything will remain as before. 

What happens is that some people always figure out that there's political power to be had in representing and stoking people's discomfort with change. Racism is how this manifests itself... 

So, yeah, it's kind of a natural human response to immigration that some percentage of people will feel very uncomfortable, but the people who live off and heighten that discomfort are worse than mere contrarians. They're sociopathic manipulators whose net effect is basically evil.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the recent Democratic debate, and the odd reactions of the rightwing press -- including the puzzling insistence of some that Hillary Clinton is every bit the socialist Bernie Sanders is.

Whenever "Clinton" and "Socialism" are mentioned, Jonah Goldberg is summoned, like a Candyman who actually wants candy and keeps running his hook uselessly through bins of Smarties going "STUPID HOOK." Goldberg starts by making a wan joke about what a drag it was having to watch the debate ("I really resented watching the Democratic debate. I watched because it’s part of my job") when he could have been, oh, seeing if lying on three mattresses is more comfortable than lying on one, and if that maid weren't such a lazy little Mexican he could have found out.

Then Goldberg complains Hillary didn't have it hard enough because Chafee, Webb, and O'Malley were "like Mohammed, Jagdish, Sidney, and Clayton from Animal House." (The foreigners, the nerd, and the blind cripple, remember? Hyuk!) He compares Bernie Sanders to Alec Guinness in The Bridge Over the River Kwai because, Christ who can tell, maybe his Metaphor Butler was in the hospital this week and all he could remember was Guinness looked rilly beat too, just like Sanders, and fart. And of course Goldberg is mad that Sanders helped Clinton out with her email mishegas.

But he's especially pissed that Clinton called for a "new New Deal." Aha, he cries -- these liberals always want a new New Deal. See, Peter Beinart once called Obama a new New Deal! And in the few nanoseconds Obama had sufficient Congressional support to pass it, he gave us Obamacare, and that didn't solve everything (look, here's Megan McArdle telling us that it's a disaster -- whoops, that was years ago: Now she just says that it's not all that) so ob-viously "The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves."

Finally Goldberg cries "it's all just so exhausting" -- Facilities! This stupid pen made my hand all crampy! -- and throws himself on his farting couch, murmurring:

And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

He doesn't know why he bothers. Oh, right -- legacy pledge!  Brightening, Goldberg muses that "pledge" reminds him of Lemon Pledge, which reminds him of Country Time Lemonade Mix and how good it tastes poured over a quart of sherbet. Goldberg triumphantly scrawls a shopping list for Carmelita. The struggle continues!

Oh, if you got distracted, please still read the column.

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?