THE NEW BLOOD-'N'-GUTS.

Fresh from his bizarre WOT slash-fic "Wildman" story about how a real-man President will bomb the Middle East into powder and win a grateful nation's respect, Schlichter is here to tell us "Why the ‘Jon Stewarting’ of America’s Youth Is Awful For Political Discourse." Right out of the gate:

Of all of the many plagues Obama’s reign has unleashed upon America...

Come on, tell me that wasn't impressive.

...the way he and his TV acolytes have empowered stupid people to smugly share their lefty wisdom may be the most tiresome. Firmly resistant to facts, evidence, and truth, his fans have been liberated to unleash their numbing dumb without the shame at their own ignorance that once would have deterred them from sounding off. As a result, America becomes a little more annoying every time some aspiring assistant barista tweets out a link to a YouTube clip titled, “John Oliver TOTALLY DESTORYS racist Ben Carson!”...

There's culture war, and then there's culture total war, and Schlichter's approach here is, like that of Wildman and President Cruz, indiscriminate carpet-bombing. He rages that, because his enemies "can’t argue, they seek to silence," but instead of explaining silence how? he leaps for the throats of the "Millennial doofuses" because they "have crummy jobs, crushing student debt, and no future. They have zero money or fame..." Not like when he was a rich and famous kid! It's like Peter Boyle in Joe underwent a Flowers for Algernon transformation, then took a bunch of meth.

No one thinks this stuff is actually funny; it’s all about solidarity. You never hear real laughs on these political shows, just cheers of approval.

You'll laugh when Schlichter tells you to laugh -- like in his previous column, "Let’s All Laugh As Liberalism Commits Ritual Suicide On Campus" ("And we will sit back and point and laugh as the weak-willed, spineless liberal losers of academia abase themselves before their whimpering student bodies..."). But here's where it really gets weird --

I recently posted a column on a plan to destroy ISIS which involved actually destroying ISIS. One gentleman in the Washington Post pointed out some flaws in my ideas, I think incorrectly, but certainly fairly. This is called an “argument.” But the Jon Stewarties had to pipe up too. I don’t expect them to be retired Army colonels or War College graduates, but I do expect them to know some basic facts about the subject before weighing in. Yet their ignorance was no deterrent.

The "gentleman in the Washington Post" is to all appearances Daniel Drezner, who treated Schlichter's Wildman column as a serious proposal and politely offered a conclusion ("To put it gently, that’s a horrible assumption"). Maybe Schlichter was holding a gun on him.

So: Schlichter apparently regards his macho fantasy as the equivalent of a paper from the Army War College and, when people make fun of it, he fact-checks their jokes -- or rather alludes to facts against which he has, at some undisclosed location, checked and found the jokes wanting.

Schlichter calls to mind one of my old favorites, Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. Peters does most of his fulminating on TV these days, alas, and I've missed his jacked-up columns. But Schlichter has come into his own and may serve as my go-to military lunatic now as we head toward Gulf War III.

STRANGE NEW RESPECT.

One thing I didn't make too much of in this week's column (though I teased it out a bit here) is the rush among conservatives to defend Donald Trump's ravings about Muslims. Instapundit stringer Ed Driscoll pushes the line that, though there mmmmmaybe weren't "thousands and thousands" of Muslim-Americans cheering 9/11 in Jersey City, Muslims were cheering in the Middle East, which proves media bias, therefore Trump is right where it counts -- that is, he could, in Driscoll's estimation, beat Hillary Clinton (to whom Driscoll compares Trump, in the fine, incoherent tradition of modern conservatives eager to tar their opponents by free-association):

Both [Clinton and Trump] in their own way are prone to speak in outrageous hyperbole because they have little fear of serious repercussions from their wild utterances. But as Steyn writes, given a choice between two crazed exaggerations — one where “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated on September 11th and another where “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” and given our current president’s ongoing escape into fantasyland, who would you count on to keep you safe in the coming years?

Sounds like Driscoll's thinking the once-unthinkable about Candidate Trump. Oh, and guess who else is? National Review's Rich Lowry, who once teased Trump that Carly Fiorina had cut his balls off, has a column up called "Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate." "Jacksonian" is wingnut code for "white people who don't give a shit who has to die to keep their asses in Barcaloungers," and Lowry is downright respectful toward its new avatar:

Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.

It is tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.

Cutting your balls one minute, sucking them the next, these people.

This Strange New Respect for Trump owes much to the temper of the times: Since the Paris attacks, conservatives have been doing their damnedest to re-instill in voters the 9/11 fear that stood them so well in the Bush years. Though they have had their problems with Trump in the past, Il Douche is great for fear-mongering and projecting an image of Making Things Happen By Being Rich and Barking Orders (or, as conservatives know it, strength).

But I think there's more to it than that. Even Trump's non-fans are being extraordinarily gentle with him. Others have noted how media outlets are reluctant to call Trump a liar even when he self-evidently lies. At Commentary, John Podhoretz talks about all the "entirely impressionistic memories" that went on around in New York shortly after 9/11 (though I vas dere, Cholly, and don't recall anything like that), and compares Trump's Jersey City cheering-Muslims bullshit to that:

So, to sum up: There were many hysterical and made-up stories afoot in New York City during that week and the weeks after. People believed anything they were told, and others simply made stuff up... Which suggests not so much that Trump deliberately told a lie in order to rev up a crowd – but rather that he’s very, very gullible.

Actually, Trump claiming to see something that reflects outrageously badly on Muslim-Americans when it didn't actually happen is the opposite of gullibility -- it's mendacity counting on the gullibility of others. It's not even like Podhoretz is covering for some idiot relative with a penchant for story-telling -- he's defending Donald fucking Trump with this well-ya-gotta-understand guff.

I think they've tipped over from Trump-can't-win-if-we-all-growl-at-him to this watery state, soon to be followed by "What sort of President will Trump be?" articles. There are only three things that motivate these people to this kind of behavior: love (ha); fear (def); and money (or the promise thereof in the Treasury-looting Trump Administration).

UPDATE. Allow me to quote me! From Nov. 4, after the CNBC-was-mean-to-us scandal:

As I've said before, in these guys' world truth is no defense against accusations of media bias. I'm not sure the Trump juggernaut can endure long enough to panic some of them into a Strange New Respect for Il Douche, but it would almost be worth a Trump Administration to see it. I mean, the country's fucked anyway, right?

UPDATE 2. Jim Geraghty is trying to preserve some plausible deniability on the Jersey City Jihad thing. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds has his own, rickety spin:

JIM GERAGHTY: Why the Facts of American Muslims and 9/11 Matter. “We cannot be a party or a movement that gets its understanding of the world from chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo.” 

I dunno, it worked okay for Obama. And I think anger at that fact is why so many people don’t care about Trump’s various excesses. You want no rules? Okay! No rules it is! That’s not good for the country, of course, but then, few of Obama’s legacies are.

Not only is Trump Obama's fault, so are "chain-e-mails from Uncle Leo." But this is of course an old racket for both Geraghty and Reynolds.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers's mortal enemies, the Syrian refugees, and why what looks like pangs of conscience in their xenophobic columns are actually the rhetorical equivalent of gas pains. The apparent agreement of ordinary citizens with their anti-refugee gush is depressing for a  number of reasons -- not only because it represents a shameful reversal of the best American values, but also because it recalls the engineered panic of the Iraq War run-up. If this groundhog sees his shadow, we get ten more years of war.

As usual, due to my meticulous attention to compositional integrity, some corkers had to be left out of the mix -- like this stop-the-presses headline from Fire Andrea Mitchell:

Syrian refugees coming to US automatically put on welfare

They could crawl up out of the surf, watch their hair in a public toilet, and get straight to a job interview, but no! Coddling's what I call it.

Also, there were more apparatchiks than Byron York and John Hinderaker weeping over poor Donald Trump and how the media was trying to make him look like some kind of Nazi -- e.g., PJ Media's Michael van der Galien, "CNN Selectively Edits Donald Trump's 'Muslim Registry' Comments to Make Him Look Like an Anti-Muslim Bigot" (presumably written before Trump kept agreeing with what he was allegedly tricked into saying, but with this bunch who knows), and National Review's Jim Geraghty who, like Hinderaker, admitted it was weird that Trump claimed stadium-size crowds of Jersey Muslims were cheering the 9/11 attacks, but then shifted the blame to "certain conspiracy-theorizing liberals" who "offered a nonsensical charge" that Muslims, or at least some sort of Arabs, were not cheering... in Jerusalem. So see, both sides do it -- Trump says Muslim-Americans cheered out of hatred of America, liberals say Palestinians didn't, so let's split the difference and invade Iran.

Anyway, column's up for your delectation.

UPDATE. Wow, Hinderaker's going all-out in his defense of Trump, harassing the Washington Post over the relative meanings of "a number," "several," and "thousands." Maybe Hindrocket's bucking for a job in the Trump Administration as head of the Department of Bullshit. He should stay alert -- I expect Glenn Reynolds will nose his way to the front first.

UPDATE 2. Ann Althouse thinks Trump may have seen thousands of Muslims, even though others didn't, because he had access to a "high-floor penthouse in Manhattan" where "I presume he has telescopes to gaze out upon the glorious long views." Trump did say he saw it "on television," but maybe he had to stand on his television set to get to the telescope. Anything's possible, right?

The racket is this: Pretend Trump slandering Muslim Americans is really just a misunderstanding, instigated by the liberal media to further their evil pro-Muslim agenda. Their fans already believe the media is evil, and probably already hate Muslims, so it's an easy twofer.

Oh, and later on, write thousands of words about how students are only pretending racism exists.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The greatest movie awards song medley of all time.

•   It's a small blessing, I guess, that most of the other Republican candidates have distanced themselves from Donald Trump's Muslim registry idea. All it really means is that these shitheels calculate Americans would not approve of it, but that's still positive -- it's when they start calculating that Americans would approve such a thing that things are grim. (You know, like the way many Republicans talk about torture as if it's an American value, instead of something that, once upon a time, we insisted we didn't do.) Of course there's always one skunk at the picnic:

"But the mosque piece of it is the controversial piece, so where do you stand on that?" [Megyn] Kelly jumped in to ask. 

"Well, I think it’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place, whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site, any place where radicals are being inspired," the senator [Marco Rubio] said. "The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs."

I don't know whether he's just that dumb or whether he or one of his campaign people decided this was the best way to distinguish him from the rest of the field on the subject. Well, he's got Breitbart.com's John Nolte on board anyway:

Proving once again that the DC Media lies are no longer effective when it comes to emotionally blackmailing Republican politicians, presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) picked up right where frontrunner Donald Trump left off on the issue of closing radical mosques.

I know Nolte represents some kind of constituency, but won't most of them be thrown out of their polling places when they insist on marking their ballots with pistol fire?

•   The perfect anti-Obama froth is an unachievable Platonic idea, but the second graf of this David Gelernter full-body thrash at National Review (the classy conservative magazine!) gets closer than most:

The reviews are in: the whole world, friend and foe, left and right, east and west, north and south, understands the President of the United States to be a naïf and a fool. The outstanding question is only whether he is a good man over his head (as the global Left seems to believe) or — as the evidence suggests — he has always looked at America and Americans with snide condescension. That seems to be his favorite emotion.

I know what you're thinking. Alas, there is no link to support the claim that everyone, left or right, feels the way David Gelernter feels, and a good thing, too, as that would qualify as a genuine mental health crisis. I think the little sputtering side-rage at the end -- "that seems to be his favorite emotion" -- really makes it; you're not really frothing unless you flail out at least one irrelevancy. But your mileage may vary. Next!

BOOBY PRIZE.

You have probably seen some of the rightwing hate-ons for Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me in recent months. National Review has posted what seems like dozens of them; my favorite is by David French, entitled "White Liberals Love Black Radicals — That’s Why They Love Ta-Nehisi Coates." (You can guess.)

Expect the sputtering rage to redouble now, because Coates' tome won the National Book Award yesterday. The first volley, which will be hard to beat, comes from an email newsletter called Prufrock from the The American Conservative. The item is by Micah Mattix:

The National Book Award winners were announced yesterday, and, of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates won the non-fiction award for Between the World and Me. Sigh: http://bit.ly/1NF58zj. I have read a few poems from Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the poetry award, and was not particularly impressed. (I haven’t read Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, which won the fiction award, so I can’t comment on it, but the reviews are interesting.) Anyway, if you know the Koch brothers, can you please tell them that a $500,000 gift to start a book award that honors actual literary merit, not identity politics, would do America a hell of a lot of good?

I've often thought that's just what they should do, and if the Kochs are big enough suckers to fund it then why not?  We can be sure "honors actual literary merit, not identity politics" is code for  "lifetime achievement award for Tom Wolfe," and that the inaugural field of Ayns or Ronnies or whatever will be swept by Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, and Kurt Schlichter, creator of "The Wildman." Shortly thereafter, the budget will be repurposed to fund Ted Cruz robocalls, and the awards themselves will be made available to any customer for each thousand dollars he spends at Goldline.

I'D RATHER BE RIGHT.

Obama said this about Republicans who are trying to protect America from pathetic refugees:

"Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America," Obama said of Republicans. "At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me."

Also:

"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate," Obama said... 

"When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land that feeds the ISIL narrative."

Naturally I am very pleased to see this, not only because Obama is usually much too nice to these assholes, but also and mainly because it's a refreshingly strong defense of common sense in the normally common-sense-free War on Whatever. When was the last time you heard any other top-tier elected official call bullshit like this?

Nice Guy Democrats like Kevin Drum think it's a bad idea, though, because mindless fear is a "political winner"; presumably we should all get on board with terror-hysteria so as to keep the love of the people. Say, Joe Lieberman's still alive, maybe he can run for President.

I realize that, as circumscribed as he's been, Obama has accomplished some good things for the country. The trouble is, they're mostly half-measures. Take Obamacare. We only have this shaky Rube Goldberg system because the insurers and the AMA had to get paid off or national healthcare would never fly -- Senators and Congressmen have to get their contributions from somewhere, y'know! Single payer has been and remains the choice of the American people, but in the name of prudence and moderation we have instead a system nobody's entirely happy with, and because they're not happy Republicans get to exploit it while scheming to bring back their preferred Pay or Die healthcare system.

This is what you get when you've been thinking half-loaves so long you treat whole loaves as some sort of Bridge Too Far. What would the American people do with a whole loaf? Isn't there a danger that they'll choke?

Now Republicans are yearning so bad for another war that they're willing to use France, home of socialized medicine and the Axis of Weasels, as their casus belli. (Never mind that France has decided to go ahead and take more Syrian refugees.) Should I, in an attempt at comity, acknowledge their imaginary concerns, and then the next set of imaginary concerns, until finally I'm saying well, if the U.N. is willing...? Fuck it.  I didn't go for it in 2003 and I'm not going for it now. Besides, look at Some Guy from RedState reacting to Obama --

It takes a particular level of gall to be on foreign soil and criticize your political opponents. It is even worse when one is on foreign soil and openly treats political opponents with a level of contempt and anger that would be better served directed at terrorists. President Obama went there and after calling the terrorist attacks in Paris a “setback” and getting pissy with the press on Monday, has begun to lash out at GOP Governors...

I know, art of the possible and all that, but I'm not making common cause with this douchebag. Like Christy Mahon said, if it's a poor thing to be lonesome it's worse, maybe, to go mixing with the fools of the earth. I'll just keep on as I have been, and if God is kind I'll be around in a few years to hear Megan McArdle explain that I was just lucky. And who knows? By then maybe a few more citizens will have caught on.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting approach, from "Captain" Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Predictably, the President continues to cheap-shot his opposition via straw-men arguments (while overseas) while demanding we believe what has been proven to be a false narrative, rather than come home to deal with the crisis with actual dialogue and some honesty. The person who is serving refugees worst at the moment is Barack Obama.

I can see "Captain" Morrissey dressed as a simple dogface in WWII, leaning down to the orphaned Dondi with a Hershey bar: "Ya gotta understand, kid -- we didn't want to leave you to die, even though we kept saying that we did. But that Obama -- he went to the Philippines, and he was mean to us! When you're starving to death, remember who's really responsible. [Dondi reaches for the candy bar; Morrissey snatches it back] Psych!"

UPDATE 2. SWEET JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY ROD DREHER IS ACTUALLY DIGGING DEVIL LYRICS OUT OF EAGLES OF DEATH SONGS:

Evil is not a game. Evil is not to be messed with. If you call up the devil, sometimes, he will come.

Then he gets into it with his commenters about whether "Sympathy for the Devil" also summons evil. If you guessed "No, 'cause Rod likes the Stones," you guessed right: "And the Stones song was inspired by Bulgakov’s novel 'The Master and Margarita'. It’s not literally expressing sympathy for the devil, but rather disclosing his familiar presence throughout the history’s human atrocities..." It's a still life watercolor, of a now-late afternoon... Really, what's the level after self-parody? Escape velocity?

UPDATE 3. Perhaps he was inspired by Kurt Schlichter's widely-mocked WOT slash-fic, in which Republicans bomb everybody and win the day -- but not before "ISIS sleepers in America had struck at shopping malls" and, while those gunless losers in Los Angeles and Chicago got mass-murdered, "the killers in Phoenix and Dallas had been unable to murder more than a half dozen because of armed citizens..." Whatever the inspiration, Erick Erickson popped a gunboner:

After Paris, I Want to Take My Gun to Star Wars

Ain't even kidding.

...But just to be safe, I plan not to go to opening day. My theater will not let me take my gun with me. There are none in my area that would allow it. So I will wait for a late showing after the crowds have died down. People can scoff and claim this means the terrorists have won. Honestly though, thinking about safe and unsafe situations is something we should all do anyway. If the opening of “Dark Knight Rises” could spark a nut a shoot up a theater, I expect opening day of the biggest film premiere in modern history could do just as much, if not more. Besides, I don’t mind spoilers, so I will wait.

Frankly, I assumed Erickson never went out in public areas where walking was required. Can't he just download a script and act the thing out with his action figures?

CULTURE COPS PATROL PARIS.

Speaking of that awful Mollie Hemingway column, one of her Paree peeves is that people aren't mourning the right way. For one thing, they play and listen to "Imagine" by John Lennon. Though she admits people get some comfort from the song, the culture cop within her cannot approve, because she finds it "embarrassingly juvenile as well as godless and communistic." Why can't Parisians go around howling Dies Irae and beating their breasts like her?

At National Review, Stephen L. Miller also disapproves of "Imagine," and of that Eiffel Tower-peace sign thing that's been going around. Like Hemingway, he acknowledges (or has been encouraged by his programmers to acknowledge) that the traumatized masses like this sort of thing, but he asks that they stop sniffling and listen to his critique: "Spreading a cool graphic can bring a moment of comfort, but it also assists in placating the masses to the point where they do not acknowledge or address the cause of the attacks." Then he goes on about emojis and The Culture and whatnot.

Back at The Federalist, M.G. Oprea takes the biscuit, though. She bitches out Charlie fucking Hebdo for not responding appropriately to terrorism with their funnies:

In a cartoon, they discussed the importance of naming one’s enemies, and in the next breath said our enemies are “those who love death.” Certainly. But in this case, that moniker belongs to militant Islam.

God knows what they think would be appropriate -- maybe something like Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" video, only with lots of ragheads exploding, culminating in a speech by Paul Wolfowitz. I guess they think when we all get back to 9/11land, they'll get sinecures in the Department of Judeo-Christian Values propaganda division, and churn out scolds by the carload. Then, by God, they'll "win" the "culture"!

HE CALLS THAT RELIGION BUT I KNOW HE'S GOIN' TO HELL WHEN HE DIES.

As always happens after a terror attack, we're seeing a lot of Christians like those asshole Governors  and  Rev. Mike Huckabee ("'It's time to wake up and smell the falafel,' Huckabee told Fox News' Bret Baier... 'We are importing terrorism'") reinterpreting the Golden Rule to conform more closely to Republican policy, i.e. the Good Samaritan was a schmuck.

At The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway thinks we have no business noticing this if we're not in the Moral Majority:

One of the hottest responses to the Parisian terror attacks was to not just stop talking about ISIS by talking about all the refugees you care about more than the other guy. And one of the most popular ways to do that was by referencing Mary and Joseph not finding a room at an inn when they traveled to Bethlehem for the census. 

So this abortion enthusiast [Jill Filopivic], for instance, offered: "This refusing to offer refuge to fleeing Syrians reminds me of a story, something about a pregnant couple and innkeepers w/ no room?" 

An “ultra-liberal gay atheist university professor from Massachusetts” wondered “How many conservatives who now turn away desperate Middle-Easterners seeking refuge will soon be putting up a Nativity?”...

Like you, I love being lectured about human decency by people who defend Planned Parenthood. But since when did liberals decide the Bible should be the basis of public policy? Imagine the implications for marriage law!

Put it this way: Though I fled the Catholicism in which I was raised long ago, I have retained what the snake-handlers call a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That is, though I stopped believing he was God, I haven't abandoned the Golden Rule. Maybe it's just a sentimental attachment -- fish don't know they're wet and all that. But I think of it more as one of the legacies of our civilization, like Shakespeare or Mozart, that affirms its truth whenever you revisit it in the right spirit.

Hemingway finds that insufficient -- how can you be a real Christian if you don't go to her church, or are gay or pro-choice? But really, fuck her. He doesn't have a patent on morality. She doesn't even have a patent on Jesus. She's just got a badge and thinks it means she has a jurisdiction.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Paris and how it's the fault of Democrats and soft-hearted Europeans who think refugees are human beings who should not be left to starve or drown. On this subject rightbloggers were an embarrassment of riches, not to mention a plain embarrassment, and some of their offenses, though unsuitable for my immediate thesis, deserve a wider airing. For example, while I could work in the National Review writers who perceived Syrian refugees as just another breed of Messican to throw out of white people's countries, the ravings of Jim Talent were sui generis and had to be omitted. His literal nut graf:

We know that these groups are extremely media savvy, that they watch what our government, and the European governments, are doing. When our President declares red lines and doesn’t enforce them, they notice. When the Congress waters down the Patriot Act, they notice.

Take that, Rand Paul!

When America wins a war in Iraq and the president decides not to leave a base there because he wants to “nation build at home”, they notice. When they kill our ambassador and personnel in Libya, and the administration’s top officials call it a spontaneous reaction to a video, they notice...

Wow, a Paris-#Benghazi connection! Someone's getting a bonus check.

Meanwhile Jim Moran has got out in front of the pack and is yelling at the French for not being jingoistic enough.

Some of these young intellectuals will be mugged by reality and wake up to the truth. It happened here after 9/11. PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon was one such leftist whose eyes were opened on 9/11. Christopher Hitchens was another.

I used to consider myself a socialist but thanks to 11/13 I'm outraged at Algeria.

But you sense something even more discouraging: a loss of energy in defending their heritage.

True, the French have sent bombers after ISIS, but they haven't picked out a totally irrelevant nation to invade and spend a trillion dollars destroying -- clearly they have a civilizational death wish!

In 1940, Hitler was able to literally walk through the French army because the nation had been so traumatized by the horror of World War I that they had lost the psychic energy to protect themselves. 

You get the same feeling of hopelessness from many Frenchmen today.

Get ready for Freedom Fries II.

UPDATE. More of this now:

Whenever I see this stuff, I can't help it, I think of Say You Love Satan.

UPDATE 2. "Governors of 4 U.S. states say no to admitting Syrian refugees." Every one of these guys a "Christian," natch.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

THE YAM IS THE POWER THAT BE

•   The right-wing commentariat has gone absolutely bonkers over the college kids with their microaggressions and their safe spaces and whatnot -- especially since the Missouri crisis got a significant number of black people involved. It's like S.W.I.N.E. meets the Black Panthers! Hence, headlines like "The First Amendment is Dying" (National Review), "The Self-Destruction of the American University" (Weekly Standard), "A Generation that Hates Free Speech" (Commentary), etc. NR drama queen David French has a good one: Before inviting his fellow nuts to purge the universities of liberal taint ("Conservatives possess the power of the federal purse... It’s time for a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left"), he tells this cautionary tale of the commie campus and what it did to a friend's kid:

Years ago, I left my law firm — where I worked as a commercial litigator — to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process on campus, first as president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), then as director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. As I left, a friend asked why I’d give up my practice to take on higher-education reform. He was incredulous. His daughter had just been accepted to an elite college, he’d just visited, and he found the school to be everything he imagined — expensive, yes, but beautiful, prestigious, and fun.

In less than a year, he apologized. He understood my career choice. His daughter had come home for the holidays, transformed. The vibrant, joyful Christian girl who’d left for school had returned sullen and depressed. She hated her family’s values, she resented her parents, and she was obviously drinking too much. The school had stripped down her value system — all in the name of “critical thinking” — and replaced it with angry groupthink. Life and hope were replaced with fear and loathing. A social-justice warrior was born.

The kid went to college and rejected her family's values. Obviously they should have sent her to a Christian finishing school instead of an "elite college." Now it'll take a shitload of reprogramming to get her to sing hymns and hate paupers again! [shakes fist] Liberal academia, you have made a powerful enemy! We won't rest until Yale and all those radical hotbeds teach nothing but Reagan, God and Jesus!

•   I'll tell you the real problem with the kids today. Many years ago I lived at 174 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. You'd think there'd be a plaque there, but no. Instead, according to the New Yorker, there is this:

Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, bad-taste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu...

I weep for this generation.

•   Real quick, for theater fans in New York: The Ivo van Hove production of A View from The Bridge is stateside now. I saw a simulcast of it from London some months back. I'm always nervous when a classic text gets the whoopee treatment from an ambitious director, and when the actors came out barefoot into what looked like an oversized bocce pit, I steeled for the worst. But it turns out turning the dial up one or two notches on the subtext, and even getting a little Grotowksi with it, actually helps this already-weird play a great deal, especially with brave actors like these embodying the furies. I bought it all, including the quasi-choral handling of the climax, and when it was over I felt like I'd been somewhere and I don't mean Red Hook. Recommended.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S SCHOOL DAYS.

All the cool conservative kids are talking about how college student activists are the new Hitler. Since Jonah Goldberg has already established that all liberals are already double-Hitler, infinity, he has to go another way. So:

Campus Commotions Show We’re Raising Fragile Kids 

...Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That’s how we learn. But what happens when play is micro-managed? St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy. 

Free play — tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at the park, etc. — is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, “we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful, cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts.”

The rise in “helicopter parenting” and the epidemic of “everyone gets a trophy” education are another facet of the same problem. We’re raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.

Whereas Goldberg is dumb and mean, but also muy macho (in a sedentary sort of way) because he was raised right in the rough-and-tumble New York City political operative's kid scene. So that today's social-justice sissies may feel bad at what they missed, here are some vignettes from Goldberg's childhood:

Young Goldberg at a playmate's carpeted rooftop playground, getting up a game of Firing Line: Okay, you be Michael Kinsley -- just act like a creepy faggot -- and I'll be William F. Buckley Junior! (grunts) Shoot, I can't get my legs to cross! OK, forget it, let's play HUAC -- I'll be Whittaker Chambers and you -- hey, where's everyone going?

Young Goldberg leans out the window of his penthouse, yells at black people: THEY SAY THAT SHAFT'S A BAD MOTHER -- (ducks behind sofa; forty minutes later goes back to window) SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

Young Goldberg goes politely up to the line of bums waiting outside H&H for stale bagels; sotto voce: Hey guys, five bucks if you  do my Geography homework for me. (A bum steals his wallet; Goldberg runs home to his mother, who wipes away his tears and says, "Gee, that's terrible, kid. You want a cigarette?")

Plus the Goldbergs weren't on welfare and earned everything they had, fart.

UPDATE. In comments, DN Nation, considering Goldberg's compliant of an "epidemic of  'everyone gets a trophy' education" -- "Who do these educators think they are, anyway? Regnery Publishing?"

SISSY FUSS; SHRUG.

Some people are dealing with the age of BlackLivesMatter worse than others. At City Journal, which usually disparages cities only insofar as they allow black people to walk around free, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson of the Mexican-Stolen Chainsaw is allowed to disparage cities in toto because they are filled with sissy liberals, whereas the country, where he lives part-time, is filled with chesty men of noble purpose:

Rural living historically has encouraged independence—and it still does, even in the globalized and wired twenty-first century. Other people aren’t always around to ensure that water gets delivered (and drained), sewage disappears, and snow is removed. For the vast majority of Americans, these and other concerns are the jobs of government bureaucracy and its unionized public workforce. Not so in rural areas, where autonomy and autarky—not narrow specialization—are necessary and fueled by an understanding that machines and tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place. Such constant preparedness nurtures skeptical views about the role and size of government, in which the good citizen is defined as someone who can take care of himself.

That's how Jonah Goldberg got so conservative -- harvesting Cheetos in the noonday sun! Hanson seems to hope his message will spread far and wide and reverse a trend, which he notes with alarm, of Americans moving away from red-state garden spots like Fritters, Alabama and into the debauched Democratic cities. But, as Steve Allen altered the old song years ago, how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm? And Hanson doesn't have a lot of tools for the job, alas (perhaps because they were stolen by Mexicans): he is dependent as usual on hoary wingnut tropes, in this case Sandra Fluke, The Life of Julia, and even that most risible of reactionary tropes Pajama Boy to get his story across:

Pajama Boy’s smirk and his message of arrested development and dependence, even if a con, offered a damning portrayal of what millions of urbanites now see as cool: getting up late, staying undressed, and sipping childhood drinks. America’s Marlboro Man he wasn’t.

No childhood drinks for VDH! And apparently no socialistic public water service either -- only pure well water replenishes his precious bodily fluids: "At my house, I worry constantly about whether the well will go dry," he tells us. "I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 PM, I go to the door armed." Guess Mexicans must be after his water, too.

One wonders why he spends half his time in the urban wastelands at all  -- perhaps, like many of the sissies he disparages, for the money? Or maybe it's a psychological issue. Attend this plaintive passage:

Half the week, when I live in downtown Palo Alto, I have no idea who else lives in the high-rise apartments—and no interest in finding out. I could be a felon or a saint and no one on the street knows or cares. That the rest of the time I live in the same house on the same farm where my great-great-grandparents lived is of no interest. I could dye my hair green and pierce my nose and the reaction would be “so what”—not “Old Victor Hanson out there on Mountain View Avenue finally went crazy.”

You can imagine Hanson walking the streets of Palo Alto, the heedless sea of humanity coursing around him, and thinking, "I could dye my hair green, pierce my nose -- no one would say a word!" Who knows what else he could do! That saloon he just passed is full of harlots, with only liberal sissies to keep them company. And in the alley, bums who would not be missed if they wound up in the river. If he can just get to the lamppost and back without succumbing...

Hanson also has one up at National Review inspired by that study of white working-class people in trouble. Of course he blames the "'hands up, don’t shoot,' Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set," and takes care to let us know that black people get all the breaks:

As a professor at California State University, Fresno, over some 21 years, I had hundreds of conversations with working-class white kids from Merced to Bakersfield, who had stellar academic records in the humanities and who wished to go to top law schools or Ph.D. programs. I ended up offering them roughly the following caveat: “I’m afraid the chances of you as a white male from Fresno State being admitted to a top program are almost nil.” I was being neither alarmist nor nihilist, but simply reflecting the experience of my own lobbying efforts for brilliant students to gain admittance to top-ranked graduate programs.

Which is why university faculties and corporate boardrooms are chock-full of black people, while whitey must earn his living by the sweat of his brow. Unless he has a sweet half-the-week-in-the-city gig.

IF YOU'VE GOT A TASTE FOR TERROR, TAKE CARSON TO THE PROM.

There's something perfect about this latest Ben Carson "vindication." Carson was questioned, you may recall, by the Wall Street Journal for his story about winning $10 for being "the most honest student in class." That award came, he said, in this way: His class had been told that their examination books had burned up and they had to retake a test--

So I, along with 150 other students, returned to the designated auditorium where our test awaited us. Only it was a markedly different test. The questions were incredibly difficult, if not impossible to answer based on the lectures and reading assignments. 

"Forget it," I heard one girl say to another. "Let's go back and study this. We can say we didn't read the notice. Then when theygive us the test, we'll be ready." The two left the auditorium. Immediately, three others packed up and left. Within ten minutes, half the class had left, and within a half hour, I was the only student left. Like the others, I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice and couldn't like and say I hadn't. I just decided to do my best and pray to God to help me figure out what to write. 

Suddenlt, the auditorium door opened noisily. It was the professor, with a photographer from the Yale Daily News in tow. 

"What's going on?" I asked. 

"A hoax," the professor smiled.. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in class. And that's you. Here." 

As the photographer snapped my picture, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. Clearly a gift from God, but I was about to receive an even better one.

Now BuzzFeed has found a guy who says --

"...I immediately said, to my wife and friend, ‘That was the prank we played at the Record! And Ben Carson was in the class,’” said [Curtis] Bakal, who noted he wasn’t actually present during the taking of the fake test. “We did a mock parody of the Yale Daily News during the exam period in January 1970, and in this parody we had a box that said: ‘So-and-so section of the exam has been lost in a fire. Professor so-and-so is going to give a makeup exam.’” 

“We got a room to do the test in and one of us from the Record impersonated a proctor to give the test,” he said... 

Because he did not witness the fake test, however, he could not confirm that Carson — or only one student — was there at the end of class. But Bakal also backed up Carson’s claim that “at the end what few students remained — it may have just been one or two, I wasn’t there — received a small cash prize.” Bakal noted a staffer from the Record “impersonated a proctor to give the test.” (Carson said a professor had given him the cash prize in his written account.)

So the truth would seem to be that, rather than winning an honesty contest against 150 people and getting a gift from God, Carson was pranked and given a pity prize. Carson recast this humiliation as a triumph for himself and his faith. And conservatives think this is great for Carson; "Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for the media to rush to the conclusion that Ben Carson’s life story is a tissue of lies," huffs Rich Lowry at National Review.

It's as if, after slaughtering all those people at the prom, Carrie White only remembered how proud she was to be named homecoming queen. But it wouldn't be the first time that a feverish belief in his own destiny led a man past all difficulties unto the political heights.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Ben Carson's bullshit, why the national press suddenly noticed it, and how rightbloggers are now busily making MediaBias-ade of the situation.

I also reference my prediction a month ago that Carson was just about over, and stand by it -- especially since I saw this in the Weekly Standard:

But we also worried that Carson is “not yet prepared to be president,” and we averred, “he’d have to show an awful lot of growth to be ready a year from now.” What’s more, for Carson to win the general election, “voters would have to conclude that he is so extraordinary a figure that for the first time in American history, they would send a man to the White House who had neither held elective office nor served as a general officer or cabinet officer.” 

We’re less certain now than we were in September that voters couldn’t come to such a conclusion. We’re less certain we couldn’t.

Since this column is by William Kristol, the wrongest man in the world, I am putting more chips on this number.

UPDATE. Got a wonderful campaign email from Carson's 2016 Committee chairman John Philip Sousa IV (yes, really). It starts:

Dear Patriotic American,
I need your help.
Please give me your permission to put your name on the 48 page booklet shown below. It’s really important.
How can that be?
The answer is that when I put your name, and the name of your city and state on this booklet, it dramatically increases the likelihood that the person receiving it will read it.
In other words, by clicking here and putting your name on this 5” x 8” booklet it truly becomes a personal gift from you to an African American who is considering voting for Dr. Ben Carson for president.

Once signed by white people, these pamphlets become irresistible to black folk. And the content is pitched right at 'em. For instance, it includes a "transcript of Ben Carson’s dramatic foray into Harlem." Apparently he held an event last summer at Sylvia's where, The Atlantic reports, he gave attendees a Bill Cosby pull-up-your-pants speech and announced he would "restart the country’s economic engine by lowering the corporate tax rate, closing fiscal gaps, like the U.S. borrowing money from China to send aid to Pakistan, and he would replace the current tax system with a proportional income tax," which must have set the room on fire. Sousa touts this as proof that Carson can deliver African-American votes to a Republican: "The black church was the strength of the civil rights movement under Dr. King, and if it gets behind Ben Carson, you and I are truly going to see a revolution take place." More likely what you'll see is Carson at the convention, endorsing whatever schmuck runs instead of him and possibly increasing his minority margin in some purple states, in exchange for which he'll get some sinecure in the Schmuck Administration from which he can run future scams.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yeah, one-hit wonders. But what a hit! 

•   Quentin Tarantino pissed off some cops, so David French of National Review went argh lieberal Hollyweird I’ll show you and all those so-called “critics”  how it’s done! Here French explains to Tarantino why Tarantino is “the Most Overrated Director in Hollywood.”

Your movies, however, are terrible. And I don’t mean “morally reprehensible” or “too violent.” I mean they’re simply bad.

Strong opening, surely he has a killer argument coming up.

But don’t tell the movie press. Rarely has so much celebratory ink been spilled on a director who has made such dreck. Ever since Pulp Fiction — your best movie — they believe you’re an artist, but over time you’ve proven to be nothing more than a splatter-film director who can attract top talent.

I wonder why those top actors want to work with Tarantino instead of, say, Eli Roth. Must have something to do with liberal media bias. Anyway:

And you’re the least original splatter-film director in the United States. You simply can’t stop making the same movie. Consider your recent offerings.

To sum up: A lot of his movies have a revenge plot and mayhem. Don’t anyone tell French about Jacobean tragedy. Or the Elizabethan, for that matter. Anyway:

And yes, I know that I just said that I don’t hate your movies because they’re morally reprehensible, but let’s be honest: They are pretty vile. You gotta admit, you love that N-word.

So he’s “politically incorrect.” I thought conservatives loved that.

...Everything else about your movies can be ludicrously unrealistic (think of the mighty mountains of Mississippi in Django Unchained, the fiction of “mandingo fighting,” or virtually any scene in the Kill Bill series)…

Leave it to French to fact check works of fiction. I mean, come on, Hitchcock, birds never act like that!

…And the media — mostly — is fine with it. Why? Because you’re an “artist.” But mostly because you’re liberal. So all the typical double standards apply.

When I go around yelling “nigger” and attacking people with swords, I get in trouble, but you do it and you're an "artist"! Also, liberal media bias because, come on — that's what French has; that’s the only reason why he bothered — he doesn’t give a shit about art (excuse me, “art”), he’s just throwing shit because he doesn't like QT's politics.  Indeed, from this wretched example it seems as if he’s never tried or learned how to explain what’s good and bad about a film in his life. It’s always sad when propagandists pretend to be critics, but why is it always the least qualified ones who try?

WHEN THEY SAY IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY...

You may have noticed the statistical review on white working class mortality covered by the Washington Post:

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

And you might have thought, as I did, well, no wonder: the white working class was doing great for decades after World War II, but in this generation it's seen its jobs offshored, then onshored at much lower wages -- and the jobs that stuck around don't pay so well either. Having excavated everything that can be excavated from the poor and the black, our system has taken to chipping at the lower end of the middle class. Between the economic and the emotional toll of this de-privileging, no wonder so many of these people are killing themselves, quickly or slowly.

National Review's David French read the same story, and of course his conclusion is that liberals are to blame:

While the economic challenges of working-class voters are well documented, the cultural challenges are just as notable. 

You may think  trying to raise kids on twenty grand a year is rough, but your lack of culchah is just as much of a problem -- and cheaper for me, so let's tackle that first!

At every turn, the cultural aristocrats cause harm. Mocking poor whites is among the last acceptable forms of bigotry.

You mean like "Li'l Abner"? Or "South Park"? French is unclear -- I assume purposefully, and that the picture he wishes to paint is of callous urban sophisticates laughing at a meth-addled cracker, rather than of salt-of-the-earth middle Americans laughing at "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Even the white working-class voters struggling with declining wages, declining health, and increasing despair are derided as somehow “privileged.” Those who speak for them are labeled bigots.

Like how they treated this fella. Obviously it was class warfare against white people.

Meanwhile, people keep dying, and families fracture. This is more than just mocking suffering, though — it’s celebrating the disease while rejecting the cure. Self-indulgence is the animating force behind the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is gutting the working class.

If you callous sophisticates hadn't done so much coke and had so many orgies, right out there where people could see it, Cletus and Brandine would never have took to moonshine and sex with their cousins.

As Murray notes in his book, cultural progressives flood the nation with messages celebrating hedonism and sexual experimentation even as they tend to preserve their own wealth and power through remarkably restrained and disciplined personal lives — getting married, remaining faithful, and investing in their children. They don’t practice the hedonism they so loudly preach.

Make that "if you callous sophisticates hadn't etc. etc. and nevertheless managed to live happy productive lives, etc." Why, it's like having to put up with a cheerful atheist -- it sets a bad example for the proles!

On the one hand you have wingnuts like French crying that the middle class is collapsed or collapsing because of Playboy and rap music; on the other you have wingnuts like David Harsanyi who claim that this shit economy is actually "dynamic" and you should all go get Uber jobs and feel the dynamism of a week-by-week struggle to afford a hovel and slop. Pick your confusion; doesn't matter which, so long as millionaires get all the tax breaks and we zero out welfare.

UPDATE. At The Federalist Ben Domenech gets in on it. He implies -- slightly more gently than other benefit cops like Jonah Goldberg -- that the growing ranks of erstwhile workers on disability are swollen with frauds. And natch, it's about the culchah:

As a cultural matter, the picture is even worse. The surrender to the permanent trap of disability payments is a consequence of a loss of a certain American working class stoicism, which grappled with the tragic nature of life with what was essentially a 19th-century mentality.

We were a stronger, more American America when crips were left to forage or beg.

It was hard enough to deal with such a vision before the disintegration of working class marriage in the country – notice the contrast drawn by Charles Murray between the attitudes toward marriage and the experience of divorce in the white working class versus professionals.

When we've finally turned into the neofeudal hellscape of Lang's Metropolis for real, I expect there'll be a statue of Charles Murray in every town square.

UPDATE 2. Some very fine comments here. e.g., Susan of Texas:

What is it about white culture that is destroying white Americans? 

You vote for politicians who outsource your jobs. Your own crap job, when you can get one, is hard on the body and soul- and dignity-crushing. You go to the doctor for pain-killers to ease the bodily pain and take too many to anesthetize the mental pain. You fatally poison yourself with drug and alcohol anesthetics or get a DWI and lose more jobs or drive away your family. (I'm still waiting for someone to tell us how getting married and not having kids will create factories out of thin air.)...

Worth going in and reading in full. I should add that, especially when you get past a certain age, physical labor is hard on you -- which is something you might miss even if you were a waiter at 20 but never a fry-cook at 55. Go to any actual working-class neighborhood and you'll see some people limping or hobbling from the bus to their homes -- and if they stiffen up they tend not to work it out at the yoga studio. I wonder if French and Domenech have ever seen this, or if they think it's really like the Seven Dwarves whistling to and from the mine.

THEY EAT THEIR OWN.

Byron York knows which way the wind blows. While assuring us that "I worked for National Review from 2001 to 2009 and know, like and respect many of the people involved in this matter," he nevertheless doubts his old buddies are qualified to moderate the National Review GOP debate (formerly known as the Telemundo/NBC/National Review GOP debate, before the Republican candidates went on the warpath against the Lame Stream Media and made Reince Priebus kick 'em out). Why not? Because National Review writers have been mean to the Republican front-runner, and might ask him impertinent questions -- just like those bastards from CNBC!

Trump is of course not the only candidate NR writers have criticized; just ask Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and others. But it's fair to say Trump is a special case, and he has been on the receiving end of unusually strong invective from NR. 

Lowry says that won't be a problem come debate time. "We obviously have strong opinions and don't hide them, but that won't keep us from being tough but fair with everyone," he told me in an email exchange.

That's what they all say, Mr. Media Bias.

The underlying problem here is that some of the networks have leaned so far left in the past that the RNC felt the need to insist on including someone who "speaks conservative" among the debate panelists. But some of the best conservative speakers are prominent figures at opinion publications who are 1) appalled by Trump, and 2) unconstrained from expressing their feelings about him. That makes for a lively public conversation, but is it a good idea for a presidential debate?

This is even more delicious than NR's Jim Geraghty having to explain to readers that noticing Ben Carson was running a supplement scam and lying about it isn't the same thing as working for the enemy. As I've said before, in these guys' world truth is no defense against accusations of media bias.  I'm not sure the Trump juggernaut can endure long enough to panic some of them into a Strange New Respect for Il Douche, but it would almost be worth a Trump Administration to see it. I mean, the country's fucked anyway, right?

FROM THE LADY-CONVINCING LABS OF THE RIGHT!

At The Federalist:

How To Fix Conservatives’ Single Women Problem

Author G.W. Thielman starts with thousands of econo-bot words about how unmarried American women are driven by manlessness ("low sex ratio") to become either parasitic "NISAS" ("non-independent single adults"), whores (who "obtain affection from high-status men by marketing features deemed physically attractive"), or successful career women which is just as bad because What She Really Wanted Was Children. In all incarnations they are liberals, so Thielman seeks corrective action:

Two suggestions are offered. First, we should voluntarily assist these single mothers through charities and other private agencies.

All this money we're spending on health care could be going to crisis pregnancy centers! And:

Second, because such women lack the knowledge to ground philosophical principles, we ought to convey stories about the adverse effects of intrusive government.

See, someone told him stories work better than charts, so he ran the numbers and found promise in the theorem:

Most NISAs presume that conservatives are mean-spirited ogres who plot their continued misery. The need a new target for their resentment, one that affects ordinary folk personally.

But how? Perhaps conservatives could learn to talk like normal people.... but no, Thielman proposes repeating the kind of heartless-bureaucrat tales you find in Reason magazine, which perhaps he plans to leave laying around in beauty parlors. (The worst ones are about cops killing black people, which shows how desperate he must be.) Eventually, he even considers the use of tinsel and glamour:

Cinema provides a further glimpse of government abuse of power. Titled “Changeling,” a 2008 film depicts a parent’s most agonizing fear: kidnapping by a serial killer. In 1928, Christine Collins, a single mother living in Los Angeles, discovers her nine-year-old son, Walter, missing. The police produce another boy and declare all is well, proffering excuses for the switch, and commit Collins to a psychiatric ward for insisting on learning the truth. Eventually, Gordon Northcott was caught and eventually executed for kidnapping and murdering about 20 children in Riverside County.

When I see a movie like that, my first instinct isn't, "Boy, we oughta pitch all those loafers off Medicaid," but perhaps I'm insufficiently in touch with my feminine side. If the flickers don't work, Thielman proposes direct address:

Advocates for less government must ask low-information voters, like Julia, whom the media continually remind of the state’s beneficence, one simple question that separates ordinary mind-your-own-business people who appreciate limited government and rule of law from the busybody centripetalists that micromanage our affairs: “Whom do you distrust less: your neighbor, or the state?"

Whereupon Julia closes the door, thinking "I thought the Jehovah's Witnesses were bad." Thereafter Thielman seems to lose the thread, spouting gobbledygook like this --

By contrast, tyrannical fiat resembling a once-and-future Hillary “what difference does it make?” “not marked classified” “cloth wipe” Clinton would invite transnational attack and dis­memberment from those who intend us harm while we fecklessly engage in navel-gazing.

-- and subheds like "Female Rule Won’t Mean a Better World." Geez, buddy, why don't you try bringing them some flowers and telling them they look nice?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the CNBC debate fallout. I know it's been done to death -- really, it's like everyone in the press turned into me for a few days -- but I add a little historical perspective as well as some comic cameos from the likes of Accuracy in Media and the always-fartworthy Jonah G.

UPDATE. GOP apparatchik Ben Ginsberg has some proposed rules for the media to follow if they want to be granted GOP debates. I don't find the much-maligned temperature requirements so bad -- talk show hosts get cold studios, why shouldn't these guys? -- but there are some howlers:

The campaigns’ will use the manner in which your debate(s) are run (and changes you say you will make from your past debates), the quality and fairness of your moderators’ questions, their enforcement of the rules and their ability to achieve parity in distribution and quality of questions and time among the candidates to evaluate whether the candidates wish to participate in your future debates.

OOoooh, get her! The fringe types affect to consider Ginsberg a RINO pudding and the deal an establishment scam and sellout. But courage! A new report suggests they may get their way and fulfill my fantasy of a debate cycle that totally circumvents the MSM:

Glenn Beck’s website has a suggestion for who would be the best choice to moderate an upcoming Republican debate: Glenn Beck. 

TheBlaze reported that an official associated with one of the Republican presidential campaigns claims that Glenn Beck’s name is being considered as a moderator for one of the upcoming Republican debates. The website did not name the source...

TheBlaze writes that at least three presidential campaigns would support Beck as a moderator — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Jim Gilmore. It goes on to say that he is liked both “in and out of the Tea Party,” and certainly at his own website.

It may be that Beck and the RNC would try to package and peddle this dog-and-pony show to whatever network is craven enough to accept it, but let us hold out hope that they'll just run it via streaming video and declare victory over the Lame Stream Media. Can't wait to see the reaction among their geriatric base! "I tried to watch the Republican debate but I wound up buying 30 ounces of gold!"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I can't clean up, though I know I should.

•   This week the Department of Energy put out a Halloween press release advertising "energy-themed pumpkin patterns to help 'energize' your neighborhood for Halloween." It also reminded revelers that pumpkin waste sent to landfills creates harmful methane gas, which is part of the reason why the Department is working on technology that would instead turn it to energy, which efforts it described at tedious length. Institutional holiday pressers are silly and we can have some good fun with them, but the global-warming-hah-how-come-it's-snowing crowd instead mobbed up to denounce the Department for, in their view, criticizing people who carved pumpkins ("Energy Department smashes pumpkins for causing climate change" -- Washington Times). The RedState asshole on the case even added, "The best part in all of this is that, despite railing against the dangers of buying pumpkins, they hypocritically have jack-o-lantern suggestions in their Energyween guide" (inappropriate boldface in original); that is, he apparently noticed the presser was clearly not telling people to abstain from pumpkin-carving, realized this didn't fit the bullshit story he was bandwagoning, and decided to portray this dissonance as evidence of his subject's hypocrisy rather than of his own self-induced reading disability. All propagandists are loathsome, but the ones who try so hard to cover their tracks are the worst.

•   That little boy in the hospital begged him to write a column about how liberals are The Real Racists™ because Ben Carson, so Jonah Goldberg steps to the plate, holds his bat aloft, drops it on his head, falls on his ass and sharts home plate.

Here’s something you may not know: Dr. Ben Carson is black.

Of course, I’m being a little cute here. The only way you wouldn’t know he’s black is if you were blind and only listened to the news.

It's a liberal media cover-up to end all liberal media cover-ups! I understand MSNBC has a video filter that makes him look white.

...But what’s remarkable is that at no point in this conversation did anyone call attention to the fact that Carson is an African-American. Indeed, most analysis of Carson’s popularity from pundits focuses on his likable personality and his sincere Christian faith. But it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.

So liberals aren't making a big deal about Ben Carson being black. Great! Isn't this the I-don't-see-color world Goldberg normally wants to live in? Goldberg pulls back his bat and...

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents.

...spins around, collapses into the arms of the catcher, and takes a splitter to the butt. "More authentically African-American"! Next he'll be calling Obama an Uncle Tom.

...And that probably explains why his race seems to be such a non-issue for the media. The New York Times is even reluctant to refer to him as a doctor. The Federalist reports that Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is three times more likely to be referred to as “Dr.” in the Times as brain surgeon Carson.

Wait, Carson is a doctor too? Who knew? That MSM really doesn't want us to know the truth!

Carson’s popularity isn’t solely derived from his race, but it is a factor. The vast majority of conservatives resent the fact that Democrats glibly and shamelessly accuse Republicans of bigotry — against blacks, Hispanics, and women — simply because they disagree with liberal policies (which most conservatives believe hurt minorities).

In other words, we're not racist because we like this black guy, and you're racist because you don't. To the showers, Jonah.

•   Oh yeah -- let's go Mets! I'm going to hang onto the myth and magic of 1986/2015 until the smoke clears and the mirrors shatter. And if it all goes south, well...