FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Dick Shawn and Barrie Chase dance to the Shirelles' "31 Flavors." 

Thanks to Norman Jewison Stanley Kramer, of all people! (And @benzero, who sent it me.)

•  Hey look, another wingnut doesn't like Between the World and Me. R.R. Reno's pitch at Catholic-con mag First Things is that "our liberal establishment is aflutter" (the sissies!) at Ta-Nehisi Coates because he is engaged in "an extended effort to keep the wounds of racism open. Coates is not glad for the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner or the other black men killed in recent years. But he cherishes their martyrdom." So, same old story: Why do these black people insist on cherishing their centuries-, decades-, years-, months-, weeks-, and days-old grievances? But Reno distinguishes himself with a rhetorical device:

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a lot more in common with Allen Tate than James Baldwin. Like I’ll Take My Stand, the manifesto Tate and his friends wrote to defend white Southern culture against absorption into the soulless materialism of Northern prosperity, Between the World and Me should be read as a nostalgic hymn to the writer’s culture—black America’s solidarity in fear and wisdom in suffering.

If you're of a charitable turn of mind, you may think this is Reno's version of (speaking of Jewison!) "You’re just like the rest of us, ain’t ya?" from In The Heat of the Night. But this is one of those terrible ideas that actually gets worse as it's teased out, e.g.:

The indictments of America (of which there are many) get aired again and again because they are an integral part of [Coates'] distinctive Afrocentric mythology, just as in Tate’s generation, a certain mythology about Northern aggression was part of a white Southerner’s heritage.

And:

[Coates] writes of being “haunted by the shadow of my father’s generation.” Malcolm X presides over his life in the way Robert E. Lee did for generations of Southerners, a symbol of dignified resistance and a refusal to allow defeat and subjugation to have the final word.

And:

Add the relative youth and fertility of immigrants, as well as rising rates of intermarriage, and we get an emerging social reality as threatening to the black heritage cherished by Ta-Nehisi Coates as to the culture dear to the Daughters of the Confederacy: One out of ­every four children born today has one parent not born in America.

It goes on and on, but I'll limit myself to one more (be warned -- it's a dilly):

Coates wants that to be true for his son. “Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of the trans-Atlantic rape.” Never forget. Never forget. As Coates repeats this refrain again, I could hear in my mind the words of that other tenacious, desperate American effort to resurrect the past: “The South will rise again!”

Slavery = The Confederacy. Well, if you're the kind of person this is pitched to (it's a cinch Reno wasn't counting on any black readers), I suppose it's worth a try.

•  Speaking of the Confederacy, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds explains why the youngs like Bernie Sanders to USA Today readers, who are probably wondering. Apparently there's a poll that shows millenials don't really like "wealth redistribution," so what the kids really want is that other lovable coot Ron Paul, only they don't know it, so they're only voting for Ben & Jerry's Stalin by accident. This is so ridiculous that I took the trouble to click through, and found Reynolds got the idea from Nate Silver. "Like Sanders, Paul drew more support from poorer voters than from wealthier ones in 2012, although that’s not true of libertarianism more generally," goes Silver's biggest howler. Libertarians dream of being wealthy cuz they're "makers" and deserve it, Sanders voters dream of justice for all -- same diff, really! There are some things sabermetrics can't figure out, apparently.

•  Re: the above segment, commenter Andrew Johnston finds that Silver is right about the makeup of libertarians, and suggests I did not think so. I should have been clearer that by "howler" I didn't mean Silver was wrong on that point, but that he was funny -- "that’s not true of libertarianism more generally" particularly: Contra Silver's wider point, there are all kinds of reasons poor folk will vote for a candidate, and what animates the working-stiff Sanders voter and the working-stiff Paul voter doesn't have to be the same thing, though I know the conventional wisdom in our Trump-is-Bernie era is that the rabble are all alike. Also, I found another vote for Sanders as the invisible Paul vote at Reason. "Ironically, implausibly," says Matt Kibbe, "Bernie Sanders has become the 'new' Ron Paul.." Well, at least he's half right on the adverbs. I guess Rand Paul must be the unloved son of the Hero, like Ron Reagan Jr.

"WE SURROUND THEM."

The saddest/funniest thing I heard from the Bundy gang holdouts' transmission from Oregon last night -- you can hear them screaming "Nazis!" at the FBI here -- was the guy crying, "Where's our 3-Percenters?... The Oath Keepers are all infiltrated with FBI agents."

Oath Keepers and 3-Percenters! Maybe they're all holed up at their wingnut separatist housing project in Idaho, telling each other how their old football injuries are all that's keeping them from goin' up to Malheur to kick statist ass.

But it's not like the true believers the Southern Poverty Law Center keep telling us about are the only ones who have misled the Oregon occupiers. No, these poor crackpots were conned by a regiment of ideological grifters who keep hinting that, if someone would just put his ass on the line, a grateful nation will rise to join them. I'm thinking of stuff like Glenn Beck's vaguely threatening "We Surround Them" shtick from 2009:

Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you’re completely alone?  

If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different.  

Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all. 

We surround them.

Then there was all the "water the tree of liberty" talk from the Tea Party guys and the mainstream conservatives who egged them on, rubbing their hands as the Tea People told the "establishment" to fuck off and demanded candidates like Trey Gowdy and Ted Cruz, whose whole politics is about feeding the inchoate rage of their constitutents with hollow but aggressive gestures like Endless #Benghazi and Government Shutdown. These showpieces achieve nothing but at least the folks back home knew they were represented by fighters!

When scofflaw and patriot Cliven Bundy got up to his mischief in 2014, sending his minions to point guns at the feds who were trying to confiscate the government land he was using but not paying for, the brethren considered him a hero. Here's one of John Hinderaker's love poems at Power Line:

So let’s have some sympathy for Cliven Bundy and his family. They don’t have a chance on the law, because under the Endangered Species Act and many other federal statutes, the agencies are always in the right. And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps. It probably has never occurred to them to bribe a politician. They don’t subsist by virtue of government subsidies or regulations that hamstring competitors. They aren’t illegal immigrants. They have never even gone to law school. So what possible place is there for the Bundys in the Age of Obama?

That Bundy was stealing (and not because he was starving) and his soldiers were threatening law enforcement wasn't relevant to Hinderaker -- what was relevant was that Bundy was one of the oppressed white people who'd been hooting and hollering about taking their country back since the Kenyan Pretender occupied the White House, and he was making a stand.

Now Big Daddy Bundy is in jail and the FBI is forcing his gang's endgame. Let's just hope there aren't too many other dummies out there who took some of the same poison.

THE GOP DELUSION.

Donald "Big Pussy" Trump won by a landslide in New Hampshire and sensible people aren't the only ones disconfited --  long-term wingnut-welfare recipients are as well, but for different reasons (briefly: Trump jumped the line, cannot be relied on to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and by fear-mongering straight-up without recourse to traditional dog whistles has shattered the notion that Republican positions on minorities and immigrants have any more courtly or civilized basis than an appeal to naked animal hatred).

They express this discomfiture in a number of ways. First and foremost: Denial. "Marco's Moment Is Now," insists Michael Graham of The Weekly Standard. "No, not Saturday night’s debate: This is Marco's moment." (I am put in mind of  Max Bialystock getting Lorenzo St. DuBois to audition for Springtime for Hitler: "Wait, wait, this is Boomerang! This is Boomerang!")

Getting knocked-down in New Hampshire does not have to be the end of Rubio's run for the GOP nomination. It could be the real beginning. It's all up to the junior senator from Florida.

Graham may just be covering for his boss, who bet long on the thirsty childman. At National Review, Eliana Johnson speaks of "Marco Rubio’s New Challenges" rather than Marco Rubio's Collapse. There are other candidates for anti-Trump savior: At National Review, Jeremy Carl calls NH "Armageddon for the Establishment," because of Trump and the "less obvious" winner... third-place finisher Ted Cruz -- whom I guess you could say the Republican "establishment" doesn't like, if only because no one likes Ted Cruz. "Ted Cruz Might Be The Real Winner In New Hampshire" says Matt K. Lewis. "...The primaries are about to head South, which is Cruz country." Wow, a Republican who can carry the South! Now all he has to do is get people in the rest of the country to embrace Opus Dei crackpots.

For laughs there's "Jeb Bush Gains Some Steam After New Hampshire" (WSJ) and, my favorite, "Why Can't Kasich Win?" by Jay Cost ("Isn't the Kasich case at least as persuasive [as] the Bush case?" Now that I can believe!).

I don't like Trump either, and I am convinced someone other than he will be nominated. But with me, one has nothing to do with the other -- America has disappointed me many times and I'm sure will disappoint me again, so I don't think we're too good for nominee (or, God forbid, President) Trump -- I just think Trump will fall because the GOP has too much invested in getting one of their made men on the ticket, and they control the means of production. These conservative columnists, on the other hand, are writing rotisserie league campaign speeches; they write as if they believe their columns and blog posts, despite being read entirely by people who already agree with them, can actually affect the race. That's what makes them pathetic: They're putting on brave faces for a mirror.

UPDATE. Comments are (as is traditional here at alicublog) glorious, and I have to call attention to a burst of song from Ellis Weiner:

You’re standing onstage one night
While running for POTUS
Debating your foes because
It’s part of the gig.
Then Monday they take a vote
You’re handed your hat and coat
But this could be the start of something big.

It goes on below the fold.

HEAH COME DA JUDGE.

It may seem as if I'm picking on Mark Judge of culture-war catastrophe Acculturated, but look, it's a busy day and sometimes you just have to take the easy lay-up. His latest is about how men should be able to go out with other men -- no, he doesn't mean anything gay, though it does get physical -- when Judge hangs with his old school buds "it’s noticeable how physical our friendships still are, even decades after we graduated. At reunions we tend to fall back on the age-old male expression of affection—light punches on the shoulder, a bear hug, even playful wrestling after a few beers." (I would pay good money to see Judge's remake of Cassavetes' Husbands.)

Judge's plea is actually for Boy's Night Out, which leads me to ask: so who's stopping you? Like all culture-warriors, he thinks behaviors of which he disapproves reflect political ideologies:

Both feminists who hector men to spend every moment with them—making sure all activities are of equal time—and conservatives who argue that a man’s entire life should revolve around his family, are both presenting ideas that are harmful to men.

Hectoring men to spend every moment with you -- isn't that from Our Bodies, Ourselves (That Includes You, Larry)? And even the comedy strawmen that pass for conservatives here at alicublog don't think "a man’s entire life should revolve around his family" -- how then, for example, would married preachers ever get away to Bible conferences for anonymous sex with men?

Here are my two favorite parts of the thing, devoid of context because who gives a fuck:

Feminists of course will take this (like everything else) the wrong way—I’m mansplaining why women don’t feel stress, etc.—but it’s actually a compliment.

And:

The decision was instant and near unanimous: No. All it took to make the right call was a reminder of last year’s monkeyshines: the drinking, pick-up games, late night skinny dipping in the ocean, frank talk about women and sex. We needed to pick the insects and fleas off of each other, and that was best done without girls.

Readers Who Liked This also enjoyed "Why the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ Sequel Should Focus on Fatherhood," which amazingly exists but was written by somebody else.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Rubio's poor debate performance and the rightbloggers' rush to defend him. Not every one of the brethren is on board --  immigration hawks like Mark Krikorian, who calls him a "Merkel Republican," will never forgive him for the Gang of Eight thing -- but Rubio's PR crisis stirred a lot of them to embarrassingly transparent damage control.

This mildly surprised me; I had been thinking Cruz was their preference and that what was bad for Rubio, being good for Cruz, would to them be good in all. But then it hit me: when you remove the novelty candidates Fiorina and Carson (and I suspect they'll remove themselves sooner than later), you see the remaining GOP field is mostly not comprised of true believer conservatives, but of what pass for moderates in that party nowadays -- that is, Kasich, Christie, Bush, and Trump, who are all horrible monsters in their own ways, but not movement zombies mesmerized by rightwing paternosters as Cruz is -- and as Rubio is, too, when you look at what he actually believes.

So the hardcore types might be feeling a bit challenged. And, as I say in the column (which you should read!): Cruz may be everything conservatives want, but they know that he's creepy. This doesn't matter to them; it may even be part of what they love about Cruz; that damp, lizard-eyed devotion might say to them, "he will protect me from the gummint revenooers and blue helments when the End Times come, even if it means blowing up the world and sending us all to Jesus." But conservatives also have some dim awareness that not every American shares their particular kinks, and where they see a new Reagan others may see Grandpa Munster. So, they figure, cherubic Rubio might serve to lure the unbelievers unto the cause, like the cute kids in My Little Golden Book of Zogg.

They may not be wrong. After all, the liberal media seem to love Rubio too ("Marco Rubio Comes Back Swinging After Difficult Debate" -- New York Times). He's the people's choice!

Anyway, have a look and see what you think.

"DIVIDE" AND BONKERS.

The other day Obama went to a mosque and made a nice speech, to which Marco Rubio reacted with non-sequiturs:

“Look at today – he gave a speech at a mosque,” Rubio continued. “Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s going to be discrimination in America of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam. And by the way, radical Islam poses a threat to Muslims themselves.” 

“But again, it’s this constant pitting people against each other -- that I can’t stand that. It’s hurting our country badly," Rubio said. "We can disagree on things, right? I’m a Dolphin fan, you’re a Patriot fan."

Rubio is clearly animated by a desire for Muslim-hater votes, and has no need nor perhaps the ability to explain, so it's left for intellectuals like David Harsanyi to tell us why being nice to Americans of all faiths is divisive:

Take this CNN headline: “Obama rebuts anti-Muslim rhetoric in first U.S. mosque visit.” What does it mean? In the piece, we learn that president reacted to “young Muslim parents whose children are worried about being removed from the country.” I know of no Republican candidate — or anyone of note on the Right; or anywhere else for that matter — who has ever suggested any policy resembling this. Not even Donald Trump. 

A president who wanted to bring people together would have dismissed this as a preposterous idea.

A president who wanted to bring people together would look at what Republicans like Trump have actually been saying -- that we need to keep Muslims out of the country because they are special contaminant -- and try to head off the next logical stage of this kind of racism, which our Muslim citizens, who are no dummies, are already worried about. That's why he went to the mosque: To let these Americans know that we are not yet that depraved, and let all Americans know that we need not become that depraved.

One more bit from Harsanyi:

Yesterday, Obama spoke about the evils of Islamophobia to a group that featured women covered, subordinated, and segregated from men. I’m happy he’s open-minded about that sort of thing.

Ha ha.

Well, at least they're not throwing bottles at them anymore. 

I could go on all day like this -- Harsanyi also asks why it's okay for Muslim ladies to be covered but Bob Jones no longer gets tax breaks, for example -- but there's no point: like all his sort, Harsanyi's just vamping with this shit, hoping some Muslim will blow something up between now and Election Day so he can rattle the bins for the GOP's Crusader constituency. There's something else the guys at the mosque have that I can relate to: A constant awareness that your future could be total fucked at any moment by ruthless madmen. 

RAND GOES DOWN BUT THE "LIBERTARIAN MOMENT" STRETCHES ON.

Rand Paul's out of the GOP race, and a bunch of people right and left are saying, hey, whatever happened to that "Libertarian Moment" thing that The New York Times magazine, Time, and others thought Paul represented, anyway?  I always knew that was bullshit, and thought Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and the conservative "war on cops" freakout exposed that sham pretty decisively last year. But apparently not, if people are still yakking about it.

So, again: Most of the people you hear talking about the rise of libertarianism are traditional conservatives trying to get over with a new shtick. They're more interested in restoring the Constitutional right of rich people to take over public resources and make private profit from them, and in otherwise ceding the rich greater rights than the poor, than they are in your window-box of weed or, heaven forfend, your so-called right to abortion -- among libertarian deal-breakers, raw milk beats reproductive rights every time.  Check out Mark Ames' nice preemptive post-mortem on Paul at Pando from October, and scroll down to the 1999 speech Rand's daddy, Ron Paul, made in defense of Microsoft versus the regulators who were sizing up Bill Gates' monopoly practices ("This is a good time for Congress to reassess the antitrust laws"). Hell, check out the Koch brothers. Money talks and hackey-sack walks.

Also check out Veronique de Rugy at National Review, responding to her colleague Ramesh Ponnuru's dismissive take on the LibMo. de Rugy does the routine about how libertarianism is more cultural than political -- a favorite of folks who want obscure the essential conservatism of what passes for libertarian politics -- and then adds:

...I don’t care particularly about getting libertarian candidates elected. I do, however, care about Americans with libertarian instincts electing more pro-freedom and pro-market lawmakers like Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul or Representatives Thomas Massie and Justin Amash. They may not consistently call themselves libertarians but they are clearly putting pressure on their Republican colleagues and pushing them to be more pro-freedom, to adopt more free-market policies, and to be embarrassed by their overspending and big-government tendencies.

These three guys are best known for hollering about Obama tyranny every chance they get, and Amash recently distinguished himself by voting against federal water aid to Flint on the grounds that "the U.S. Constitution does not authorize the federal government to intervene in an intrastate matter like this one" -- though maybe he was just trying to get dehydrated citizens to explore raw milk. Plus he's really into the flat tax. Feel the freedom!

As for Rand Paul himself, he has his good points and his bad points; he's your basic ambitious Republican Senator, which is to say a potentially catastrophic grifter, and when he returns to the national stage in another political season who knows how much libertarianism he'll flash. Maybe he'll call for war against Iran, and be hailed for the bold political jiu-jitsu -- then, back to war with the EPA!

UPDATE. Though I had nowhere to put it in the main post, I'm re-upping this old thing about another popular favorite among conservatarians: Approving social safety nets only so long as they serve as corporations' no-cost health care plan. I mean, you can't have a post like this without some Megan McArdle.

A GLOWING RECOMMENDATION.

I don't have a lot of spare time and hadn't planned on reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money, which apparently treats the Koch Brothers, but as is often the case one review can make a difference:

Those who hate too much become like the people they hate, and so it is with Jane Mayer, whose Dark Money, a 450-page screed of unrelenting venom, portrays a vast right-wing conspiracy controlled by a small number of libertarian donors. Like the John Birch Society of days gone by, Mayer sees a cabal of dark forces that secretly dominates American politics. And like Joe McCarthy, people two or three degrees of separation from her villains are tarred with their brush. Fifty years ago Richard Hofstadter said that the Birchers and McCarthyites exemplified the “paranoid style” of American politics, but now it’s the Mayers who have debased American politics.

There's an inside joke embedded in this skein of spit: the Kochs' old man was actually a Bircher himself. Other than that, it's all rant. The reviewer, George Mason professor F.H. Buckley, tells us that Mayer's book "is politics at the level of Keith Olbermann, a long, unremitting, hate-filled sneer," and Mayer "is evidently a person whose mind has never risen above the arrogance and hatred peddled on the thoroughfares," a "monomaniacal bore," etc. The closest he comes to telling us how she might be wrong, though, is this:

Mayer’s world is one of dark forces and private venality, but what she doesn’t get is just how one seeks donor support. No one ever received a dime by saying they’d do the donor’s bidding. Instead, one tells the donors what one wants to do, and either gets or doesn’t get supported.

I wonder if Buckley's ever heard the one about the blind horse, the nod, and the wink. The best part, though, is this:

In reading her diatribe, I was amused to realize that I would have been dead-center in her sights, had I been important enough to be noticed.

Better luck next time, F. A few days ago the New York Times reported on some risibly faked plagiarism charges against Mayer. It looks as if Buckley's not the only one who doesn't want people to read her work, which suggests that it's very much worth reading.

I wonder if these guys know how obvious they are? Or are they just convinced that there's no point even trying to make it look legit?

UPDATE. In comments, mds: "I mean, sweet, tender Baby Jeebus on toast, they couldn't get some crank at Harvard or Chicago? They actually went with a guy at a university the Kochs have given tens of millions of dollars to?... We're talking Oscar the Grouch being outraged at accusations that the hand up his ass belongs to Caroll Spinney."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers and the Iowa caucuses. This was interesting to write because, as I sort of mention in the column, while political reporters are by and large just hoping to get reads and keep their jobs, rightbloggers are more hubristic: they really seem to believe they can make a difference in national events by the perfection of their logic, the shrillness of their vituperation, or the capitalization of random words. Look at Erick Erickson, who demands purges at the drop of a hat, and all the political illiterates who talk electoral strategy from their Barcaloungers and make Mark Penn look like Clausewitz. In a way it's touching, and in the last ditch I guess I prefer them to working propagandists like George Will and Peggy Noonan, who may know a little more than the bloggers but use that knowledge to perpetuate ignorance because it pays. But then, some of our worst columnists used to be bloggers (latest installment: If I define "decadence" low enough, maybe someone else will help me obsess over it)...

Ah, screw 'em all. Anyway, here's my version of horse-race journalism, and I didn't have to stay at a Motel 6 in Keokuk to write it. My editor took out my joke about Ted Cruz' bad breath -- in fairness, I've probably cost them a fortune in lawsuits already -- but there are still few good ones left.

UPDATE. Just days after their big anti-Trump issue, National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponurru are already trying to adjust to life in the joint:

Through the Goldwater revolution, the party became newly oriented around limited-government conservatism, and eventually a better politician than Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, came along to represent the new dispensation and get elected president.  

Maybe Trump could serve roughly the same function. 

Sorry, laughed so hard I sprained something.

He could lose badly this year and yet give rise to a future GOP that takes enforcement of the immigration laws seriously, reduces low-skilled immigration, and does more to represent the less-schooled wage earner, while also rejecting fantasies of mass deportation.

I see a conference room session, like the old Erhard Seminars Training except everyone wears Trump clothing and thinks he's in charge and must assert his authority at all times or be crushed. The participants are all hoarse from screaming at each other. The sign outside the locked room reads REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION 2022.

Those gains would, however, come at a fearful cost that conservatives should strive to avoid.

Pssssh. Like they wouldn't take it if it meant more elbow room at the Big Trough.

UPDATE. Looks like Cruz came in first, and National Review is partying like it's November 8; on Twitter Lowry is thanking Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and (get this) Glenn Beck, and declaring, "My tally of top four finishers in Iowa: Conservatism 60%, Trumpism 24%." If it had been Conservatism 57%, Trumpism 27%, of course, they'd all be hiding under desks while Il Douche goose-stepped up and down Main Street. I think Trump has a few kicks left in him, but as I said last month, he was never going to be the nominee; he is what he has always been, a symptom. When he goes dormant, the sickness will pop out somewhere else.

I'm not going to stay up to see if Bernie Sanders will pull it off; the arc of history bends toward justice, but it's long.

WHAT TO EXPECT TONIGHT.

Tonight's Trumpless Republican debate will be all about the remaining candidates trying to peel off Trump voters by showing America that, unlike him, they are true conservatives who believe in limited government, a permanent end to the Ex-Im Bank, and just kidding they will actually try to peel off Trump voters by being as offensive at they can without getting bleeped:

BUSH. (reading from card) "Boy, that Hillary, what a bitch, huh?"
PAUL. Was that supposed to be a joke? Try it in Spanish!
CHRISTIE. What Jebby said. I hate that fat bitch.
CRUZ. (murmurs into mike) Speaking of fat bitches.
CHRISTIE. What's that? What'd you say to me? You come over here and say that to my face, mister.
CRUZ. Is that your face? I thought there was a full moon out tonight.
KASICH. Muh muh muh muh muh.
CHRISTIE. No wonder nobody likes you, Ted. Jesus Christ. And you smell too. Folks, you should get a whiff of this guy from up here. It's like ten bums on a bonfire. (RUBIO laughs.) Whatcha laughing at, squirt? (points to him) This guy, you know he cries? Backstage I gave him a little pinch on the arm, like nothin', he went (scrunches up face) "Aiiee! Madre mio, no me gusta!"
RUBIO. Where'd you learn Spanish? Taco Bell?
BUSH. "No wonder her husband Bill is a warmonger." I mean whore! Whoremonger. I -- I have a Right to Rise...

You flip the channel to the Donald Trump Veterans for Something or Other Who Gives a Shit, and find Trump on a glossy 60s-style stage set, his name behind him in big letters like at the end of the Elvis '68 special; he and the audience are doing the call-and-response choruses to "What'd I Say?"; they've been doing it for ten, fifteen minutes, no one cares, a beach ball is bouncing around in the crowd, women have their shirts off, and Mike Huckabee is running around the stage in a loud, checkered suit like some deranged mix of Flavor Flav and Stubby Kaye, honking a Harpo Marx horn and yelling "IN THE END TIMES, TRUMP'S MY FRIEND TIMES, AIN'T WE GOT FUN!"

A DANGEROUS GUIDE FOR BOYS.

As a young'un, Marco Rubio got tagged by the cops for drinking beer in a park; when the story recently came to light, he laughed it off. Credit where due: I am in sympathy with anyone who has brownbagged his bottle, even if he later turns out to be a shit, as Rubio has. And though his team's "humorous" response is not actually funny, and implies the Washington Post reported his youthful transgression to attack him rather than to generate a more clickbaity story, at least it's dismissive.

That is how I would leave it, but for the gloss of Mark Judge, the artist formerly known as Mark Gauvreau Judge, at Acculturated, my favorite culture war/wingnut welfare cluster. Judge isn't satisfied with good news for Rubio -- he wants thinkpiece fodder! And so:

Rubio hit back with a fake ad revealing his other crimes—coloring outside the lines, double-dipping potato chips. The episode was a seemingly small political blip, but it inadvertently points to another problem: We need to stop trying to prevent our boys and men from being boys and men.

It's Routine 19 -- the feminaziation of our boys by libtards! But Judge doesn't know when to quit:

We need to let them feel passion and lust and adventurousness and act on it. We need to let them get in trouble, drive fast cars, and chase girls. The dark and dangerous part of them—us—that does these things is also the place that can call forth great leadership....

He seems to have upgraded "teenager drinking beer in the park" to the Scarlet Pimpernel.

The Rubio “story” in the Post reveals how our culture has become uncomfortable with male behavior. On one hand there are the liberals who seem to celebrate any kind of sexual expression except heterosexual manhood, which they aim to deride and ultimately destroy...

Guess Judge would be happier if the Post ran items like "How to Knock a Bitch Up" in the Sunday Comics.

Both left and right attempt to do the same thing: stamp out the shadow. The shadow is an idea from Jungian psychology...

Ugggh I'll spare you -- oh, wait, get this:

The shadow is crucial to psychic health, and particularly powerful in leaders (both male and female). Think of the classic Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk was literally divided into two people, one good and one evil. While the evil Kirk...

Urkel just called Judge a nerd. Eventually:

Rubio’s satirical response was fine, but it would have been better if he had embraced his shadow, freely admitting that as a young man he felt lust, the thirst for danger, anger, and even depression.

Jesus Christ, I would so love it if Rubio read this, felt inspired, flew Judge down for some intensive speechwriting work, and at the next Republican event answered his first question, "Sure, we're all against Obamacare, but what I really want to talk to you about tonight, America, is this: How you ever, when you were young and high on teenage angst and MDMA, made it with a girl who's into superstitions, black cats and voodoo dolls? Who'll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain --  make you live her crazy life but she'll take away your pain? Like a bullet to your brain? Come on!"

YANKEE DOODLE DUMBASS.

I've been coming to this library for years, reading books, using the computers, and sometimes making withdrawals that I never returned. The Feds claim I took hundreds of books and owe thousands of dollars in fines on them, but you know what liars they are. Besides, these books belong to me by right; it says "public" library right on the door, doesn't it? And am I not the public? Also, this land here used to be Indian land, and my ancestors helped kill a lot of those Indians. Surely I should have this library if only as a prize for my great-great-great-great-grandaddy's service.

But these jackboots and lickspittles got a little pushy about the overdue books -- plus the tools I liberated from the department of public works, and that cop car my buddies hot-wired -- so my fellow patriots and I had no choice but to take possession of the library. The ease with which we took it I consider even more proof that this property belongs to us by right. And we thought the Feds must see it that way too, since they treated us respectfully, befitting citizens of a sovereign state.

Nonetheless we convened citizen grand juries to bring the sheriffs and deputies (so-called) and all federal agents to justice once the Rebellion came. But we planned give them a fair trial, notwithstanding their treasons, and if found guilty they would have been permitted access to a preacher and last words before they were hanged. We are not savages.

You may have heard that the people of the towns did not support our occupation. They wanted to use the library themselves, you may have heard, and they wanted the research that was being done here to continue. I am sure not many felt this way, but let me assure you that this library was liberated on their behalf and in their names, and that once the Rebellion came, anyone who swore the Loyalty Oath would have been able to borrow books on even friendlier terms than they had before my fellow patriots and I took it over. They would also have had access to that portion of the library that was already in my home, though on a limited schedule.

As for the so-called research, I hope our friends and neighbors know that it was never of any use to them. We went through that research and saw it was just a lot of gobbledegook, dead languages and so on, and Big Lies like global warming. Actually these so-called scholars were being used by the federal government as an excuse to keep the people from having full access to the facility. This is why we had commenced clearing out this research area, and planned to outfit these rooms with sofas and wide-screen TV as soon as our next shipment of provender came in, when the trouble came.

Already we see the Feds and their lapdog press trying to make out that our fallen comrade Crazy Zeke was responsible for his own death, just because he was fond of saying that the Feds would never take him alive and that he would kill anyone who tried. But I am sure the people know what he was really saying: Don't tread on me. I am also sure those of my comrades the press claim have run away are already busy arranging for my bail. Stay strong, brothers and sisters, and work for the Rebellion. The library is yours.

OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the National Review anti-Trump issue and the schism it reveals among rightbloggers. It's sort of like the schism in the Republican Party, only instead of quotes from some guy at a Trump rally we have quotes from people with websites and, in some cases, budgets, which do not necessarily make them more coherent.

UPDATE. In comments, Yastreblyansky refers to one of the NR "Against Trump" contributors I didn't quote, William Kristol. Kristol's rhetorical linchpin in this case is "in a letter to National Review, Leo Strauss wrote that 'a conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity' ...Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?" Yastreblyansky has the bad taste to remember what Kristol was saying about "vulgar" Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin some years back. It's amazing that someone so willing to say any goddamn thing as Kristol yet remains the wrongest man in the world.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I like the Bob Luman version okay, but this one sounds lonesomer.

•   National Review has decided to stand athwart Trump, yelling "Stop!" -- which is rather ungracious of them because, despite their protests, he's their Frankenstein, his candidacy the logical evolution of their politics of demonization and dumbassery. Or maybe it's better to say he's NR's Shakespeare, a great popularizer, raiding their ancient classics to make blood-and-thunder crowd-pleasers. Nearly every shtick he pulls -- the superiority of the super-rich, peace through belligerence, xenophobia -- was previously promoted in the pages of NR, but writ fancy-like, to make it look respectable to dummies. Trump had the genius to realize that Republican voters, at least, no longer need all those pseud curlicues; why trifle with the coy racism of Mark Krikorian, for example, when you can hear about a Giant Wall Against Messican Rapists from a Man of the People, and roar along yourself?  In fact I'm sure that's one of the reasons National Review is going hard against him: when conservatism under Trump is reduced to its essence -- namely broadsides, ring shouts, and racial slurs -- what will happen to their editorial wingnut welfare? (The other reason, probably more important, is that Trump won't promise to destroy Social Security, which is a deal-breaker for the guys who pay their wingnut welfare.)

•   Should you venture into that National Review Trump thing and find yourself struggling, go straight to the Thomas Sowell part; while the other guys either sputter or rage or sputter with rage, Sowell is in approximately the same territory as the Major in The Magnificent Ambersons ("Sun... Earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the Earth..."), a place where Godwin's Law is not only broken but also strewn around in bits:

No national leader ever aroused more fervent emotions than Adolf Hitler did in the 1930s. Watch some old newsreels of German crowds delirious with joy at the sight of him. The only things at all comparable in more recent times were the ecstatic crowds that greeted Barack Obama when he burst upon the political scene in 2008.

Elections, however, have far more lasting and far more serious—or even grim—consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.

Perón, Obama, Hitler: An Eternal Golden Braid. Yeah, these guys will save conservatism.

THE PATTERN BECOMES CLEAR!

From the cacophony of their commentary, conservatives seem of late to be experiencing all the Kübler-Ross stages of grief simultaneously.  Jonah Goldberg, sent out to enforce wingnut orthodoxy in the face of the Trump-Palin challenge, is basically just going homina homina homina like Ralph Kramden caught in a harebrained scheme ("The problem is this implicit notion that if you are an 'establishment candidate' you aren’t a 'real' conservative. It may be true that if you are an establishment candidate you aren’t a populist" farrrt). The others have been telling each other Trump is Obama's fault so much that they seem at this point to bore one another.

So credit for initiative to Mario Loyola at National Review, who digs into history to get to the heart of the matter: It's not Obama who's to blame, it's that bastard FDR and his political equivalent in Europe, the Third Reich.

The Nazis succeeded in selling themselves as the solution to the workers’ plight. Of course, they were nothing of the sort. Hitler promptly led German workers from a bad situation into an infinitely worse one, a world war that ended in the destruction of whole cities, the deaths of 3.4 million German soldiers, and a record of crimes against humanity that will forever shame that people more than any other had organized Western civilization. 

What bears remembering here are the worries that led Friedrich Hayek to write his classic treatise, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek started his most famous work in Britain, and worked hard to finish it after the Anschluss joined his native Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. He wrote it in English, for English-speaking audiences, to warn them that the road to the serfdom of totalitarian rule starts with the embrace of socialist policies. Hayek argued that replacing market competition and stable rules with heavy-handed regulations and arbitrary control of social outcomes leads inexorably toward tyranny. 

He saw the great English-speaking peoples committing the same mistake the Germans had made in embracing the socialist policies of administrative government 30 years earlier. He saw them sleepwalking down the same road to serfdom, and he wanted to warn them of the consequences. Though one book could hardly make a difference, his timing was impeccable. In the United States, the Supreme Court had just caved in to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had dismantled just enough of the U.S. Constitution to make way for socialist policies and the capture of government by special interests.

Makes you wonder why Roosevelt sent us to war against Hitler, when to hear Loyola tell it they were basically after the same thing.  Bonus points for this:

My purpose here is not to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, which would be preposterous and stupid...

Wait for it...

...but rather to show how dangerous it can be for working-class folks to lose trust in the leaders of mainstream democratic parties. The Nazi Party styled itself a workers’ party. Its opposition message was essentially the same as that of Michael Moore in movies such as Fahrenheit 9/11...

Maybe we should have a Godwin Challenge to check the speed with which columnists transition from citation of Godwin's Law to breaking it.

SEVEN COME ELEVEN, SNAKE EYES WATCHING YOU.

Oh, thank fuck, there’s a transcript, I don’t have to listen to her psycho Tupperware party pitch. Though from what I did hear on C-Span, I have to say Sarah Palin's delivery today was a lot more focused and easier to follow than it was at CPAC ’14, where she performed Kabuki versions of ancient wingnut tropes. Well, of course, Palin’s a pro — she knew this time the audience was not those weary shock troops of the movement, looking for a little pep talk, but the restless masses who might follow Trump — people who have the same bitterness in their souls as the CPAC attendees but don’t know the cues and need a little more reason-why. Sure, she hauled out the “weak-kneed, capitulator-in-chief” routine, and shouted hopey-changey; she had to remind the crowd who she was. But the heart of her speech came out of a slightly different tradition:

He’s been able to tear the veil off this idea of the system. The way that the system really works, and please hear me on this, I want you guys to understand more and more how the system, the establishment, works, and has gotten us into the troubles that we are in in America. The permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class, and that’s why you see that the borders are kept open. For them, for their cheap labor that they want to come in. That’s why they’ve been bloating budgets. It’s for crony capitalists to be able suck off of them… 

Look what’s happening today. Our own GOP machine, the establishment, they who would assemble the political landscape, they’re attacking their own frontrunner. Now would the Left ever, would the DNC ever come after their frontrunner and her supporters?…

It’s a little too easy to say “stabbed in the back,” though Dolchstoßlegende is certainly part of what she’s peddling. The “crony capitalists” bit is the tip-off. What do you do with a Party of Business that, eight years after they left the economy a smoking ruin, still can’t bring themselves offer anything better than tax breaks for the rich and Social Security cuts? You talk about the betrayed ideal of true capitalism, not crony capitalism but the real deal.

This is not so much an indictment against the nameless other as an excuse for previous Republican disasters: Last time was fucked up, but this time we’re going to make it work! Capitalism is, in the ideal, a hit or miss proposition, at least if you believe (as Republicans must) that your current losing streak is something that's gotta break because baby needs a new pair of shoes. And as a cartoon capitalist of the old school, Trump is just the man for this approach: His career may have been, in its own small way, as much a bankruptcy-prone disaster as the Bush economy, but look at him with his expensive suits and his swagger, he came out smelling like a rose!  Despite their famous optimism, Palin and Trump aren't offering a sure thing; they're just telling voters they may as well put their chips on them, so at least in the interval before the croupier sweeps those chips away you can enjoy the promise and presence of a winner.

UPDATE. Comments are, as ever, a joy. Hearing La Palin cry, "the permanent political class has been doing the bidding of their campaign donor class," redoubtagain adds, "whereupon she pledged to donate all of SarahPAC to Trump. (Oh, that's not in the transcript? Never mind.)"

Even better are the conservatives whining, like Neil Young on "Tired Eyes," it wasn't supposed to go down that way! At The Federalist, Robert Tracinski:

We have been tempted into embracing as our leaders and spokesmen a series of media personalities whose main selling point is that they are outrageous and controversial and like to stick a finger in they eye of the Mainstream Media and infuriate “the Establishment” and the “PC Left.” 

All of which is well and good, if it is in pursuit of a coherent pro-freedom ideology, by which I mean a coherent view of the world and of the role of government as embodied in a broad and consistent political agenda. That’s what Rush Limbaugh used to do.

Remember when it was all about the mega-dittos, man?

But when we embrace these media personalities, the danger is that we will end up just having the outrageous and flamboyant personality, without the coherent ideology...

...namely, tax breaks for the wealthy and persecution of minorities! And Trump and Palin had to spoil it! You and I may not deserve what's happening, brothers and sisters, but at least the pig-fuckers are getting a bit of agita as well.

UPDATE 2. OK, here's the line of the day, and possibly the decade, from former CNN correspondent Erick Erickson:

Sarah Palin gives Trump legitimacy.

They'll be putting us in camps soon enough, but for the time being this is really fucking funny.

UPDATE 3. National Review's David French is upset that his fellow conservatives are piling on his wife's former meal ticket:

I’m not saying she’s beyond criticism or that one should support Trump because of her endorsement.. but perhaps we should consider that the combination of her personal relationship with Trump, her personal experience suffering from years of the most vicious and personal attacks directed at any current or former politician in the United States, and her deep convictions regarding policy priorities for the next president have led her to this decision. In other words, she’s not simply hunting for headlines — she’s doing what she thinks is best for the country she loves.

You can almost see the looks of incredulity on readers' faces, ratcheting from bemusement on "personal relationship with Trump" to squinting disbelief on "suffering" to gaping incredulity on "deep convictions" until finally, at "best for the country she loves," they explode in laughter. Well, everybody gotta eat.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' pissing and moaning over the sailors and prisoners released from Iranian custody. This is such a clear-cut case of conservatives trying to portray an undeniable Obama accomplishment as something shameful that I'm surprised more hasn't been written about it.

Source-wise this was a embarrassment of riches, accent on embarrassment. Take Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag. He sucks in general ("Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," 2013) but when the cause is extra hopeless his propaganda gets extra foamy. After one long snarl ("Iran isn't even bothering to threaten Obama. It just slaps him around") failed to disgorge his Obama rage, Greenfield wrote a post called "IRAN IS TRAINING OBAMA LIKE A DOG," using not, as you'd expect, a metaphor about Iranian masters Pavlovizing a drooling Obama, but one in which the dog controls the master:

What Obama has going on with Iran isn't mutual. It's a relationship in which Iran's ‘moderates’ show that Western governments can be trained to give them what they want or they'll make a mess on the floor by taking hostages or blatantly violating nuclear protocols... 

Iran knows how to use diplomacy, but its intentions are not diplomatic. So instead it's using diplomacy to train Obama and his European allies to dispense more treats even as it continues to pursue a nuclear weapons program. 

And the most pathetic part of this is that Obama and the Europeans have been trained to treat every payout like a victory.

Yee-eah, so Iran is like a dog that cheats to get treats... except they're still a dog and Obama's still the master. Concise analysis. Maybe Greenfield had a longer version in which the Iranian dog attacks Obama because its brain got too big for its skull from all those treats, but someone at FrontPageMag decided to edit for a change.

Anyway, have a look at the column. Some good ones there too.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See first item below

•  At the Old Firm's latest Pazz & Jop poll, Robert Christgau says something I took to heart:

One reason I’m so glad Pazz & Jop still exists is that for all of its flaws, it does provide kind of a consensus, so that if you go, if you’re still interested in albums, you go down to 300, you find stuff that you’ve never heard of, and every once in awhile, you find something that’s really good... You don’t just look at the Top 40: you go down to 300 and you make a list and hear most of it in one place or another. It’s better than checking out the track of the day on fifteen different blogs.

Thus, our F'RTH videos this week: Pile, "Mr. Fish" from You're Better Than This, #265; Joanna Gruesome, "Last Year" from Peanut Butter, #287; Carol Lipnik, "Almost Back to Normal" from album of same name, #309; and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, "Waiting for Blood" from The Night Creeper, #330. I look forward to more spelunking.

•  Jonathan Chait thinks he sees the GOP capitulating to Trump:

Indeed, Trump’s numbers have not only risen, but the entire backdrop of his position has changed. The percentage of Republican voters who could see themselves supporting Trump has grown from 23 percent last March to 65 percent now. Trump could now beat Marco Rubio (a popular figure within the party) in a head-to-head matchup. He remains far from inevitable. The first vote will still not be cast for weeks. Yet those of us who believed Republican elites would kill Trump’s candidacy out of self-preservation have to face the increasingly plausible prospect that, for whatever reason, they may lay down their arms before a shot has been fired.

I said in December, and believe to this day, that while some prominent conservative propagandists have learned, let us say, a strange new respect for Trump lately, Trump will not be the nominee. For one thing, no one really knows if he even has a get-out-the-vote operation. "Trump campaign officials declined to provide information about its GOTV effort" to the Washington Times, a not-unfriendly organization, though those officials do tell WashTimes "Mr. Trump has taken steps to set up a robust operation." Smells like bullshit, don't it? Also, look at his fundraising. This is a Potrumpkin campaign! But the main thing is: The RNC is not a bunch of assholes. I mean, they are, but not in that sense; history suggests they have their best shot since 2004 this year; they know it, and they're not about to blow it by letting a TV buffoon (who owes them nothing) represent the GOP to an electorate which -- and people keep forgetting this -- is not entirely comprised of Republicans. This ain't a student council election, hell, it ain't even the Golden Globes. If there's a threat they'll find a way to block it. I suppose I can only afford to be so definite because if they do nominate Trump I will no longer care even as little as I do about being embarrassed, because I will have become emotionally prepared for the End Times.  But there you are.

•  The whole Ted Cruz "New York values" thing is beyond idiotic, but the duh-prize goes to Todd Starnes at Fox News, who near the end of his sub-literate yak says New York values are "the kind of values that would compel someone to use a national tragedy like 9-11 to score cheap political points." Man, someone hasn't been paying attention, or at least hopes no one else has.

RETRONUTS.

The National Institutes of Health is one of America's greatest accomplishments. It does the slow, hard work of building up medical research that turns into cures and better health for our citizens. They're the reason we got fluoride in our water. The built the Human Genome Database. Here's an accounting of just some of their research internal breakthroughs (not to speak of work done with their grants). Their scientists have won 87 Nobel Prizes. I've been in their clinical trials for years and I can tell you they are one impressive bunch.

Ben Howe from RedState thinks they're a bunch of malingerers growing fat off Gummint welfare:

In case you thought that Republicans had in any way turned their back on frivolous spending, here is a reminder that they have not. According to The Atlantic, Republicans have completely surrendered on even the idea of curtailing government spending on frivolous research that could just as easily be funded by the private sector. 

In this case, we’re talking about funding for the National Institutes of Health, which I’m sure does many useful things, but also spends a lot of money on really dumb experiments that have been done over and over again for years with self-evident results. A choice example of waste in taxpayer-funded “research spending” is seeing whether monkeys being addicted to cocaine has adverse health consequences for monkeys.

Haw haw! They's givin' cocaine ta monkeys! They should ask them monkeys why they ain't ee-volved yet! Also, they studied sexual responsiveness in rats, which is also ridiculous, like that time in the 1940s they experimented with X-rays and rat tumors. Using radiation to kill cancer! Have you ever heard such a crazy idea!

This is such an ancient trope -- crazy scientists doing outrageous experiments with money you could be investing in my uranium mine -- that I wonder if anyone actually falls for it. My guess is even Howe doesn't believe in it; its appeal is almost entirely nostalgic and emotional, based on fading memories of vaudeville comedians in fright wigs running around with giant hypodermic needles. In fact, in a way it's a scientific experiment in itself -- how little or how much power to enrage does this ancient bullshit still hold? Guess we'll find out!