THE FRENCH HAVE A WORD FOR IT: DE TRUMP.

All is going according to plan. As I have been insisting, the GOP will find a way to unTrump itself, either before or during Cleveland, and Cruz and Rubio's slight victories on Tuesday will help. But when it all comes down, it will come down to power relationships -- among those who run and wish to continue running the Party, and against the Trump faction -- and not with the bullshit-Agincourt #NeverTrump "movement" of pencil-necks declaring war on fucking Twitter.

To show you just how bogus this is, Megan McArdle is now pitching in: Inspired by alleged real-life events ("'She’s beside herself,' my mother said of a near relation, who is apparently seriously considering voting for a Democrat for the first time,") McArdle "asked on Twitter whether this was a real thing, just as the hashtag #NeverTrump began trending," and you'll never guess what she learned!

What surprised me? First, the sheer number of people who sat down and composed lengthy e-mails on a weekend.

Yes, your elderly aunt in Sarasota who wants you to know the truth about Obama's FEMA death camps isn't the only one who does this. Thank God for bcc!

Second, the passion they showed. These people are not quietly concerned about Trump. They are appalled, repulsed, afraid and dismayed that their party could have let this happen. They wrote in the strongest possible language, and many were adamant that they would not stay home on Election Day, but in fact would vote for Hillary Clinton in the general and perhaps leave the Republican Party for good. 

Or maybe that nice John Anderson will run. I swear I'd vote for him, or at least tell people I did!

Third was the sheer breadth. I got everything from college students to Midwestern farmers to military intelligence officers to former officials in Republican administrations, one of whom said he would “tattoo #NeverTrump” on a rather delicate part of his anatomy if it would keep Donald J. Trump from becoming the nominee. They were from all segments of the party...

Stop and think about this a moment. These correspondents 1.) know who Megan McArdle is and are following her on Twitter, and 2.) when given the chance are not just willing but eager to write her long letters about how they want Trump stopped. They're probably not John Q. Public types who don't know much about politics but were just looking to catch up with old friends or maybe look up some recipes on the Twitter and this McArdle lady asked so nice I said "Muriel, fetch me down my email-writing laptop" etc.

In fact, McArdle goes to the trouble of reproducing parts of some of the emails, and you can get some idea from them of the sort of Republican we're talking about:

I paid for my education, in part, with scholarships that had the name "Reagan" in them...
Even then, at the tender age of 12, I knew I was a conservative...
I was the conservative hack at my college newspaper...
I've written $2,000 check for four Republicans (John McCain + 3 others)...
Played Reagan in our school debate in '84, when I was in eighth grade...
...serving a brief period as a city committee member...
...I count Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek among my idols...
...I owned Sheriff Joe Arpaio pink boxer shorts...

So they're basically hardcore, deeply-involved Republicans who have pretty much bought (and sold!) everything else the party has been selling until Trump. And why are they against him, mainly? In a follow-up, McArdle tells us:

What they cared about was, very broadly speaking, character. The bullying, the authoritarian instincts, the lying, the erratic behavior, the lack of any interest in policy, the lack of impulse control, the misogyny, the brutal xenophobia. These are issues that are rarely issues at all in a political campaign, because most politicians who become serious contenders for the nomination pass the basic threshold of not behaving as Trump has. (I'll say more about that in a future column.) 

Trump fans should know that the #NeverTrump Republicans who wrote to me are not rejecting you [Trump voters], or even your issues. They are rejecting Donald J. Trump, because they think he is a bad person...

The NeverTrumps are not rejecting your issues, ordinary Republican voters who have made Trump the front-runner of your party -- they're rejecting your avatar. They were Reagan in a school pageant or owned pink Arpaio panties; Trump wasn't and didn't. And he's gross, not like Ted Cruz, whose face makes babies cry but that's just because of his integrity. Sure, Trump is right on immigration but he doesn't use a dog whistle -- he just sticks his fingers in his mouth and blows, like he's summoning a taxi. What would we think of ourselves if we allowed a person like that to enact our favored policies?

What is it conservatives like to call this sort of yap in another context? "Virtue signaling," isn't it?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump, Christie, and the Kübler-Ross clusterfuck of the rightbloggers, who seem to be experiencing all the stages of grief at once.

One of the weirder aspects of last week's events was the brethren's call for Cruz and Rubio to employ the dark art of humor as a weapon against Trump. As I've observed before, these guys don't really understand humor. They don't think of it as balm to the human spirit -- they think of it as ordnance, something Saul Alinsky taught Hollyweird Liberals to use against them, and they stay up nights studying files marked "set-up" and "punch line," trying to crack the code. "Cruz and Rubio Unveil Plan to Mock and Dismantle Frontrunner," announced Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard, as if "mock and dismantle" were a military operation. When Rubio managed to get in some jokes at the debate, they were delighted, but seemed not to know or care whether the jokes were funny. They issued reviews like "Rubio mocked and belittled Trump in the humorous, mocking and highly effective manner that Trump used to make Jeb look small" (William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection) and "Obviously this strategy, of diminishing Trump as a clown by clowning on him relentlessly, is worth trying... we can sit here and spitball the strategic virtues of the 'mock Trump' strategy all day long — it shows Rubio’s not a beta male who’s afraid of Trump..." (Allahpundit, Hot Air). Sounds like fun, huh? Zhdanovism's a tough gig.

Anyway, I've got some jokes in my column, but they're the funny/keep-from-crying kind.

UPDATE. Speaking of ugh, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist:

Call it the 1980s Underdog Movie Theory of the Republican Primaries. This was practically its own genre. It was not just “The Karate Kid.” It was a theme in “Back to the Future”.. and in “Top Gun.” (Though that’s a better analogy for the Rubio-Cruz relationship, with Cruz as Iceman.)

And Megyn Kelly as Charlie. After more like this ("Rubio certainly found the 'Eye of the Tiger'") we get the konservetcult comedy angle:

Actually, this is a darker variation of the narrative in which the hero has to learn to fight the villain on his level. So the guy with a command of policy whose brand is his positive, optimistic style has had to learn how to win by using his opponent’s weapon of ridicule. 

So that's why Rubio was talking about Trump pissing himself.

You know what last week was? It was that moment in “The Untouchables” when Sean Connery says to Kevin Costner, “What are you prepared to do?” And he eventually realizes he needs to fight the Chicago way: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue.”

With Trump creeping ever upward in the polls, it's clearly time for Rubio to escalate. Prepare the joy buzzer and the fart cushion!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (HOLY SH*T CHRISTIE EDITION).

That's how the pros do it, folks.

•   Ha ha ha ha ha. First they finally get Rubio to do insult comedy on Trump at the debate -- not well, but at least he was sassy, and that made the people who follow him as the GOP savior feel sassy too -- "This is fight-them-on-the beaches time. This is Agincourt," perorates National Review's imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke. (Yes, this was their finest shower!) Rubio even started to warm (some might say unseasonably warm) to his new role -- and then Chris Christie went and fucked it all up. Some folks are pointing to Jon Ward's "Why Christie Never Went After Donald Trump" for the explanation:

...Rubio was ascending to be the Trump alternative, a spot Christie wanted for himself. With his kneecapping of Rubio, Christie eliminated the Florida senator from the running in New Hampshire, although Rubio’s unimpressive finish there didn’t improve Christie’s standing in the race. And as a result, the non-Trump lane has remained muddled between Rubio and Ted Cruz, while Trump has won three consecutive states with less than 50 percent.

This suggests by cracking Rubio, Christie was doing what he had to do to get to Trump's level -- knocking off the contenders before engaging Mr. Big. It makes some sense. But what's missing is why Christie decided to quit. A large part of Christie's appeal among Republicans is his gift for insult comedy. It's actually sharper than Trump's, but Trump's is currently more popular -- apparently Christie's shtick is a little too intellectual for the GOP proles, who don't want to have to work hard to get the references (i.e. know something about government). So my guess is Christie doesn't expect Trump to win. (In fact it's beginning to look like no top Republicans are expecting their Party to win.) He's decided to embrace the current Sultan of Insult and wait for 2020, when Trump's act will be old and the crowds may have learned to love the Christie variation.

I'll add one more thing. I remember when Ann Coulter said during early days in the 2012 campaign, "if the Republicans don't nominate Christie... then Romney will be the nominee and he will lose." Coulter is now a reliable Trump booster, and her ravings may suggest to some that immigration is the reason for her devotion. But Christie was never focused on immigration. The real unifying factor among these three parties is faith in rage and vituperation as the way to the hearts of the people. In fact, it may be all they believe in.

•   At The Federalist, Mark Hemingway has an online aneurysm some poor editor could only think to call "Bernie Supporters’ Hatred Of Work Is Why Trump Supporters Are So Mad." It starts with Hillary's emails (or as the Bowery Boys/rightbloggers call it, Routine 12) and thereafter spatters like a rotten tomato across a broad barn door of sub-topics. But you can smell something solid coming at this point:

The odd thing is that people are voting for Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly for kind of the same reason as Trump supporters, in that they don’t want larger economic issues forcing them to change their culture or lifestyle. However, the motivations of Sanders supporters are much less sympathetic.

This is an interesting way to look at the pressing economic issues of the day: Voters aren't worried about money to live on, replace a worn-out car with, save to send a kid to college, etc. -- they're worried that money will "change their culture or lifestyle." What's that even mean, and why are Sanders supporters' concerns worse than those of Trump's? Apparently it has something to do with the Sanders kids wanting to have a job, a good job, one that satisfies their artistic needs; Hemingway is here to tell these puppies they "can’t 'do what they love' without financial realities being such a killjoy." And what does he use as examples of their foolish utopianism? Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn -- the places in America, in other words, where you're most likely to make a living "doing what you love," rich cities that are in fact getting crowded because the market has spoken and youngsters prefer those places to such Republican Valhallas as Topeka, Kanas and Fritters, Alabama. Listen to him:

Portland’s celebrated “artisanal economy” is basically a result of overeducated hipsters who want to live in Oregon because the cost of living is relatively cheap and it’s beautiful, but there are no traditional jobs with opportunities for advancement. 

So they’re all starting craft businesses and restaurants. When you have one food truck for every 1,000 people, as Portland does, that is a result of desperation, not necessarily the kind of enterprise and initiative you want to celebrate.

Whereas they could be churning out rightwing propaganda like a real man! The rest is near-incomprehensible, but it seems Hemingway thinks work is only real when it's difficult and unrewarding and being done by someone besides him.

GOING DOWN WITH THE FLAGSHIP.

That National Review broadside against Trump last month seems not to have done the trick, and the magazine's employees are hysterically demanding Republican Presidential contenders lay down their political lives for the good of the Bush tax cuts and their phony-baloney jobs.

Culture-warrior David French sputters that Ben Carson and John Kasich, good Christians though they may be, have given in to the sin of Pride by staying in the race, and must repent:

And here’s the ultimate irony — these pro-life Christian candidates can do nothing by staying in the race except help a biblically illiterate, thrice-divorced, proud philanderer hurtle ever closer to the nomination. Every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio is a vote toward embracing Planned Parenthood and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. It’s a vote away from sensible judicial nominations or a rational foreign policy. And it’s a vote toward the potential destruction of a Republican Party that — for all its faults — is America’s last political hope of protecting life, religious liberty, and national security...

Ah, but "every vote they take from Cruz or Rubio" is also a potential vote for John Kasich or Ben Carson! Think how many more books they'll sell, how many more dollars their speaking engagements will draw! And isn't that really what the Almighty wants -- whatever will make any given member of the Elect richer? Read your Bible, French!

As the race goes on, my respect for Scott Walker and Jeb Bush grows. Both men had plausible paths to the Oval Office. Both are immensely accomplished public servants with solid conservative records. Both were once favorites to win the nomination. But they both had the integrity and foresight to bow out the instant it was clear they’d missed their chance.

Walker had the "integrity and foresight" to see he'd run out of donor-suckers, and Bush, whose heart for the struggle seemed to have caved in like an overdone soufflé months ago, probably quit in dutiful response to a note shoved under his door by The Family.

Meanwhile imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke says "It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project," and blames not the candidates but that plurality of the GOP electorate who won't vote for National Review-approved, housebroken wingnuts:

For the last eight months or so, a significant portion of the Republican party’s voters have been in thrall to a bizarre, Occupy-esque conspiracy theory, which holds as its central thesis that sabotage and pusillanimity are the root causes of the Right’s recent woes. In this mistaken view, the conservative movement’s failure to counter all of the Obama era’s excesses is not the product of the crucial democratic and structural factors that prevent any one faction from ushering in substantial change, but of a lack of will or desire...

On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk.

Shall he, now? Yet Cooke is the same guy who, a few years ago, wrote in "In Praise of Paranoia" that "reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic," and also this:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Now, having fluffed the black-helicopter-watching, lunatic fringe of his movement in expectation that all the benefit would accrue to him, Cooke has seen them go Trumpers -- who could have predicted! -- and tries now to summon sensible conservatives to shut them down. But don't worry, he has suggestions:

If Donald Trump can flood the airwaves with his nonsense, his opponents can counter it incessantly. And while they are at it, they can tie him up in court, just as he’s trying to do to Cruz. There are a good number of “just asking” questions ready to be put to them, among them “Trump’s mother was Scottish, can he really be president?” and “Trump ran a host of scams designed to rip off the poor; surely one of them would like to sue him?

Ha ha, Scottish! Imagine the confusion among the Trump fans: "S'coatish? Is thet what them funny-boys call a nigger?" Also try to imagine Trump confronting an aggrieved poor person in front of an audience of Republicans -- they'll probably start chanting "moocher!" and kill the pauper before security can haul him away. Here's Cooke's closing peroration:

“If not us, who?” Ronald Reagan asked in the heat of the 1981 budget battle. “If not now, when?” Time to go nuclear, chaps.

I say! Screw your courage to a sticking place, wot? There's a good fellow. I hope they pushed a few desks aside to make some room for volunteers at NR headquarters.

But hold on, it's not over till the fat homey sings: Jonah Goldberg, raise the roof!

As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That’s awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don’t become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely.

It may be cribbed from his freshman comp assignment "Our Friend, The Beaver" but it still sings! After some similar rhetorical dazzlers, Goldberg proposes to the Presidential Candiate action figures on his desk "a Rubio-Cruz ticket":

Cruz won’t work at the top of the ticket for the simple reason that too many GOP quislings fear Cruz more than Trump. But a unity ticket — a la Reagan–Bush in 1980 — in the form of Los Hermanos Cubanos might just do the trick.

But the silence of the action figures seems to have gotten to Goldberg --

There are real costs to such a deal (not least the fact that there are better general-election running mates for Rubio).

A series of tiny farts like the squeaks of a trapped mouse (Frrt frt frt FFrrt frt), a drop of flop-sweat,  and Goldberg lunges to close the deal:

Maybe there’s another way, but I haven’t heard it.

[A concussion grenade of farts.]

And in a race where Trump has changed everything with his boldness, it’s long past time for his opponents to provide some of their own.

Be bold, shitheel Republicans who will never have a better chance at the Presidency, and stand down at the command of magazine editors! Your reward will be great in the buffet of their next subscriber cruise!

UPDATE. The struggle is joined! Pimped by futility infielder Megan McArdle herself, there's a conservative anti-Trump PAC called "Make America Awesome" -- cuz "America's already great," get it -- run by Republican operative Liz Mair. Did you know they've been around since December? They kinda sneak up on you. Check out their humorous ecards, e.g., "When I get hitched, it'll be to a guy who won't invite Hillary Clinton to our wedding." Feeling the Rubiomentum yet? No? Obviously they need more donations to make the magic happen. Then, when the GOP finally puts Trump on Double Secret Probation, they can have a beer bust with the leftovers and pad their resumes with declared victory. The grift goes on forever and the party never ends!

KIDS TODAY ARE INTO CASUAL SEX, SNAPCHAT, AND THE GOLD STANDARD.

Much as I'm enjoying the lamentation of the wingnuts over Trumpism, let's not forget there's nothing in Rightwing World that can't be made worse by libertarians. In a Reason article called "How Political Correctness Caused College Students to Cheer for Trump," Robby Soave seeks to tell us how Il Douche's rise may be good for the Makers Up Takers Down Cult. To this end, he claims that "at a recent Rutgers University event, throngs of students erupted into cheers of 'Trump! Trump! Trump!'" and follows with several grafs about how political correctness is yuck and The Youngs are getting sick of it I bet I bet. But eventually Soave is forced to provide the context for the chanting:

To be clear, this was a pre-sorted group of non-liberals: conservative and libertarian students affiliated with the campus's Young Americans for Liberty chapter. The occasion was a visit from Breitbart's [Milo] Yiannopoulos, a social media celebrity associated with the GamerGate and online anti-feminist movements.

The YAL and men's rights activism! Now there's a groundswell. I hear the kids now eschew the beach at Spring Break, and congregate instead at Sharon, Connecticut.

The crowd at Rutgers -- and at Yiannopolos's other appearances -- certainly suggests that some students are sick to death of the liberal orthodoxies being drilled into them during every waking moment of their time in school. What if millions of Americans feel the same way?... 

Matthew Boyer, a Rutgers student, leader of its YAL chapter, and organizer of the event, told Reason that the people chanting "Trump," were "individuals who have been railing against political correctness" and identify with "Trump's recent actions as part of the anti-PC movement."

Why, we might be on the verge of another... LIBERTARIAN MOMENT! [Crowd breaks into Lambada, the forbidden dance.] Thereafter it's all bitching about safe spaces and #FreeStacy, but no evidence that young people are going libertarian -- indeed, such evidence as we have suggests they're headed the other way. Here's Soave's closer:

One person who is definitely having a good time is Yiannopoulos. He doesn't mind that protesters scream at him wherever he goes—in fact, he welcomes it. He enjoys it. 

"The whole thing was pandemonium," Yiannopoulos told me, recalling the Rutgers event. "But a wonderful spectacle." 

Pandemonium, but a wonderful spectacle. Would anyone deny that the same could be said of the 2016 GOP presidential race? 

You know who to thank for that.

The only meaning I can discern from this (aside from "please keep paying me, Nick") is that chaos is good for the movement -- maybe in the confusion you can slip a pamphlet into someone's pocket, or grab a tit.

UPDATE. Comments are already fun! whetstone, using the old template: "I used to be a centrist, but ever since I had to read a bell hooks essay in freshman comp, I want to ban Muslims from entering the country."

Also worth your while is the link to In These Times' story on the Young Americans for Liberty -- here's one especially ripe passage:

The [YAL] convention featured a number of sessions devoted to growing the YAL movement on college campuses. But it included others focused on attracting the roughly 300 attendees to seek employment in one of the many different arms of the conservative movement, like the series of sessions on Friday afternoon devoted to “A Career of Liberty.” The Campaign for Liberty sponsored a panel on “Working on the Hill,” the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored a panel on “Becoming a Professor,” and the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and State Policy Network all organized a panel on “Working for a Think-Tank.” 

At that last session, panelists offered advice on how to market oneself to think-tanks and discussed the benefits of their respective organizations.

What I'm wondering is, when it's time to intern for Justin Amash how do they get these kids out of their Skinner boxes?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the weeping and lamentation of the rightbloggers in the wake of South Carolina. It's a day late because of some VV administrative issues, but the extra hours haven't shaken my thesis -- especially the bit about how hard it will be to get either Cruz and Rubio to stand down for the Good of the Party. Since I filed, we've seen the hilarious contretemps over whether Marco Rubio believes in the Holy Bible -- which I love, first because Rubio's originally-alleged crack about the Revealed Word of the Lord ("Got a good book there, not many answers in it") sounds like something Dougal on Father Ted would say, but also because at first I thought Rubio might indeed have slagged the Bible just to wind up that religious maniac Rafael Cruz, and was tempted to switch my support to him on that basis.

Also, I noticed rightbloggers pushing and pulling for their favorite anti-Trumps, and now there are even more of them; for instance, D.C. McAllister at The Federalist declares -- in defiance of an avalanche of new Rubio endorsements  -- that "Rubio Needs To Move Aside For Cruz, Not Vice Versa." To a suggestion that Rubio promise Cruz a seat on the Supreme Court in exchange for his withdrawal, McAllister says, "even if Rubio did nominate Cruz, it is highly unlikely he would be confirmed. The establishment wing hates Cruz. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he’s worse than Obama. The chance of Cruz being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice is slim." So the right place for this lovable character is at the top of the GOP ticket.

My favorite fallout so far is from Ben Domenech, explaining that evangelical Republicans are flocking to Trump because, basically, that Jesus stuff was all bullshit and they're really just mean sons of bitches who want to get back at the hippies:

Congratulations to the American left: you asked to win the culture wars -- and evangelicals are giving you Donald J. Trump.

On to victory in November! And please do read the column.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Comin' to D.C. March 29. Looking forward.

Beautiful day, let's play two! Kia found this one.

•  The latest thing among those eternally-whining wingnuts is that Twitter is censoring them via something called "shadowbanning," by which self-promoting men's-rights activists and people who use "cuckservatives" unironically allegedly "have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines." Evidence: an "[unnamed] source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech," whose "claim was corroborated by a[n unnamed] senior editor at a major publisher." Good enough for alt-journalism! According to Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos, Twitter seeks "to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by muffling conservative voices on the platform," so if Trump loses the nomination by a handful of Tweets, you'll know the reason why. One preponderator of this story blames "Twitter’s recruitment of radical feminazi Anita Sarkeesian to lead its censorship board, I mean, 'Trust & Safety Council.'" Sigh, girls spoil everything, don't they? At least this guy has some dim awareness that Twitter is not a public trust but a private company that can have whatever terms and conditions it likes, and so lays off the ridiculous "censorship" yap in favor of some free-market fist-shaking:

On Twitter as on Facebook, the deck is stacked against countermoonbats. A lucrative opportunity awaits whoever can create a social media outlet that does not impose an oppressive left-wing political creed.

Get ready for Conservapedia: The Social Network!

•  In another fartful post, Jonah Goldberg starts with what may look like a startling admission:

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake.

Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees.

But he's done this before. Nine-and-a-half years ago, Goldberg said, "The Iraq war was a mistake." Of course he didn't want to leave -- he wanted to stay in: "A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out," his reason-fart echoes down the years. Some paragraphs later, he added, "I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay. Polling suggests that they want us to go. But polling absent consequences is a form of protest." Sounds like he was feeling cornered, and rightly so -- the American electorate was days away from returning Congress to the Democrats. Now he's confessing error again. I wonder what's worrying him this time? (BTW: This seems as good a place as any to recall Conor Friedersdorf's roundup of conservative slurs against those of us who were against the war before they were.)

•  I get what some people say about Bernie Sanders' electability problems, but I also see that conservatives absolutely do not know how to deal with him. We've seen, God knows, plenty of Sanders=Trump bullshit, but even rightbloggers seem to be getting sick of that. The other popular shtick is "Socialism = Stalin, vote Bernie and get the gulags," a ploy which depends strongly on explaining away European socialism -- usually by pretending Scandinavian countries with universal health care are Reaganite laboratories of unfettered capitalism -- and hoping nobody tells the voters about the "sewer socialism" under which millions of Americans once cheerfully lived without being hassled by the Secret Police. But Jazz Shaw at Hot Air has come up with an interesting new angle:

Sanders really seems to have it in for money and you have to wonder where the grudge comes from. 

In an editorial at Investors Business Daily, we get a glimpse of one possible source of Bernie’s unrelenting war on dollars: he’s never really had many of them.

Yes, the argument against Bernie Sanders is that he never made a lot of money. Well, at least that'll kill the Sanders=Trump thing.

As IBD notes, he never really earned a steady paycheck until he was in his forties and even then it was from the government when he was finally elected mayor. Before that he ran up debts, failed to pay his own utility bills and was known for being perpetually broke.

It's almost like something was more important to him than money! I imagine Shaw hearing the Gospels and going, "Pfft! Who is this loser?"

This is the guy who now wants to oversee the management of all of our collective money in the federal government?

Part of me wishes they'd run with this -- "Poverty Sucks, Vote Alex P. Keaton" -- but maybe there's some appeal here for a certain type of Republican voter -- the kind who really worries about whether his neighbor's car is nicer than his, who likes to brag about what a killing he made on the market or by only ringing up two of the three cereal boxes he got at the Safeway, and who is less outraged by human suffering than by a welfare recipient who got to eat fresh fish instead of gruel. You know -- assholes.

TWO TONS OF FUN.

Been following rightwing millennial outreach a bit. National Review got their "Collegiate Network fellow" (i.e., intern) Celina Durgin to write a corker about how all her coevals are stupid to vote for Sanders. Fave bit:

Now, I’m not an old fogey trying to patronize the youngsters. And I believe I apprehend the reasons for their support that go deeper than his “free-stuff” policies. What I am is a Millennial pleading with my peers: Please resist jejunely embracing the notion of “justice” that conceals radical political and economic transformation.

Well, I was young once, too, so I will resist senilely disdaining young Durgin's prose. But over at The Federalist we have a pair of striplings who bear further examination. Bre Payton and Rich Cromwell -- despite their tender years, both have been treated here before -- tell us "Why Sports Illustrated Isn’t The Right Place To Talk About Body Positivity" and if you're thinking it's because either feels his/her spank mag spoiled by fatties, no such luck -- they lack any such refreshing directness of purpose.

First they mention that "plus-size" model Ashley Graham's 2016 SI Swimsuit Issue cover is merely a variant among three, so "it’s almost like they were afraid that plus-sized model Ashley Graham wouldn’t be able to sell enough magazines on her own and got skittish. Way to embrace positivity!" Actually one of the cover models is pugilist Ronda Rousey, which ain't exactly trad cheesecake either -- but wait, that chiding was just a humorous feint; next they tell us they think Graham "looks smoking hot." They even use a gif of an appreciative Audrey Hepburn because millennial (or maybe they're trying to tell us Hepburn was gay, not sure which). Now who's the enlightened chubby-chaser, libtards?

But eventually they have to come up with something like a thesis. Here is their first try:

She’s a departure from the norm, and that’s not such a bad thing. On the other hand, there are a few sizes—15 according to our numbers—between size 0 and size 16. Don’t get us wrong, we think it’s great the magazine is using a model who looks like she eats lunch on the regular. But why does it always seem that whenever a publication or a company uses a woman who isn’t a size 0, they swing for the fences?

We mean we like a little junk in the trunk, but WHOOOOOA you-all are goin' for the gold medal of Giganta-Gal if ya know what we mean and we mean get yourself a radiator and join the Junkyard Band! Even though you are smoking hot [emoji].

A few backstage-at-the-school-play fumbles later, they try another one:

In a TED Talk last year, Graham told the women of the audience that most of them were considered “plus sized.” She went on to decry this as a bad thing, saying women should reject the unfair labels the industry was handing out.

Graham is right—most American women are considered “plus sized”—but what she failed to mention is this is largely because we’re losing a battle with an obesity epidemic. Most Americans (roughly two-thirds of adults including women) are overweight, and nearly a third are obese.

[Blink.]

So while it’s important for women to have an opinion of themselves that exists outside of the noise of the digital world, it’s not the best idea to encourage everyone to ignore a problem that shaves an average of 6.5 years from one’s life...

[Blink. Blink.]

But wholesale acceptance of anything and everything, every shape and size, disincentives us to work for something better. That’s where the body positivity movement — and focus on appearance — get it wrong. Yes, we are more than our appearance, but that doesn’t mean we should just tear open a package of cupcakes and sit down while reveling in our elastic waistbands...

What they're telling Graham, and for her own good, is: You're gorging yourself into an early grave, tubbo, and that's why true Americans should only whack it to waifs -- it's a public health issue. Well, if Payton and Cromwell are going to stick with this wingnut welfare racket, it's never to early to learn to endure public humiliation.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT.

The title -- "Sanders and Trump Have Risen from the Wreckage of a Broken Culture" -- makes it look like yet another of those "I literally can't tell them apart" comparisons of the share-the-wealth Senator to the TV bully-boy. But National Review's David French doesn't explain the rise of the two candidates or what it means, and I'm not sure he was really trying. He mainly talks culture war. That's his usual hobby horse and it's even lamer than usual, but in an instructive way. He begins:

Pop culture can normalize radicalism with astonishing speed. Conservatives have long known and lamented the truth of Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher’s famous declaration: “Let me write the songs of a nation — I don’t care who writes its laws.” Artists and the media shape our cultural environment so profoundly that their progressivism has become the default, the air we breathe. Wherever the progressive current flows, the people will drift.

Taking his own Zhdanovite POV for granted -- that liberals have the Billboard 100 while conservatives have Congressional majorities -- I'm not sure what this political operative has to complain about. If you're getting the laws you want, why do you care what the art looks like?

Since its birth, the modern conservative movement has fought bravely to create its own counterculture, in hopes that at least some people could drift the right way, and eventually the current would be reversed.

"Fought bravely to create its own counterculture"? What could that possibly mean? Have they been woodshedding or workshopping their counterculture in a black-box theater at the Heritage Foundation? Before attempting to explain, French bitches about how hard it is for such as he to make how-you-call-the Culture:

But it’s impossible in one generation to either replace or match liberal-dominated institutions that have existed, in some instances, since before the founding of the nation. One doesn’t simply create a conservative Harvard out of thin air. Hollywood is the product of generations of artistic effort. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast media are collectively immense institutions, governed by a set of shared assumptions and located in geographic regions where dissent is rarely heard.

This makes no sense. If you don't like Harvard, why not build up Bob Jones University and other Bible schools into the academia that you claim to desire? If you don't like Hollywood, why not make your own indie flicks? People do it all the time. And haven't you guys been telling us that the Liberal Dinosaur MSM is dead as the dodo, and pumping out conservative newspapers, magazines, and TV networks for literally decades? But French goes on whining:

The Right, by contrast, hasn’t truly had time to build institutions, so it has built celebrities.

OH COME ON.

It’s easier to make one man famous than it is to make Harvard --

Oh, well, if it was easier I don't see what else you could have done

-- so conservative culture is dominated mainly by a series of personalities, and those personalities are often defined and exalted not so much by the quality of their distinct ideas but by personal charisma, with particular emphasis on anger and “fearlessness.”

Long story short: The dog ate their manifesto, so instead of building a counterculture they built a living pantheon of radio shouters, bow-tie dicks, and other assholes, and now one of them is the Republican Presidential front-runner and it's someone else's fault.

... As William Butler Yeats wrote at another time of existential crisis, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” We’re left with a world where “the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When a culture breaks, so does a nation.

Buddy, you don't know what culture is. Nor counter-culture. Those movies, books, videos, songs, etc. that you wish were promoting your values? You can have them -- all you gotta do is make them yourself. Don't waste time squawking about how Big Culture is against you -- or go ahead if it makes you feel better; avant gardists and punk rockers did it all the time, when they were the new kids on the block. But they also did work. That's the only way anything gets done. If Jasper Johns or Patti Smith just bitched about how they ought to be the next big thing, raised a bunch of money off that, and didn't use that money to make art but instead used it to bitch some more about how they ought to be the next big thing, you never would have heard about them.

I mean, holding the back of your hand to your forehead and moaning like Dr. Smith on Lost in Space isn't getting you anywhere -- unless you goal is to get some saps to pay you good money for it, in which case mission accomplished.

UPDATE. As is traditional at alicublog, comments are excellent. Yestreblanksy gives us the full provenance of that Fletcher quote, and it's so much richer than the looka-me-I-read-books use French put it to. MichaelNewsham posits:

If only there was a vast entertainment complex producing its own movies and TV shows, owning its own studios and broadcast and cable network, owned by a right-wing billionaire who also had an enormous chain of newspapers to help push his conservative productions without fear of the liberal MSM.

As I've been saying for years, Murdoch knows better than to throw good money after bad.

POINT/COUNTERPOINT.

From January, Victor Davis Hanson:

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn't the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up? 

To play the old "what if" game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers...

From the Grammys last night, Kendrick Lamar:


Kendrick Lamar Grammy Awards Performance 2016 from Jamie Apps Media on Vimeo.

Take a fuckin' seat VDH.

UPDATE. In comments, a very worthwhile reaction by dauwhe:

I'm the worst kind of music snob, listening only to Jazz for the last three decades. Curiosity lead me to Kamasi Washington's "The Epic," which bothered many of the critics, but on first hearing had me dancing around my living room in a transcendent state. Many of the same musicians contributed to Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly." And so I ended up with a CD in my house with a parental warning (Thanks Tipper!). I'd never bought a rap album. I don't listen to the radio... Yet Kendrick Lamar blew me away. Staggering ambition, searing emotion, musical genius at the smallest and largest scales, and a dramatic political statement—I feel lucky to have experienced this music. I can only surmise that VDH did not listen, or did not recognize the profound humanity and intelligence of the music and its creator. His loss.

Yeah; it must suck to be so committed to an ideology that requires constant blinkers and earplugs.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the death on Antonin Scalia and the freshly-discovered tradition requiring Democratic Presidents to refrain from nominating SCOTUS replacements while the Republican Party is imploding.  Readers taking a hard de mortuis nihil nisi bonum line, please note that most of the jokes are on rightbloggers and their panic-stricken reactions.

I didn't have room for everything I would have liked to include. John Zmirak's proposed "Keeping [Scalia's] Court Seat Empty — for Years, If Necessary" is in, but I hadn't space for his wow finish:

In the meantime, of Justice Scalia, I feel sure that he is enjoying his reward, and I hope that the Catholic Church recognizes him soon. As they said of John Paul II, santo subito! Antonin Scalia, pray for us.

Shouldn't they work on Ss. Breitbart and Bork first?

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.