FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

This is my favorite Carl Perkins tune. What's yours?
• Listen, I think Trump can still win this thing, and I know just how he can do it: Tour the nation with the Bundy boys and other newly-exonerated Malheur occupiers, taking over federal facilities as they go, looting the gift shops and throwing the booty to their howling mobs ("Here's one case of commemorative mugs Capital City will NEVER see a profit on!"). To further cement relations with the crucial survivalist treehouse demographic, Trump should also start dressing like Junior Samples and using chaw ("I was dipping snuff," he can tell the mob, "but it made me all --" [reads off card] "-- sniffly-like").

• David Brooks admits modern conservatism is fucked because the shitheels sold it for scrap, and for a while I was surprised at him; lines like "It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism" even suggest a capacity for self-awareness. But you know Bobo: no way he was gonna get through a whole column without botching it--

This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old.

Sorry, had to catch my breath. Your big names are senile as well as psycho? How is that a good thing for conservatism?

Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great. It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex. Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).

The reformicons, that nerd sect that was supposed to lead the party to glory before that guy showed up? There's a whole ridiculous story about them in the New Yorker; here's one of my favorite lines:

Trump became the Frankenstein’s monster of Reformicon candidates, taking on the group’s respectable positions—such as skepticism about the economic benefits of immigration—and rendering them into an indefensible state.

How dare the populist spoil our beautiful artisanal policies! They expect a Phoenix to rise from the ashes, but what they're really gonna get is a Smog Monster.

WINGNUT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

You may have seen the recent high-level discussions online of the degenerate state of rightblogger discourse, based on "Want to save the Republican Party? Drain the right-wing media swamp" by Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post.

If you've been reading alicublog for any length of time, you may have thought: yeah so? Because ugh, I've been covering that mess since 2003 (since 2002, really), and as followers of Max Blumenthal, Rick Perlstein and others know, it's been going on much longer than that. Ur-shitheels like William Buckley, Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Adolph Coors et alia accelerated the metastasis that has given us the Limbaughs, Savages, Coulters et alia of today, whose poisonous influence has corrupted our policy discussions to point where a large plurality of Americans think climate scientists are con artists trying to steal the honest living of oil company executives, universal healthcare is impossible, and toleration of minorities is contrary to the wishes of the Founding Fathers.

Well, Megan McArdle is here to tell us that this is all the fault of the liberal media -- liberal media, in this case, meaning large media outlets that are not Fox, nor the various rightwing print publications from the Washington Times to the San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Those organizations may have money and readerships, but they have not the cachet of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and McArdle seems to consider that cachet -- despite her long ultra-capitalist bona fides -- to be a public trust, access to which her friends in the Movement -- that is, "serious conservative journalists" -- are entitled.

The media is liberal, McArdle assures, because all the people who go into it are liberal, at least so far as she knows, and she knows everybody. And their liberal bias asserts itself in tricksy ways:

The process mostly operates subconsciously; it is entirely possible to believe that you are being strenuously fair while setting the bar higher for believing “conservative” stories and liking conservative politicians than for “liberal” ones. An unlikeable liberal politician will still be disliked; an irrefutable “conservative” fact will still be accepted. But in the mushy middle, the ground will tilt toward liberalism.

You will not be surprised to hear that McArdle offers no actual examples of mushy middle liberal bias; perhaps that would require a search engine using mushy logic, and it has not yet been developed.

That the media refuses to hire her friends is unfair, because they're really terrific journalists. Her only named example is -- oh, come on, you'll never guess:

I could point out that Rampell is remarkably ungenerous in ignoring the many serious conservative journalists who spoke out early and often against Donald Trump, including an entire “Against Trump” issue of the National Review, the elder statesman of right-wing journalism. (The National Review also printed an editorial unequivocally stating that then-President-Elect Barack Obama was a natural-born U.S. citizen.)

National Review's NeverTrump issue was, as I covered at the Village Voice, ridiculous, a mass knee-jerk by establishment conservatives who'd spent their professional lives building a quasi-journalistic bureaucracy that they suddenly found threatened by the rise of a reactionary who'd stolen their thunder but owed them nothing.  And their grudging editorial defense of Obama's citizenship ("We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job...") was yet followed by crypto-birther essays by such as Andrew C. McCarthy's ("This certification is not the same thing as the certificate").

This bare evidence McArdle stretches into a case that there are "so many of those [conservative] outlets" that "remain committed to careful reporting and debunking things like the Obama birth certificate nonsense, rather than simply pandering to their readers" that we must take them seriously and grant them MSNBC press passes.

But she doesn't name any others. Who are these worthies? Who at National Review qualifies as a serious journalist who might be suitable for promotion? Those few who've had the qualifications already got jobs in the liberal media -- Robert Costa at the Washington Post, Alexis Levinson at Buzzfeed, et alia.

In other words, the market seems to be doing a good job of promoting those conservative journalists who can perform actual journalism. Whom else would McArdle promote? Certainly none of her own former interns would do.

If you don't accept that the best conservative journos are being nefariously kept out of the better publications, nor that the lack of such reporters has left important stories unrevealed to the public, then McArdle has another, entirely different angle for you -- this one focusing on the conservative journos who aren't so good, but it's not their fault -- they're depraved on account of they're deprived:

Conservative media, in other words, became an ideological ghetto. And ghettos often develop pathologies...

What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside. Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones. 

Yes, the former Jane Galt is arguing for affirmative action for wingnuts. If only someone could get her to reverse-engineer her metaphor and apply it to black people.

TWO MORE WEEKS.

It's the home stretch, and the brethren are hauling out the big guns -- like "Hillary has a weird wrinkle in her face."

In such an environment, you know the latest James O'Keefe video ratfuck has gotta be big wingnut news -- though, being both old-school and just plain old, and accustomed to stories of political operatives being sent out to beat up their opponents, the whole idea that I should be shocked by stories of guys going out to get beat up is kinda hilarious to me. But John Nolte at the Daily Wire is extremely serious:

Thanks to James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, we now have video proof that high-ranking Democrat operatives directly connected to the highest-ranking Democrats in the land (the Clintons, the DNC, marriage to a sitting congresswoman) have engaged in vote fraud and the orchestration of violence at Donald Trump's campaign events.

And our elite, political media doesn't care.

And this is why, in their infinite wisdom, our Founders gave us the right to self-defense in the Second Amendment.

Wait wut.

...This is no joke. There is nothing these people will not do to obtain power, and the elite media is fully on board.

You are being replaced, disenfranchised, and now the media is giving Democrats permission to commit violence against you.

Take advantage of the Second Amendment while we still have one.

And by all means…

Stay ungovernable, America.

Calling for armed insurrection is something winners do! Expect that last line to wind up on red hats soon. Okay, on the lighter side and according to the rule of three, here's the orginal Sniffles the Clown, Larry Kudlow at National Review:

Finding Strength in Melania Trump
She’s making me take a second look at Donald.

From the front or from the back?

...I’ve only met Melania once, a few months ago at a funeral. For some reason she recognized me.

Maybe you and Donald have the same dealer. The thing's full of gems, but I think this is my favorite individual paragraph:

Under pressure, with great civility, instead of viciously attacking these women, as Hillary once did to her husband’s accusers, Melania simply said, “All the allegations should be handled in a court of law."

I know she's prone to plagiarism -- wasn't that a line from Profiles in Courage?

UPDATE. Attend Master Persuader Scott "Dilbert" Adams:

If there are no sponsored terror attacks before Election Day, it means ISIS prefers Clinton. They have the means. Think about it. #Trump

The Master Persuader has planted the prostate seeds of doubt that will kill the crotch-cancer of Clinton! You know, I think Trump can still win, but with material like this I'll be damned if I'm gonna pass on any opportunities for overconfidence.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

....about Trump's charges of a "rigged" election, and the brethren's defense thereof.

Among the bits I had no room to include was the libertarian perspective of Reason’s Sheldon Richman, “The Election Is Rigged, But Not as Trump Would Have Us Believe.” Some of his observations are reasonable enough, if suffused with the rarified air of the ivory tower or perhaps a distant planet where human behavior is an exotic subject ("viewers are more likely to reach for the remote when they hear about transcripts of speeches to Wall Street than when they hear 'locker-room banter' and insults"), but then Richman gets down to the real problem:

But there's another side to the "rigged election" charge that's bound to go unnoticed. The American political system, like all political systems, requires a good deal of peaceful cooperation to operate. This is obviously relevant to the transfer of power, which gets so much attention nowadays. This cooperation goes on in two respects: first, between the government and the subject population—government cannot rule purely through force because the ruled always substantially outnumber their rulers—and second, among the many individuals who constitute the government's branches, agencies, and bureaus...

On and on it goes for hundreds of words and with citations of Hobbes, Locke, and Roderick Long ("Now this of course does not mean that anarchists have achieved their goal of a society based purely on cooperation") till the merciful conclusion: "Finally, I think we can say that the elections are rigged but not as Trump would have us believe. They are rigged in the sense that the outcome is predetermined for power and against liberty. It'll take a change in ideology to change that." Well, with material like this, that's bound to come any day now.

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT, CONT.

This is just a random ladleful of what Ace of Spades is cooking, post-debate:

Apparently there are a lot of women, including lots of women who don't call themselves liberal feminists -- MeAgain Kelly and half of the online female "conservative" commentariat, for starters -- who actually think that a woman is allowed to insult a man to the accompaniment of a witch's mocking cackle and the man is not allowed to say anything more than "I agree with you, Thee of the Superior Sex."

You can stop there if you're busy -- Mr. Spades is a volume dealer and will always have more of the same -- but those of you with time to kill may want to take in a bit more just to assure yourselves I'm not making him look bad with selective quotation:

Go fuck yourselves, women (and some men) who think this way. You're not superior and you have no special rights and privileges, and men do not have a special requirement to defer to you in all things. 

People who claim these things seem to be trying to vindicate some personal, at-home domestic issue -- "My husband is such a useless cad!" -- through their political agitation. 

You have two choices, ladies: You can either compete in the hard world, or you can keep to the soft world. You cannot go out into the hard world, and in fact employ the tactics of the hard world like insult and mockery, and then demand to be treated by the rules of the soft world.

Comment is largely superfluous, but I will remind you that Mr. Spades was doing this kind of thing way before MRA and red pill and Gamergate and all that stuff. Some of my younger, less experienced readers may think this kind of grotesque and willful sexism is a recent efflorescence in the movement, ignited by Trump, but it's really only a reassertion, one of many since women started insisting on their rights. Believe it or don't, once Mr. Spades was a bright young politically-incorrect thing, celebrated as part of the New Butchitude back in the days when Republican presidents could swagger around in a flight suit and get away with any old shit. The years have not been kind, and sometimes he reveals weariness at holding the old standard aloft, and swears he's turning over a new leaf: "I think human beings are meant to live in the three-dimensional world of air and light and breath and blood and not just reduce themselves to machines in the service of lesser machines," etc. ecch. Then some bitch gets the other bitches cackling and he has to man up again.

What I'm saying is, you may think they're on their last legs because they're so pathetic. But they've hung in longer than reason would suggest were possible; don't be surprised if President Hitlery fails to do them in. In fact, given how they've responded to Obama, I can safely say they'll insist that the first female president has destroyed man-woman relations.

Remember, just because it's stupid doesn't mean they'll stop trying to get away with it.

THE FUTURE OF BIRTHERISM.

The whole Trump idea of a "rigged" election is giving mainstream-esque conservatives fits. David French tries to explain to his readers that the American system is so darned robust that even a monster like Hitlery Klintoon cannot damage it -- notwithstanding that just last month he wrote "Hillary Clinton Is Even More Dishonest than You Thought" and that if she were, forbid it almighty God, elected Presient, "Americans will either be exhausted by the drama or so thoroughly hardened to dishonesty and scandal that our politics will be debased for a generation." The "exhausted by the drama" choice seemed strange to me at the time -- we'll either be tired or a lost generation! -- but I now assume French knew he'd eventually need to write, well, what he just wrote, when the election was no longer in doubt and the apocalypse had to be put back in the toy chest till next time.

A betterworse example is Allahpundit at Hot Air. He predicts, in the wake of a Trump defeat, "a splintering on the right on basic questions of the opposition’s legitimacy" -- and I can't guess what he means, since Republicans have been casting doubt on the legitimacy of Democratic Presidents since 1992; I really expect some bright boy on their team to declare that Hillary is "no man that's born of woman," so according to Shakespeare she's illegitimate. But the last paragraph pretty much shows where Allahpundit is at.

I recommend this piece by Joel Pollak of Breitbart...

Yeah I know, but bear with me:

...on the ways in which the election is, and isn’t, rigged. “Rigged” in terms of a deeply slanted media? Most definitely. “Rigged” in terms of Hillary Clinton being let off scot free after committing a felony in mishandling classified information? Absolutely, and it’s worth noting that every day. “Rigged” in terms of vote counts being manipulated next month? Ah, no. Exit question: Since when is Barack Obama a fan of manning up and taking responsibility for one’s own political problems? He’s been whining about Republican obstructionism every day for seven and a half years.

Basically his POV is that of course the election is rigged, just not the way Alex Jones and Trump think -- they're crazy, not like us sensible, mainstream, center-right conspiracy theorists. (And even in the solitude of his writing chamber he's compelled to throw sand in the eyes of an invisible adversary: Oh yeah well what about Obama he complained about things too!)

With these guys, anytime anything doesn't go their way, it's because it was rigged.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's week of groping accusations and the brethren's damage control. A dirty job, but someone's -- actually, "a dirty job" just about covers it.

Among the outtakes:  There are some rightbloggers who can't approve of Trump but still think their fellow shitheels should elect him President. One of these, Ace of Spades, offered this literary explanation: While both Trump and Clinton are “jackals,” he said, Trump is merely “a jackal being released into a swamp full of alligators looking to devour him,” while Clinton is “a jackal being set loose in a field full of sheep with no defenses…” He further explained that the sheep in his metaphor are “any Republican or Christian unprotected by the elite power structure” and that Clinton Jackal also has “a pack of ravening jackal minions who will gladly join her in hunting and tearing apart the sheep." Close reading suggests these minion-jackals are the “political establishment of Washington DC.” But who, then, are the alligators? The establishment, again? Seems redundant. Maybe the jackals are working with the alligators, with the help of Dr. Doolittle. Spades' mysterious fable will long occupy historians, or at least forensic psychologists.

"FOR HAVING CREATED NEW POETIC EXPRESSIONS WITHIN THE GREAT AMERICAN SONG TRADITION."

Well, no one can say they don't know this Laureate's work. (Actually I'm sure there are some bowtied Roger Kimball motherfuckers for whom it might as well be Onyx or Kevin Gates.) But what might the Nobel Committee mean?

From the beginning (well, near the beginning -- it's strange to think that songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" are essentially Dylan's juvenilia) he had an unfair advantage over other poets as a rock 'n' roller; not only did he have the poet's traditional advantage -- relief from the burden of explanations -- he also didn't have to sound serious, either. Part of the joy of Dylan is the extent to which he just seems to wing it in the time-honored, whimsical tradition of close-enough-for-rock-'n'-roll. (You might say Little Richard got there first, and Dylan might agree with you.) I think this looseness is where a lot of his lyrics come from -- like this, my very favorite Dylan couplet ever, from "Million Dollar Bash":

I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist
I punched myself in my face with my fist

That is so stupid it's sublime. And that's just my particular favorite -- bear in mind, millions of allegedly half-literate teens were in 1965 singing aloud, "You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal," probably as in love with keening sound of CEE-ullllllllll as with the words. Some of them were even singing, "But the second mother was with the seventh son." Mind, that was the same summer as I Got You, Babe and I'm Henry VIII, I Am.

But Dylan wasn't just fooling around. If you take the time to think about that line about being invisible with no secrets, it turns out the metaphor is even more vivid and effective. (I'm still not sure about that seventh son, though.) I'm convinced Dylan saw from early on that hipster obscurantism was not only fun and profitable but also something with which he could go hunting for the Real Thing. Some go after it thundering and blundering, but Dylan chose to sneak up, casual-like, looking like he didn't care till it was time to throw the knife. Just because you didn't want to seem serious didn't mean you couldn't be serious.

Maybe he read and took the point of Ellen Willis' 1967 critique of his "silly metaphors, embarrassing cliches, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others," etc. Maybe he figured that out himself. Maybe the motorcycle crash had something to do with it, or the bad scene after Woodstock, but his imagery and inventiveness became muted, prematurely autumnal. It took me years to figure out that he wasn't just filling measures on "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"; I didn't get why Judas was laying out tens for Frankie to pick from, and why Frankie was unable to choose -- they're all ten dollar bills! -- until I started to have dreams like that too, and to think more seriously about death. Dylan was 26 when he wrote it.

Over time Dylan has come to seem much less weird, partly because we've gotten used to him and because he's been festooned with honors and become a Cultural Figure, but also because the more mastery he got over his songwriting, the more it came to resemble the work of the other masters in his field -- good American Songbook stuff, love songs and stories. (He sees that too, hence Shadows in the Night.)

But he didn't shave himself to fit that mold. Rather he pushed it out, gently, to suit himself. I remember how shocked and thrilled I was by "either I'm too sensitive or else I'm gettin' soft" -- holy shit, it's quarter to three and there's no one in the place except Bob Dylan! If his love songs didn't have the economy of a Jimmy Van Heusen song, that was okay; one of the benefits top being of the New Breed was that you were expected to be undisciplined, a little shaggy and bloated like a fat couch at a hippie house. ("If You See Her, Say Hello" = 234 words. "All the Way" = 130.)

Dylan took advantage of his allowance; some of his songs feel like director's cuts avant la lettre. "Idiot Wind" (639 words!) is like a scenario for a Sam Peckinpah movie no one could possibly finance. But along the way he learned to be sparing when needed, too, as in "Make You Feel My Love," one of the Dylan songs closest to the old tradition. The song is a plea; the lines are spare with short words, to carry the plaintive feel; the emotions are raw to the point of embarrassment.  And it sneaks up on you like Dylan sneaking on the muse. See how it goes from something almost mundane to something majestic in just the first two verses:

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love 

When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love

 I'm not sure if this is what the Swedes meant by "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," but it does the trick for me.

CHRISTIANS MAKE EVERYTHING WORSE, PART 535,998.

Eric Metaxas is new to me, but his "Should Christians Vote for Trump?" at the Wall Street Journal is one hell of an intro:

Over this past year many of Donald Trump’s comments have made me almost literally hopping mad. The hot-mic comments from 2005 are especially horrifying. Can there be any question we should denounce them with flailing arms and screeching volume? I must not hang out in the right locker rooms, because if anyone I know said such things I might assault him physically (and repent later).

He's a Christian, see, but he's still dead butch!

So yes, many see these comments as a deal breaker. 

But we have a very knotty and larger problem. What if the other candidate also has deal breakers? Even a whole deplorable basketful? Suddenly things become horribly awkward. Would God want me simply not to vote? Is that a serious option?

In case you haven't guessed, Metaxas' point is yes, noxious as it seem, brothers and sisters, you have a Christian duty to vote for Trump because Hitlery Klintoon.

To make his case Metaxas cites a bunch of wingnut memes -- e.g., "What if she defended a man who raped a 12-year-old and in recalling the case laughed about getting away with it?" -- and offers ISIS as a reason to vote for Trump because they're evil and Clinton is... I don't know, in favor of ISIS? Etc.

But that's not the best part. In case his fellow Christians are still not sure they can stomach a vote for Trump, here's how Metaxas bids them find strength:

The anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer also did things most Christians of his day were disgusted by. He most infamously joined a plot to kill the head of his government. He was horrified by it, but he did it nonetheless because he knew that to stay “morally pure” would allow the murder of millions to continue. Doing nothing or merely “praying” was not an option. He understood that God was merciful, and that even if his actions were wrong, God saw his heart and could forgive him. But he knew he must act.

You read that right: Metaxas is comparing Trump voters to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Clinton to Hitler.  I guess that makes Trump Sophie Scholl.

The next step will be a painting by Jon McNaughton (of the famed Obama-tramples-the-Constitution stuff) showing a ghostly Jesus standing proudly behind a raging Trump, or maybe a footprints-in-the-sand thing where Jesus says, "When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I flew off to Trump Tower to grab some chick by the pussy."

FRENCH TWIST.

David French is on fire this week, by which I mean more ostentatiously nuts than usual. (Can you blame him? Strategery Presidential candidate Evan McMullan seems to be making some progress in his bid to take Utah and, if the prognostications of Josh Gelertner mean anything (spoiler: they don't), throw the election to the House. French, who rejected the Billy Kristol Party presidential bid earlier this year, may be eating his heart out over what might have been.)

One French post is about the depressed viewership of NFL games on TV. French naturally blames Colin Kaepernick and other protestors:

While it’s difficult to explain the behavior of millions of people by reference to any single cause, I’m dubious of the NFL’s attempt to rule out player protests as offering any explanation for the ratings drop. The NFL isn’t the NBA. Its fan base isn’t as clustered in progressive urban centers but is far more equitably distributed across the country.

As the Coach says in That Championship Season, basketball is no longer the white man's game, so You People in your urban hoop-ghettos can protest all you want, but we white men out here in the Big Suburb demand you calm your black folk down or it's bye-bye Pennzoil ads.

Thus, it plays a doubly dangerous game by embracing the social justice left. It stands to alienate more fans than it attracts, and it’s in bed with a cultural force that ultimately despises the league itself. Social justice warriors hope to destroy football. They don’t want what’s best for the league or the sport. Instead, they want to use it until they kill it.

The National Football League -- betrayed from within! You fellows in the executive suites are deceived -- Those People aren't your friends, they're trying to kill you. In NFL, pass-catcher mau-maus YOU!

Sometimes I think modern conservatism is just one long riff on the word "nigger-lover."

Elsewhere French gets into the pussy tape, and echoes Trump agent Betsy McCaughey and others with a oh-yeah-well-you-libtards-love-sex defense. Remember, this guy professes to despise Trump, so this shows how insanely devoted to culture war he has to be:

This is one for the Vox record books. The liberal site — which purports to “explain” the news...

Impudent liberals! Only Jesus can explain the news!

...— is now trying to explain why some conservative Christians are sharing Beyoncé lyrics and passages from Fifty Shades of Grey in response to the Trump tapes. Their explanation? Christians view dirty words and sex assault as basically the same because, well, read it for yourself...

French argues theology with the Vox quotes for a while ("all sins are certainly not 'equally' bad in their moral gravity or their earthly consequences") before proving their main idea right:

Second, regarding pop culture, it’s not that pop culture is just crass — it celebrates perversion. Fifty Shades of Grey seems to describe its own sexual assault. Here are key passages, via Rod Dreher:

Imagine David French and Rod Dreher examining the evidence! "Look, Rod, have you seen this?" "Wow! I don't even know what that is and I'm gettin' a boner! [stabs self in leg with penknife]"

I’m not even going to attempt to quote Beyonce’s lyrics. They don’t describe sexual assault but instead a quid pro quo-style sex relationship where she grants all kinds of favors to men she has sex with — the kind of relationship that women have forever rightly condemned as sexual harassment.

You libtards say you're against sexual assault but she took his ass to Red Lobster -- according to the Bible that makes her both a whore and a whore-monger!

At the heart of the conservative critique, however, is something very real — calling out a Left that has helped sexually debase our culture to such an extent that only one moral norm remains, and even that’s truly optional in the right context. All the Left cares about anymore is consent, but its icons (like Bill Clinton) get a pass even then, and if a novel gets popular enough — like Fifty Shades of Grey — then it exists in its own exempted, subversive category.

David French answers your "consent" argument with unproven allegations and fiction! Now who's a dirty bird?

Heather Mac Donald says it well:

Ugh. All you need to know about that is Mac Donald has taken time out from her usual job -- warning white America of the national Negro uprising -- to explain that women are whores ("Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels...") and parse Beyoncé and Jay-Z with a Talmudic intensity seldom seen outside a Black Studies seminar or the writings of Victor Davis Hanson. Mac Donald is also mad at Amy Schumer: "She confesses to a 'weakness for orgasms.'" In short, the Clenis and Hollywood made everything badsex and we need to get back to "the chivalric ideal that gentlemen should treat females like ladies," which comes with permanent inferior status for women but, on the bright side, maybe marginally fewer rapes, at least outside of wedlock or the manor.

Imagine a normal person reading these posts, and you'll see why their movement is in trouble.

THE LAST OF THE RED-HOT LOSERS.

As I mentioned in the column on Monday, some conservatives are using the Trump tape to establish moral distance between themselves and the candidate. George Will, for example, is so rattled he's quoting Kris Kristofferson. (He attributes "freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose" by the song's title rather than to its author -- guess he considers it a vulgar bit of folk wisdom from Hippietown and can't take it seriously enough to acknowledge authorship, as he would for Tacitus or Casey Stengel.)

Others are trying to spin it as a silly bit of potty-mouth rather than a sinister expression of hatred toward women (charitably assuming that didn't actually, as he memorably put it, grab them by the pussy). Part of the strategy, such as it is, is to confuse creative or even simple use of obscenity with misogyny and sexual menace. A popular example is former New York Lieutenant Governor, national health care assassin, and all-around dumbass Betsy McCaughey conflating Hillary Clinton's appreciation of Beyonce with Trump's appreciation of sexual assault on CNN because both involve words not normally spoken in church.

But for my money the more interesting version is by ancient Washington Times hack Wesley Pruden. (For background, here's a typical passage from a column in which he compared, and not as a joke, Herman Cain to Ronald Reagan: "Things have gone from bad to badder for the self-righteous artsy-fartsy elites, who for all their book-learning and self-regard just can’t figure out America.") Pruden loves Trump because he sticks it to sissies like "the editor of the precious and erudite New Yorker magazine" on their "fainting couches in recovery rooms across the precincts of the mainstream media," and this week he suggested that grab-her-by-the-pussy isn't so bad because Trump is a man, unlike some Presidential candidates he could name:

It’s a credit to their sex that women are rarely good at either cussin’ or telling what were once called “smutty stories.” Most women think the woman is always the butt of the joke, even when it’s usually the man cast as hapless jerk who humiliates himself in an absurd pursuit of elusive prey. A woman with a good repertoire of abuse is occasionally said to be able to “cuss like a man,” but she more resembles the woman preaching in Dr. Johnson’s famous jibe, “like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

You ladies should stick to what you're good at, like needlepoint and cocksucking.

On the other hand, a talented teamster with a brace of ornery mules, headed to the sawmill with a heavy load of fresh-cut pine logs, could keep up a string of obscene abuse for fully two or three minutes without ever repeating himself.

Pruden recalls this from when he was a cub reporter on the Fritters (Ala.) Slaver-Picayune back afore they came up with the horseless carriage. Last time Pruden saw a present-day Teamster, he was probably nervously asking him what he thought of those Redskins while planning a column on how unions are destroying the country.

Not many dirty mouths, male or female, can do that. Who would want to?

Nobody cultivates a dirtier mouth than Hillary Clinton. It’s difficult to describe Hillary in full because a decent regard for the gentle reader forbids it. Any teamster, cop, or Secret Service agent assigned to Hillary duty has to put his hands over his ears even to think about it.

Lordy, sech language! Pruden then recirculates a bunch of jacked-up claims from the age of Troopergate about Clinton's cursing abilities, fondly reminisces about the days when Strom Thurmond would bestow "the occasional pinch when he came upon a young lady bending over the groaning board at a cocktail party," and then just basically wanders off onto a tangent about these new-fangled cellular phones that take recordings kids can play back on their Walkmen.

At no point does Pruden portray a hint of awareness that normal American women are acquainted with coarse language -- not only because men yell it at them on the street whenever they wear anything more revealing than a hijab, but also because they live in the 21st Century -- and a great number of them occasionally employ it themselves, and probably would not only excuse but admire Clinton's ability to pitch it back at the limpdicks by whom she is surrounded. Unless Pruden really is being kept in a jar on a musty old rolltop in the City Room, he can't have failed to notice this. So why's he pretending? The same reason guys like him pretend we can keep out the world with a wall, and that white men will always run everything: The alternative is too awful to contemplate.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the pussy thing, and the debate. The topic was an embarrassment of riches, not to say a plain embarrassment, and here are some of the outtakes:

Regular readers will recall that Rod Dreher has been extremely Trump-curious lately (“The more things like this happen, the more sense Trump’s idea to halt Muslim immigration for the time being makes”). Friday morning Dreher was swooning for him, with “Trump To Catholics: ‘I’ve Got Your Back’” (“Donald Trump sent a letter to Catholic leaders gathering in Denver… I find this encouraging”) and an even more embarrassing post called "The Little Way of... Donald Trump?" Hours later Dreher was demanding Trump resign. “There is no way a pig like this will be elected president. None,” he wrote, the scales falling from his eyes, or his thumb falling from the scales. Later Dreher declaimed, “When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option [subject of Dreher’s new book] will be all we will have left.” By then there’ll have been enough born every minute to make it a best seller!

After the debate Dreher declared Trump the winner and wrote,"You know, I really think Donald Trump still has a chance — not much of one, but a chance — to win this thing. I did not expect to be saying that after this debate." That would be a good reason not to constantly make hysterical statements that you have to disown a few hours later, dummy.

The most interesting thing about Jonah Goldberg’s column on the subject was that it wasn’t totally stupid: He even said people who “still think Hillary Clinton would be worse” than Trump should “just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name.” I think that, while other big-name conservatives are secretly rooting for Trump, this campaign has really put the zap on Goldberg's head. Imagine that your biggest claim to fame is a book about how liberals are all fascists, and then one day your whole movement is taken oven by a guy whose campaign blueprint is the rise of Adolf Hitler. Even worse, the guy thinks you're a loser. If Goldberg’s entire career hadn’t been a geyser of poison shit I’d feel sorry for him.

UPDATE. You gotta be shitting me, Scott Gant and Bruce Peabody at the Wall Street Journal:

What’s next for the Republican Party and Donald J. Trump? After hearing Mr. Trump make a series of derogatory and sexually predatory statements in a 2005 recording that was leaked last week, Republican officials are openly fretting about the future of their party and its candidates. Some are calling on Mr. Trump to step aside so that a new presidential nominee can be chosen.

With Mr. Trump emphatically rejecting that idea, the best chance for Republicans to secure the White House (and improve their prospects down ballot) may be a different course: Mr. Trump could publicly declare that although he will remain the Republican nominee he will resign immediately after taking his oath of office on Inauguration Day, leaving his more-popular running mate, Mike Pence, to succeed him as president.

In this way, Republicans can effectively replace Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket, without having to endure the logistical and legal turmoil of formally nominating a new standard-bearer less than a month before Election Day.

"Logistical and legal turmoil" meaning "impossibility," in this instance.

...Under the 20th Amendment, the newly elected president’s term begins at noon on Jan. 20. A President-elect Trump could recite his oath of office and then immediately resign.

I think they should let Trump do the inaugural address first. Maybe even sit in the Oval Office awhile and give away some pens.

Fantasies like this aren't meant to convince. They're just symptoms of dissociation. Conservatives want the benefits of a Trump campaign (all those nice new Nazi frog voters and energized hillbillies!), but they want you to believe -- they want to believe -- that it has nothing to do with them, because they're in a tower above the fray, swaddled in nice, reasonable discourse.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fuck all this shit. Beasties.
•   I know it's been days since this Lionel Shriver's boo-hoo but I happened to see an interesting comment about it on Facebook and it encouraged me to look harder. Shriver, you may recall, was given rough treatment at some stupid Aussie literary conference, allegedly because she championed writing characters of different ethnicities than oneself. Shriver has the right to create such characters, of course, and people who think she shouldn't have it are indeed idiots; originally I was left wondering why she cared what people who were clearly beneath her contempt thought about that or anything else. But then someone published excerpts of what Shriver actually said. Turns out she thought she was already oppressed -- that is, that she suffered the kind of oppression that doesn't actually prohibit you from writing or publishing or doing anything, really, but makes you feel righteously politically incorrect -- a feeling one gets from reading lookit-the-silly-college-stoonts stories in the Daily Mail. Jim C. Hines:

...Shriver presents the example of a party at Bowdoin College, wherein hosts were punished for passing out sombreros at a tequila-themed party. You can read more about that incident and form your own opinions. It’s interesting to note that this wasn’t an isolated incident at the school. “Last fall the school’s sailing team hosted a ‘gangster’ party where attendees were encouraged to wear stereotypical black clothing and accessories,” and “In the fall of 2014, Bowdoin’s lacrosse team held what was billed as a ‘Cracksgiving’ party that featured students wearing Native American garb..."

In other words, it sounds like the kids at Bowdoin were behaving, not like brave free-speech warriors, but like assholes, and the school regulated -- a questionable decision, maybe, but not the coming of the Fourth Reich. Oh, Shriver wasn't done with her catalogue of censorship yet: "At the American Music Awards 2013," she told the crowd, "Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha." And now she's in a concentration camp. Kidding! She remains one of America's richest and best-loved recording artists. But she, too, has known the oppression of not having everyone love her all the time.

Just before the Hines section I quoted, he said something that should go on a sampler or on the entablature of a building:

Look, if you’re going to claim you’re not allowed to write a certain type of fiction, you need to back that up.

And the Facebook comment I mentioned began thus:

Why do I always have to dig down five links to find an article that will actually tell me what the original offense was amidst some long list of grievances for these stories?

For the same reason that Rod Dreher's tales of homosexual tyranny always comprise thousands of waste-words and sputters, underneath which is usually buried a tiny noppression, e.g. someone saying curse words at a bigot: Because if people knew what such people were actually so worked up about, they'd never stop laughing.

HILLBILLY SNOWFLAKES.

Rod Dreher, who thinks a professor saying "Fuck you, asshole" to an anti-gay colleague is "Leninist and Stalinist," also thinks some effete writer-fella portraying Mike Pence as a rube in The New Yorker is a good reason to vote for Trump:

Holy J.D. Vance, Batman. They really don’t get it, do they? Their contempt. They really do believe they’re punching up, when in fact they’re punching down.

If Trump wins this election, the only comfort I will take from the victory is knowing that Douglas McGrath and the [New Yorker] editors who find that snotty condescension towards middle Americans funny will be wailing and gnashing their teeth.

Have I got news for Dreher! "Li'l Abner," "Snuffy Smith," Them Hillbillies Are Mountain Williams Now, The Beverly Hillbillies -- it's been going on for decades! And some hillbilly jokes have even grosser punchlines, too ("Get off'n me, diddy, yer bustin' mah cigarettes!"). It's a holocaust, culture-war wise.

One thing I always thought about country folk, though, was that they were tough, and that they gave us city slickers as good as they got in the humor department. But that was before such as Dreher became their spokes-snowflakes. (On second thought, let's not blame the honest Tobies of the hinterlands for Dreher's conniption fits -- I'm sure most of them have never heard of Dreher, which is just as it should be; much of the time I wish I'd never heard of him either.)

UPDATE. Speaking of snowflakes, wingnut blowhard and Congressional sore loser Allen West was slated to speak at St. Louis University and, as part of his pre-show publicity, told his followers "Folks, I’ve just been CENSORED" because his operatives "were not allowed to use the words 'radical Islam' on any advertisements for the event." And isn't that what John Peter Zenger fought for -- the right to control collateral materials for his upcoming speaking engagements at a private college? West further raved:

I along with the [Young America's Foundation] activists will not back down from this challenge. And if this is just a case of ill-conceived political correctness, we’ll rectify that. But, if this is a case of the influence of stealth jihad radical Islamic campus organizations such as the Muslim Student Association, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, then you will be exposed. And I recommend to the President of St. Louis University, you do not want it known that a radical Islamic organization is dictating speakers on your campus — that is not the type of PR you really want.

To recap: Because his hosts won't have "radical Islam" on the flyers for his speech, West accused its Muslim student association of "jihad" and threatened to denounce SLU as enablers thereof. In West's world of perpetual grievance that's what fills seats -- and also empties them, it would seem, because when it came time for West to speak a huge segment of the audience walked out.

Try to imagine how someone with an ounce of wit or class would have responded to that; a humble "well-played" is the least you might expect. But this sputtering I'm not the snowflake, you're the snowflake! response at Right Wing News is typical:

The students were members of the SLU Rainbow Alliance and the Muslim Student’s Association. Now let’s remember these are the Lefty folks who preach tolerance of other perspectives to all of us. And now look at them acting like immature children plugging their delicate ears with their sticky little fingers so they don’t have to hear the horrifying fact that not everyone, gasp, agrees with them! Good thing they left the venue. They probably had to be checked into the children’s program and go do some crafts and drink apple juice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The true definition of "political correctness" is "someone refused to endorse my racist bullshit."

(Since SLU is a Jesuit school, I expect this will eventually be portrayed as part of Tim Kaine's Jebbie treason.)

THE LAST OF THE NEVERTRUMPS.

Peter Spiliakos at National Review:

I can’t have contempt for Trump supporters as a group. Some — Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich, for example — are contemptible, but they were that way when Trump was just a game-show host. I know and respect many Trump supporters in my personal life, and I know several of the authors in the Scholars and Writers for Trump group...

Scholars and Writers -- you mean these numbnuts? Bill Bennett? Roger L. Simon? Thomas Lifson, the biggest dummy at American Thinker? This is like saying, "Martin Shkreli's kind of a dick, but that Bernie Madoff, he's so mild-mannered."

Anyway, Spiliakos' shtick is Come Let Us Wingnut Together:

It isn’t clear that Trump has the slightest interest in the principles of American government — whether it is his desire to “open up” libel laws so that he can legally persecute his critics or his offhand suggestion that he would implement national stop-and-frisk policing despite a total lack of presidential authority to do any such thing. Trump’s only consistent principle is to do and say whatever is best for Trump in the moment. He is a demagogue.

But that does not, by itself, make the case against Trump. He is a demagogue, but he might be our demagogue.

Blink. Blink.

Let us remember the weaponization of the IRS by the Obama administration, and that the famous Citizens United case was about the government trying to prevent the release of a film that was critical of Hillary Clinton.

You mean when Tea Party operatives portrayed themselves as humble pastors of the Constitution, and propagandists portrayed themselves as artists, and they all got away with it?

Clinton is also a demagogue, who dismisses Trump supporters as “deplorables” and Bernie Sanders supporters as deluded, mom’s-basement-dwelling losers.

i.e.: Clinton referred ingraciously to racist nuts and Nazi frogs and, despite Spiliakos' debunked bullshit, with sympathy to the Sanderistas. She's just like Mussolini!

If we are reduced to a choice between two demagogues, each contemptuous of the rule of law, it might make sense to pick the one that is on our side.

I'm guessing even some National Review readers are looking at this and thinking, "Last weekend Donald Trump tweeted through the night about how Miss Universe is a whore because she sassed him back."

Except that Trump is not on our side. Trump is on Trump’s side...

C'mon, dude, shit or get off the pot.

This still leaves the argument that, even if Trump is a demagogue, and is unreliable, he is still better than Clinton. This is a strong argument...

Now I'm thinking: what's the market for this? Even in wingnut world is there anyone who would hang on the spectacle of Spiliakos mooning like a maiden in a melodrama over the simian figure of Trump? Eventually he tells us his plan is to "write in someone's name," and then huddle for warmth with his fellow conservatives:

...But if Trump wins, his principled critics and his principled supporters should work together to help him when he is right and oppose him when he is wrong.

(Last coherent thought as his body and everything within hundreds of miles turns to ash) "Well, we tried."

If Trump loses, those same groups should work together to build a post-Trump Right that addresses the concerns of Trump’s working-class supporters and earns the votes of persuadable Americans who could not be persuaded to vote for Trump.

"Gather round, boys, have some snuff! Or chaw if you prefer. Don't crowd, now, stand well back. You like wrestling, don't you? Well, our new candidate Son of the Undertaker is going to body-slam the deficit with STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING AHHH IT HURTS AHHHHHHH"

Whatever happens, we should recognize one another as friends divided by prudential differences in difficult circumstances. Whatever happens, we should reconcile on the basis of our shared principles — because whatever happens, we will share the same fate.

(Picks up papers from podium, waits for applause; hears instead in the distance the feral children from A Canticle for Liebowitz screaming "EAT! EAT!"; ceiling collapses.) A short life, but a merry one!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about another fun-filled week on the trail with Trump, including post-debate spin, his obsession with the insolent Miss Universe, his bizarre suggestion that Hillary Clinton cheated on her husband, and the New York Times Trump tax story. It's a feast, jump in.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Current mood.
•   Last Friday I mentioned a long-distance diagnosis of the allegedly dying Hillary Clinton by one John R. Coppedge, M.D., of Texas, every bit as ridiculous as previous long-distance diagnoses of Barack Obama I'd seen in crappy wingnut sites, but in this case published by the respectable D.C. tipsheet The Hill. Well, now look what The Hill is cooking:

Clinton’s sixth nerve palsy: What difference does it make?
By Zev Shulkin, contributor

This put in mind of Daniel Plainview crying "I am the Third Revelation!" The Sixth Nerve Palsy hath oped the Seventh Seal! Shulkin, "an ophthalmologist in Dallas, Texas," saw Clinton on the TV in 2013 when "Clinton appeared before Congress with thick glasses" and noticed "the left lens of Hillary’s glasses appeared hazy and a close-up of her black frames revealed a sticker with vertical lines. That sticker is commonly used to manage diplopia or double vision," leading Shulkin to "surmise from looking at the direction of the lines on Hillary’s glasses, that Clinton developed a sixth cranial nerve paralysis or palsy as the result of her fall" that year. No wonder she did so badly in the debate on Monday! Next week: The Hill finds a guy who can do EKGs with his personal Mind-Ray (patent pending).

•   Here's a screenshot of what appears at the top of disqus' alicublog comments section when I go to it:

I realize these come-ons are to a great extent tailored to me, or rather to an algorithm's idea of me and my interests based on what my internet usage reveals -- mainly that I'm an old white man who visits a lot of rightwing sites. I include this because it suggests, in its poetic way, the reason why Trump and his enablers are hammering on about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. People say Trump's obsessed with her and maybe out of control but -- at the risk of sounding like my more Scott Adams-ish friends who think everything Trump does is 12-D chess -- I think his logic is more like the logic of this advertising: That old guys like me are susceptible to the cheesiest, most LCD appeals, especially when it comes to women, and would be swayed by a story about this hot chick who acts all la-de-da and deserving of respect but she's really not because she was in a porn film -- well, okay, just Playboy magazine and a reality show, but don't worry, we'll find the good stuff if we keep looking! In other words Trump and his people, like the people behind this advertising, have a very low opinion of us, and offer us the opportunity to confirm it by electing him.  I think this is closer to the mark than most of the essays about what sub-classification of authoritarian Trump is.

•   Time for one more -- how about this doof from The Federalist? He's sort of Reform MRA -- that is, he accepts all the men-want-polygamy, women-want-hypergamy, alpha-males-get-all-the-trim red pill guff, a la:

If a man’s social status in its various incarnations plays a prominent role in his attractiveness to women, then a man’s promiscuity indicates that many women have recognized his social status. This effectively raises his standing further...

...but rather than portray this knowledge as secret wisdom with which dorks can get laid, he argues for the Restoration of Virtue, because he's moral, see, and thinks it's terrible that Young People Today are having sex, and assumes it's all very sad sex on account of a book he read, but doesn't like the implication that the girls are the "victims" of this very sad sex. In fact, he clearly thinks what's needed is more female victims:

In other words, any mutually beneficial bargain would have to restore chastity, slut-shaming, and early marriage while ending no-fault divorce... 

In the absence of the civilizing power of marriage and family and the virtue of chastity that facilitates it, it girls will always choose those boys to pursue, and the cycle will only ramp up as long as society overlooks this antisocial behavior of the girls because sensible people are afraid of being labeled misogynists for calling it out. 

If we want this ugly situation to change, then demanding more from boys while simultaneously disincentivising them from offering more is a losing proposition. The only viable time-tested option is to reverse course and begin recovering what we, as a society, have lost. 

We need to begin respecting men again. We need to recover the virtue of chastity even if it happens to make a slut feel ashamed...

Ugh. I never thought I'd say this, but at least the straight-up MRA guys seem like they're capable of enjoying themselves.

IT'S SO NICE TO HAVE YOU BACK WHERE YOU BELONG.

Here's more evidence that Jonah Goldberg may be slowly coming out of his Trump funk. Who else in American letters would, in attempting to explain the power of (urgh) "narrative," come up with a passage like this -- not to mention leave it in:

President Obama understands this too. Just consider the way he talks about terrorism — often reassuring Americans that they’re more likely to die in a bathtub accident than in a terror attack.

And he’s right.

On the other hand, bathtubs aren’t trying to get nuclear weapons. Nor are bathtubs destabilizing the Middle East (often killing massive numbers of non-Americans) or otherwise plotting to conquer the world.

Thought experiment! There's a tornado coming! And your only hope of shelter is a local mosque! Sure, in a tornado you could get smashed like a mosquito -- but the Koran says you're a dhimmi, and in a room full of Muslims there's gotta be one who's gonna wanna dhimmi you up! At least the tornado has no ideology! What to do?

To be fair, Goldberg is trying to make a point about how narratives can be deceiving:

I’m not naive. Crafting stories to serve political purposes is as old as politics itself. But the problem seems to be getting worse.

Perhaps it’s because our country is so polarized and our media environment so balkanized and instantaneous. Politicians and journalists alike feel compelled to make facts serve some larger tale in every utterance.

You can take it from the author of Liberal Fascism! Ah, Jonah, it's been too long.

DEBATE ONE.

When he started sniffling it all suddenly made sense: The stream of consciousness. The inability to stop talking even when he had clearly run out of things to say. The ground chuck facial coloring. I understood why they came up with the whole shtick about how he never touched alcohol -- it was like Hitler and meth! Or Muskie and Ibogaine! And it doesn't even seem to be good shit -- it's like his handlers skimmed it and cut his share with baby laxative. Well, serves him right.

She was stiff and slow, and he made no sense to me whatsoever. As usual. Who knows what Mr. and Mrs. America think?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Presidential debate prep -- that is, rightbloggers trying to prepare Americans for the idea that facts are bullshit and it's just the exhilarating hatred Trump makes you feel that matters.  I used last week's ridiculous fist-shaking over Samantha Bee as an objective correlative, but I could have picked any of several dozen equally stupid controversies, including Zack Galifianaki's “Between Two Ferns” interview with Hillary Clinton, much in the manner of the one he did with Obama that enraged rightbloggers in 2014. The effects of the Hillary int were similar. Take Nick Gillespie of Reason, for example: “‘Between Two Ferns’ is a comedy bit, so nobody's expecting anything remotely tough,” he said in a brief moment of clarity, before lapsing into “but for it to actually be funny there's need to some edge…” Libertarianism and culture war -- the worst of both worlds! Others, like The Liberty Beacon, seemed not to know what they were looking at (“Hillary Furious after Comedian makes her Look Ridiculous in Interview!… Comedy and sarcasm have never been so poignant”).

Or I could have used the opening of the new Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., which inspired Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media to list “Exhibits You Won’t Find in the New National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Among these: “Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing, plagiarism, and communist advisers,” “Unpatriotic black sports figures,” “The Democratic Party’s history of slavery,” etc.  In a follow-up, Kincaid answered the common charge that slaves built the White House by pointing out that in the War of 1812, slaves helped burn it down, so really it all evens out.

In any event, I have to say I'm in some sympathy with the debate commission's Janet Brown and her much-derided comment on big facts and little facts. Whatever the moderators might do to keep things honest, wingnuts will litigate the hell out of it -- like they did in 2012 with Candy Crowley, whose fact-check on Romney they continue to blame for his defeat -- in fact, their butthurt over that led to the GOP debate reforms that, one might argue, led to the nomination of Trump. So Brown's in a tough spot. This is what happens when you're forced to do business with shitheels. Here's hoping the voters have not ceased to recognize such people for what they are -- and, if they do, revile rather than identify with them.