THE AGE OF IL DOUCHE.

America is fucked. But you knew that. The rise of Il Douche merely accelerates the stroke.

I'm still seeing some people talking about this election as if Trump voters were a bunch of poor oppressed hillbillies desperate to be freed from the meth and misery to which Tyrant Obama had condemned them. But as has been shown, Trump voters aren't poor -- though they obviously do feel as if they've been deprived of something, and that voting for Trump would give it to them. You can get a glimpse of it in Rod Dreher's reaction to the news last night:

Sure, Trump stirred up the Nazis, but look on the bright side, he made the liberal elites sad! I think this was a big part of the winning formula. I doubt Trump voters seriously believe their man will make international trade more advantageous to the U.S., or settle race relations, or bring global peace. But they don't like the people who are actually working on these things; they are delivering unsatisfactory results and, in the Trumpkin mind, that isn't because these things are difficult and complicated, but because they spend too much time thinking about their friends the blacks, the women, the foreigners, and the gays. Never mind your so-called rights, widget sales are fluctuating, now how'm I going to afford that second home? It's gotta be the fault of liberal elites!

You don't have to be a yokel to think like that -- hell, you don't even have to be a Republican. You just have to be a certain kind of American who's always wondering where's his.

There was never really any reason to feel sorry for these guys before, and there sure isn't any now. They're going to get what they asked for good and hard, and so, alas, are we.

We could feel sorry for ourselves, but that trick never works. Best I can tell you is to keep your head up and don't let 'em talk you out of the truth -- or your sense of humor. Those are the two things their kind most despise, in part because they can't take them away from you.

EARLY AND AWFUL.

That's how yez do it in a Demmy-crat town, yerrah!

It's Election Day, and already hilarious, with turnout depressed in traditional bellwether Dixville Notch -- 4 for Hillary, 2 for Trump, 1 for the stoner and 1 for Mitt Romney. Protest votes in Dixville Notch! By 2020 they'll have armed poll watchers.

At the New York Post Charles Gasparino just can't fathom "The markets’ foolish panic over Donald Trump":

Since nearly the moment Comey made the announcement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 357 points, or nearly 2 percent of its value, through Friday...

All of which is lunacy.

As crazy as Trump’s demeanor has been at times during the campaign — I’ll admit it’s more than a bit odd that the possible leader of the free world gets into late-night Twitter feuds — there’s nothing nutty about what he has proposed on taxes or regulation, at least from the market’s perspective. If history is any guide (see the Reagan years, and the last six years of President Bill Clinton) lower taxes on individuals and corporations, as Trump is proposing, are usually a good thing for stocks, as are fewer regulatory burdens for business.

I know Uncle Ragey smells like "medicine," runs red lights, and has a tendency to reach over the seat and grab the girls, but I still don't see why you'd rather take the bus to school -- the bus costs money!

Will update as often as goddamn job allows.

UPDATE. At National Review, Dennis Prager is bringing in the sheaves:

I was one of you in vigorously opposing Trump’s nomination – on my national radio show and in my syndicated column. And I paid a price, as you have, in losing longtime supporters – in my case, any number of listeners who supported Trump from the outset and found my strong opposition to him disappointing and worse.

Unlike you, however...

I'm a sleazebag whore who's really only here for the money and the white supremacy.

...I did say from the beginning that if he were to be the nominee, I would vote for him.

Oh man, Dennis, you were so close! Quit living the lie, Dennis! You're only 27 years old, your hair shouldn't be that white!

Most of you are simply too intelligent, too idealistic, and too self-questioning not to have at least on occasion had second thoughts. If you understand – and I cannot believe that most of you don’t – how destructive another four years of any Democrat in the White House, let alone the truly corrupt Hillary Clinton, would be, it is inconceivable that you have never questioned your Never Trump position. Never Trump, after all, is not the same as Never Question.

"Doesn't my hand feel good on your little pussy? You can say 'Never' to Uncle Dennis, but you can't say 'Never' to pleasure!"

To prove my point, one of my favorite Never Trumpers, Jonah Goldberg, wrote in May: “If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump.”

In that moment of exquisite honesty, Jonah acknowledged one of the most important moral arguments to be made for voting for Trump – the lesser-of-two-evils argument.

YOU WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG -- YOU ARE ALL ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE! YOU ALONE CAN CHOOSE THE FACE OF GOD, AND YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT TO BE ANGRY AND MALE FOREVER! Prager also addresses that tiny minority of conservatives worried about their conscience or, as Prager dismissively refers to it, "self-image":

How can they, truly decent people, vote for someone who has exhibited the uncouth speech and behavior that Trump has? Or, as some have expressed it, “How can I explain to my daughter that I supported Donald Trump?”

As someone who also thinks of himself as decent...

Yeah I know but give it a minute.

...I think that saving America from Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the Left is the most decent thing I can do. And as for your daughter, just have her speak to any of the millions of wonderful women who are voting for Donald Trump. They will provide your daughter with perfectly satisfying moral and woman-centered answers.

He doesn't say what the woman-centered answers are; probably the usual bullshit, only in pink.

UPDATE 2. Roger L. Simon dismisses the "virtue-signaling" conservatives who couch their support of Trump and act embarrassed -- "I have supported Donald Trump unabashedly from the moment I thought it was clear he would win the nomination," he says. Trust me, what he's signaling ain't virtue:

At first blush, or any blush, Donald Trump -- a brash real estate tycoon who made much of his money from gambling casinos -- would seem an unlikely leader for such a crusade. But I submit it's the contrary (and, no, I'm not virtue signaling—at least I don't think so). The extreme situation we are faced with today -- we might call it "crony socialism" -- needed and needs an extreme personality both to get our attention and to get change accomplished. Nothing much would have happened, in all probability, with any of the other candidates. This time, of all times, an outsider was necessary.

Put another way, we have to fight their thuggery with a thug of our own.

In hell, Franz von Papen gets the small comfort of seeing, albeit through a wall of flames, his shtick become fashionable again. My favorite of Simon's insights is this:

He is also the first Republican in decades to make a serious attempt for the African-American vote. We can only hope that others will follow his lead, for the benefit of all our communities.

If only Republicans knew it was so easy -- and so effective!

UPDATE 3. As of 9:30 pm, I see some of you guys are nervous. Don't be! Not because the worst can't happen -- the worst currently has the inside track. But let's be honest with ourselves -- the frog knew that scorpion was a scorpion when it gave him a ride. Is America the frog, or the scorpion? Questions Remain!

If it all goes to shit, remember, nothing in this life is guaranteed. The next four years may require more of us than you expected. But when you get to a certain stage in life, you realize that no road is smooth all the way. Get you some tires with more tread, and press on.

UPDATE 4. 

Silver lining: They're not going to even pretend not to be white power peeps. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the end of the 2016 election cycle. And good riddance. Or maybe not -- could be we'll look back on this as one of the last decent weeks before chaos came again and the Dark Time ensued. Vote, for Chrissakes!

Not much in the way of outtakes -- the column is extra big, as befits the topic. I did look in on Mr. Spades, my go-to rageclown. He seems demoralized. Get a load:

The Washington Post has been particularly foul -- starting about four years ago, they re-made themselves into, essentially, a Social Justice Warrior blog with a sports section. 

More: Don Surber says the press went all in for Clinton -- and got a tie for their spastic efforts. 

They've stripped themselves of all credibility, reputability, and, worst of all, influence. 

No one will ever believe them again. 

No one. Ever.

I don't know what's funnier: That Mr. Spades is discoursing to his audience of aging fratboys on the credibility of the Washington Post as if he were Churchill after Dunkirk, or that he's citing in all seriousness Don Surber. 

ONCE-SLOW GOLDBERG SHOWS HE'S GOT PLENTY OF GAS IN THE TANK.

I have noticed that the Trump takeover of the GOP has left Jonah Goldberg a bit adrift and demoralized, so it is with pleasure that I announce he's returned to form with a column worthy of his alicublog tagline: the stupidest thing ever written until Goldberg writes something else.

First, recall all the recent news stories of hours-long lines of early voters and Republican voter suppression and voter harassment. OK, now catch Goldberg's headline:

How early voting endangers democracy

Not even kidding. In his lede, Goldberg suggests that the recent blockbuster (and bullshit) Comey email drop is vital voter information that would have gotten early Clinton voters to change their minds, then follows with a classic Goldberg tic: trying to make this look bipartisan-like by adding,

...a couple weeks before that, NBC News released a tape of Donald Trump describing how he likes to sexually assault women. Since then, nearly a dozen women have come forward describing treatment that closely tracks the behavior Trump himself described...

Early-voting start times vary by state and often by county. In Minnesota, people started casting ballots in September. In Ohio, voting began just five days after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced...

Someone who voted in early October might have missed that Trump was a scumbag! Acknowledging that "early-voting supporters concede the point and then say it just doesn’t matter" -- i.e., everyone knows this is a phony argument made up by Republicans who typically get creamed in early voting -- Goldberg tries this:

They note that the people most likely to cast early votes are committed partisans, immune to new facts and information. There’s surely some truth to that --

Which is why the Comey drop would have made them vote for Trump, I guess.

-- but as the scale of early voting increases with each year, it must also be less and less true every year.

It must be, because the longer the line for something, the less likely it is that all the people on that line really want what's on the other end, that is I mean  farrrrt did you hear that? Who did that? Why are you looking at me, I say that's grounds for ending this argument with me winning --

Unfortunately all around Goldberg still has a word count to fulfill, so we come to this:

Also, one might wonder why people who decry the rise of ideological polarization and partisanship are so eager to make it easier for hardcore partisans to vote... 

Every day we hear pious actors, activists and politicians talk about the solemn and sacred duty to vote, and yet everyone wants to make voting easier and more convenient.

[Blink. Blink.]

Many dream of the most cockamamie idea of all: online voting, so we can make choosing presidents as easy as buying socks on Amazon.

This gets human nature exactly backward. Nothing truly important, never mind sacred and solemn, should be treated as a trivial convenience. Churches that ask more of the faithful do better at attracting and retaining congregants. The Marines get the best and most committed recruits because they have higher standards...

Drop and give me twenty, then you can vote! That's how we did it when America was strong -- well, sort of, actually we used poll taxes and literacy tests. And, because we wanted to motivate black people to be all they could be -- like the Marines, and the Church! -- we used it mostly on them.

I predict that whoever wins Tuesday, we're in for a golden age of Goldberg. Keep a gas mask handy!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm serious, there's things to do.
• If you had Marina Abramovic in the pool, congratulations: The latest Wikileaks thing is that because John Podesta was invited to an Abramovic performance, he and all Clintonites are into black sex magic. InfoWars:

“SPIRIT COOKING”: CLINTON CAMPAIGN CHAIRMAN INVITED TO BIZARRE SATANIC PERFORMANCE
Menstrual blood, semen and breast milk: Most bizarre Wikileaks revelation yet...

In what is undoubtedly the most bizarre Wikileaks revelation to date, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was invited to a “spirit cooking dinner” by performance artist Marina Abramovic, to take part in an occult ritual founded by Satanist Aleister Crowley.

In an email dated June 28, 2015, Abramovic wrote, “I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina"...

Spirit cooking is also an “occult practice used during sex cult rituals, as explained in the book “Spirit cooking with essential aphrodisiac recipes,” notes Mike Cernovich.

The revelation that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, is presumably interested in weird, gory occult ceremonies was too juicy for even Wikileaks to ignore.

This has inspired some of the brethren to great feats of epistolary analysis.

You might be asking: Roy, you never messed with this Infowars stuff before, why now? The answer's simple: They're the new Republican base.

WE ARE NOT SO VERY DIFFERENT, YOU AND I.

This being the week before the election, there's a lot of garbage being written, and someone may beat this entry by John Ellis of PJ Media, but he's set a high bar. Ellis affirms he's NeverTrump, but does not allude to the reason, which he spelled out in a recent column: He suspects Trump of trying to throw the election to  Clinton ("Here's a conspiracy theory for you: Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race at the behest of his good buddy Bill Clinton. If that's true, Trump is serving his friends the Clintons well because almost everything that he does seems to be in order to help Hillary get elected…").

But let that pass. Now Ellis is back to tell us that the "squabble" within his movement just shows how pure it is, because it "reveals a desire to protect the integrity of the conservative movement." He apparently is not referring to Nazi frogs and neo-Confederates, but to Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and all the other guys who denounced Trump as a special menace and then endorsed him -- which is noble, not craven as it looks, because

...many of the Republicans who are planning on voting for Donald Trump next week are planning to do so with their noses firmly plugged and with a deep sense of regret about what might have been. Many who disagree with my #NeverTrump position agree with my assessment of Trump's lack of competency and virtue. Outside of the shrill voices of the alt-right, very few conservatives who are planning on voting for Trump are attempting to put lipstick on their pig. And that's the way they see it—Donald Trump is most definitely a pig, but he's their pig and they'd rather have their pig in power than the other side's pig.

Thaaaaat's an interesting definition of integrity.

...Thankfully, many Republicans continue to retain their integrity even as they prepare to vote for one of the two worst candidates for president in American history. Over and over, I see an acknowledgment of Trump's vileness even while calling for people to embrace the "lesser of two evils" arguments.

I must have missed the director's cut of Cruz's "vote for this scumbag" speech.

Democrats, however, can't embrace that argument because they refuse to acknowledge that their candidate is evil.

This has got to be the saddest version of the "at least I admit it" tropes since the Joker told Batman he completes him. Five more days! And the goodbad news is they'll never get less crazy.

SURPRISINGLY!

What the hell is up at The Hill? In September they published a couple of particularly egregious long-distance diagnoses of Hillary Clinton. Now look: today I saw a tweet from The Hill saying "Trump surprisingly popular in Africa." It leads to a story called "Trump’s tone resonates in strongman-weary Africa" -- an even more counterintuitive headline.

After claiming for Trump "surprising resonance in parts of Africa where people are weary of the political establishment" and that he's "enjoying a strong amount of popularity in Uganda and other African nations," the reporter quotes a "a lecturer in political science at Northwestern University and columnist for a Ugandan newspaper" who seems to agree; then, paragraph 7:

To be sure, support for Trump is not unanimous.

One poll conducted in South Africa and Nigeria, the continent’s two largest economies, showed a marked distaste for Trump. According to the WIN/Gallup International Association poll, released in October, respondents in those two countries overwhelmingly preferred Clinton 69-20.

Later we hear how some people were excited by a fake Trump quote that suggested he would "lock up" African dictators ("a Trump campaign spokeswoman confirmed that the quote is false" is one of the more revealing sentences in the report), some more quotes from professors, and a joke by Trevor Noah in which he called Trump "basically the perfect African president” and showed a picture of him dressed like Idi Amin.

At first I thought this story was uniquely awful, but then I realized: It's like the apotheosis of pro-Trump "reporting" -- and indeed of the Trump campaign itself. It's built on great mounds of bullshit adorned with thin wisps of fact. Plus -- and this is what distinguishes the Trumpian from the traditional Republican variety of journamalism -- it cites stuff that is clearly, even admittedly, not true as evidence. Because why not?

We do face catastrophe on Tuesday, but to a great extent the catastrophe's already happening.


UPDATE. Speaking of garb campaign reporting, from the once-good, now Trump-in-law paper The New York Observer:

Bernie Sanders Abandons Clinton in Final Week

This week Sanders made campaign appearances for Clinton in Milwaukee, Plymouth, NH, Portland, Maine, at Dartmouth College, in Youngstown, Ohio, and Kalamazoo, Michigan. I may have missed a few. In Friday and Saturday he's scheduled to stump for her in four Iowa towns.

Nonetheless the Observer offers commentary such as this:

Though Sanders supporters have been relegated to apathy since he officially ended his presidential campaign at the Democratic National Convention, Sanders is beginning to show every intention of giving his supporters something to be excited about after Election Day. Clinton’s free pass from Sanders is over.

That's not glory you're covered in, guys.

ROD TOOK THE MANGER, BECAUSE THE INN WAS FULL OF GAYS.

Airbnb has written a non-discrimination clause into its user agreements. As reported by the New York Times, this would appear to be less a spurt of SJW enthusiasm and more a PR/business decision -- Airbnb was getting shit because some of its renters have been a bit, er, exclusive about whom they'd allow to rent through their listings:

[Airbnb's] reputation was stained in December, when Harvard University researchers released a working paper that concluded it was harder for guests with African-American-sounding names to rent rooms through the site. Several Airbnb users have since shared stories on social media saying they were denied a rental because of their race. In May, an African-American Airbnb user filed a suit against the company, seeking class-action status, saying he had been denied a place to stay because of his race.

Thus does Airbnb avoid association with bigotry, and people who only want to rent to white people can go to or even start up a competitive service, perhaps called Honkyhost. The magic of the marketplace in action!

Longtime readers will be unsurprised to learn Rod Dreher, spokesman for the oppressed white straight masses, is incensed, and declares he would never sign such an agreement, because in his view Airbnb is "passing judgment on my religious beliefs, and committing itself to bias against me and others who hold them."

Fine, you might say -- then hie thee hence to Honkyhost (or, given Dreher's hard-on for the LGBT, HetHost) and luxuriate in your straightwhiteness. But you don't understand -- for Brother Rod, the problem is that you and Airbnb would so readily dismiss him; he considers himself and his fellow "religious traditionalists" oppressed by your noxious non-discrimination:

I’m about to check out from a Courtyard Marriott. What if in the future, hotels like this compelled their customers to sign such a commitment? There would be few places that religious conservatives and others who didn’t accept the LGBT line could stay when they travel. It’s not hard to imagine gay activists in the near future instituting a corporate campaign to get “Fairness Pledges” to be part of the business model of hotels and other businesses. If they succeed, then somebody will need to come up with The Religious Conservative Motorist Green Book.

The original Green Book, if you don't know, was a guidebook for black travelers disaccommodated by Jim Crow. I already had been looking forward to a nation free of racial and anti-gay prejudice, but that the very idea of such a world drives Dreher to Freedom Rider cosplay just makes the prospect that much sweeter.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Evan McMullin fantasy presidency. Yeah, I contemplated making this week's column about the Comey bullshit, but the situation is still in flux and in the absence of an actual accusation it's basically a scarecrow for Republicans to shake and make scary noises behind. I mean, look at the Ole Perfesser's page from last night:

PREDICTION: “Comey broke precedent about announcing a criminal investigation near an election because he saw something disqualifying.” If so, Hillary may regret the demand that he release everything ASAP . . . .

Meanwhile, as to the timing, note this: FBI agents knew of Clinton-related emails weeks before director was briefed. Does this mean that the agents were afraid to tell him for fear of Loretta Lynch-style interference, like last time?

Posted at 6:48 pm by Glenn Reynolds 

Questions Remain! Jon Stewart already has "Bullshit Mountain," so what can we do with this -- Bullshit Tsunami? Bullshit Event Horizon? (No, better save that for the endless Congressional investigations.)

The McMullin thing, on the other hand, in addition to being hilarious reflects the brethren's deepest fears and desires. The sources cover a good cross-section of wingnut-world, from Jonah Goldberg to the Christer nuthatch Witherspoon Institute to Erick Erickson's clubhouse. Plus when rightbloggers mention it their eyes go all gooey, like that dog whose owner dressed up as his favorite toy.

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.