FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Of course John's my favorite Beatle,
but George is close behind.
•  I'm unlocking another edition of my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!), this one a transcipt of Stephen Miller's unheralded appearance before the House Judiciary Committee's White Nationalism hearing. Part of the inspiration was Candace Owens' appearance, which as Stephen A. Crockett Jr. reports was sort of a parody of the conservative attitude toward white nationalism (which is by far the biggest terror threat in the U.S. now) -- let's just get a black lady up there to say that it doesn't exist and you're the Real Racist™! If they can get away with this, I see no reason why Miller can't get away with his own Jew-channeling-Goebbels innovation.

•  One good thing we may be able to salvage from this administration, if we survive it, is permanent damage to the whole stupid idea that evangelicals have anything serious or beneficial to add to the national debate. Remember when Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's evangel whisperer, was the model for such people -- temporizing, pencil-necked, only gently pushing the authority of Our Lord & Savior for conservatism (and then only for the goody-goody parts)? Well, now it's the age of the Savage Messiah, baby, with goons like Franklin Graham excusing Trump's sins and getting Republicans to promote their popcorn propaganda for them in hearings. (I'm not going to see Unplanned, but look forward to the sequel Unplanned 3-D, in which the actors thrust bloody, dismembered fetus parts at the audience. Move over Paul Morrissey!)

I'm sure some Jesus freak has defended Trump's cage-and-boot immigration policy before, but Matthew Schmitz's offering at the godly First Things, "IMMIGRATION IDEALISM: A CASE FOR CHRISTIAN REALISM," strains itself to make it look like the Lord's will. Schmitz starts out lamenting how naive he was as a young man, and how he thought the manly men he worked with who "complained about 'illegals' taking American jobs" were bigots when really they were just expressing common-sense Christianity in earthier terms. Later Schmitz learned that, by applauding hard-working immigrants, "elites" like Barack Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda "portray working-class Americans as violent, hateful, and incompetent. They revel in their suffering." Gotta choose who to feel sorry for: The whites or the browns. Guess which side Jesus is on? Thus people who want the kids caged and booted are The Real Christians.

Also the liberal elites are like the guys who didn't want to fight Hitler: "Sooner or later, even the most idealistic calls to welcome migrants must contend with hard reality," warns Schmitz. "In the run-up to World War II, men inside and outside the Church invoked the gospel to justify appeasement and pacifism..." We had to fight Hitler's SS, and now we must fight the army of cleaning ladies and day laborers who similarly threaten our country!

The whole thing's nuts, but this may be the keeper:

While advocating realistic and Christian migration policies, the Church must not forget that the most important migration is that of souls into heaven. In Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pope Pius XII speaks of the need to “provide all possible spiritual care for pilgrims, aliens, exiles and migrants of every kind.” He praises the Church’s long history of care for migrants, including the Catholic colonizers of the New World. (Pius’s view is not easily reconciled with liberal pieties.) According to the Pew Forum, 19 percent of the foreign-born, Hispanic adults living in the United States have given up their Catholic faith—half before they arrived, half after. These are souls lost at sea, spiritual migrants stopped at the border between earth and heaven.

Apparently by letting immigrants into our fallen nation, soft-hearted liberals are causing them to lose their faith, thus condemning them to an eternity in Hell. Who's mean to immigrants now? So when Trump's immigration control people kick over water bottles so immigrants may die of thirst in the desert, they're really just sending them quicker to heaven!

We must never forget what monsters these people are.

THE UGLIEST AMERICAN.

This is in some ways the Trumpiest thing that ever was:

During a guided tour of Mount Vernon last April with French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump learned that Washington was one of the major real-estate speculators of his era. So, he couldn’t understand why America’s first president didn’t name his historic Virginia compound or any of the other property he acquired after himself. 

“If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” Trump said, according to three sources briefed on the exchange. "You’ve got to put your name on stuff or no one remembers you"... 

If Trump was impressed with Washington’s real estate instincts, he was less taken by Mount Vernon itself, which the first president personally expanded from a modest one-and-a-half story home into an 11,000 square foot mansion. The rooms, Trump said, were too small, the staircases too narrow, and he even spotted some unevenness in the floorboards, according to four sources briefed on his comments. He could have built the place better, he said, and for less money.

This put me immediately in mind of an anecdote about Booth Tarkington's and Harry Leon Wilson's play, The Man From Home, in Louis Scheaffer's first Eugene O'Neill biography Son and Playwright:

In [young O'Neill's] view the good things were not the home-grown products that played to packed houses but the serious importations that pleased only the few. What audience tastes of the day were like can be gathered from something Booth Tarkington once said about The Man from Home, a smash hit of the 1908-1909 season he had coauthored. A story of American tourists abroad, it was intended to satirize those who ran down Europe’s historic splendors in favor of the sights back home. “So when we built up the Hoosier in our play,” Tarkington recalled, “we gave him a lot of this kind of jingo patter. We thought our audiences would be amused with us and at him, and yet like him as we did. Instead, they cheered all his boastings…. They burst with loud patriotic applause when he said, ‘I wouldn’t trade our State Insane Asylum for the worst ruined ruin in Europe.’ The popular success of the play might be called accidental.”

It's hard to know whether Trump is genuinely this stupid, or whether he's merely playing the monied rube here for the benefit of his idiot fans. In either case his act as seen at Mount Vernon is more or less the same as he's been doing for years: As a self-help huckster, snake-oil salesman, game show host, presidential candidate, and president, Trump's success is based on putting over the notion that the smart people are putting one over on you, but he will put you wise -- he'll teach you the secrets the smart people won't share, sell you the "quality" items the smart people hoard for themselves, elevate with an apprenticeship some humble young Horatio Alger who'd never get a break from the smart people; and finally, when given the ultimate prize, he will lock up the Queen of the Smart People, drain the swamp and fix America.

With the Mount Vernon tour Trump is letting everyone around him know that the things smart people like, or rather are pretending to like in order to bamboozle the common people -- historical artifacts, indeed history itself, and the homey values of the Founding Fathers -- are actually stupid; this supposed "attraction" is just a dump (as Trump called the White House when he got there) and this Washington schmuck didn't have the savvy and pizzazz that Trump brings to the Big Show. Why waste your time at some rickety old house when you could go to Trump Tower? And if some loser bitches that Trump's leadership betrays the values of people like George Washington, well, who was Washington anyway except some soldier who, though admirable because he didn't get captured, didn't know half of what Trump knows about building a fortune and making a name for oneself? Because the only real values are Trump's values, and anything else is a trap to steal your money.

Mencken called it, but he didn't know the half of how it would end up.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART INFINITY-MILLION.

Fox News:

Sounds like quite a groundswell! Exactly how many "calls" were there?

“The people campaigning against the Amazon campus are financially illiterate,” said Tracy Maitland, president and chief investment officer of Advent Capital Management during a panel discussion the Black Economic Agenda, according to the New York Post.

He later told the newspaper that he blames the 29-year-old Democratic Socialist for spreading misinformation and helping to kill the agreement with Amazon that would have benefited people in her home state.

“This was a disgrace. I partially blame AOC for the loss of Amazon. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. That’s scary. We have to make sure she’s better educated or vote her out of office,” he said...

So literally one rich guy in the story -- and no one else in the story -- says he and his fellow rich guys might vote AOC out of office ("Vote Hedley Throckmorton III, get to pee in a bottle on an Amazon shop floor and this free tote bag!").

This bullshit story is covered by other wingnut websites to their hatewank readers, who mutter "even her own people" as they grab the Kleenex. And Lord how the money rolls in!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

End it someday what's that sound
•   This is the 25th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. On Twitter people are talking about where they were when they found out. I certainly remember; I was getting into a van to do some road dates with a band. Someone said they couldn't understand why he did it; I thought I did understand, and was even more of a drunken asshole on the trip than usual. A few years later I quit the limelight, as it were, and performed only as a humble bass player until I knew I had lost the calling and laid down the tools for good. Part of me thought and still thinks I did so because I was weak, but part of me -- the part that won -- thinks I did it to save myself, and Cobain's suicide was part of the fact pattern that convinced me.

With the benefit of a quarter-century's perspective I realize that everyone's damage is different, and one data point for that is I haven't blown my brains out -- not dispositive, but I'm willing to take it as a sign that either my problems weren't as bad as his or my resources were better, or both. But in 1995 I was vibrating sympathetically with Cobain's music, and the finale made sense to me, not because it rejected life but because dredging up those painful feelings and amplifying them to that scale seemed like very dangerous work -- like sculpting an avalanche. It isn't how it has to be; a lot of artists have plumbed those feelings without even getting dirt under their nails. But some guys can't do it any other way.

Anyway it seems pop music doesn't seem to have any place for that sort of work anymore, and maybe we're better off, just as maybe we're better off with the tiny speakers digital tech has made possible instead of the large, cumbersome, and chest-rattling subwoofers of the past. We're here and he's not, that's for sure. Still, I miss the comfort in being sad.

•   Oh, here's another newsletter edition opened to the general public (Susbcribe It's Cheap™), about how conservative anti-LGBTQ efforts are still happening very much though on the downlow as far as the media's concerned. One of their tools, as usual, is reverse victimhood -- it's actually the minorities who are oppressing them, and they have to exclude them from certain civil rights in order to protect themselves. Today in the Wall Street Journal:

We Were Smeared by the SPLC
Our work for religious liberty got us branded a ‘hate group.’ Such lies have real consequences 

...[The Southern Poverty Law Center] falsely maligns ideological opponents in an effort to crush them rather than debate their ideas honestly. I know, because in 2016 the SPLC branded my organization, the religious-liberty nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, a “hate group.”

Hang on, some of you are thinking -- Alliance Defending Freedom? The group that in its early form, the Alliance Defense Fund, field an amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas for guess which side on the grounds that "same-sex sodomy" is "clearly" a "distinct public health problem"? The group that wants to bring back conversion therapy where it's been made illegal? Whose executive director praised an Indian court for ruling to "protect society at large rather than give in to a vocal minority of homosexual advocates"? SPLC has these fuckers dead to rights, but op-ed author and ADF SVP Kristen Waggoner cries she's been "smeared as a bigot" by them merely because she is moved to "disagree with its far-left worldview." She ends, "Let’s aspire to be a country characterized by tolerance, freedom of conscience and love of neighbor," which must be some sort of inside joke. Remember: These guys have to disguise what they're doing because if normal people knew they would laugh them out of existence.

PRESIDENT NICE YOUNG MAN.

Well, Mayor Pete Boot Edge Edge just got the kiss of death: A glowing review from David Brooks.

In a recent Iowa poll he surged to third place. His campaign just announced that it’s raised an impressive $7 million since January. And I can’t tell you how many Democrats in places as diverse as Nebraska, Indiana, New York and Washington have come up to me over the last few weeks raving about the guy. I met a superfan in Frederick, Md., who says that every few hours she calls the campaign to give another $10.

Sorry but this makes me think: How does Brooks meet these Democrats, or anyone? When he dumped his wife he quickly married his research assistant, so he doesn't seem like a guy who gets around.

This is the biggest star-is-born moment since Lady Gaga started singing “Shallow.”

What'd I tell you? Don't start climbing the walls yet, though, because Brooks is about to tell us what's so dreamy about Buttigieg:

The Trump erahas been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing.

I bet you've already seen the bothsides card peeking out of Brooks' jacket pocket:

The Buttigieg surge suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who want to say goodbye to all that. They don’t want to fight fire and divisiveness with more fire and divisiveness. They don’t want to fight white identity politics with another kind of identity politics.

They are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.

Joe Biden feelz ladies up, and Amy Klobuchar hits people, so in the absence of Michael Bloomberg or a Care Bear stuffed with vouchers, that leaves all the Monsters of Identity Politics, Virtues That Are Not in Bill Bennett's Book, and Socialized Medicine, who are unacceptable, and Mayor Pete.

Buttigieg’s secret is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.

And of course there's one group that's most important to make comfortable and that's David Brooks and milky boomers like him.

First, he is young and represents the rising generation, but he is also an older person’s idea of what a young person should be.

Mrrowr hot.

He’d be the first millennial president, but Buttigieg doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes that have been affixed to America’s young people.

He doesn't talk with a smart mouth!

Young people are supposed to be woke social justice warriors who are disgusted by their elders. Buttigieg is the model young man who made his way impressing his elders — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey, the Navy.

Cut of his jib etc.

Young hipsters are supposed to flock to coastal places like Brooklyn and Portland; after college, Buttigieg returned to Indiana.

He's like J.D. Vance except not yet an obvious fraud.

...Second, he is gay and personifies the progress made by the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, but he doesn't do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values; it’s just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife. He speaks comfortably about his faith and says that when he goes to church he prefers a conservative liturgy to anything experimental.

He's the kind of gay person you'd like if you didn't hate gay people!

Finally, he’s a progressive on policy issues, but he doesn’t sound like an angry revolutionary. Buttigieg’s policy positions are not all that different from the more identifiable leftist candidates. But he eschews grand ideological conflict.

In other words, Brooks is sure that, as one of those geezers Mayor Pete looks up to, he can talk him out of the leftist stuff, it's not like anyone would notice. Well, let Brooks have his fun before he inevitably informs us more in sorrow than in anger that he has to support Trump because Democratic Nominee Fill In The Blank thinks he's racist.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been on an early Waylon kick lately; here's one I got off my mama's old radio.
• I'm unlocking yet another issue of the newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!™) that's just for funsies, albeit the grim modern political kind, in which the White House gets a couple of special dinner guests. Enjoy!

• I get after Rod Dreher a lot, but he's such a perfect amalgam of nearly every terrible conservative trait that he's sort of irresistible. Take this one in which he riffs on a Michigan Live story, "Teen who traded tennis for video games says more pressure playing virtual sports." The kid, Ben Stoeber, is interested in robotics and says he was drawn to tennis "because of the social aspect of it" and expresses no other feeling for it, so I guess it makes sense he'd switch and who cares, but Brother Rod howls "Decline and fall... So this kid left his body, and now lives inside his head. What a tragedy this is!" and goes on about how "doing work with your body (or playing games with your body)" is imporant because "When we remove ourselves from the physical world and retreat into our heads — as these young people are doing — we habituate ourselves to a false narrative about who we are, and what we are. We also become weaker, more subject to authoritarian rule."

That seems weird coming from a guy who doesn't look like he's done much heavy lifting himself, and is so exquisitely sensitive that he can't clean up after his dog without puking. Maybe he figured other readers would make this connection, too, and so rambles about how when he was growing up his old man was always trying to push him to do sports, but young Rod wasn't into it:

I honestly can’t say to what extent my resisting his attempts to get me into the world beyond my head was about a character flaw within me, or it was about him pushing too hard for me to do something that went against my nature. Had my dad not been so pushy about it, or if he had tried more gently to introduce me into nature, or if he had ever shown interest in the books and ideas that captivated me as a child, maybe I would have been different.

This reminds me so much of one of Albert Brooks' narration bits in Real Life: "I’m an entertainer but, quite frankly, if I’d studied harder -- or been graded more fairly -- I would have been a doctor or a scientist."

Anyway, just because Rod Dreher can't snap an emery board doesn't mean anyone else can get away with ignoring the physical world. (Plus, he reveals, his own son has taken up bicycling -- see, Dad, maybe if you weren't such a hothead we'd be a sports dynasty now!) "Please, Ben Stoeber, pick your tennis racket back up!" Dreher cries. "You don’t have to quit playing video games, but make them secondary to your life. Watch Wall-E and think about the choice you’re making..."

At no point does Dreher seem aware that Stoeber's leisure-activity choice may be reasonable and in any case need not be made with any consideration for the False Narrative of Modern Man; nor that his own lack of athleticism is something he might, after years of adulthood, take responsibility for himself instead of laying it on his now-dead father.

FROM THEIR METH LABS TO YOUR LAPTOP.

I've unlocked the most recent edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (like the fellas hanging out at the Rexall say, Subscribe, It's Cheap! ™), in part so non-subscribers can see what they're missing, but also so you can read a little about the latest wingnut conspiracy theory: That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, their beat-off noire, was not actually elected to Congress but merely "elected" to "Congress" if you know what they mean and why should you.

It's ridic, and a valid argument against paying it any mind is that, the two million views received by a YouTube video pushing the theory notwithstanding, it has drawn little mainstream conservative attention. After all, YouTube is the province of barking madmen -- they may get millions of views but no respect from ordinary Republicans, right?  To which I would say, okay, then how about this from the slightly better known Laura Ingraham of Fox News:

A guest on The Laura Ingraham Podcast has claimed that transgender people are trying to use social engineering to create a new species, with the host speculating whether this species would be “part human, part animal"... 

Nathanson told Ingraham that trans and non-binary movements have sprung up because “feminists challenge the notion of gender” and this has evolved into the development of feminist ideology. 

In response, Ingraham said: "Their goal ultimately is the destruction or elimination of the traditional family, though, is it not? That's what we really want to get at here. That's really what's going on..."

Nathanson agreed with Ingraham, adding: “I think that the trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they're basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species..."

Ingraham asks: "And the new species will be looking like what? Will be part human part animal? I mean, will be human mostly…" 

Nathanson said, "I think human and part machine," to which Ingraham replies "part machine, hmm."

Who knows, maybe at that point Ingraham was thinking, "Whoa, I agree liberals and trans people are doing The Island of Dr. Moreau for real, but that machine bit is crazy!"

As my entire oeuvre should have taught you, conservative crazy may start at the bottom of the media food chain, but it's never meant to stay there -- because alternative media outlets have always been the skunkworks where they test propaganda for potency before chucking it at civilians. So while liberals in their wilderness are bringing back Early Progressive, New Deal, and Great Society ideas, conservatives don't bother, and devote themselves to slurs and psychodrama. Look how hard they're pushing "SetUpGate" as a way to justify vengeance against people who think Trump worked with the Russians to fix the election; clearly the hope is this will scare everyone out of demanding a fuller accounting of the Mueller report. That strategy, judging from the polls, isn't working -- but maybe next week they'll tell us Adam Schiff is a vampire or George Soros was photographed literally pulling the strings from the House ceiling but Hillary killed the photographer and burned the picture, or some such shit. Why not? The racket has worked a long time and is always worth another shot. As the panic over Trump's latest Obamacare eruption shows, it's not like they have anything else.

BEYOND MUELLER.

So, the investigator’s report was sent to a longtime Republican flunky, who says “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” and that he has no plans to release the full report which might tell us what that means. The president says this in fact does exonerate him, and his followers agree.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see what's going on. But a lot of people are not thus equipped, so I’m not surprised conservatives are playing it this way. And since these guys are always on offense, I'm not surprised that they’re trying to turn it around by demanding investigations of their own (or endlessly-extended Two Minute Hates of “The Media,” which they’ll probably settle for because it's easier to get away with). As I reported at the Village Voice, this was their MO when Mueller announced his first indictments, and there is no reason for them to change it now.

Witness Michael Goodwin at the New York Post, with "How to end our national nightmare — probe Hillary Clinton again." It's front-loaded with wish-fulfillment, telling readers "it is tempting to breathe a sigh of relief and assume that our long national nightmare is over" -- as if Mr. & Mrs. America have been straining under the yoke of Mueller coverage -- then spooling out a fantasy in which "this is an enormous vindication for Trump," whose "supporters were understandably in a celebratory mood, with some saying on Twitter that it felt like 2016 election night all over again," while for Democrats "too, Friday night was like a repeat of Trump’s election victory." (This is meant to stir memories of crying Democrats, which is MAGA Viagra.) Not only that, the Dems "ruined their own credibility, and their continuing efforts to destroy him by innuendo and investigation" -- that is, asking to actually see the report -- "can only add to their disgrace."

Then, for Trumpkins who have yet to nut, Goodwin spins tales of a Day of Wrath counter-investigation of James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, "the reprehensible John Brennan," James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and yes, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, and Barack Obama ("what did President Barack Obama and his administration do, and why did they do it?").

I'm not sure whether the idea of a vengeance mission led by Lindsey Graham will actually fire anyone's imagination, but it will keep the scared kittens of the press too pinned back to ask relevant questions.

These events can be dispiriting to noobs, as I can tell from all the bothered liberal posts. But to those of us who've seen it many times before it's just a nuisance and maybe even, in historical perspective, a fleeting one. No one's going to change their mind based on this, because everyone knows who and what Trump is and who and what Republicans are, which will only become more obvious in the days to come. In fact, the one good thing about the information pile-up of our times is that no one lacks the data to see through these scams -- it's mainly a question of willingness to look. It wasn't always that way. The run-up to the Iraq War and the Clarence Thomas hearings, respectively, each led to a general manufactured consensus that foreign wars of liberation were back, baby, and that once Senators decided a woman was a lying slut that was an end to it. Those messages have sustained some damage in the intervening years; it hasn't ended jingoism or institutional sexism, quite, but the trend is in the right direction. Hell, even Young Republicans aren't as hypnotized as they once were. So press on regardless.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Jazz ain't dead, it don't even smell funny.
• A snippet from a recent Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (TO WHICH YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE, he hollered with one hand to the side of his mouth like a newsboy in a '30s Warner Brothers picture, IT'S CHEEEEAP ™):

For his recent defense of the Electoral College [David French] might be excused, because it’s mostly no better or worse than all the other shitty rightwing defenses shoved, hastily and scarce half made-up into this breathing world by conservatives after Elizabeth Warren called for the EC to be abolished. (David Harsanyi’s “Democrats Want To Kill The Electoral College Because They Fear The Constitution” at The Federalist is my favorite; Jamelle Bouie effectively smacked down all this nonsense on Twitter.)
French does go the extra mile, though, with this: 

And let’s not pretend that a national popular vote elevates every citizen’s vote in a way that the Electoral College does not. Your vote counts in each state, and the fact that your state is overwhelmingly red or blue is no more or less demoralizing than the popular-vote idea that your single vote is thrown into a pool of 130 million others.

So the Republican voting in D.C. (where Clinton won with 90.9% of the vote) presumably feels himself more connected to the result than he would if his vote had a chance of contributing to a winning margin. I don’t think even French believes that.

I bring this up because the aforementioned wave of wingnut Electoral College defenses by Very Serious Commentators, all full of Founder Worship and rEpUbLiC nOt A dEmOcRaCy yak, has been followed (as if so ordained by Morning Memo!) by some dumbed-down (well, more dumbed-down) versions tailored to the Trumpenproletariat in bottom-feeder media such as the Washington Examiner, where David M. Drucker writes under the interesting headline "Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College":

Some Republicans say the problem is Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance. It's an attitude tailor-made for the Electoral College in the current era of regionally Balkanized politics, but anathema to attracting a broad, national coalition that can win the most votes, as past presidents did when seeking re-election amid a booming economy.

"Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance" is "tailor-made for the Electoral College"? I wonder if James Madison had that in mind.

Others argue that neither Trump, nor possibly any Republican, could win the popular vote when most big states are overwhelmingly liberal.

“California, Illinois, and New York, make it very, very difficult for anybody on our side to ever again to win the popular vote,” said David Carney, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire.

Since it's rather giving the game away to say "Most people don't want our candidate to be President," they're arguing that most people is the wrong people -- libruls whut live in fancy states where they have highfalutin' sundries like soap and toothpaste. (Drucker is so grateful for the Trump campaign's help in filling his column that he ends with some bullshit about how the Trumpkins expect to lose the popular vote again but win the Electoral College even bigger in 2020 -- “We look to maintain and expand the Trump map" -- mainly, it would seem, to impress even more crushingly on Americans that the dead hand of the Founders -- manipulated as a cat's-paw by the modern GOP -- doesn't give a shit what they think.)

For a doubly-dumbed-down version see Hannity on Fox, transliterated here:

"You think all those red states would stick around and be in the United States if they kept losing to New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois?” Hannity asked. “I tend to think not.”

The final tantrum is always secession with these people. This time I say let them go, and we can establish generous refugee programs for the non-assholes who will flee the New Confederacy.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,200,843.

When Rod Dreher ostentatiously shows concern for his fellow man, you know there's a catch:

Readers, I have to go out for a few hours on a sudden errand. When I get back, I would like to hear from you who are in the flood zones of Nebraska and Iowa. It’s amazing how little coverage your tragedy is receiving. If I didn’t follow the Twitter accounts of Sen. Ben Sasse and Jake Meador, I would barely know a thing about it. I know the same thing happened in 2016 when we had the devastating Louisiana floods.

Let's see what The New York Times, which is Liberal Media Central and must be suppressing this story out of irrational hatred for the Common People, has been doing about it in the past three days:

March 20, "U.S. Farmers Face Devastation Following Midwest Floods [Reuters]"; "An Iowa Town Fought and Failed to Save a Levee. Then Came the Flood"; "The Latest: Minnesota to Help Nebraska Flood Fight [AP]"; "Missouri River Towns Face Deluge as Floods Move Downstream [Reuters]"; "Flooded Iowa Communities Surviving With Trucked-In Water [AP]."

March 19, "Rising Waters: See How Quickly the Midwest Flooded"; "Like ‘House Arrest’: Flooded Roads and Swamped Bridges Strand Nebraskans"; "Pets, Livestock Among Victims of Midwest Flooding [Reuters]"; "Missouri River Flooding Catches Small Nebraska Town Off Guard [Reuters]"; "Midwest Floodwaters Tear Through or Spill Over Many Levees [AP]"; "‘It’s Like an Island’: Scenes From the Midwest Floods [multimedia]"; "The Latest: Pence Views Raging River, Visits Shelter"; "Floodwaters Threaten Millions in Crop and Livestock Losses."

March 18, "Why Is There Flooding in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin?" "‘It’s Probably Over for Us’: Record Flooding Pummels Midwest When Farmers Can Least Afford It"; "Flooded U.S. Air Force Base Underscores Climate Risk to Security: Experts [Reuters]"; "'Angels of the Sky' Offer Flights Into Flooded Nebraska City [AP]"; "Scenes from Record Flooding in Nebraska [multimedia]"; "Homes Flood as Missouri River Overtops, Breaches Levees"; "Nebraska Nuclear Plant Still at Full Power as Floodwaters Recede [Reuters]"; "Three Dead, One Missing in Devastating Floods Across U.S. Midwest."

I may have missed a few. Dreher seems to have missed considerably more than a few. In comments (not in his main post), he breezily notes,

To be fair to the media, some readers say they’ve seen a lot of coverage. I think that this is an example of how silo’d we tend to be, even if we don’t mean to be. Sometimes a reader or two will accuse me of ignoring a particular news event because I haven’t posted on it — and I haven’t even heard of it!

Tee hee! Meanwhile a number of Dreher's commuters snarl things like "Why isn’t this covered more, Rod? This affects only the benighted people in flyover country..." and "The headlines are the latest nothingburger from the Mueller probe and Beto eating dirt." Elsewhere on Twitter, a bunch of people who seem unable to use Google News act like there's a media blackout on the floods. "Is it me or would this be getting a lot more attention if this were closer to New York or LA?" uueries pollster Patrick Ruffini. Others chime in: "This is catastrophic and mainstream media is pretty much ignoring this." "If a disaster happens on the coast, it’s full scale media coverage. But a disaster in the Midwest .....crickets. It’s ok, we don’t need u elites anyway." "Where is all the media’s coverage about the devastating floods in Nebraska?!?!" Ad infinitum.

I keep telling and telling and telling you guys: There is no flakier snowflake than a wingnut, and their propagandists feed them on grievance stories like the Great Media Blackout of Your Tragedy and how the big bad city slickers don't care because a steady diet of bullshit is what keeps them voting Republican.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Players only.
•  I'm seeing a lot of people saying The New Zealand Muslim Slaughterer didn't mean those things he said -- at least the ones that embarrass local wingnuts. Like when he wrote these words:

The person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.

Seems, in terms of basic English, clear enough to me -- but according to various Internet Lawyers he was just trolling, "shitposting," being "extremely online," or even trying to get Owens in trouble --  at least that seems to be Tichael Macey's take:

It's like the white power sign: It's a signal to your fellow Nazis until you get in trouble, and then it's just "OK" God you people see Nazis everywhere!

This must also be why the shooter mentioned Trump and Anders Brevik, too -- in fact maybe he's really a liberal, talking religious war and murdering 49 Muslims just to make the Right look bad.

•  Meanwhile Trump has said this out loud:

You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress...

Maybe he's shittrolling, like the Christchurch shooter! Actually gloomy as I often am, I doubt that the army and the cops, or even "Trump's Bikers," would rally to his side if he were lawfully removed from office. It's possible he's trying to demoralize opponents, though I expect this will just go in the huge pile of things he does that pisses them off. Most likely he's trying to make his rump of supporters feel strong and supported. His 2016 campaign summoned them out of the hollers and klaverns, and given the polls they may be feeling pretty stranded right now -- but as long as The Leader is threatening to murder liberals, they're getting what they came for, which has nothing to do with a better country and everything to do with inchoate rage, minorities everywhere, and grandchildren who never visit.

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT WE, THE BIGOTS, ARE REALLY THINKING!

I'm unlocking another Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter issue -- this one about the mishegas around Michael Jackson. As you may imagine I'm not entirely convinced that people who have suddenly realized MJ was a child molester are acting in good faith. (By the way, I swear that you're missing a lot of other first-class material if you're not a subscriber -- go here and get on board.)

Speaking of people who have a strange reaction to explosive revelations, I'm not shocked that conservatives are uniformly defending Tucker Carlson's racist and rapist comments. Typical is this guy (formerly a famous Latin-pseud crackpot) at MAGA cult site American Greatness:

Let’s be completely clear here. Nobody—least of all the leftwing mobs attacking Tucker Carlson right now—cares what he said on the radio a decade ago. Except to the extent that his words can be wrapped around his neck like a noose. 

All the feigned outrage is exactly that: feigned. David Brock and his henchmen, along with their instantly mobilized Twitter mob, are not outraged. Not in the least. They’re giddy! And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve been looking for a way to get “Tucker Carlson Tonight” canceled since the show debuted. The search intensified as its popularity rose and its message caught fire. 

The imperative to kill the show reached a fever pitch after Carlson’s now-legendary January 2 monologue, which is the most searing indictment against a failed ruling class since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

Three sputter-filled grafs (and about a dozen thereafter) and no mention of what Carlson actually said; you'd think he had defended motherhood and the flag rather than child rape and white supremacy.

But frankly the unearthed Carlson is just a more-upfront version of the Carlson we've known all along -- the Carlson who told Lauren Duca "stick to the thigh-high boots" and dog-whistles racists with alarming regularity. And more-upfront Carlson excites them for a reason. Someone on Twitter lamented that the right's solidarity with Carlson showed how devoted to "tribalism" people have become. But I say these guys aren't defending Carlson because he's of their tribe -- even some conservatives, after all, peeled off the Roy Moore bandwagon in the final days. No, they defend Carlson because they agree with what he said. Not to put too fine a point on it, they're white supremacists and misogynists, and only wish they could say such things themselves and get away with it. Well, as the Trumpification of the Right progresses, I'm sure they'll get their wish.

UPDATE. As usual, making everything worse, National Review's David French:

Here’s the way it works. If you’re a conservative or a Republican who attains any kind of prominence at all, then the hunt is on. Media Matters has its rolling list of allegedly bad or silly things I’ve said and written, for example. And the more prominent you are, the more diligent the hunt.

Being accurately quoted is persecution! Or, in the words of A. Ridiculous Pseudonym at RedState, "Maoist totalitarianism."

If only Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd had tumbled to this racket! After embarrassing himself at the end of the movie, he could have attacked those liberals who were persecuting him by describing what he said.

RODDY DREHER IS TOO SENSITIVE TO WORK AT THE POST OFFICE.*

* apologies to Charles Bukowski, really, but get a load of this from Rod Dreher's latest:

Here’s something interesting. On Jonathan Haidt’s test for moral foundations, I scored unusually high on the “purity” scale. It so happens that I am extremely sensitive to certain aromas that most people find disgusting (and even some that most people don’t). It’s so bad that there are times when I will have to leave the room quickly so as not to vomit (which means my wife is the one left behind to clean up the dog poop, and suchlike).

[Lips pursed, arms folded] Snnnkkk. Snnkk.

It is entirely involuntary. Entirely. When I was a kid, I couldn’t be nearby when the men gutted and skinned a deer they had killed. It wasn’t the visual imagery; it was the smell. I would double over gagging, and couldn’t help myself. 

[Hand over mouth] Snkkk. Snnkk. Snnkk.

This is also why I can taste and smell pleasant nuances in food and drink, and enjoy eating more than most people.

BAA HAA HAA HAA oh my god -- you peons just gobble your food but Sensitive Rod tastes the rainbow! When he's not vomiting, that is.

Two of my three kids are the same way — except their sensitivities are ramped up so much that they don’t like to eat things that taste vivid. All three of us can detect aromas that most people can’t, and when we find them unpleasant, we also find them to be intolerable. Weirdly, my daughter cannot stand the aroma of bananas. It’s so severe for her that we don’t eat them in her presence. Just the sight and smell of a banana is enough to put her on the edge of vomiting.

Those poor kids.

Does this have anything to do with my conservative politics? Maybe...

Ha ha, I know guys, but wait that's not even the real punch line --

...but how would this theory account for the extreme sensitivity that so many left-wing college students have to the mere presence of conservatives in their midst?

Those SJWs -- such sissies! Oh, sorry, honey, I can't clean up after the dog -- I'm too SENSITIVE.

Have we decommissioned "pussy" as an epithet? Pity. (What I wonder is, does Rod ever get too sensitive to enjoy his sacramental meats?)

ANOTHER ONE JUST LIKE THE OTHER ONE.

I've unlocked for you a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter issue (to which newsletter you should subscribe! It's Cheap!™), which takes the form of a transcript from a Republican rally against anti-Semitism -- that is, in favor of hysterical misreadings of what Rep. Ilhan Omar actually said about AIPAC.

This has been as phoney-baloney a manufactured controversy as I've ever seen, and I suspect that conservatives are hitting it hard because they know they can count on the support of the kind of neolibs one can always expect to fall for bothsider gibberish, e.g. Jonathan Chait. (Chait, like others among the tub-thumpers, seems to think the title of an old Puff Daddy joint is "a longstanding anti-Semitic trope," and that "the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country" is not a clinical description of what AIPAC and other such organizations do.)

It is so well-observed a phenomenon that the American conservative movement has never been a sincere supporter of any minority group except billionaires (though it is very adept at claiming victimized-minority status for Christians and men) that I'm surprised some people can pretend to not hear the bullshit detector going off every time they do it.

THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS.

Erick Erickson was once a Trump skeptic, but when Trump won he began almost immediately to turn:

Take Erick Erickson, the former CNN pundit who for months denounced Trump in nearly apocalyptic terms — e.g. “With the rise of an authoritarian menace to our republic, it is important to go on record now, while he can be stopped, that we will play no part in his rise.” 

After the election, Erickson was conciliatory — not toward voters who had tried to stop Trump, but toward Trump himself. “Perhaps,” he mooned, “as only Nixon could go to China, maybe only Trump can reunite the country.”

Last month Erickson declared himself all-in for the big win:

This week in 2016, I declared I would be “Never Trump.” A friend suggested I use a hashtag that had started circulating on Twitter, i.e #NeverTrump. The piece exploded and pushed me into a whirlwind of coverage. Despite lots of pressure, protestors literally on my front porch, and harassment directed towards my family, I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. I voted third party.

Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like...

In the rest of that column Erickson mainly complained about the Democrats' abortionism and environmentalism -- complaints he had already made many times, pre- and post-Trump -- but closed, "I will vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. And, to be clear, it will not be just because of what the other side offers, but also because of what the Trump-Pence team has done. They’ve earned my vote."

Yet Erick Erickson, proud Trump voter, just can't quit the contrarian shtick. Here's Erickson recently talking about "Jeremiah 29 Conservatives" who "have given up on national politics. It has become too ugly, too compromising, too unaligned with their values" and who believe "Republicans and conservative institutions in Washington have made too many compromises to be effective"; such Jeremiahs have "retreated from national politics because they could not stomach the character flaws of the President or the direction of the Republican party..." In response to their withdrawal, Erickson says, "Conservatives in Washington and the conservative donor class need to reconsider how to engage on the local level with those more worried about their children’s education than a border wall."

In other words, the big-time conservatives like Erick Erickson have fucked up, and the lost lambs of the movement should take the advice of small-town conservatives like Erick Erickson.

In the long con that is modern conservatism, the advantage of beating the base in the head with bullshit for so many years on end is that it renders them too dazed to recognize that the guy they paid going into the funhouse is the same guy taking their money as they come out.

THE CONSERVATIVE MORAL CASE FOR YOUR IMMISERATION.

Kevin D. Williamson has it made; during his time of trouble the conservative intellectual establishment turned out to sing his praises, and they are apparently disinclined to revisit that evaluation (because who would that leave, Ben Shapiro?), as Williamson has been just churning out bile-burps at National Review ever since. Dig this lede:

Senator Bernie Sanders, gamely making the case for socialism on CNN, offers a familiar argument: that access to health care and other goods like it should be understood as a “right.” 

Properly understood, that claim is literally nonsensical, having the grammatical form of a sentence but no meaningful content, inasmuch as it is logically meaningless to declare a right in a scarce good. (I am using scarce here in its economic sense rather than in its common conversational sense.)

Does his lofty dudgeon leave you unconvinced? Brace yourself, here comes the argument:

For example: If you have twelve children and six cupcakes, the possibilities of division remain the same even if you declare that every child has the “right” to an entire cupcake of his own. Goods are physical, while rights are metaphysical, and the actual facts of the real world are not transformed by our deciding to talk about them in a different way...

[Several irrelevant slurs later]

When a politician declares a “right” in a scarce good, it indicates either that he is a simpleton or that he believes you to be, and one’s as good as the other, that being another defect in democracy.

Health care is a limited resource like the hypothetical twelve cupcakes -- you cannot create more health care by, say, having a rich nation that drops trillions on wars and billionaire tax cuts spend its money instead on training and employing doctors and medical facilities, any more than you can make more than twelve cupcakes.

The rest is almost as bad:

Senator Sanders points to the Scandinavian model as an example of what it means to have health care as a right. Senator Sanders has traveled widely in his life — he found much to praise in the Soviet Union while honeymooning there, and said so — but he is, like many American progressives, almost completely parochial.

I'll spare you: Williamson is not dumb enough to repeat the much-ridiculed conservative argument that Scandinavian healthcare is not socialist and we can't have it here because that would be socialism. He does come close, though; he tells us Scandinavian healthcare is not socialist -- for example, "private out-of-pocket spending on health care is proportionally higher in Sweden... than in the United States," though you don't hear as much about Swedes being left homeless or doing without life-saving medicine due to cost as you do in the U.S. due to their, um, not-socialism. He also admits U.S. health care sucks.

So why, then, can't we have what Sweden is having? Williamson's trick answer -- and this will surprise no one familiar with his contempt for dying hillbilly communities-- is that the Swedes are morally superior to grasping Yanks:

[Swedish] citizens are understood not as baby birds with open beaks being fed by the state, but as having primary responsibility for themselves. “It has the connotation that you have the social obligation to be competent,” Sanandaji says. 

Not a right, but a duty...

Get that through your fat heads, leeches!

In the United States, we have a poor and diminished notion of citizenship, that citizens are only “taxpayers” and “voters.” Good citizens, in the inescapable contemporary formulation, are those who “play by the rules and pay their taxes.” That’s the real individual mandate: Pay and obey. The progressive proposition is that, in exchange for this obedience, childlike citizens are to be provided for by government in loco parentis, and that their role in this is almost entirely passive: submit to taxation, follow the regulations, receive the benefits. Hence the rhetoric of health care as a right. 

A fuller and more mature notion of citizenship would be one that holds, as ours once did, that among the first duties of the citizen is to provide for himself and look after his family so as not to burden his neighbors unnecessarily.

In other words: Swedes understand what their taxes pay for, and are thus worthy to have their cancer treated, while Americans are all weak-willed socialist moochers who must have socialized medicine forcibly held back from them by bigbrains like Kevin D. Williamson.

It's not that you can't have it because it's socialism -- you can't have it because you suck. Vote Republican!

OSCAR PREDIX FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

Okay, it's minutes away -- too late to affect the betting line, but just in time to embarrass me! You've seen my Best Picture nominee reviews. And now the proto-envelopes, please:

Best Picture: Green Book. My big sucker bet! I know everyone says Roma, and I loved it, but like I said, it looks and moves too much like a museum installation -- Green Book is old Hollywood stuff and pEoPlE LiKeD iT. (Also: Driving Miss Daisy didn't get a Best Director nomination that year, either.)

Best Actor: Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Best Actress: Glenn Close, The Wife
Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz, The Favourite

I'm sticking with conventional wisdom all the way, except for Weisz, whom I think will lap the field out of sheer magnificence.

Best Director: Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman
Best Original Screenplay: Green Book
Best Adapted Screenplay: A Star is Born

My other sucker bet! I think a split ticket on Best Picture and Screenplay is the sort of comity gesture Academy members might like.

Best Original Score: Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman
Best Cinematography: Alfonso Cuaron, Roma
Best Production Design: Black Panther
Best Costume Design: The Favorite
Best Film Editing: Vice
Best Song: "Shallow," A Star Is Born
Best Make-Up and Hairstyling: Vice
Best Sound Mixing: Bohemian Rhapsody
Best Sound Editing: A Quiet Place
Best Foreign Language Film: Roma

Blanchard is always great and his style and Lee's dovetailed so well here it's giving me a serious hunch. Roma was too good for Cuarón not to win a craft award. The other craft award predix are based on previously observed Oscar wealth-sharing.

Best Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Best Documentary Feature: Hale County This Morning, This Evening 
Best Special Effects: First Man
Best Animated Short: Bar
Best Life Action Short: Skin
Best Documentary Short: A Night at the Garden

I am totally guessing. I'm guessing on all of these, really -- who knows the heart of the Academy voter anymore? But this is part of the fun for me, and maybe you. Now, on to the Pantages!

(Oh, I'll try to be responsive in comments should you be so inclined.)

UPDATE. Well, I'm losing already.

UPDATE 2. Okay, got the make-up thing, I'm a star, yay.

UPDATE 3.  Why did I bother.

UPDATE 4. I won at something! I feel good now!

UPDATE 5. FIRST MAN FOR VISUAL EFFECTS I'M A  G E N I U S

UPDATE 6. LOL all the woke people are mad about Green Book. Guys, this is Hollywood. What did you expect? It’s like being pissed they didn’t nominate The Love Witch. Anyway, I shoulda put money on it!

ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 7.

(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, The Favourite, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Green Book.)

Vice. Lively, politically astute, but a bit of a mess. In The Big Short, reformed funny-movie maker Adam McKay dramatized the fucking-over of the American economy, and amplified it with explanatory montages. Vice, about the fucking-over of America, is similar but with even more weight on the montages -- in fact, most of the historical characters are introduced mainly as pieces of the Brechtian educational filmstrip; for example, Frank Luntz has lines but no character; his main usefulness is as a living demonstration of how Republican propagandists used focus groups to not just sell policies but also poison the public discourse. Long passages are just tableaux or archival footage, cutting political events with clips of The Rifleman, Survivor, and Jane Fonda's Workout, seasoning history with zeitgeist.

You can see why Cheney looked like a great focal point for the story: He not only has a fat hand in every Republican outrage from Nixon through W, he also exemplifies the Republican success story: Be a total fuckup, get religion either figuratively or literally, latch onto some scumbags who respect your scumbaggery and scam your way to the top. The film suggests a similarity between the trajectories of youthful drunkards Cheney and George W., but also acknowledges the big difference: Unlike Bush Cheney is not even passably good with voters; he only shines among his fellow power jocks; as one of the film's many joke sequences underlines, his gift is to look serious and knowledgeable even when pitching total nonsense. In other words, he can bullshit the bullshitters, and he's not above hauling in an expert or two -- trained legal analysts, for example, with no excess of scruples -- to back his bullshit up.

The main problem with this approach is, Dick Cheney is not a tragic or a comic or even an anti-heroic figure -- he's just a piece of shit. Christian Bale dives to the center of the character and comes up with a believably not-too-bright guy who loves his family and finds a way to raise their standard of living by joining Today's GOP. This is a sensible explanation of the real Cheney's career, and Bale does it well -- but it has very little to do with the political lesson McKay's giving, other than to unnecessarily explain that amoral men make amoral movements. What would it mean if Cheney were a different person? What's the functional difference between Cheney and, say, fellow country-wrecker Donald Trump? After a while the Dick Cheney story diverges from the political story and, despite a half-hearted attempt to link some family drama to Republican hypocrisy (which could be yet another movie!), loses focus.

As Lynn Cheney, Amy Adams manages to spell out the personal frustrations that she displaces by feeding Dick's ambition without turning into a Lady Macbeth bitch-caricature (with a script that does her no favors), and Sam Rockwell does a good job of catching both W's weakness and charm. And I enjoyed all the cameos and special guest appearances, including Madea as Colin Powell. But the real doubles act, to me, is Bale's Cheney and Steven Carell's Donald Rumsfeld. There's a lot of student-exceeds-the-master in the relationship, and while Carell never makes the old bastard genuinely likable, there's some poignance in his profession of admiration from an abandoned office to the old friend who's just cut his throat. If we could strip away the superfluities, that's the part I'd keep.

That's it! In an hour or two, my predictions; then, showtime!

ON TO OSCAR 2019, PART 6.

(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Bohemian Rhapsody.)

Green Book. I don't get the alleged problem with this movie. I don't see it as "The White Savior" -- I see it as The Odd Couple.

Dr. Don Shirley is black, brittle, and insistent on his rights -- for which who could blame him, as he's an educated, talented classical musician forced to play pop to get over, and it's 1962. He can't take comfort in his blackness, either; backstory and behavior suggest his education and ascent from poverty has left him cut off from his roots. (He professes not to know who Aretha Franklin is, surrounds himself with African artifacts, and never talks to his family.) Despite his bitter experience of the world, he's surprisingly unworldly -- putting himself in obvious mortal peril throughout his tour of the Deep South -- and you get the impression he hangs onto that unworldliness, as he hangs onto his nightly bottle of Cutty Sark, because if he were constantly seeping in the undiluted ugliness of the world it would kill him.

For his Southern tour Shirley enlists as a driver/guardian Tony Lip (so-called, he says proudly, because he's "a bullshit artist... I'm good at talking people into doing things they don't wanna do"), a streetwise, unbright Bronx goomba with an extremely que-sera-sera attitude -- which isn't easy to maintain, as he's uneducated and marginally employed with a family to feed. When the Copa, where he works as a bouncer, shuts down for a few months, he's mainly qualified to win short money on hot-dog eating contests and he won't work for the Mob, so when someone gets him the Shirley gig he takes it, even though -- we have clumsily telegraphed to us early on -- he's prejudiced against black people.

Can two diverse men share a Cadillac Seville without driving each other crazy? [Cue theme music]

Yes, Green Book has the kind of Lessons-In-Life-and-Love howlers you would expect. The weirdest is when Tony gets the fastidious Shirley to play some R&B at a local black juke joint. (Shirley delicately removes a glass of whiskey from the upright first.) And Lord help us, those clips on TV aren't a joke, Shirley does help Tony write love letters. To his wife!

But the movie has a trick up its sleeve, and the trick is dramaturgy. Because of the way the characters are built, not only are those scenes less obnoxious than they could have been, the whole Driving Dr. Shirley thing works pretty well, too. First, when Tony really does play White Savior (and, blessedly, we get the first instance of this out of the way early), Shirley is ungrateful and mainly outraged at the unfairness of a system that makes it necessary that he be saved. So it's not really the whitesaving that turns the relationship around. But Tony's enough of a go-along type -- and, let's face it, used to servile gigs -- that he doesn't get too indignant about that. That gives him room to pay attention. And he's also, as a bullshit artist, a good enough student of human nature to actually pick up on what's eating Shirley, and a good enough human being to care. (Key line: "I been working nightclubs in New York City my whole life. I know it's a complicated world.") Shirley may be alienated, but not so alienated he can't pick up that Tony is actually listening, and in response he begins to unburden himself more to him -- even when it's in anger. Time then does its work.

So what if it's corny? I think I would have preferred it if [spoiler!] on Christmas Eve Shirley just stayed home and called his estranged brother instead of going all the way from West 57th Street to the freaking Bronx IN A SNOWSTORM to hang out with the Italians who, a minute ago, were calling black people eggplants. It ain't Frantz Fanon, it's a Hollywood movie. I was held.

Also it's Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, so if nothing else you can soak in their craft. Ali's Shirley is a real old-fashioned fusspot -- you can imagine Shirley learning and adopting a Clifton Webb facade, and shifting to the shit-eating smile when there are white folks to be pleased -- but even from the beginning you can perceive the years of hurt behind it, and when it's exacerbated -- as when a couple of black horseshoe players at a motel call him "fancy pants" -- you can feel the wounds reopen. And his pride is real and he can't be moved off it. (And he's funny! He really nails "I knew you had a gun.") Mortensen's technically ridiculous -- I mean, 'ey, gabagool, 'ats-a some accent, chief. But he's believably a creature of instinct who has operated so effectively on it, and has had so little need (or maybe capacity) for higher orders of thought that you can believe he'd unthinkingly accept Arthur Avenue bigotries, and unthinkingly say the ridiculous shit he says to Shirley (including that Shirley isn't as black as he is!) but, when his instinct tells him he had it all wrong, he would heed that, too. These guys have some great scenes together -- the one in the rain after they get sprung from jail, ending Ali climbing the ladder on "so if I'm not black enough, and if I'm not white enough, and if I'm not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?" (Imagine being given that line on a piece of paper and getting what Ali gets out of it!); but I almost prefer watching them do the dumb scenes like the love letter ones, because as much as my eyes roll to describe it, they don't roll when I watch it.

ON TO OSCAR, PART 5.

(Other Best Picture Nominees considered so far: Black Panther, A Star is Born, Roma, BlackKkKlansman, and The Favourite.)

Bohemian Rhapsody. I've often said that the biopic is an intrinsically minor artform, and that only extremely rare exceptions bend the curve. Bohemian Rhapsody looks good and moves with some of the strut and glide of Queen's music, but it has all the traditional biopic problems -- for example, outside the star, there are no real characters. Credit Tom Hollander for sneaking a hint of dry humor into his lawyer/manager Jim "Miami" Beach (and Mike Myers -- had me fooled!), but everyone else is a cipher. Maybe it's because they're all still alive and could make trouble but the movie bandmates don't give us anything besides the most pro-forma behind-the-music moments: The lightbulb that's-a-great-riff! moments, the Freddie-you've-gone-too-far moments, etc. Even Mercury's female "love of my life" Mary never shows any feelings but Freddy-related feelings, and out of a regrettable soap opera at that. What if they'd been a little playful about it? When Freddie says "I think I'm bisexual" and Mary says, "you're gay," didn't anyone on the set realize how funny that is? I was laughing, anyway.

In fact all the stuff about Freddie's sexuality is weirdly fraught -- I haven't seen a leather scene like that since Cruising. (Wait'll they make the Rob Halford biopic!) Well, the closet can do strange things to a man and, given his background, Mercury was particularly [cue the music!] under pressure from both directions -- pushed not to go too far for obvious social reasons, but compelled to reveal what was going on inside himself for artistic reasons. That's a lot to take on and I can hardly blame Bryan Singer,  the superhero-movie director of a big-budget can't-miss biopic (who has some issues himself), for deciding that the answer is the true love of a decent bloke you can bring home to your stereotypically uptight immigrant dad. But sweet as that is, judging by his music I bet that wasn't all Freddie Mercury was going for.

But if the script doesn't show us, at least Rami Malek's performance is able to suggest it. There have been a lot of jokes about Rami Malek's dental prosthesis doing the acting for him, but like any good actor Malek makes the thing work for the character -- sometimes the teeth are a totems of his fears and sorrows, something to hide and brood over, and sometimes they're the prow of a proud ego-ship steaming late into rehearsal. And despite being 90% of the movie, Malek's Freddie is still able to remain a little mysterious -- even in the cliche good-love and bad-love scenes, you can feel that he's protecting something inside himself -- his heart, maybe, or his ego, or his talent; something, in any case, that can't stand too much handling. Whether at the top of his game or the height of his madness, that makes Mercury vulnerable and lovable and fascinating, and not just someone we're staring at because he's famous. For a biopic that's an achievement.