FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 Dunno if the '68 Catch My Soul was any good (anyone see it?)
but Jerry Lee is always worth a listen

•   Hey, don't you wish you knew what Tubby was up to behind the fortifications? Here are some White House scenes from my newsletter, unlocked for non-subscribers: Trump with the vaccine team, and Trump giving Mike Pence some news. Plenty more where that came from, so subscribe: It's one of the few Substacks that aren't about how cancelled the author is! 

•   Conservatives continue their Edgeplay of Trump's attempted coup. At the Examiner Edgelord Byron York explains what's really bad about this straight-up assault on democracy:

Thursday's news conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis marked a turning point of sorts in the way some Republicans view the president's challenge to election results around the country. Among those Republicans -- Trump supporters all -- there is concern that the attorneys' sensational theories of election fraud are hurting the president's cause rather than helping it. [Emphasis added]

I mean, it's like Seven Days in May meets the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone, but the main thing for York is, how does this get us to 270+1? The rest of the cabal are only slightly further along the road to "Donald Who?" Rod Dreher feels compelled to tell readers, "if Team Trump can produce meaningful evidence, then we have to take it seriously, no matter how much that ticks off Democrats," before admitting -- convinced, apparently, by his hero Tucker Carlson -- that the Giuliani-Powell stuff is Looney Tunes and Trump lost. But no need for too much soul-searching because bothsides:  

I talk about the Left and its crazy beliefs about the founding of America (e.g., The 1619 Project). But we are seeing the same kind of thing on the Right with this post-election psychodrama. 

Leftists have opinions about historical events; Republicans try to overthrow the will of the people. Same diff! At the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan laments what might have been if only Trump had "acted even remotely normal in his first term, if he’d had the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources to moderate himself, to act respectably." And if my uncle had tits he'd be my aunt. Clearly these guys are hoping everyone will pull themselves together and get back to electing duller, less volatile authoritarians such as Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton -- unless they won't and choose to stick with Trump, in which case they'll get back to forgetting what was dangerous about him in the first place. 

EDGE PLAY.

You've no doubt heard about the Giuliani clown show today, and you may have even heard some smart people observe that, clownish or no, it's still entirely sinister for the Trumpkins to continue pushing these outlandish conspiracy theories two weeks after the election. 

But I'm not sure enough people have caught on to how much other prominent Republicans are enabling this fiasco -- even as they seem to be demurring due to the outrageousness of the con. 

For example, note what Giuliani's associate clown Jenna Ellis responded when asked where the team's evidence of election fraud was: 

Your question is fundamentally flawed, when you're asking, "where's the evidence?" You clearly don't understand the legal process. What we have asked for in the court is to not have the certification of false results. And so to say, "Hold on a minute, we have evidence that we will present to the court." We haven't had the opportunity yet to present that to the court. We're given you an overview and a preview of what we've discovered. But no court yet has had that opportunity. 

You may have caught that Ellis is saying they have evidence but also that it can only be revealed after state election certification dates have passed -- which would mean delaying or possibly invalidating those certifications of the votes (or, as Ellis puts it, "false results"). And this request to upend the traditional election process comes cloaked in a profession of good faith: That they only want to reveal the truth, but can't do it until the system makes the highly unusual and dangerous concession to their cause (which thus far judges have not been willing to do because they've shown no evidence).

Now consider how the mainstream press is treating the Republican reaction. Here's a tweet by Marc Caputo of Politico about GOP operative Karl Rove's Fox News analysis of the Giuliani conference, which Caputo characterizes, "Karl Rove stops just short of calling the conspiracy theories espoused by Giuliani and Powell crazy." In my view he stopped well short. Below, my transcription of Rove's remarks, with some some sections italicized:

Mayor Giuliani said there was a centralized plot involving widespread voter fraud in big cities controlled by Democrats. 

Sidney Powell said the plot was communist in origin, that it had come from Venezuela, it involved Hugo Chavez, and that George Soros and the Clinton Foundation were key participants in the plot. 

These are serious, somewhat strange accusations -- but serious, and now Mr. Giuliani and Ms. [Sidney] Powell have an obligation to go to court and prove them. Because these are question of fundamental fairness of our presidential election, and alleging that there are conspirators who worked in major cities in an organized effort to engage in widespread voter fraud, and then foreign agents and powerful Americans, namely Soros and the Clinton Foundation, were involved. 

So they've got an obligation to go to court and prove these, or the American people will have every reason to question their credibility.

So I'm not gonna say that they don't have proof, but they better come up with proof and go to court, because these are serious allegations that basically say our election was manipulated by a combination of foreign and domestic actors and stolen and that cannot be left just simply out there, it needs to be either proved or withdrawn, and the only way to do that is to take these accusations and go to court. Major Giuliani may be right that people who signed those affidavits don't want their names exposed. But by God you cannot make an accusation like that without following it through by going to court and trying to prove it. If it's left out there, it will be both unfair to the President if it's true and unfair to the American people if it's false.

I italicized the section where Rove repeated the Trump team's crazy accusations. You don't have to be an NLP guru to realize that for the careless viewer -- at Fox News, a solid majority -- this is just confirmation that the fantasy is real. 

But notice also that Rove is pushing something very close to what Ellis is pushing: The necessity of getting that "evidence" out there. Rove very weakly alludes to the possibility that they won't be able to produce it, but he portrays the "evidence" of this Soros-Clinton conspiracy as so important that he can't  just dismiss this epically failing legal crusade before they've had a chance to really present it -- which they can't do unless we start to overturn the election process.

So why is Caputo being so chill about it, portraying Rove's carefully titrated, don't-piss-off-the-Leader response as a win for truth and sanity? Maybe for the same reason the rest of us don't want to take this attempted coup seriously -- because it's insane. But not taking their fantasy seriously doesn't mean ignoring it, or pretending it isn't real and telling other people as much.

Unless you're a major media figure with a hard line in consensus reality, I guess. Check out Sahil Kapur of NBC News: 

Republican senators are mostly standing by Trump as he refuses to concede defeat and pursues litigation. But there are growing signs that they see the writing on the wall… and inch toward acceptance.

"Growing signs" that they "inch toward acceptance," eh? Read the story and you find it's not so much as an inch and maybe not even a millimeter -- there's Mitch McConnell saying "We’re going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one," which could easily mean from the First Trump to the Second Trump administration; Senator Tillis saying "that Biden is 'probably' the president-elect," big concession; and Lindsey Graham fist-bumping Kamala Harris on the Senate floor!  

You never see one of these Republicans saying "Trump should concede," but you see plenty of headlines like "GOP increasingly accepts Trump's defeat -- but not in public." A cynic might conclude they're by no means committed to the obvious, and if the miracle comes they want it known that they never did commit -- but if it doesn't come, they're just as invested as the newsmen in pretending they did. 

THE GRIFT THAT KEEPS ON GRIFTING.

Back on November 10, days after rational people accepted the election results, the Washington Examiner's Eddie Scarry was not quite ready to concede them -- but he was willing to consider (just for the sake of argument, mind) whether Trump's litigation was actually something less than a noble crusade:

There are really only two possible reasons President Trump's reelection campaign is now throwing itself into legal fights over the election. Either the president truly believes there were enough invalid ballots counted to cost him the election, or he simply doesn't want to concede defeat until every avenue has been exhausted.

In the former case, the Trump campaign is right to head to the courts — you know, the place where liberals were most at home these past four years chasing the president's tax returns and stopping or slowing every part of his policy agenda.

Had to get that in there, because the next part, mild as it is, might offend his readers:

If it's the second reason, the lasting impact of Trump simply delaying the inevitable with a bunch of baseless charges of fraud and cheating is only going to depress his supporters and puncture a Republican Party otherwise set up for political success in the near future.

Not that Trump's trying to enrage his rubes with a new Lost Cause for future grifts -- no, he's just misguided; he doesn't know what damage he's doing to his beloved Republican Party! 

Well, Tubby's trail of laughable suits seems to have proven out Option B -- but Scarry hasn't admitted that, at least not in his columns; instead, he has counseled Republicans to be of good cheer because though they lost the election, they're really all winners:

Trump came out of nowhere, exposed a lot of our country's problems, and was even good enough to fix a few of them. His presidency was a success. Now it's time to move on.

"Fix a few of them," Scarry's link to another of his own columns reveals, refers to immigration -- though on what grounds he counts this fixed (or plural) is unclear; lines like "Immigration came up in neither of the presidential debates" and "No one has talked about the wall since last year" seems to lean toward a "you can't pin that on him" defense. 

Now, with approximately 99.9% of top Republicans still refusing to admit defeat, Scarry's got another column today, and guess what it's about:

The Left's post-election spite

It's fascinating to see how spiteful liberals can be, even when they win...

I'll mostly spare you -- since their (still unacknowledged by most Republicans!) Presidential victory, liberals were mean to Jared and Ivanka -- "literally, his children," weeps Scarry, as if they were Romanoff toddlers -- and think the people who helped Trump carry out his policies should not be rehired. But here's the howler:

Conservatives generally accept electoral defeat and wait for the next time when, hopefully, the results will be in their favor.

Generally, huh?  Meanwhile Lindsey Graham is still trying to rig the election results and Giuliani is trying to do his legal Rip Taylor routine in a Pennsylvania federal court. Conservatives are accustomed to having it both ways, so it's no shock to see some of them denouncing the victorious Biden supporters while others refuse to acknowledge they've been victorious at all. I assume this'll be the shtick -- "So-called 'President' Biden signs bill -- but is it legal?" -- for a good long while, maybe four years. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Love that dirty sound.

Rightwing yahoos are still screaming they were robbed, and their claims just get wilder -- here's a genius who seems to believe (insofar as meaning can be discerned in the morass) that Massachusetts really voted for Trump, and claims footage that is almost certainly from 2016 is of UMass kids protesting Biden.

Meanwhile good-taste conservatives, who are more sensitive to self-ownage, are sloooowly backing off that position  -- but they're not all the way there yet. Byron York, for example, has been feeding the faint hope of diehards for days at the Washington Examiner. Two days after the election he was telling 'em, "There are plenty of anecdotal reports of things that look fishy, but it is up to Trump to present some evidence of irregularities." A week after the election he was telling them about "The election lawsuit Trump should win." He was talking about the one against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to allow ballots received after Election Day to be counted. But those late Pennsylvania ballots were segregated from the others by court order, and total about 10,000 -- Biden won Pennsylvania by 60,000 votes. Maybe York didn't know that when he filed -- whatever the case, he sure didn't share with his readers, though he allowed in the last graf of his column that "In the end, the case might have no effect on the presidential election results in Pennsylvania. But that's not the issue at hand." 

York got a little closer to the reality the rest of us had acknowledged on Thursday, admitting the GOP "has not filed any challenge that appears likely to overturn the results in any state." He even pulled the traditional move of beaten conservatives -- crying about how mean liberals cancel-culture them out of everything they deserve:

Indeed, rather than focus on mail-in ballots or election observers in Michigan, it makes more sense to look at Trump's loss as the result of that daily beating -- a media establishment, an entertainment industry, academia, the government's permanent bureaucracy, and a massive special counsel investigation all trying to bring Trump down every single moment of his presidency. It took a toll. It had too [sic].

With the cause lost, York may have wanted to completely unstick himself from the humiliation before the weekend. But he scored an interview with Trump, which seems to have affected his exit strategy. Trump babbles on to York about how irregularities cost him "millions of votes" in Michigan and Pennsylvania;  York glumly observes, "It was definitely an optimistic scenario and one at odds with the current state of the race." 

You almost feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember that all this bellyaching is in the service of yet another Trumpkin distraction. Because fucking with elections is self-evidently the Republicans' stock in trade.  Trump flunky DeJoy’s USPS smash-up mishandled tens if not hundreds or thousands of mail ballots and the GOP pulled out all the voter-suppression stops, including the drive-through fuckery in Texas -- not to speak of the GOP's years-long gerrymandering and disenfranchisement drives. 

It seems Democrats have found some ways to fight back, particularly under Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Republicans are scared to death by it. So while the screaming fits of the dead-enders are probably more chemical imbalance issues than anything else, the Republicans' extended indulgence of this "voter fraud" bullshit is at least partially motivated by a desire to get people thinking once again that their opponents are actually guilty of the crimes that they themselves got caught committing.

TAKE IT EASY, BUT TAKE IT.

It was great to gather in Black Lives Matter Plaza after Tubby's defeat on Saturday and hear the cheers and shouts and car horns of celebration. Of course, dark cloud that he is, Trump is harshing our good time with his bullshit fraud accusations, enabled in courts by the creeps at the Jones Day and Porter Wright law firms. (Jones Day in particular got pissy about being called out. Fuck 'em. Next time I go to small claims court see if I call them!) 

These charges haven't achieved shit, legally; in the most recent collapse in New Mexico, Trump's lawyers didn't even wait for the judge to tell them GTFO and withdrew their own complaint. But Trump's minions, including not only rightwing TV and internet clowns but also elected officials, insist on treating the election as unsettled (or as settled with Trump as the winner!) even as Biden's winning margins continue to pile up. 

That's creepy -- and so are the usual media stooges inevitably bothsiding this, like Howard Kurtz:

Yogi Berra famously said “it ain’t over till it’s over,” and while the world is acting like Joe Biden is the 46th president, Donald Trump is still filing lawsuits and complaining about a stolen election. It doesn’t feel like it’s over.

On one side, we have Whoopi Goldberg scolding Trump voters for questioning the election, telling them to “suck it up.”

On the other, we have Mike Pompeo dismissing as “ridiculous” a question about the transition, saying: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

A President impeding a lawful transition of power while his cabinet officials support him, a comedian making a wisecrack -- same diff, right?

I'm a little pissed about all this intransigent bluster, as the resulting anxiety over how far this goon and his minions are willing (and, more to the point, able) to take this fash fantasy has rather eaten into my good time. But I think Elie Mystal has the right idea. His whole Q&A at The Nation outlining the impossibility of Trump prevailing on legal grounds is worth reading, but this -- about what to do if Trump nonetheless is able to get enough state legislatures on board to get the election to SCOTUS where The Rummy and The Handmaid can fix it -- is the key part:

Well, what’s our plan for that?

My dude, I don’t have a plan for “nothing matters anymore.” The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.

What if Trump fires FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel and gets the “deep state” to keep him in power indefinitely?

I’m not Kiefer Sutherland either. I cannot find the mole.

What if Trump launches a full-scale coup d’état and uses the military to keep him in power?

Then we’re at war. Honestly, what do you want from me? 

I'm with him. In the event of Code Red I expect to get in the streets, but beyond that I'm not thinking about it. Meanwhile we have a change of administration scheduled in 70 days, and then the daunting tasks of unfucking everything Trump fucked up. That's enough worry! I'll watch the court cases and the vote certifications and the Electoral College vote and all that a little more closely than usual, but life is for the living and right now both I and American democracy are both very much alive and that, my friends, is the main thing.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Eat a peach.

•   Tubby can still maybe-might-could steal it, but his opportunities are rapidly dwindling, and his supporters are awakening to winning Biden totals from Georgia and Philadelphia and realizing they're getting beaten by black people! Adding cream to the jest are conservative poobahs flipping their shit. When it looked better for his cause on Tuesday night, Godly Rod Dreher was cooing over the socialist race-mixers' defeat ("something very good happened, and I want to celebrate it"); he even ran that picture of a ululating SJW that all MAGA trolls have in their Pictures file.  But when Tubby started to sink into the Slough of Despond, Dreher retreated to the "A Divided Country" angle beloved of losing wingnuts throughout history (when they win, it's a mandate; when they lose it's a "divided country"). Of course, lickety-split Dreher returns to ressentiment; Trump is the "bodyguard" conservatives need against the tyrannical Left, who "control all the heights of the culture, and even that is not enough for them" -- they presume to win elections, too! Bonus LOL: "The progressive writer Jesse Singal gets it."  

But the real howler comes when Dreher attempts to tug the heartstrings. Cue the mournful harmonica:

Last point. A couple of weeks ago, I was up in my rural hometown buying chicken feed for our hens. As I was checking out at the tractor supply, I saw a very old white man toddling into the store on a walker. He looked to be World War II veteran age. 

At this point I wondered: Why not have him wear something that would definitively identify him a WWII combatant, like one of those VETERAN hats?

He had a patriotic mask on and a red MAGA hat. 

Ahh, I see. 

His voice was so weak that the checkout clerk couldn’t hear what he was saying through his mask. 

Awww.

Finally someone in line interpreted it for her: he wanted to know where he could find brackets to mount his flagpole on his front porch. 

AWWWWW.

It was like something out of a Spielberg movie — but of course you would never see anyone wearing a MAGA hat in a Hollywood movie, except as a villain.

Sputter sputter that lefty Spielberg Jew-know-what! 

I don’t even know who that old man was — his mask covered most of his face — but he loves his country, and wanted to fly the flag. Not a Trump flag — the American flag.

I guess the old man was too frail to mount a Trump flag on a truck and run a Biden bus off the road. Keep playing that harmonica, Slim! 

Now, consider Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones...

LOL OMG contrast this white-man-who-probably-raised-the-flag-at-Iwo-Jima with this insolent Negress!  

...the founder of The 1619 Project, which teaches that America was founded in iniquity: for the sake of preserving slavery. It’s factually untrue, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s legitimately contestable. 

Pfft, slavery, in America? What are they teaching them kids?

This narrative has become standard in American media, and among many progressives. Can you imagine someone who believes what Nikole Hannah-Jones does wanting to fly the American flag from their front porch?

Dreher pitches bitch-fits about Hannah-Jones every couple of days, yet he seems not to have actually read her 1619 essay, which begins, "My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard."

If not, then what does that tell you about why so many Americans chose to vote for Trump, despite his many grievous faults?

It tells us they're morons. 

We are going to remain a divided country. The election solved nothing. 

Again, the "divided country" thing: "solved nothing" is just another way of saying it was a disaster for honky soreheads like Dreher who are about to lose their "bodyguard" and have to share power with people they've been taught since birth to despise. 

•   To add some sparkle to this historic morning, why not enjoy my latest White House scenes unlocked from my newsletter, where Tubby plots his defense of the throne? Like real life only with better timing! 

BREATHE.

The good news is that the trends in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and even Pennsylvania are positive, and Tubby's mob boss routine early this morning seems not to have had the desired effect: Regular media just say the votes are late, and even the front page of Fox News' site says "ELECTION DECISION DELAYED." It adds "Trump and Biden campaigns dig in for legal fight with key battleground state winners undeclared," which is true but slightly misleading: barring a hanging-chad scenario, most of the outstanding states will probably report (but not certify!) enough votes to make a call reasonable, and THEN the legal shenanigans will begin in earnest (though some already have).

So breathe. As I said in the newsletter this morning, "chaos" is what the Republicans want, but our institutions are not obliging them. Some Republicans, having failed to wreak chaos in the press and the process, seek instead to implant chaos in your mind by portraying the President as a king whose word is law, making you doubt the validity of any lawful vote that contradicts him, which in some feeble minds would give him the right to steal it for Our Nation's Good. 

Don't you believe it. The Brooks Brothers Rioters will return, but this time we're not caught off guard and they can be repelled. And it won't happen right away. So have a great day, get some exercise, drink some water and maybe put some bourbon in it. We ain't into the woods yet. 

UPDATE. Really, it's psyops at this point. Take Postmaster General DeJoy's flagrant defiance of a court order on ballots obviously held back by the P.O. from the electoral boards (if it wasn't obvious before, his non-compliance makes it so).  How much difference those ballots would make is unknown, and perhaps unknowable; but DeJoy's intransigence -- as opposed to, say, a bootless pretense of digging up the ballots -- has I think a purpose besides the strictly legal one: the Trump mob thrives on the impression that it's all a fix and so you should just throw up your hands (unless the Democrats are winning, of course) and let America be its own rotten self. This reminds me of a story the husband-and-wife screenwriting team David and Leslie Newman told on some talk show years ago, about a producer in the 1960s trying to line up a convincing student demonstration-turned-riot scene for his film. The director told David Newman that the campus on which they had permission to shoot was a hotbed of radicalism, so they'd just have cameras ready for the riot that would inevitable occur. When Newman asked what would happen if no riot ensued, the director said, "we'll cause one." 

UPDATE 2. The Republicans are trying Brooks Brothers Riot II in Michigan:

As you may know, the Chief Justice, The Rummy and The Handmaid are veterans of the original BBR, so if this attempt to stop the count (with Biden ahead and getting more so) leads to a Supreme Court case I imagine there'll be high-fives for the plaintiffs all around the bench. But the Democrats have gotten way smarter since 2000 so if it can be headed off I expect they're prepared to do so. It's really a matter of how much overt criminality the system will allow. Like I said: Don't do their work for them by assuming they can't be stopped. 

DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT.

OK my commie friends, you know the drill: First we Twitter-mob the polls and cancel-culture Tubby with our so-called "votes"; then, once Biden's inaugurated, Kamala Harris slits his throat -- preferably during adulterous sex! -- and throws us the keys to power, thus beginning the REIGN OF ANTIFA! First order of business: extradite all Republicans to Den Haag -- starting with those Lincoln Project fuckers. That'll teach 'em to suck up! 

Alternately, Tubby steals it and we hella riot! So it's win-win, I'd say.

Signs are propitious. My wingnut mailbag is full of hysterical headlines like "Rudy’s Got Them BOXED In! Biden IS FINISHED!" And "Sleepy Joe’s Assault Victim Is Ready To Talk….He’s Done!" (Links provided for historical purposes, I don't advise clicking, they're super spammy). These guys don't sound like winners.

A good barometer for rightwing panic levels is Rod Dreher and... well...

You know what? Nobody fears pro-Trump riots. They fear antifa, they fear Black Lives Matter, they fear the Left — the same people who have been rioting all year, and for which our media have been carrying water. If the Trump voters are disappointed tomorrow, they’re not going to burn down their communities, smash windows and grab loot, and generally behave like a hoodlum.

Sounds like Doc in West Side Story yelling at the Jets -- get outta here, ya lousy antifa, I'm tryin' ta run a candy store! 

Forgive me, I'm a little punchy -- after all, I've been rioting all year.

Dreher cites as evidence that "the Left" is going helter-skelter a clip of some lady on a video chat with 262 people (I didn't realize "the Left" was so small -- we're sure punching above our weight!), talking about defending against a coup by getting armed and ready to defend freedom, which sounds like standard wingnut patter of the past fifty years to me. Plus some businesses are boarding up their windows in case post-election protests get heavy. Dreher goes on:

Cities boarded up for fear of rioting. The President of the United States having to barricade himself in the White House. This is what the Left has done to our country in 2020. And you watch: if this happens, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the lot will all be blaming Trump.

Mark my words, in a month Holy Rod's bedroom walls will be festooned with Boogaloo Boys pin-ups.

UPDATE. Even blowdried media-friendly conservatives like National Review's Rich Lowry have Dreheresque paranoia about the window boards:

There are certainly malefactors on the right who should be called out and shunned, and it’s disgraceful that Trump has spent so much time preparing the ground to argue that he’s been cheated if he loses. Yet the Left has the numbers, the proven penchant for violence (up to $2 billion of property damage this year so far), and the intellectual enablers to put parts of America on crisis footing in anticipation of its possible shock and upset after November 3.

"The Left has the numbers"? I thought these guys thought they were the vox populi. Oh, I forgot -- since Tubby's numbers have tanked, the Right is all "we're not really a democracy, y'know" -- basically admitting conservatives only hold power against the will of the people. 

Trump’s most fervid critics have been expecting a coup with such certainty that they will treat a Trump electoral victory as if it is one.

Jut because everyone knows if he wins again it will also be with a minority of votes and the help of hellacious voter suppression, people will call it a "coup"! They're so touchy. Alright, he goes to Den Haag too. Next!

UPDATE 2. Neither are the front pages at the dumbest rightwing websites encouraging to the brethren's cause:

"All is lost, save my honorarium!" Meanwhile at Gateway Pundit the top story is "Don Jr. Rallies in Yuma City – Ivanka Rallies in Michigan – Eric Trump Rallies in Florida… So, Where’s Hunter?" Now there's a story with legs! Senile Grandpa will probably punch the touchscreen extra hard after he sees that.

UPDATE 3. From comments:

I just drove into NYC (Midtown) and can attest the city is not, in fact, boarded up. A couple of chain hotels are boarded up and one groundfloor salad bar that's been vacant the past couple of months. But definitely not "the city."

Here in DC there's been some boards added to storefronts near Black Lives Matter Plaza, but they started doing that at the end of May, when there was some actual damage. Back then they even had some boards up on H Street NE, which were later quietly taken down because lol come on. 

Also, the only rioting I've encountered this past year was a Trump caravan on the I-287...

Ah yes, the Battle of Mario Cuomo Bridge. The douchebags are trying it at polling places, too. But by all means obsess on Antifa -- it might sell a few more barrels of prepper rations, and ain't it all about the grift?

UPDATE 4. Another commenter:

I guess Rod doesn't pay attention to the news as several Boogaloo Boys have been indicted for actions during riots and the US Marshals straight up murdered an antifa dude.

Doesn't pay attention? Does this look like he doesn't pay attention?

Rod Dreher is a straight-up fascist. And many other popular conservatives are just better at covering it up.

UPDATE 5. Well, they said it would take days to count the votes and that appears to be the case. So get some sleep and drink plenty of water, maybe with some bourbon in it.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

When are people going to catch on to Sabrina Chap?

It's the homestretch, boys and girls, and as we might have known the Republicans and their operatives on the courts are trying to steal it. The Boof Kavanaugh opinion on the Supreme Court's Wisconsin election order, the Court's ominous segregation of post-Election-Day mail ballot returns in Pennsylvania, and the Minnesota switcheroo suddenly requiring all mail ballots to be received by Nov. 3 rather than merely postmarked by then -- with Tubby yelling that votes must not be counted after Election Day -- all point to at least an attempted Bush v. Gore 2 and a straight-up gank. The only way around it I can see is to run up the score so much they can't cheat successfully. America expects that every citizen will do their duty. 

On the other hand, Mr. Jonathan Miller points me to  an encouraging sign -- Ole Perfesser Glenn Harlan Beauregard Jubilation T. Reynolds preparing his troops for defeat: 

What is going on in media now is not normal. It is, in fact, a species of coup. Should Biden win, many will regard his victory as essentially illegitimate because of this, and they will have a good argument.

This is in relation to Glenn Greenwald's "I Been Censored" hissy fit. (Boy, if only I'd still had the Voice gig when I started my Substack; I could have got in on this bullshit.) Can't say I can see the Perfesser's Threepers, Neo-Confederates and Militiamen rallying to the defense of Greenwald -- wait'll they find out he's gay, and that his husband's last name is Miranda!

But most of the brethren express faith in an imminent Red Wave -- based on truck parades, which have replaced boat parades since the unfortunate Lake Travis incident, and other nonsense like this from "Illicit Info" (I warn again clicking their link, it's spammy as hell):

‘Can I Change My Vote’ Trends On Google As Biden Campaign Goes Into Tailspin, Hunter’s Laundry Aired, Debate Lashing [Opinion]

...What if, hypothetically, someone voted early for candidate ‘D’ only to learn that the person they cast their ballot for was … for argument’s sake, … is being blackmailed by a hostile foreign power?  That would be a serious problem IF that were to occur.

Well, apparently there are an increasing number of Americans who have voted early (as nearly 60,000,000 Americans have already done) want to know if they can change their vote.

They then link to a Fox News story and suggest it says "Google searches of the phrase 'can I change my vote' peaked" right after the last Presidential debate and the first wave of Giuliani-Hunter Biden bullshit. Not only is there nothing in the story about whose voters were searching the question -- Illicit Info and Fox News both wait a good long while before revealing that the spike actually happened five days after the debate.  They close:

That fact of the matter is that we do not know, and we will never know, but we will have a much better idea when the election is over and all the votes are counted.

They're as bad at covering their asses as they are getting people to look when they show them. They are right, however, that we do not know. So vote! It ain't illegal yet. 

THE STATE OF THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT, 2020.

Rich Lowry has certainly come a long way since he edited the "Against Trump" issue of National Review in 2016. After the election NR swiftly transitioned to a JustTheTip Trumper publication, and Lowry obligingly struck the colors and hoisted the MAGA flag. Today, as the rats pour over the gunwales, with his movement a blasted hulk, Lowry gives what's left of his followers a final message: Vote Trump to say fuck you to people you hate!

The Only Middle Finger Available
If Trump wins, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture to the cultural Left.

Well, as embarrassed journalists like to say, authors (even EICs) don't write their own heds and deks, so maybe --

If Donald Trump wins a second term, it will be an unmistakable countercultural statement in a year when progressives have otherwise worked their will across the culture.

After months and months of statues toppling and riots in American cities and a crime wave and woke virtue-signaling from professional sports leagues and absurd firings and cancellations, the year would end with a stunning, stark rebuke of all of that.

-- well, guess not: Lowry is pretty clearly taking an O.J. "If I Did It" approach: No declaratives or imperatives, just a description of rightwing bugbears and bêtes noires and how readers whose fever dreams are full of them might-could at least enjoy a spasm of vicarious vengeance via the "middle finger" of a Trump vote. 

Of course you have to believe some weird shit to buy it -- for example:

If Trump manages to pull off an upset in 2020, it will be as a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture.

So, Black Lives Matter protestors (whom wingnuts always call "rioters," it's in the Style Guide) and professional athletes are at the "commanding heights," whereas the President of the United States -- who with his footpads in all branches of the government has been wrecking the economy, the national health, the judiciary, the environment, not to mention trust in the institutions that hold the country together -- is, I guess, just a ceremonial figure like the village idiot or a cat or dog you elect Mayor of a township for shits and giggles. There's no consequences to that action except an occasional chuckle about how this collapsed civilization must really piss off the libs. 

Vote, please, and do extra diligence to make sure it gets counted. We're not in fact sending a message (Republicans don't listen anyway) but trying to improve and indeed save our lives.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 Locals. They're good.

•    I did a thing for the newsletter (this issue free even to non-subscribers! How can I do it? Low overhead!) about last night's debate. The only way you can paint it as a victory for Tubby is if you grade it solely on yelling, posturing, and other alpha-ape displays of dominance. I certainly don't understand all the people saying, as "Access Maggie" Haberman did, that he "heeded the pleas of his advisers to tone it down." As I observed in the newsletter, that lasted maybe ten minutes. Perhaps Haberman means he sometimes resorted his baby-whisper voice between bellows, but on my TV he was mostly his usual self -- and, as I observed much further back than this, his is not an act that wears well over time, let alone during a pandemic. And who on God's green earth thinks hollering "I'm the least racist person here" over and over again is a winning strategy -- except for total racists, and he's already got them locked up? For the election, I am cautiously optimistic, which is to say frightened rather than despairing. 

•   Speaking of white supremacists, Republican golden boy Madison Cawthorn -- Good looking! Young! Disabled, but charismatically so like Greg Abbott! Running for a safe seat in the South! -- keeps outing himself as a Nazi, and the media keeps outing itself as unable to accept the evidence. Candidate Cawthorn first became famous for his effusions over a visit to "the Fuhrer"'s house in Germany. One could have interpreted his remark charitably, and conservatives did: My very favorite of these attempts is National Review's "Madison Cawthorn Is Not a Nazi." There's a headline that doesn't arouse suspicion! Cawthorn's also been accused of prevaricating about his career and military intention, and of sexual harassment, and of still more fash weirdness:

Cawthorn oddly follows precisely 88 people on Twitter. (88 is white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.”) He posed for a photo wearing a gun holster emblazoned with a Spartan soldier’s helmet, a symbol associated with far-right gun culture in general and the Oath Keepers specifically.

Also he called his no-work company "SPQR."  But, ho ho, maybe he just doesn't know what he's saying! "It would surprise me if Cawthorn knew that these have become alt-right symbols," tut-tutted Reason's Robby Soave, "just as it would surprise most people to learn that making the OK gesture will get them branded as white nationalists by hate-group watchers." (Not if they're paying attention, it wouldn't.) Regular old newsies cut Cawthorn slack, too; even stories that point out more dumb shit he did refer to him affectionately as a "a 25-year-old in a potentially historic bid for Congress."

Anyway, a few months pass, and now we find Cawthorn's website accused a critical reporter of working "for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” (Cawthorn took it down but the internet is forever.) Suddenly all Cawthorn's weird fascist tells look a lot harder to excuse away. Not that the Republicans won't try (Ben Shapiro's already covering for him, posting a Cawthorn op-ed that's light on the Nazism) because they want that seat badly. But the next time they and the press back up one of these guys and say, "I can explain everything," we ought to tell them not to bother.  

•   I see Peggy Noonan's making her late push for a Trump comeback ("Did he? Could he?"), claiming he won the debate and achieved the important goal: 

If you wanted or needed an excuse, an out, to vote for Mr. Trump, if you wanted an argument that justified your decision in a conversation in the office, he probably gave you what you need.

First of all, what's with this persistent rightwing theme that Trump can win by giving his followers an excuse rather than a reason? Isn't that a disqualification rather than a recommendation? Secondly, what would "justify your decision in a conversation in the office"? Sheets and pillows? "Russia Russia Russia"? "ACO plus three"? If you're using this gibberish to excuse your vote to your colleagues, you were voting for him already. No leaner, if such a sad creature exists, was waiting for Trump to yell that he was the least racist person in the room to make the leap.

Mr. Trump’s power, recovered Thursday night, is to speak like normal people, so you can understand him without having to translate what he’s saying in your head. 

"Oh, I get it -- he says Blacks Lives Matter is all about killing cops!" 

Trump supporters believe he will win because of his special magic, Trump foes fear he will win because of his dark magic. Pollsters and pundits stare at the data and wonder how to quantify his unfathomable magic.

Pollsters are looking at polls that overwhelmingly show Trump losing and musing upon his "unfathomable magic"?  If it were anyone else I'd say Noonan was counting on Republican election fraud to make her prediction sensible ex post facto (which it could! So defend your vote, people!), but with her I guess it's the leprechaun telling her to burn her credibility.  

•  Oh, I have one more thing to say about this awful Noonan column:

It’s only a poll, but after Gallup, a New York Times/Siena poll asked the same question, and 49% said they were better off.

What’s interesting, though, is that when Siena asked respondents if the country was better off than it was four years ago, only 39% said yes.

What does this mean? No one knows. If the polling is more or less correct, you wonder: Will people vote on their own circumstances or what they perceive to be the country’s?

This is very, very reminiscent of something longtime rightwing buffoon Jeff Godlstein (old-timers will understand why I spelled it that way) claimed in 2006 as a reason why, despite the "good" economy, "the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public." To Godlstein, it started with Paul Krugman telling them (perniciously!) that some people were suffering, and the American public, which was doing great, taking it too much to heart: 

...the result is Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

That was January 2006. Remember the 2006 midterms? Kinda like the 2018 midterms. Americans are prey to all kinds of bugbears and prejudices, but most of us know when we're being conned. 

LATEST DREHER CATACLYSM.

Gotta thank Christopher Hooks for pointing this one out: Holy Rod Dreher hears from a data scientist that "roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT" and flips:

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration...

As you may have guessed, Dreher didn't realize "B" means bisexual, and when it is pointed out to him he emits a can't-miss 2020 Jonah Goldberg Central To My Point winner:

This is probably true, but it doesn’t really change much. I’m not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? 

Blink. Blink.

So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because “bisexual” could cover “open to sex with both sexes”....

Might could, huh. 

...but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.

If it makes Rod feel bad it's bad for America/Christianitythe babbys. 

But let's go back to his blather about how non-het women are "anti-natalist." Set aside that not only bi but also gay women can have babies (and trans people too -- which Dreher should know because he frequently screams about it); why would it be anti-natalist if a lot of women (including straight women) didn't want to have babies? That doesn't mean they're against childbirth -- that just means they don't want to do it themselves, just like my lack of interest in downhill racing makes me anti-skiing. The difference, I guess, is that Dreher thinks it's these women's duty -- every woman's duty, it would seem -- to make themselves available for childbearing whether they want to or not. 

PS. In case you were wondering where Dreher, the prototypical JustTheTip Trumper, had come down after months of "I'm not Trump fan BUT" pee-dancing: In a separate full-body-fit over an Associated Press story that accurately portrays Amy Coney Barrett's support for anti-LGBTQ policies, he's taken a quintessentially Dreheresque route -- he probably won't sully himself with a vote for that Bad Man with the Good Judges, but he definitely wants other people to do it for him:

I have pretty much decided to vote third party for president (American Solidarity Party). Trump has my state locked up anyway, so I’m thinking that I would like to cast a vote in favor of a party whose platform I really believe in, as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils, and choosing between the evil of two lessers. 

BUT:

Reading this AP story this morning, though, has reminded me again of the contempt the left has for people like me, and our institutions... I hope you Christian readers — especially those in swing states — will too. Though my vote really doesn’t matter in my state, this issue might move it to Trump anyway, given the quality of his judicial appointments. If I were in a swing state, this AP story, and what it symbolizes, would seal the deal for me.

There's an old gag about how if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament, but if men could get pregnant Dreher would just find some other bullshit reason to get other humans to do the job for him. 

UPDATE. Just want to note for the historical record (I'm old-fashioned that way) that Dreher has updated again from his famous "reader" "mailbag." The alleged correspondent is a "Gen Z female reader" who says girls are saying they're gay or gayishe because of "increasing self-aggrandizement" among today's Fallen Youth "that surrounds this idea of identifying as any type of LGBTQ. It’s a social marker that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd. It makes you cool, it makes you one of the crowd." It's Queer Pressure! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 Out of the way, it's been standing too long.

•   I'm cautious to the point of superstition about these things but it looks as if we may be headed in the right direction election-wise. (Remember: They cheat! Vote and let no one stop you!) And I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised that after years of sluicing the most deranged rightwing bullshit, the press and social media seem finally to have decided not to cooperate with at least one obvious disinformation attack, the Hunter Biden Laptop Caper. Gizmodo has a nice rundown on how sketchy it is, as do others, but you hardly need it: What mentally complete person would buy that Biden fils left laptops full of incriminating emails -- look, screenshots! Impossible to fake! -- with a repairman who felt it was his patriotic duty to give them to RUDY GIULIANI AND STEVE BANNON? (Who then funneled them to the New York Post -- presumably because Rupert Murdoch was all the Trump gang had left after David Pecker outlived his usefulness.)

The indicted shitbag Bannon is already self-discredited, and I hope this helps convince people that the New York "chortle chortle gotta love the" Post is not the cute ragamuffin they keep kitchy-kooing and is instead a repulsive and dangerous propaganda outfit. And as for Giuliani, well, here's my latest newsletter item on Third-Act Rudy (Free even to those of you who haven't subscribed yet!), and how this latest humiliation is just a reminder that he was always shit, and in much the same way as the President he serves as bagman and butler. 

•   While we're on the subject of FREE items from my newsletter (no, don't believe I dropped it: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down) here's another: a conservative defense of SCOTUS nominee Goody Godlywench, on the grounds that of course she's not going to rule in favor of the things she and all her enablers desperately want. The whole caper reminds me of a story from the childhood of former Justice John Paul Stevens; the missus found it in a New York Review of Books essay on his autobiography:

A primary business of Stevens’s immediate family was running the upscale Stevens Hotel in Chicago. But when it faced insolvency during the Great Depression, the hotel “borrowed” more than $1 million from the Illinois Life Insurance Company, which was controlled by Stevens’s grandfather, uncle, and father. Illinois state prosecutors saw this transfer as a form of embezzlement and indicted the three family members. Upon hearing the news, Stevens’s grandfather suffered a stroke and his uncle committed suicide, leaving Stevens’s father to face trial alone. A Chicago jury convicted him, but the Illinois Supreme Court subsequently reversed the conviction and directed an acquittal, finding no evidence of criminal intent.

Although one suspects that these events were traumatic for Stevens, who was still in his early teens, he recounts them in a typically matter-of-fact way. But what he says he learned from the experience is revealing: “In recent years, my firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system’s fallibility has reinforced my conviction that the death penalty should be abolished.”

It would be wonderful, wouldn't it, if more of our judges had some acquaintance of the cruelties and caprices found on the other side of the law,  instead of being bred in vats by the Federalist Society and religious maniac fringe groups. 

THE TRUMP YOU LOVED, THE TRUMP YOU KNEW, THE TRUMP WITH A SONG IN HIS HEART.

All proud MAGA choads know Joe Biden and all his voters are Antifa rioter-murderers who want to sell white America to Muslim Chinese Black Mexican rapists and deny Goody Godlywench her true place on the Supreme Court/under her husband's headship. But their worst crime is hiding from the American people what a swell guy President Trump is, and Lou Holtz (yes, that Lou Holtz) is here to set the record straight! 

Most voters only “know” President Trump through the lens of media coverage and public policy debates — but that doesn’t come close to capturing the true essence of a man who spends every hour of his working day fighting for the American people. 

 Whereas the president’s supporters tend to focus on defending him on substantive issues, such as making the case for his America First policy agenda, his critics gleefully assail him on a personal level, hoping to undercut the appeal of his message by demonizing the messenger.

The liberal media are always telling us how Trump mocks the disabled, calls for his opponents to be jailed and protestors to be beaten, calls veterans losers and suckers, loots the Treasury, cheats on his taxes, cheats on his wife etc. -- but they never talk about his winning personality. 

Predictably, the left employed the same strategy following the recent presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, launching a full-on smear operation as soon as the event was over designed to make the president seem like an aggressive bully rather than a confident, assertive leader compelled to forcefully defend himself against a tag-team effort by his opponent and the debate moderator.

"Make the president seem like an aggressive bully" -- boy, they must have used hypnosis. 

Unlike most politicians, President Trump doesn’t resort to fake displays of empathy such as kissing babies or crying on camera — but that doesn’t mean he is devoid of compassion or dislikes babies.

It's just that Trump's a simple guy doesn't know how to portray his feelings to the public -- it's not like he was in show business.

The American public doesn’t often get to see the human side of Donald Trump, and when that side does peek through his no-nonsense exterior, the media tend to ignore or misrepresent it.

Surely Holtz has a concrete example of the human side of Donald Trump to offer us, since the President himself is too shy to show it?

After I did some campaign appearances in 2016, President Trump was informed of how sick my wife, Beth, was and he called her and spoke with her for 10 minutes. 

I totally believe this. Also, Zappa took a crap onstage and ate it.

His conversation was to encourage Beth about how important she was to her family. It was a genuine concern for an American citizen.

Wait, actually now I do believe it. In fact I can hear it in my head: "So ya know, Lou's gonna do some campaigning for me, now how's he gonna do that without someone ironing his shirts and cooking his meals and whatever it is you frumpy housewives do, when you're not sick that is? So, lemme see, I got a few more minutes, whattaya like? You, you're a lady, you like flowers and soap operas, right? I was on a soap opera."

Whenever I spoke with him over the past few years, his focus was always on what he could do to help others. I have never seen him wallow in self pity when the media has been so unfair.

This... this is Donald Trump we're talking about, right.

When I played golf with him, he counted every stroke, never moved the ball…he was the most honest golfer that I have ever played with. 

LOL, the true measure of a man! I used to follow the AlwaysAction Twitter account, recently caught up in one of that platform's half-assed sweeps of spam accounts -- and contrary to the Washington Examiner's portrayal, it was indeed a spam account, endlessly recirculating a small numbers of aged wingnut propaganda clips, mostly calculated to inflame the rage and racism of its fans. One thing I noted in their stream was a clip, also endlessly recirculated, from the Trump campaign showing the candidate signing an autograph for a little girl; it stuck with me because it was the only clip they ever showed -- indeed one of the few I have ever seen anywhere -- of Trump showing anything even faintly resembling kindness toward another human being. And this was from a hardcore Trumpkin feed! 

Maybe the reason people don't see "the human side of Donald Trump" is not because it's been concealed from them, but because he and his handlers prefer to project a Mussolini image of dominance and capricious cruelty in order to maintain his thrall over his authoritarian followers. Or maybe he's just a scumbag. Or both! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Singer/songwriter stuff, like back in the old days. I like it.

 

•  The otherwise inexplicable decision by White House osteopath Sean Conley to clear Tubby to start infecting the masses tomorrow makes sense if you realize that, as recent American political history and my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down White House sketches show, Trump is a mob boss who has surrounded himself with weak incompetents, not because he doesn't know from quality, but because he prefers wash-outs he can threaten into doing his most deranged bidding. Like, who would hire Wilbur Ross -- voted Most Likely to Fall Asleep in Cabinet Meetings by Factotum Magazine -- except someone who wants a senile old crook whose discernment is so enfeebled that he would go in front of TV cameras and make a fool of himself in defense of Trump's tariffs? Likewise, who here thinks their own doctor would tell them, sure, you've had COVID-19 a week, why not go give an unmasked speech to thousands of umasked people and tell 'em I said it's okay? 

•  Speaking of pitchmen and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- subscriptions to which are still available and cheap! -- allow me to share today's White House sketch, "Key Mar-a-Lago," as My Free Gift To You. Things are no doubt grim at the White House, and don't think it hasn't had an effect here in the District -- Kia and I biked around Capitol Hill the other day, and the line at the Engine Company 8 firehouse for after-work COVID-19 testing went around the block. Not that Tubby gives a shit, but normal people know the virus gets around. But go ahead and enjoy the thing -- what can we do but laugh? (Besides vote in unprecedented numbers.)

•  The week has been so full of garbage takes it's hard to pick favorites, but David Brooks' mewling that "America Is Having a Moral Convulsion" in The Atlantic is pretty rich. This bit in particular is classic Brooks:

When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier -- habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.

Yes, in Brooksland they're always spiritual and communitarian, these things that make up ideal American life and its traditional "habits of deference to group needs," huh? But in the real world, you know what helps? MONEY. Because you can't live without it, and the U.S. sent us a pittance months ago. Later Brooks mopes:

By August, most Americans understood the failure. Seventy-two percent of Danes said they felt more united after the COVID-19 outbreak. Only 18 percent of Americans felt the same.=

Guess why? Here's Denmark's action plan:

A total of DKK 285 billion (US $42 billion) has been appropriated in a number of “relief packages” to support businesses and workers until June. This spending represents almost 13 percent of the Danish GDP, making the Danish plan one of the most expansive in the world...

The government will support 90 percent of wages of hourly workers who are sent home up to DKK 26,000 ($3,800) a month and salaried workers will get 75 percent covered up to DKK 23,000 ($3,350). The salary guarantee program is organized through the Danish three-party-negotiation system, which consists of the government, unions, and employer organizations. Small independent companies outside the system will also be eligible...

It's amazing that in this country the top commentators on social conditions are people who've apparently never had to pay for a bounced check.   

DON'T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME!

Here's my Veep debate wrap from last night. Harris did great by the standards of these things, never more so than when she was looking at the blowhard Pence in patient wonder at, as the feminist memes say, the confidence of a mediocre man. Conservatives in turn complained that she was conducting physiognomic warfare on God Boy. "Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris could be seen smirking, smiling, and laughing during Vice President Mike Pence’s answers during the vice presidential debate," sputtered the Washington Examiner, which enlisted "Republican committee member Harmeet Dhillon" to amplify the talking point by calling Harris a "smirking robot." "Her constant smiling and smirking didn’t work," claimed Joe Battenfield of the Boston Herald, who also claimed for Pence a "dominant" performance -- I'll show you headship, bitch! Roger L. Simon -- yes, The Man Who Created Moses Wine and one of the great buffoons of old blogging days, now writing for the Epoch "House Style 'Chinese Flu'" Times -- got it in the headline ("Kamala Loses Debate by Smirking") and if you think I'm gonna subscribe to read the rest you're crazy. 

These guys hate that women can speak without being spoken to at all, but when women give them insolent looks they go all Frank Booth (I mean, in a wimp propagandist way). 

UPDATE: Didn't post the link to my wrap-up before -- here it is! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Billy was the real thing. 

•   They say Tubby got the virus but since they're completely untrustworthy we have to consider alternatives: 1.) It's the truth; there were too many leaks and loose ends to keep it quiet; like what would they tell his next audience of virus-targets if he's too sick to show up? 2.) They're just plain lying, using a get-well-soon story as a distraction from his disastrous campaign week; 3.) They're mixing truth with lies -- like maybe he just hit a serious cognitive drop and they're calling it COVID as a cover. Well, whatever it is, the guy will be low-key for a little while his goons do the talking. Byron York at the Washington Examiner:

Then there is Trump's role as candidate. Remember that the president, and a lot of Republicans, too, have mocked rival Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement" and appearing mostly in virtual events. Well, it now appears that coronavirus will force President Trump to adopt a Biden-style campaign, at least for the next 10 to 14 days. The Trump campaign can still gather big crowds, which he can address via video. But there will be an undeniably different dynamic to those events, because the president always feeds off the energy from a big crowd, and he can't get the same effect sitting in front of a camera.

LOL yeah, let's schedule big rallies where Trump's loyalists can watch him on TV! How heartwarming. It'll be like the GOP Death Cult version of Spartacus, or Stone Soup: The President can't give you the King's Virus himself, but several of you are probably teeming with COVID-19, so you can give each other coronavirus in his name! It's a Trumpmas miracle! 

If you prefer your idiocy mainstream, here you go:

Does Biden suspend his campaign as Trump is quarantined? Is the White House failure to observe protocols a reason for Biden to continue his campaigning?

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) October 2, 2020

•  Meanwhile, from slightly before Corona Don time, here's Rod Dreher:

Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:

A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday...

Dreher actually thinks his frothing hatred of trans people is shared by normal people and will be a game-changer in the election.

Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.

This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 

[Hysteria Bold in the original.] This reminds me of this previous bit of Dreher electoral analysis:

UPDATE: New CBS News poll finds no Kenosha bump for Trump, even in Wisconsin. People who want the situation calmed trust Biden more.

UPDATE 2: A friend who read this told me on the phone, as we were talking, that he finds it impossible to believe that there was no Trump bump from the rioting — but easy to believe that people who intend to vote for Trump would not admit it to a pollster. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t tell a pollster if I was going to vote for Trump. Is that paranoid? Maybe. But I don’t think people are wrong to fear that this information is being recorded, and might be used against them one day.

Not too paranoid, huh? Then he added one of his Letters to Repenthouse "from" someone who feels exactly the same way. I have my own feel-good ideas about how this election could go right, but it seems weird to me to watch the guy say over and over again that maybe fear and hatred will pull it out for the Party of God. Well, I guess it's better than admitting that voter suppression is their only real hope. 

•  Sorry, I can't let the subject alone -- it's too rich. I see the Washington Times is trying to stir shit by sending out a Breaking News alert about this:

It's very obvious UUURGK BAD BROWN LADY TALK BAD ABOUT LEADER stuff, but stop and think: Why would an appeal to sympathy toward Trump work on his fans? They always talk and think about him as superhuman -- an impression supported by his pointed cruelty and brutality, which proves his disdain for human weakness. He doesn't get coronavirus, he gives it! Think about those crazy Ben Garrison cartoons (and the weird Trump-as-Rocky Photoshop sent out by Trump himself) portraying this flabby tub-o-guts as a buff he-man. Can they even imagine Trump suffering from a mere disease? Maybe if it were cancer, that would work -- people "fight" cancer, so the image of a Swole Trump battering the Grim Reaper might play. But a flu virus? That's like a Rocky movie in which the boxer plans a comeback against Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Boring! I expect that when and if Trump pulls through his factota will tell the rubes thrilling stories of how he refused the wheelchair as he lumbered heroically to the snack machine in the lobby.  

STATE OF THE UNION.

 You can read my contemporaneous notes on the first debate here. I have very little to add. except to say that the 60% edge Biden got in the CNN poll is not super-meaningful, at least as regards the event itself; it seems close to where the voters are, debate or no debate. People who support Trump will support any loathsome thing he does, while people who support Biden are basically people who are sick of Trump, so any cavils about Biden's watery responses would be overridden by an existential desire to see the madman deposed and honor restored. Things have gotten weird, but America, not so much. Or so we hope.