WHO WOULD JESUS STRANGLE?

I have a rare Monday Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie out today, featuring Bible Stories for Conservatives, including the Parable of the Good Samurderer. This is inspired by the recent tendency of conservatives such as Ron DeSantis and the Wall Street Journal editorial board to call Subway Strangler Daniel Perry a “good Samaritan.” 

Many other people have noticed what an insane reversal that is. But it’s to be expected nowadays: First, notwithstanding I know some righteous Christians, the kind you see on TV and in the news – and the many Republican pedophiles chronicled by @antifaoperative and others, and of course holy-rolling propagandists like Erick Erickson – are mostly vicious bastards. When put in a position to be actual Good Samaritans by an influx of immigrants escaping poverty and prosecution, these Christians instead gleefully ship the confused refugees up north and then laugh at the chaos it causes. (At the same time, they constantly holler, over the clatter of their collection plates, that they’re the ones being persecuted.) I tell ya, if I see a crucifix or a Jesus fish on a guy, he’s not getting anywhere near my loved ones or my wallet. 

Also, the prestige press colludes with the idea that killing a guy for yelling on the subway is a rational response – for example, by referring to the Strangler’s actions as “restraining” rather than killing, as if the guy were still alive laughing about how he got away with it like on a cop show. As I’ve said before, many times on the subway I’ve seen tense situations defused by normal common-sense conflict resolution, and none of these ended in death. But for your average suburbanite, who goes from McMansion to SUV to office park and back without ever encountering another human being, let alone a homeless one, it's easy to imagine that the only way to deal with an obstreperous street guy is to kill him. You see these choads online going HE WAS THREATENING and bragging about their gun collections, and you wonder what kind of fucked-up padded existence they live.

UPDATE. Speaking of fake Christians, David French is at the Times to tell us all how dangerous the subway is and how you gotta understand why Penny felt like he had to kill Neely and then EIGHT GRAFS DOWN:

There is no evidence that Neely assaulted anyone...

Nonetheless "The best way to resolve these problems isn’t through jury trials of those, like Penny, who take it upon themselves to intervene" blah blah blah horseshit. These fucking people. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/12/23.

Yeah, I know, the Supremes' vocals are phenomenal,
but it's also cool just hearing it like this.

Hell of a week, huh? I didn’t watch Tubby on TV – I already knew that he’s full of shit and that CNN is likewise, so what was I going to learn from it? How former Tucker Carlson employee Kaitlan Collins was going to mask her collaboration as incompetence? I understand J-schools frown on this approach, but for me a simple “I caught your act” will suffice. You’ll notice not even the rightwing press is talking about it as if Trump articulated any meaningful point or policy – it was all boo-yah theater reviews of his “characteristically spectacular” style etc.

Who needs it? And who the fuck does Anderson Cooper think he's fooling? This was no learning experience. Again, the whole shtick is just meant to keep the Republican rump excited – which doesn’t deliver a majority, but with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and bills like the one in Texas that allows the GOP to throw out Democratic Houston’s votes on a whim, the plan is to rule without one. 

Anyway, we have a freebie at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that continues a theme from last week on the Subway Strangler. Conservatives continue to champion Daniel Penny – now up on manslaughter charges for killing Jordan Neely – as a hero; they invariably refer to him as a Marine and/or a veteran to make him look admirable (notwithstanding their Congresscritters are currently fixing to screw veterans on benefits).

At The Federalist Jonathan S. Tobin laments that “someone who isn’t a ‘person of color’ is always going to be assumed to be in the wrong in any violent confrontation today,” refers to Penny as “the veteran who restrained the homeless man” -- rather hoping you'll miss, I suppose, that his “restraint” killed the guy -- and portrays the once-common argument that vigilante murder is not acceptable as an attempt by socialists to turn the dead homeless guy “the new George Floyd” and rekindle what Tobin describes as “the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots that shook the nation.” (No such thing has happened.) These guys really are, as my essay has it, killer nerds, desk jockeys baying for vicarious blood. 

And, you know what, this one was members-only but since it’s Friday I’m releasing it: a fun thing about the old days when people yelled things at the movie screen. (Ain't that just like a liberal -- winking at disorder!) Comments are open, have fun!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/5/23.

Flow!

•  What a week, eh? It seems like the well of rightwing judiciary corruption stories is inexhaustible. The latest -- with the direct involvement of Federalist Society kingpin/nation-wrecker Leonard Leo, Trump lie diffuser Kellyanne Conway, and Clarence Thomas’ insurrectionist wife – is a humdinger: 

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

The “landmark voting rights” case was Shelby County v. Holder, the one in which Leo’s SCOTUS toadies shanked the Voting Rights Act. (It’s also worth mentioning Conway, Thomas, and Leo are all members of one of those DC fascist affinity groups to which such people flock.)

Man, they’re just crooks, right? And of course we’ve got the usual fash fluffers sputtering “how dare you” at anyone who dares to notice this crime spree. 

This was grist for my mill in one of this week’s two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: A scene in which some leading influence peddlers and their clients meet up at a billionaire mansion to conduct business with a longtime alicublog figure of fun.

•  The other free issue is a meditation on the latest object of rightwing hero worship: The man who murdered an obstreperous subway hustler in cold blood. Just when you think conservatives have bottomed out morally, they manage to saw through the floorboards and find another sub-basement. 

The Twitter creeps are vile enough, but the paper-trained pundits of the right who’ve gotten in on this are even worse. Abe Greenwald at Commentary may be the current nadir: He jerks off at length about how his pet murderer was a manly Marine, dammit (“courage is their defining trait… there aren’t many like them”) and fantasizes about having a Subway Strangler floor show of his own:

I’ve been on a few trains where “something was happening,” and if a Marine had suddenly appeared and taken matters into his own hands, I’d have bought him a steak dinner.

Eeeeyikes. The murderer, meanwhile, is alleged to be huddling with a prominent Republican lawyer politician-lawyer (anti-Bragg, just the way Trump likes 'em!), and the crew is preparing for Bernie Goetz redux for some electoral juice -- not in New York City, where such people are justly despised, but in the boondocks and Bumfucks where New York is hated and feared as the Land of Ooga Booga. Of course this ain’t 1984 and George Floyd is much fresher in the minds of potential jurors. Maybe the creeps' model will be Kyle Rittenhouse, with lots of burble about Big Scary Cities and Standing Your Ground. 

•  Finally, since I love a good callback, let me note this blubberfest at the Moonie Washington Times:

Conservatives excluded from 2023 commencement invites

Conservative speakers, already a rarity on college campuses in recent years, may be even more of an anomaly this spring as the nation’s universities hold commencement ceremonies featuring an array of educators, entertainers and politicians drawn from the left — and essentially devoid of anyone from the right.

Whether you’re a respected scholar, a Supreme Court justice or even a former president, the message from most of the country’s colleges is clear: No conservatives allowed.

Boo hoo, the mean college students won’t pay to listen to us bitch about uppity minorities and how no one wants to work! 

This is a return to form for conservatives – in fact it goes back to the days when they were retooling their “political correctness” shtick into “cancel culture” crybullying. I wrote about it for the Village Voice in 2014, when they were outraged that students didn’t want to be regaled by war criminal Condoleezza Rice. In the same column I found conservatives yelling because they weren’t getting the Hugo Award nominations to which they felt themselves entitled, and also this eerie harbinger of Wingnut Shtick To Come: 

For example, last week New Hampshire father William Baer was arrested for disrupting a school board meeting. He complained about the assignment of Jodi Picoult’s YA novel 19 Minutes in his teen daughter’s class because it had a sex scene in it. As the video shows, after Baer had finished his allotted two minutes, he refused to shut up, so the board called the cops, who took him away…

Some people might think the board overreacted; others may think they did right to keep Baer’s heckler’s veto from stomping everyone else’s right to speak. Rightbloggers, however, thought the board had infringed on an important Constitutional right: The right to take over a public meeting if you feel really strongly about it, and are right-wing.

This was, of course, before they invented “Moms for Liberty” to hide their totalitarian agenda behind apron strings. But the basic grift is the same.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/28/23.

But I think you know/That I can't let go

It’s the weekend – let’s be re-creative! One of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries from this week that I’m unlocking is an open call for your favorite cover versions of songs – especially ones that go the extra mile to get something new out of the originals. I already posted my top pick (The Residents’ eerie “Viva Las Vegas”) but I have to admit the prize could as easily go to the tune up top here, Erasure doing “Take a Chance On Me.” It’s so breezy, so sweet, so gay! But your choices are at least as valid, let’s hear ‘em. 

The other REBID freebie is one of my scenes in the Catholic Conservative Rectory, with Mr. Justice Boof Kavanaugh sharing drinks and colloquy with the Elders of the Comedy Irish. Poor Boof is back in the news because some folks have noticed that back in 2018, as Above The Law bluntly states, “The Senate Fucked Up The Kavanaugh Investigation” by tossing credible testimony about the now-Associate Justice exposing himself at a party at Yale. Of course, most of us knew the Senate was bum’s-rushing the guy onto the Court at the time – what do you think the protests were about?

(Lagniappe: Here’s one of my White House scenes with Kavanaugh from the reign of the former guy. Lotta laughs if your sense of humor tends toward the mordant. You ought to subscribe.)

Speaking the shitshow that is the current SCOTUS, Jamelle Bouie is very good this week on how it’s rotting from the head. Polls show the rest of the country has some idea how bad it is, too. I can imagine Roberts putting a tail on Alito to make sure he doesn’t fuck up the mifepristone case like he probably did Dobbs, but I don’t see the trajectory turning around anytime soon and there’ll be plenty of opportunities (like Moore v. Harper) for them to speed the decline. Pack that shit already. 

UPDATE. No sooner do I mention how fucked up the SCOTUS cons are when...

Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’
The author of the Dobbs abortion ruling answers attacks on the court’s ‘legitimacy.’ He says he thinks he knows who leaked the draft and is certain about the motive.

Yes, the guy who almost certainly muscled his fellow wingnuts by leaking his own draft decision on Dobbs is granted a high perch in the Wall Street Journal to say it musta been a lib:

He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

How brave he and his fellow wingnuts were to resist! But as the previously cited poll results show, that's not how Mr. and Mrs. America see it -- they find the Supremes, rather than their critics, untrustworthy. Rather than reason with these commoners -- ha ha I know; like they read the Wall Street Journal! -- Alito rages how unfair it all is:

“We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

Alito cries about how no one defends him and his buddies -- even the bar associations (“if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks”) -- how he has to be "driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force," and how hard he has to work on his decisions, etc. Surely he doesn't sound like an old autocrat who need not answer to any authority and who is hated by the people he purports to serve, eh? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/21/23.

For me, a good cover makes you hear the original differently.
I never much liked this song before I heard this version.

I’m outta the hospital and back on my bullshit! As proof, have some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. First one’s about how other Republican officials might try to copy Ron “Three Fingers” DeSantis’ B-movie goon act. (I mentioned this a few days ago but what the hell, it’s news if it’s news to you.) I see Fingers has been having a hard week; apparently some donors (and voters!) notice his charmlessness and lunatic policies could be a liability in the general election. There is one super-rich guy pledging, hilariously, he would “go without food” to make this chunkhead President – increasingly this is becoming the age of the single rightwing billionaire patron, as shown by dedicated contributors to such as Rod Dreher and the Marble Freedom Trust – but it looks as if the closer we get to actual vote-counting time, the less people want a candidate who basically acts out neo-Nazi pamphlets in his governance. Once again, it seems Supercrook will be the GOP’s champion in the brief vote-show before the next insurrection attempt.

Speaking of big donors, the second freebie is mostly a monologue delivered by Clarence Thomas’ charming wife, explaining to the rabble why Supreme Court Justices of a certain political inclination aren’t bound by laws and norms to which we may, in our childishness, have expected them to attend. It has been grimly funny to see such frauds as Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Charles Murray and David French all rushing to defend Thomas’ Sugar Nazi as one hell of a guy who, on that basis, should be able to buy whatever unanswerable public official he wants. But they and the recalcitrant Thomas are part of the same imperturbable ruling class ethic: When the going gets tough, just act as if what the peons think doesn’t matter. It’s worked so far! 

Only other thing I really wanted to mention is Elmo’s blue-check purge. As expected, it’s already making it hard to identify real government agencies and public services from fakes. This doesn’t matter to Elmo and his incel army, who continue to portray the mass decertification as some sort of populist victory. But too little attention is paid to the real purpose behind it. 

Once upon a time Twitter was a good place to find, talk to, and sometimes yell at, people whose expertise and experience, attested to by Twitter, were valuable and meaningful. It was as close to a public forum with such people as most of us ever got.

Now it doesn’t matter whether you actually are, for example, an internationally-known forestry expert, or whether you’re just some guy who paid eight dollars so he can pretend he is one. In fact the phony may have an advantage over the real if he’s a Friend of Elmo – that is, the sort of right-wing troll he favors and amplifies. Where once a user’s achievements were significant, now all that matters is volume – how much one’s signal is boosted by the corrupt owner, and how many bots you can afford to muscle-up your tweets. This destroys Twitter as a resource, but promotes it as a propaganda tool – an alternative universe where the worst ideas are promoted, not because so many people even on the platform believe them, but because shitheels can rig it so it seems like they do. If these people lose again in 2024, count on them to say it’s impossible because Catturd2 has more followers than Biden got votes. 

OFF THE ROPES AND ON THE MEND.

Hey guys, just letting you know I’m out of the hospital. My gratitude to the folks at the NIH Clinical Center for once again taking such good care of me. It just makes me more fond than ever of big government, and more contemptuous of jail-Fauci science-is-witchcraft Republicans like Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat.

Healing is happening, though more slowly than it did when I was a pup. But dammit, I can still type! So far I’ve answered muster on all this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues – here’s a freebie, about the exciting new trend of Republican officials acting like mob bosses, insofar as their social disabilities allow. As I’ve said in the past, Ron DeSantis suffers especially in this regard:

The problem with DeSantis is, he may be too much of an obvious goon to translate as leader material beyond the borders of his corrupt bastion of Florida Men. He reminds me of minor gangsters in old movies as played by Sheldon Leonard and Mike Mazurki, except Leonard and Mazurki had presence and even charm — DeSantis is more like Rondo Hatton. It’s telling that he so consciously copies Trump’s body language; on the one hand it shows the requisite shamelessness, but on the other it also suggests a lack of inner resources. Once Trump’s out of the way — and he will need to be, for anyone else to advance — the new champion will have to have some style and swagger of his own, and if DeSantis can’t achieve that he’ll go down the way the minor Warner Brothers hoods did.

Meanwhile I see at the Wall Street Journal that Barton Swaim has chivalrously rushed to the defense of Clarence Thomas’ Sugar Nazi, Harlan Crow. Swaim starts (under a gentle drawing of Crow clearly meant to make him look like a more charming Noah Cross) by tut-tutting the “political left” for what Swaim portrays as its penchant for “delegitimation”:

The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness…

If you’re wondering how liberals got away with suggesting conservatives were stirring up fear and loathing of gays, Muslims, and trans people, you may have just awakened from a 20-year coma. 

…the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.

Lately, of course, most accusations of Republican criminality are focused on Donald Trump, an obvious and widely-acknowledged crook. (By the way, somewhere Hillary “Lock Her Up” Clinton is laughing her ass off.) Swaim does mention Trump, but as a victim: He “rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate.”  More sinned against than sinning! 

Swaim then travels to Crow’s estate for a tour and whattaya know, Crow’s got MLK and Lincoln memorabilia too, and he’s pals with Cornel West – see, it’s not just Nazis! Over sandwiches Crow tells Swaim how moderate he is – “I’m kind of a traditional George Bush type Republican… I’m moderately pro-choice—a first-trimester guy… So when people say I want to influence people on the court, I would say that if I were trying to do that, which I’m not, I’m not doing a very good job.” So Thomas and Crow can agree to disagree that people who aren’t them can have their rights taken away. It’s not like there’s anything important at stake. Just keep it civil, without delegitimation! 

Finally, I see Texas has gotten so gun crazy they’re mowing down cheerleaders, which in the Lone Star you would have thought were a protected species. What’s next, oil tycoons?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/7/23.

Getting some good music recs lately.

Lord, what a week. First there was Tubby going to court – the inspiration for one of my renowned satirical fantasia and the first of two (2!) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week.

(By the way, as I have told my paid subscribers, I’ll be off the clock next week, so there will probably be no ‘Round-the-Horn on the 14th and certainly no freebies before the week to follow. All the more reason to subscribe and get these treats on the regular. It’s cheap!)

Funny as the embittered and indicted Trump is, I must say his defenders are even funnier – none more so than the Just-the-Tip Trumpers who weep over What Their Movement Has Become under the rule of Tubby but have nonetheless and predictably rushed to defend him from the indignity of criminal charges. (Michael Powell: "Trump's behavior Immoral? Sleazy? [David French] says Yes and Yes. But..." lol)

National Review is currently half given over to the Trump Defense, including this spectacular angle from Rich Lowry:

Yes, Trump Was Extorted
Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.

This hed and dek, and the whole ridiculous thing, posits Tubby as victim, which is hilarious, so as a propagandist must when tasked with peddling absurdities Lowry denies he’s doing what he’s clearly doing, and right out of the gate:

It’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.

From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.

He should be indicting her! Lowry then lists a bunch of other similarly victimized men who were called to stand and deliver merely because they had paid for sex in violation of their marriage vows – and, really, who among us hasn’t been there, fellow conservatives? Lowry includes among Trump’s fellow victims former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, which has to be a first at National Review.

Eventually:

It takes two to tango — the women made the demands, and Trump paid up because it was worth it to him to make these stories go away.

Again, he was no victim, but the women who cashed in were no victims, or saints, either.

I’m sure the conservative audience Lowry accurately envisions would see any man-woman conflict, such as a rape accusation, as something in which the man may look like the sole guilty party – BUT! 

The other REBID item on the arm is today’s, about the pile-up of rightwing outrages including the expulsion of those two Tennessee reps by Republican assholes and why it may all come out alright. Dare to dream! 

UPDATE: Speaking of rightwing outrages and Just-the-Tip Types, I see the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel is nervous that the loony abortion bans feral Republicans are shoving through their state legislatures is costing them votes:

Conservatives cheered mightily last year when the Supreme Court returned abortion to the states with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And rightly so. Yet that was a legal victory. The political question is something else entirely, and it’s the left cheering now. In race after race, state after state, Democrats are pummeling conservative candidates on abortion, drowning out every other topic, stoking fearful centrists, suburbanites and women to turn out and elect them to office.

Even with the smell of the coffee strong in her nose, Strassel spins: It's about the Democrats' "pummeling," not the voters rebelling. Also, overturning Roe was wonderful, Strassel says, but they're not selling it right:

The GOP’s problem is muddle and inaction. Fearful of getting crosswise with the pro-life right, Republicans have failed to land on a consensus position.

LOL, bullshit: It's not "muddle and inaction," it's the gleeful misogynistic id of the conservative movement reveling in its victory over bitches. Why would they act all sober and compromising when the Wingnut SCOTUS gave them the keys to the kingdom? Strassel misses that, while her constituents believe in the same terrible things she does, unlike her they aren't obliged to try and make it look good for the manicured readers of the WSJ. They do lie, but not to cover their tracks -- they lie because, and for the same reason, their idol Trump lies: Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to her enemies to show them they are not. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/31/23.

I don't listen to this guy often enough.

Happy Tubby Got Fingered Day! As I mention in today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – released to general population as a commemorative gift – this indictment is no guarantee of justice; we haven’t even seen the full indictment yet, nor do we know what’s coming down the judicial pipe, and one never knows what a jury will do.  But it has shown, in a small way at least, that this alleged untouchable, the princeling of the putzes, is not utterly beyond the law. 

Which of course has the Trumpkins fully flipping out. Along with what you’ll find in the REBID piece, you’ve got U.S. Senator Rand Paul calling for D.A. Alvin Bragg’s arrest, and many other rightwingers, ranging from the Speaker of the House to the lowliest, tiniest-faced propagandists, calling for retaliatory prosecutions with no legal justification. Which just shows how strong their position is! You can find others on the internet crying that this indictment means America is a dictatorship, and soon the True Sons of Liberty will rise up and take down the Dusky Soros Hordes. In other words, Insurrection Attempt II – This Time It’s Hilarious! 

Even worse are the sober-sided Just-the-Tip Trumper types, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who call the indictment “a sad day for America,” sob sob, and insist that in such a case “the evidence should… be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive,” which (though IANAL) seems to be a brand new standard for felony prosecutions. Eventually they get to a slightly more manicured version of the bald threats made by the goon squad:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.

The cheaper the kooks, the gaudier the patter. 

UPDATE. I neglected to mention Erick Erickson's lulu. He advances the same tropes as the rest of them – the indictment “will help Trump immensely,” and “the case is so, so thin that Trump is very likely to get acquitted” (again, the indictment is as yet sealed) – and adds some nonsense of his own: For example, that “independents who don’t care for [Trump] but do not hate him could swing decisively and sympathetically in his direction just as a recession is breaking out. Alvin Bragg could very well have gotten Trump re-elected.” Apparently Erickson had a choice between polling data and his own ass and chose his ass. 

Most remarkably, Erickson also goes out of his way to insult D.A. Alvin Bragg -- and the grand jury: 

Alvin Bragg represents a wing of the Democrat Party that is on the short bus of the party. He’s not very bright. I suspect the grand jurors are just rabid progressives, too, and they are all in the wing of “let’s put the SOB behind bars.” They hate him. They call him vulgarities instead of the President. They just want him in prison, and they’ll do anything to get him there. 

They are not smart enough to consider the ramifications and too blinded by rage against Trump to care.

In a later post Erickson calls Bragg “a dim-witted county district attorney.” I’m sure Erickson’s constituents enjoy hearing the black lawyer and the New York City jurors (whom they probably imagine as the Central Park Five padded out with skels from Death Wish) called stupid, and that's why he's laying it on so thick. I wonder what he’ll do, though, as the wheels of justice slowly grind and he is obliged to up the ante. Maybe he’ll call in the AI that says racial slurs! 

ALSO, THEY SMELL.

I released a little something at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today based on the proposed force-feeding of Glenn Youngkin’s commencement address to the students of George Mason University. There are many political issues on which I at least see grounds for disagreement, but the idea advanced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression aka FIRE – one of those rightwing Bizarro-World versions of actual civil liberties organizations, like the ACLJ – that the 6,000-plus students who have petitioned to withdraw the school’s invitation are thereby censoring and cancelculturing the fleece-clad rightwing douchenozzle makes absolutely zero sense:

FIRE encourages @GeorgeMasonU students to resist censorship and instead enter both their commencement ceremony and life after graduation with a willingness to engage ideas with which they may disagree.

It's not a debate, it's a goddamn graduation party. My guess is that the freeze-peach guys are coming down hard because GMU's a pretty conservative school and the fact that even those students are sick of their bullshit is probably very embarrassing for them.

I have been saying for a long time that libertarians are conservatives with social anxieties, but just as the past few years have further depraved conservatism, it has also reduced libertarianism to the point where its few decent erstwhile exemplars like Jane Coaston and Radley Balko have basically walked away from it while its remaining adherents spend their days bitching about AI that won’t say racial slurs and fluffing the Kochs. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/24/23.

I love Roy Hamilton's original and most of the covers,
but today let's have it funky.

Only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie this week, folks – times is tough and I need a few more of you to subscribe. (Five days a week for $7/month – you’d be crazy not to subscribe!) As it happens it’s Monday’s action-show episode of The Proud Boys coming to New York to rescue Tubby from Alvin Bragg, and I’d say it hasn’t aged a bit, since here it is Friday and not only the overtly psycho conservatives but also the nominally normal ones have spent the week screaming their loyalty to the former President. 

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board has felt it necessary to step in and explain to Kevin McCarthy that investigating Bragg for investigating Trump is making them look bad to the normies. Of course they cloak this concern with passive-aggressive bullshit – “Meantime, Democrats couldn’t be happier that House Republicans are helping them in their Trump obsession,” ha ha Murc’s Law strikes again! – but it still reveals the nervousness that the movement’s front men have to be feeling as the Mad King and his vassals pour over the GOP gunwales and threaten to scuttle their preferred candidate, the Florida Fash.

Speaking of the Journal and passive-aggressiveness, Peggy Noonan really breaks the bottle today, warming up first with a ladylike defense of her former meal ticket, recently accused by an eyewitness of tanking the Iran hostages’ chances of rescue to boost his electoral chances in 1980. Her primary argument is, basically, that Reagan was going to win anyway, and genteel witness impeachment (“As for Ben Barnes’s memories, I don’t think he was being untruthful. I think the old man was remembering what he came, in time, to interpret…”). But this bit is particularly rich:

But: Would Ronald Reagan OK a scheme to lengthen the imprisonment of American hostages in Iran to bolster his personal political prospects? He almost killed his own presidency a few years later in an attempt to free an American agent imprisoned by Islamic jihadists in the same place. Reagan’s preoccupation with the suffering of the CIA’s William Buckley resulted in a jerky, far-fetched scheme that would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Sure, that’s why he was making payoffs to death squads – he was such a softy he couldn’t stand the thought of a CIA agent squealing, I mean getting hurt. 

The second half of Noonan’s column is devoted to attacking Bragg’s prosecution on the grounds that it actually seems to be happening, as opposed to the many more justifiable prosecutions that are not happening. Get a load:

“But that’s how we got Al Capone—we couldn’t charge him for being a murderous gangster so we got his books and indicted him for tax evasion.” Yes, but Al Capone wasn’t president. We didn’t owe even a small civic courtesy to his supporters. 

Whereas we have to kiss the asses of the insurrectionist crackpots who would flip out if Trump were apprehended in the middle of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Good-taste conservatives like Noonan love that the country’s being radically remade by red-state revanchists and the Federalist Society into a rightwing totalitarian state, but when it looks like even ordinary processes of government will discomfit them they always plead for stasis.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/17/23.

Fun, city.

Got a couple of Roy Edroso Break It Down freebies for you. One takes off from the “woke” gibberish that’s sweeping conservative intellectual circles. Since Bethany Mandel’s embarrassment on live TV, you can’t swing a cat on Twitter without hitting a rightwing blowhard workshopping his own tendentious definition of the word. Between this and the campaign to portray wokeness as the cause of the Silicon Valley Bank failure (which is rich in several ways, not the least being that rightwing vampire Peter Thiel had $50 million in the allegedly woke SVB), it’s clear that conservatives have abandoned policy and politics for hermeneutics and its close cousin, bullshit. 

The other freebie is a fun little sketch based on Oklahoma’s apparent puzzlement that big companies don’t want to move there. “There is no reason for us to continuously lose out to another state in this country on major business developments,” the president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate writes; “…I am determined find the common denominator as to why we aren’t being chosen and figure out how we can become more attractive to businesses looking to expand or relocate.” 

Guy, I don’t mean to be rude, but educated people simply don’t want to live in places that are rapidly adopting the abortion-banning, gay-erasing, anti-education policies of the modern Republican Party. I mean, it’s getting so doctors don’t want to move there – soon enough they’re going to have to go back to letting barbers do operations. 

When red states brag about how so many people are moving from places like California and New York to Bumfuck, they always let you know those people are moving for economic reasons – yet they never seem to grasp what that means: That the emigrants could no longer afford their first choice and had to settle for less. It’s like saying, “Haw, more people are eatin’ margarine instead o’butter – must be because margarine is so much more delicious!”  

There's plenty of beauty and flavor out in the country, but it seems like the people who run those places are less interested in promoting that than in cursing the infernal cities and making their own jurisdictions meaner and dumber out of pure spite. (And because it makes their subjects easier to control, of course.) It's like they're having a race to the bottom and are mad that not everyone wants to compete. 

ROY'S OSCAR PREDIX 2023 (FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY)

 [Oscar announcer voice] Before we get to the Oscar predictions, let us dispense with the last nominee. [/Oav] For my other Best Picture nominee reviews, see the previous post.

Entertainment Weekly did one of those annoying Anonymous Hollywood Insiders Talk Oscar things where the kibitzers are obviously miserable alte kakers who can’t understand why black people are so pushy and the world has passed them by. (The “marketer” who said he liked The Banshees of Inisherin for “the sense of community… Don't we all just want to move there right now?” is my favorite). But one of the oldsters did get me to laugh by calling Top Gun: Maverick a “big beer commercial” and that stayed with me as I was watching it. I kept imagining Spuds McKenzie in Cruise’s role, transmitting not only his aerial combat instructions but also his love talk with Jennifer Connolly via a voiceover by Don LaFontaine. 

And why not? Maverick was made to be taken unseriously. Look, I’m sorry, I recognize it’s a quality product, and I loved the zoom-zoom and pew-pew, and if the fun macho posturing ain’t Only Angels Have Wings, for our low, mean age it will do. But its emotional content, like the relationship between Maverick and Goose’s son, Pinball or Dipshit or whatever it is (oh, OK, Rooster, guess you caught on pretty quick – what a disagreeable old man I have become), is just cheap – though, like the beer this all seems to be a commercial for, effective to its purpose (which is to make you care about what happens to these guys more than you would, say, the puppets on Fireball XL5) if you get down enough of it. I give director Joseph Kosinski much credit for catching me up on the Top Gun backstory without cluttering up the movie. And if I were invested in that backstory, I guess Maverick’s and Jennifer Connolly’s sub-Hallmark dialogue and Maverick’s and Val Kilmer’s cheesy version of Jack Nicholson’s and William Challee’s scene in Five Easy Pieces (it would be parody material if Kilmer weren’t actually sick, dammit) might be moving. For me, they were carefully planted chokepoints to keep Maverick from becoming Starship Troopers without the self-awareness. OTOH the climactic air battle is a honey and the editing is boss, but Hans Zimmer’s score – ominous and ethereal at the same time -- is the secret weapon.

OK, now my predictions:

Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All at Once. Unlike in previous years, I’m not taking any sucker bets in major categories this year – if I’m to be wrong, let me be wrong with the mob! It’s good, it’s funny and weepy, it’s the magic of the movies. If not: Maverick: Top Gun.

Best Actor: Brendan Fraser, The Whale. I’m not gonna pay twenty bucks to see Fraser’s actual performance at current streaming rates (ditto for Nighy, alas) but the odds are too great and the competition, while brilliant, too thin: I loved Aftersun but Paul Mescal’s is surely the most low-key performance ever nominated, and Austin Butler is too young (and, unlike young’uns like Daniel Day-Lewis at the time of My Left Foot, not convincingly showing more than an uncanny ability to impersonate). That leaves Colin Farrell, whose work I fear is too subtle to distract voters from lobbing a love bomb at the maltreated Fraser. If not: Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin. 

Best Actress: Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like I said, no sucker bets. Blanchett broke down my resistance to her austere craft with Tár the way Meryl Streep did for me with The Post, but the Yeoh love-fest seems unbeatable. If not: Cate Blanchett, Tár.

Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Nope, not fucking with this Tinseltown tidal wave of sentiment for Short Round’s comeback. If not: Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin.

Best Supporting Actress: Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin. Like everyone I love Angela Bassett but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a funny-book movie and hers is a funny-book performance, full of brio but unidimensional. And as Heath Ledger showed, you can win an Oscar for that if it’s unexpected – not if it’s General Zod. (Also, way too much screen time.) If not: Bassett.

Best Director: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once. If not: Todd Field, Tár.

Best Original Screenplay: Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin. It sure sounds like writing (Irishness helps!). Plus it’s got jokes. The Tár script is downright novelistic in its detail and ambiguities, so it could go Field's way, but look, I'm trying to win here! If not: Todd Field.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Sarah Polley, Women Talking. Making it a chamber drama and making it watchable is a helluva thing. If not: All Quiet on the Western Front. 

Best Editing: Eddie Hamilton, Top Gun: Maverick. Not just for the zoom-zoom, pew-pew, either; the high-intensity conversations really pop, too. If not: Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Best Cinematography: James Friend, All Quiet on the Western Front.  If not: Florian Hoffmeister, Tár.

Best Score: Justin Hurwitz, Babylon. If not: John Williams, The Fabelmans. 

Best Production Design: All Quiet on the Western Front. If not: Elvis.

Best International Feature Film: All Quiet on the Western Front. If not: EO. 

Best Costume Design: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. If not: Babylon.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Elvis. If not: The Whale.

Best Animated Feature: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. If not: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Best Animated Short: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. I actually saw all five of these! And while I loved the wordless, two-color children’s book feel of Ice Merchants and the innovations of My Year of Dicks, I’m afraid the Apple Films Christopher Robin ripoff will get it. If not: My Year of Dicks. 

Best Live-Action Short: The Red Suitcase. If not: An Irish Goodbye. 

Best Documentary Feature: Navalny. If not: Fire of Love.

Best Documentary Short: The Elephant Whisperers. If not: Haulout. 

Best Sound: All Quiet on the Western Front. If not: Top Gun: Maverick.

Best Visual Effects: Avatar: The Way of Water. If not: Top Gun: Maverick.

See ya at the show! (PS I reserve the right to make changes until one hour to air time.)

UPDATE: Oh yeah that thing from RRR will win Best Song! OK, see ya at the show!

FINAL UPDATE: 16 out of 23 -- 70%, a passing score. I'll take it! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/10/23.

I'm a late 20th-Century guy and this is my jam

Omigod it's almost the Oscars! And, as I have been doing for years now, I'm going to try and guess the winners, and as prep have seen nine of the ten Best Picture nominees (I will dutifully see the Tom Cruise thing this weekend and report on it here, though I regard the prospect much as Pee-Wee regarded the snakes in that pet shop fire.)  As a favor to you, my public, I have brought my reviews of those films out from behind the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down paywall so you can read them:  The Fabelmans, Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

As to non-cultural REBID offerings released free of charge for this week, I have just the one, about a National Review author trying to hold aloft that publication’s Conservatives-with-Good-Taste banner while the actual conservatism outside NR’s castle walls grows increasingly vicious and feral. It’s good, of course, but there’s plenty where that came from if you have taste and $7/month (cheap!). 

The week brought more madness in the form of Tucker Carlson’s Selected Shorts from the Jan. 6 Tour-Group Visit to Our Nation’s Capitol. The grift is clear from the lunatic responses to this Dinesh D’Souza tweet: Wingnuts show brief video clips of quiet moments among the mob, then say that proves the hours of mob violence that day – notwithstanding that these are also documented on video – no longer mean anything because “MSM” “lied.”  

If it were an argument it’d be self-refuting -- as it is, it’s just more evidence that conservatism has descended even further: As it has abandoned policy for dumb culture-war stunts, it has also abandoned common sense for magical thinking -- literally looking reality in the face and calling it fantasy, and vice-versa. Which is why our politics now depends on standing up for reason as well as for specific political positions. Fortunately in my case these mostly coincide! 

I did get some encouragement, though, from a new USA Today/IPSOS poll that shows most Americans don’t see what’s so bad about being “woke.” Not sure what other differently-worded or -implemented polls would yield – as we’ve seen from ridiculously loaded polls, like the New York Times one that claimed “some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism” as a sign of rampant cancelculture rather than of ordinary good manners, these things can be rigged or willfully misinterpreted. But it’s nice to know that however many bots and creeps pollute social media with claims that everything from M&Ms to the military is killing us with wokeness, some of us still have our heads on straight.

Another bonus: the poll enraged ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and sent him sputtering to his fanbase with this doozy:

What I find more telling about the country’s true view on the term woke comes from standup comedians who make a living saying out loud what their audience is thinking. From Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Bill Burr to Neal Brennan, almost every progressive comedian is ridiculing woke ideology on progressive platforms like Netflix and Hulu.

Yeah, who cares about a poll of normies when you can get vox populi straight from these rich comedians telling the boomers who paid $200+ a seat to listen to them that something the kids like is bad? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/3/23.

Hey, it's happy hour and this is just nice.

Another hard week for America, folks, but at least some of us get the weekend off! Not me, though – I’ll be busy on the weekend getting a head start on next week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues. Speaking of which, let me unload the freebies for the week just passed – first, the Dilbert Diaries, the next logical step in Scott Adams’ career; I am convinced he’s convinced that the full fascist takeover is imminent, and he wants to be New Hitler's Court Jester. 

He may not be wrong! Ron DeSantis has been tearing it up, declaring himself Lord of Disneyland, and planning his destruction of the press and continuing his persecution of trans, gay, and educated people (the Democratic base!) in his mosquito-gator-and-mortgage-fraud kingdom. I half believe that he and Trump are working together, and the governor’s lunacy is meant to make the ex-president look less dangerous so when they nominate him some of the independent voters (the dumb ones who ruin everything) might say, well, he’s not so bad.  

Conservatives don’t see the downside, though, and except for a few apostates they’re all in for the full fash. I actually think they’re excited by it – I mean, Trump was a blast for them, but he only shat on Latinos and foreigners – this guy is a literal queer-basher!  (Fun project: Try to find any DeSantis assurance that he’s not attacking LGBTQ people with these programs. He simply doesn’t do it. What does that tell you?) 

I was directed to Hot Air, which had been an unremarkable wingnut site for so long that I hadn’t even looked at it for years. They got a guy there now called David Strom who has a post about gay and trans stuff called “The Hershey Highway to Hell.” OOOH HOW EDGY. Also he calls the trans woman Faye Johnstone “he,” always a sign of moral clarity/dorkism. (Imagine him among normal people; I put the time between his first deliberate misgendering and his ejection while shouting I’M BEING CANCELCULTURED at about two minutes.) At one point Strom gets after the trans lady’s non-profit:  

“Supporting youth-serving organizations across Canada.” Literally, the only phrase that makes sense in the entire business description is about getting access to children. On that point, alone, is the description comprehensible. Access to kids.

Ever notice how it’s always about the kids? These trans folks don’t like HAVING kids, but they apparently like being with them quite a lot. Preferably with as few clothes on as they can get away with.

There is nothing in fact or reason supporting this slur, but yelling groomer is what they do now instead of lectures on limited government. Oh, and elsewhere at the site addressing the DeSantis Don’t Say Gay bill is an old alicublog figure of fun:

This really, really bothers some people.

Most of the bill concerns the rights of parents, which really, really bothers some people, too.

Hint hint. There are all kinds of ways to call your enemies groomers, and Jim Lileks, being an old-fashioned type, really, really prefers the really, really eyebrow-waggle. 

Hey, but let’s lighten up – here’s another REBID bit, this one about movies you saw when you were younger that take on whole new resonances when you see them later in life. I did Night Moves, but you can do your own in the comments. It’s a community, see; you really ought to subscribe (cheap!).

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN ON A SUNDAY: 2/26/23.

Yum.

•  Sure, why can't "Friday 'Round-the-Horn" happen on a Sunday? We had one on a Saturday once, remember? Wasn't that crazy? We're pretty quirky and unpredictable here. Sky's the limit! 

•  Anywho: The major freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down from last week is this one about a Zoom meeting between the GOP leadership and their policy chief. I notice that in recent weeks the alignment of the Republicans with Russia is getting tighter. Maybe you saw Matt Gaetz's House resolution calling for the U.S. to stop helping Ukraine repel its invaders. (It's actually called the "Ukraine Fatigue Resolution," as if their House propagandists didn't bother to change the name from the talking point that inspired it.) And you may have seen that preeminent conservative intellectual CatTurd2 advanced the theory that he Ukraine war is actually some sort of false flag operation ("Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets"), to the approbation of his millions of fans. 

And last week the Head Defenestrator in Charge himself, in announcing his withdrawal from the START Treaty, gave what amounts to a 2023-style U.S. Republican campaign speech:

Look what [Western nations] are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages...

But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Ron DeSantis couldn't have done it better! And the rubes are eating it up: the account in the hard-right Trumpist Christian Post, for example, tells the story from the Putinist POV ("Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning over what he called religious attacks from Western culture Tuesday...") I keep making jokes about Putin following Orban to CPAC, but at this point I'm expecting him to speak at their next National Convention. 

•  Whew, that's depressing. So here, here's a straight-up fun thing from REBID, about books you don't read so much as graze. Got any like that? Tell it to the comments box! (And subscribe -- it's cheap!)

•  Finally I want to thank the universe for the gift of laughter, courtesy of Scott Adams telling the world what he thinks about those pesky black people and getting his "Dilbert" thrown out of a bunch of newspapers. Guess he decided 2023 was a good time to go full racist -- the Bund will remember and reward him comes Der Tag. 

Adding cream to the jest are all the cancelculture crybabies like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Cathy Young rushing to tell us that oh, no, Adams getting chucked for his beliefs isn't cancelculture because race hatred is something we all condemn -- you know, like trans health care. I predict Bari Weiss' next scam will be a guide to which firings and dismissals qualify as cancelculture and which don't -- and no one will realize it's just the Republican national platform. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/17/23.

While I produce five days a week of high-quality content at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (go over and have a look, subscribe if you like, it’s mighty good eating for the pennies it costs), productivity at the old alicublog plant has been down a while. I regret it, but between REBID and my other editorial work there’s not much room left for bodily functions, let alone the kind of funsies for which this site became known back in 1953, when “blogs” rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line and, due to their tendency to roll rather than locomote, wound up in the dustbin of history, a short distance down the road to oblivion and turn left. 

But sometimes a red flag can get this old bull to charge. Erick Erickson, a longtime figure of fun in the alicublog rep company, has an even more ridiculous than usual item up today. The headline is:

We Cannot Reject Sabotage On Rail Lines Just Yet

Let us tiptoe past Erickson’s long preliminary yammerings about how Joe Biden is trying to blame everything on Donald Trump (though given Trump’s rollback of rail freight safety features he’s certainly blameworthy) and Biden LIED about the CHINESE BALLOONS (“The Administration that lied repeatedly about the Chinese spy balloon wants us to trust them on it not being sabotage, just Trump”), and cut to the 19th graf:

The reality is these incidents are probably not sabotage. Buttigieg, for all his whining, has a point. There are many train derailments every year. We’re more sensitive to them now because of media exposure.

This is the next best thing to “it was all a dream.” 

So why was Erickson going on about sabotage? 

But the point is that this Administration regularly tries to blame Donald Trump for everything, has lied repeatedly in the past few weeks about the Chinese spy balloon, has done such a bad job dealing with these issues too many Americans now know the Transportation Secretary’s name, and we simply cannot believe them.

And if “we” (Erickson and his tapeworm, who I gotta say has his work cut out for him) can’t trust Joe Biden, maybe we’ll trust Erick Erickson’s self-refuting innuendos. Oh, and if you took the side-bet on “Hunter Biden’s laptop” being in the story? Collect your winnings. 

But the real prize this week is Peggy Noonan, who has been on fire (regrettably not literally) with her rambling silver-alert takes. This week’s starts with snipage at Nikki Haley, who recently launched her Vice-Presidential (whoops, I mean air-quotes Presidential) campaign:

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

1990? How about the 80s, Peggy, when as Ronald Reagan’s handler you filled his mouth with uplifting bullshit and helped engineer spectacles like Nancy waving at Ronnie on the telescreen at the 1984 Republican Convention? That's when propaganda was propaganda, you young punks! 

Speaking of bullshit, this seems to be about the only thing Noonan likes about Haley: 

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

…until said scramblers-over-the-border get driven back over by Greg Abbott’s vigilantes or dragged up north to use as pawns in a cruel culture-war stunt. Honestly, I can’t imagine even her Republican readers don’t immediately think this. 

Then there’s a long grumble about those horrible ads on the teevee during the Super Bowl – they made America look like “a nation of morons” (don’t bother waiting for the penny to drop, guys), whereas back in the day they had Mean Joe Greene being all nice and cuddly for Coke and that was the real America, real Ronnie-and-Nancy koochie-koo kitsch, not this nutty, noisy stuff:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.” 

Sorry, lady, but would you like a new car, soft drink, or diabetes management app? These are the damn ads. I’m convinced Noonan was just turned off by all the rock and rap (“the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance”). It's a miracle the Journal kept her from fulminating on Rihanna. Look, Grandma, they aren’t pitching this shit to me, either, but I know better than to Blame Society.

Oh, but her closing… man; she gets on Will Smith and starts pitching to write his Oscar 2023 speech:

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment…

Two more grafs of this! I give it five barf bags! I doubt Noonan is even expecting the call (though I love imagining her on the phone, pinching her nose, and droning “This is Miss Noonan’s answering service”); I expect the play is to wait for Smith to deliver what promises to be a perfectly anodyne and expected (though less white!) apology-like spew, and then sigh contentedly: “Ahhh, he took my advice!”

"FOR THE GOOD OF OUR LORD, THE CHURCH WAS ALWAYS ON THE SIDE OF THE STRONG"

Though baby is in perpetual need of new shoes and I should go easy on the freebies lest paid subscribers feel themselves short-changed, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down must today report that this week’s open letter to the New York Times accusing the paper of an unseemly hard-on for trans people has been answered by the O.G. anti-cancel-culture Harper’s Letter of 2020 crew*. (* is joke, comrades.)

The Times itself has responded to the trans advocates’ letter (“the very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults”), but anyone who’s been following the issue will agree that the more important response will be from the Bari Weiss platoon, who will invariably defend the more powerful party as the living embodiment of the First Amendment, against which all criticism must be considered an assault against same. 

The Times clearly doesn’t give a shit and has followed up with a column from Bret Stephens’ ex portraying J.K. Rowling as a victim of vicious trannies. There’s all kinds of hilarity in this; first, since it’s not appearing in the usual overtly conservative outlets, Pamela Paul sugars it with several pro-trans statements Rowling has made over the years (e.g. “Trans people need and deserve protection”). No doubt most American conservatives who support anti-trans legislation and rush to read this will experience a moment of revulsion before deciding, based on their long experience with Republican politicians talking about any minority rights, that she only had to say something like that to get over. 

(BTW it’s interesting to note how much Republicans have pulled back on that strategy; has DeSantis himself, for example, ever couched his assaults on gay and trans people by saying any version of “I have nothing against them personally”? Because I’ve never seen it.)

But the best stuff is the meretricious comparisons – people who criticize Rowling’s trans statements, for example, are the same as Christian fundamentalists who criticized Harry Potter wizardry as Satanic, because “critics have advocated that bookstores pull [Rowling’s] books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so.” (Paul links to a citation saying one Australian bookstore has done so. I would love to see a tally of books pulled by the anti-trans forces versus those of the pro-.) And get a load of this:

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized.

A careless reader, and it’s hard to imagine Paul having any other kind (including on the Times copy desk), may come away thinking Rushdie was assaulted by transsexuals rather than by a religious maniac. 

In short, the powerful are persecuted, the powerless are a mob, and the Times is on it (the side of the former, that is). 

(Headline source here.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/10/23.

RIP Burt Bacharach. I love this one, which for all its
tricky syncopations is fresh and free and swinging.

The State of the Union is seldom intrinsically interesting; I do recall the first of Bill Clinton’s ass-breaking-long SOTUs showing his tendency to bury the opposition under an avalanche of proposals, but I have no memory of which if any of those proposals ever saw life. 

The same is true of the Biden 2023 edition, but it had a couple of amusing outcomes: First, it got the Republicans to scream (literally, in the case of the less well-bred Republicans in attendance) that Biden was lying when he said they wanted to fuck up Social Security and Medicare.  This was the easiest out in the world for Biden because every American, liberal and conservative alike, knows Republicans want to rip open both programs and spill their contents into the pockets of their major donors, and post-SOTU polls suggest they haven’t changed their minds.

Nonetheless conservatives sputtered like the parents in a 90s video that it was a dastardly ruse – “BS,” huffed Byron York at the Washington Examiner – notwithstanding the voluminous documentary evidence of Senators like Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson admitting as much, which the White House cleverly provided in an official “fact sheet.” Mitch McConnell effectively telling Scott to shut the fuck up was a sweet bit of lagniappe. 

But the weirder development, for me, is Peggy Noonan calling Biden’s speech “Trumpian” – which I wrote about in an essay at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m releasing to non-subscribers today. As it turns out, the Crazy Jesus Lady isn’t the only one trying that one. “Biden’s State of the Union address last night was conspicuously heavy on what could only be described as Trumpian economic themes,” said National Review’s Nate Hochman; Ross Douthat at the Times claims the speech’s “key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted — albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults — from Trump’s populist campaign.”

These guys are all bought into the idea that Trump is a “populist” despite his never having achieved the support of a majority of voters. To them the term seems to mean “acting like a vicious dumbass and pretending to give a shit about the proles.” Trump was always great at the first part, but I doubt anyone outside the deranged yokels one used to see at his rallies ever believed the second part, and if they did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with its massive giveaways to the rich, convinced them otherwise. 

Conservatives seem to think that the damage they’ve done to American institutions over the past several years is all to their own benefit – that by ruining faith in education, for example, they’ve brought to life the Florida Golem with his Don’t Say Gay (or Black) Laws that they expect to sweep the nation. They don’t seem to realize that while chaos may inspire the feral types of the Republican base to tear down what’s left of the rubble, most of us -- old folks who remember and young folks who dream – want government to, at the very least, do what it used to and insulate us from the caprices of the rich and the insane. The main difference between Biden and Trump is the former can call up that vision and be believed. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/3/23.

Just catching on to this guy,
maybe he's for old people, I dunno, it's good.

This is usually where I drop a freebie from this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. But I already gave you one of those earlier in the week. Times is tough, son. The paltry $7 subscription rate gets you five issues a week and keeps baby in cakes and ale. 

Oh, alright, here’s another one: Some accomplishments from the first week of the New Model Congress. Surprise, it’s fanciful – even, you might say, satire. (Come back! It’s not Saturday night yet!) But in one sense, anyway, I’m not sure even Swift or Juvenal could keep with this crew – get a load:

Now, I really do mean “in a sense” because satire doesn’t depend so much on “keeping up with” (much less “staying ahead of”) this kind of inanity as it does on getting at the soul of it – which I hope (he says, bowing deeply in his motley and jingling bells) I manage to do at REBID. 

But as a political rather than an aesthetic matter, it’s a live issue because, as wretched as earlier iterations of Congress have been, and as injurious as they have been to the public’s faith in the democratic process, the current bunch are so openly nihilistic that, at least for younger citizens, the institution may not recover from the damage. I mean, I thought it was pretty goofy when Nancy Pelosi and the gang kneeled in kente cloth, but at least once they got some help from the Senate they managed to pass some pandemic relief; the way the current Republican House is thrashing and straining at the bars of bicameral restraint, we have to assume if they ever get complete power again they’ll go nuts and just spend their mornings rubber-stamping death squad authorizations and donor tax breaks, and their afternoons making fart noises into the mic like Keith Relf. 

THE GREAT UNLEARNING.

Here, have a rare mid-week free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down; this one’s a scene from a future AP African-American Studies class. Pushing the needle from “satire” to “prophecy” is today’s news that the College Board caved to the bullying of Head Florida Man In Charge and scraped all the authors who wouldn’t pass muster with your average moderately-polite white racist out of that AP lesson plan:

After heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the College Board released on Wednesday an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies —  stripped of much of the subject matter that had angered the governor and other conservatives.

The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.

And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.

The black conservatism thing is hilarious – an outright and obvious act of rightwing affirmative action/social promotion (These guys haven’t earned a place in the curriculum on merit? Here’s a carve-out!) Time to pull those dusty Thomas Sowell books out of the remainder bin, though I’m sure the teacher will also accept the dozens of donation-seeking emails Tim Scott has sent out claiming unnamed Democrat(s) called him an Uncle Tom. 

In the Rules for Rationals I ought to produce one day, one of the aphoristic chapter headings will be: Fascism is a crime of opportunity. One reason we didn’t have so much trouble with would-be Fuhrers a few years ago is because they got treated the way they should be treated – that is, told to fuck right off. But when the fascists took over the Republican Party, they demanded their opinions be afforded the same respect and forbearance that Republicans always get, as if insurrectionism and trans and CRT panic were the equivalent of the Balanced Budget Amendment – and, of course, our dumb-shit prestige media fell for it, and now we have the classic “Nazi bar” situation where they’ve so colonized the discourse that they can’t be dislodged, and the New York Times is writing headlines like “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand” rather than “Fash Goomba Muscles Educrats to Gut Curriculum, Thrill Shitheels.” 

Meanwhile I’m sure Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are hard at work on “Twitter Files XIV: Jan. 6 defendants deprived of Constitutional right to all-access social media pass.”