FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I didn't know so many Carole King demos were available online. 

Life in this modern world isn't so horrible sometimes.

•   I haven't heard what he has to say yet, but I can understand why John Boehner wants to GTFO. Who needs it? I'm more interested to see whether this actually dampens rather than exacerbates the crazy among the House Republican fringe. I mean, they won't have Boehner as the Establishment Daddy to blame for the eventual collapse of their zany maneuvers, and that may spook them; also, Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem like a Cromwell. What do you guys think?

•   I listened to the Hamilton musical score on NPR (there's now a crowdsourced lyric sheet, too!) and like it a lot. I am as regular readers know a sucker for this kind of musical pastiche. (Hamilton is mostly well-padded crossover rap, crossing further at times into pretty pop.) It's like the best Schoolhouse Rock ever, but with a genuinely interesting POV: that while the top-tier American Revolutionaries certainly had commendable ideas, they were also about getting over -- and in fact the getting-over was mainly where they lived, because there was just too much competition and urgency to play the philosophe much. It's kind of a nice joke, and also a relief, to see Thomas Jefferson portrayed as a cut-throat snob rather than the Sage of Monticello, and to see Washington's cabinet meetings played as rap battles. I can see why this excites people, and I agree with Frannie Kelly's conclusion on NPR about the coming high-school productions.

•   Need a laugh? Rod Dreher's always good for one. Today he's read something about a forthcoming authorized biography of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, in which the Eminence allegedly claims he was "part of a secret club of cardinals opposed to Pope Benedict XVI." You may recall Benedict resigned the papacy, so either Danneels is taking the piss a la Bill Ayers or this anti-Benedictine movement forced him out with footage of Ratzinger fucking a horse or something. But of course that's what I'd think -- here's Dreher's take:

This is the first confirmation of rumors that had been going around for years about Benedict being thwarted by a liberal conspiracy, one that eventually forced him out. These men — Danneels, Van Luyn, Kasper, Lehman, and Hume, at least — all preside over dying churches. And they killed the Benedict papacy. Danneels, you will note, was given by Francis a prominent place at next month’s Synod on the Family. 

I am glad this came out now. The orthodox bishops and others going to the Synod now know what a nest of snakes they are working with, and how high up the corruption goes. Poor Pope Benedict. My heart breaks for that good man.

Poor Pope Benedict! I wish I could be there when Holiness Emeritus Benedict steps his Prada shoes out of Castel Gandolfo and finds Dreher and his fellow nuts kneeling there, bewailing his martyrdom. 

THEY STILL CAN'T QUIT HER.

We all know from years of bitter experience how conservatives feel about Lena Dunham, right? Well, imagine how they'd feel about a Dunham/Hillary mashup in the form of an friendly interview. Feel the incoherent, seething hate from Breitbart.com's John Nolte!

Just months after recanting a phony rape charge against an innocent man and apologizing for making light of what many have described as the sexual abuse of her younger sister...

If you need it, here's an explanation of why "phony rape charge" and "sexual abuse" don't mean what Nolte wants you to think they mean (though regular readers will have already assumed that). Anyway, Nolte goes on churning these charges against Dunham -- in fact there's almost nothing else in the column but bitter froth -- until he brings it all back home:

If you think about who Hillary Clinton is married to, no one should be surprised she shrugs off charges of sexual abuse. She’s had a lifetime … of … practice.

Eccentric use of ellipses in original. One imagines Nolte reading it aloud to himself several times, trying to figure out what typography and/or punctuation best communicates his rage-stresses. Em-dashes? Boldface? Interrobangs?

And while we haven’t yet seen the full interview...

Talk about premature ejaculations! Well, sometimes the fantasy is enough.

UPDATE. On a daffier note, Ann Althouse reacts to Clinton's anodyne definition of feminism ("A feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights... It just means that we believe that women have the same rights as men") as if AT LAST SHE'S GOT HILLARY ON THE STAND WHERE SHE CAN'T WRIGGLE OUT OF IT!

Who writes the definition? We're still saying what X is "by definition" after all these years of scoffing at the anti-same-sex-marriage people who kept saying, tediously, marriage is by definition between a man and a woman? 

Even if we are still doing "by definition"-style arguments...

If you like logic puzzles that end in enigmas ("Put that way, the resistance itself [to calling oneself a feminist] sounds feminist to me"), just follow the link and God go with you.

UPDATE 2. Oh for fuck's sake: Bre Payton at The Federalist:

Clinton thinks it’s really odd when women think that it’s important they have the same rights as men, but resist the feminist label. Clearly the two don’t understand why some women are hesitant to associate themselves with some of the extreme aspects of feminism that the movement has become known for. 

Perpetuating fake campus rape statistics, insisting upon access to abortion on demand, and outright man-hating have become major attributes of the more vocal elements of modern feminism.

No supporting links, alas.

But those probably don’t bother Clinton or Dunham, as they both are huge fans of Planned Parenthood...

I'm seriously trying to envision the target audience for this, but I keep seeing wild, hairy creatures howling YOU MADE US IN THE HOUSE OF PAIN! NOT MAN! NOT BEAST! THING! It's like you're talking to people who think Pope Francis seems like a nice guy, but you're anti-Catholic so you go, "Clearly the Pope doesn’t understand why some people are hesitant to associate themselves with some of the extreme aspects of Catholicism that the movement has become known for." I mean, you may be right and you may be wrong, but you sound to a normal person like you're trying to put one over, or new to the planet Earth.

YOUR LYING EYES.

Remember at the last GOP debate, when Carly Fiorina described a Planned Parenthood video where evil abortionists threw living fetuses into a whirring blender, then drank it? Okay, so she described (as revealed by Sarah Kliff) some other bullshit that wasn't there. Anyway, to the rescue of her fantasy rides Jonah Goldberg:

And they have a point. The exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos. But anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina’s off-the-cuff account pretty accurate. 

It's fake but accurate, in other words.

Most of the center’s videos involve hidden-camera conversations with current Planned Parenthood managers, as well as interviews with veterans of the abortion industry, discussing the selling of fetal body parts for research purposes. The video Fiorina probably had in mind included eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a metal bowl, its leg kicking, to illustrate the witness’s recollection of seeing precisely that in another case.

Probably! She might be talking about "videos of fetuses moving and kicking" that "were not shot at a Planned Parenthood clinic," which Fiorina's staff sent Kliff in her defense. But there's no need to nail it down, because we're looking at a wider truth:

That sort of juxtaposition might not fly on the nightly news, but it’s the sort of dramatic device used in documentaries all the time. It’s akin to a documentary maker interviewing a witness to Cecil the Lion getting shot, and using footage of another lion getting shot as an illustration...

I know how that is. There was that documentary where I was described as being an asshole to people (which I freely admit I have been at times, I'm not proud of it), followed by that famous clip of an South Vietnamese cop shooting a guy in the head. I tell you, I got some shit for that! More than a few people said they were with me until that scene.

The larger problem is that people are talking past each other. Fiorina’s remarks — and these videos — are really aimed at the abortion industry and its Achilles’ heel, late-term abortions. None of these videos would strike a chord if the only images were of blastocysts.

Likewise, Roy Edroso, Asshole, wouldn't have stirred much interest if it merely contained my drunken tirades and pathetic attempts at fisticuffs, but throw in a summary execution and we're cooking with gas.

On Goldberg goes till the Otteresque summation (the abortion lies of Hillary Clinton are "a far greater distortion of the truth than anything Fiorina said") and the traditional fartcloud, and we are left with the inescapable conclusion that abortion is gross and shut up.

UPDATE. From comments:

Well, I'm convinced. I mean, look -- they're right next to each other. 

AU REVOIR, NIEDERMEYER.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I feel sorry for Scott Walker. He's a monster, best known for his scheme to destroy the Wisconsin teachers' union. Conservatives loved that about him, of course, because he was fulfilling their most earnest wish to humble those moocher cloth-ears who dared demand a living wage for work that didn't generate dividends or rightwing propaganda. Also he's been trying to get rid of tenure at the University of Wisconsin, which really sets their hearts on fire. And he loves Jesus and Reagan.

Many conservatives chose to imagine that ordinary people would love Walker just as much as they loved him -- though he always seemed to my unstarry eyes to be in a constant trance state and perhaps developmentally disabled. When Walker was caught eating some barbecue he'd just been serving to people with his latex serving gloves still on, it looks weird to some, but at The Federalist Peter Cook claimed it only looked weird to liberals because they never did an honest day's work -- unlike Walker, who once briefly did marketing for the Red Cross before entering politics. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review found Walker a perfect candidate for a "Return to Normalcy" campaign "with his homespun tales of one-dollar sweaters, his quiet Midwestern roots, and his down-to-earth everyman appearance..."

Did ordinary people see him that way? It now appears ordinary Republicans didn't even see him that way. Or maybe they did see it, but decided it wasn't enough. Walker was doing okay in the polls until Trump broke out. And suddenly there went Walker's whole reason for being. It turned out his dollar sweaters and latex gloves and his lack of schooly airs weren't what appealed to them -- it was his willingness to be mean to the people they hated; and if you want a candidate to be mean to the people you hate, isn't it much better to have one who seems confident about it? (And if you want one who seems to be in a daze, there's always Ben Carson.) What's the point of ressentiment in a minor key? In April, when Walker tried to excite the crowd by harshing on Mexicans and people found it offensive, National Review's Rich Lowry said, "Walker should take the shots as a compliment, and hopefully, the rest of the field will begin to think and talk about immigration the same way." This was before Trump started calling Mexicans rapists and sweeping the field.

Anyway, now the brethren are wandering away from the scene of the crash with their hands in their pockets, whistling. Byron York was a big booster back in the day. In January he said, "Scott Walker doesn't have to be great on the stump to do well," because  his union-busting was so electifying that "GOP voters will cut him a little slack in the charisma and oratory department." Now, York sees more clearly Walker's "limitations" -- first, there was his "lack of foreign policy chops"; then, said York, "an even bigger problem was domestic policy. [Walker] just wasn't very up on some of the key policy and political issues that a president has to confront..." That wouldn't seem to leave much. Trump doesn't know anything, either, but nobody cares because his ignorance is so dynamic.

Like I said, I wouldn't say I felt bad for the guy, but it must be something to have pandered your ass off for months and then discover that it wasn't enough to be a bully -- you had to act like a bully, too.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The Ahmed Muhamed case got me thinking of Stiff Little Fingers, which got me thinking of The Undertones, which got me playing The Undertones all afternoon. Loov-ley. 
• Did you know Breitbart.com has a Doritos tag? And no, it's not there to get Jonah Goldberg to come over more often -- it's to denounce the homosexual menace of Rainbow Doritos packaging, which was created to celebrate Frito-Lay's partnership with the It Gets Better project. (Frito-Gay, amirite #c'monbrodon'tleavemehanging.)  It Gets Better was created to keep young gays from killing themselves, which is of course unconscionable in Breitbart world, so John Nolte demands Frito-Lay explain how they can support a project founded by Dan Savage, who has not shown proper deference to bigots, and another operative warns readers of other gay snack foods  so they don't accidentally turn Game Day into Gay Day and convert their beer buddies. (Breitbart.com also reports that the gay Doritos are "a variation of the standard Cool Ranch-flavored chips," which makes sense because they taste like cum.) But American Thinker does B-bart one better by giving an asylum window to one Ed Straker (h/t Will Menaker), who may be a Poe but so what this is awesome:

Furthermore, I think we should push other companies to launch pro-heterosexual campaigns. Perhaps we could persuade a hot dog maker and a hot dog bun company to do a joint effort promoting man-woman relationships. 

Until we try sexualizing food like the left does, we'll never know. And if we think like the left, we desperately need to find out.

Maybe he should marry a chalupa in protest of Obergefell -- or infiltrate gayism, then take it down from the inside. Politics is down-low of culture, comrade!

• It may seem weird to you that, while you look at the Texas clockmaking student's case (made a digital clock, brought it to school, got arrested) and see sad bigotry thwarting the admirable intellectual ambitions of a second-generation immigrant kid, some other people see unearned Muslim-American privilege (or, in the case of some prominent nuts, a conspiracy to let jihadis take over America). But remember, these guys are convinced that America has already been taken over by the Kenyan pretender Barack Obama, and that his seven-year reign of terror has so changed America that it no longer behaves in ways they're accustomed to seeing: Instead of siding with the authorities, people are siding with the powerless, dark-skinned kid. And not just people: MIT, Facebook, and other companies have all told him that, in effect, it gets better. It's interesting that conservatives have been crying because the kid who got suspended for a Pop-Tart gun and others similarly hassled  didn't get all this attention. But those cases actually did get attention -- not only from conservatives, but from the so-called liberal MSM, because everyone loves a bureaucrats-gone-wild story. And from all I can see, conservatives merely turned these teachable moments into more sour grievance to steep in; while supporters of Ahmed Mohamed have reached out to him, encouraged his scholarship, and made something positive out of the experience. Maybe that's why they're so pissed.

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT, PART 4,287.

I see conservatives are excited for their female Presidential candidate who will never be President because she pimped the Planned Parenthood videos, describing a grisly scene that apparently doesn't actually exist, in hopes that, like misleading movie posters and doctored critics' quotes, it may steer voters to view the bloody images they do have, and get them so grossed out they'll say, "alright already, I'll do it myself with a coathanger and a bottle of Lysol if you'll just shut up."

But just because they're eager to turn stomachs doesn't mean they've given up on winning hearts and minds. At The Federalist A.D.P. Efferson tells us:

Some of my dearest friends are pro-choice, and some of my dearest friends are pro-life. I have known these women and men to varying degrees over the course of my lifetime, and I can say beyond doubt that regardless of their political leanings, none is even remotely a monster.

Despite the incredible popularity on social media of polarizing people according to ideology to punish them, I’ve never felt an urge to maliciously single out my liberal friends to publically castigate them, even though their beliefs stand in radical, stark contrast to mine. Nowhere is this contrast more glaringly evident than in the abortion debate, because there is no suitable compromise on terminating a life. Either the baby lives, or it is aborted. 

I have engaged in numerous thoughtful discussions with pro-choice women about abortion, some very heated ones...

I'll bet.

...but have yet to find common ground on the issue of the rights of a woman superseding the rights of the infant, because ultimately there isn’t any...

We'll just have to agree to disagree, my baby-murdering friends! Meantime let Efferson explain why good people might do such awful things:

Shedding light on this idea is Clay Jones from Biola University, who has spent the last several decades studying the psychology of genocide.

Not even kidding.

His research exploring human depravity attempts to answer the hard questions about humanity, such as: Who are these people who commit mass murders? How do normal citizens slaughter their own countrymen without so much as a second thought?

We'll just cut to the chase: Yes, Efferson actually believes her friends are committing literal genocide, just like they did in Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags. But she doesn't think of them as monsters because... well, she's not clear on that. She does mention that her pro-choice friends "love their kids, they volunteer at schools, they attend church," etc., but she also quotes Jones to this effect: "When you read genocide studies you find that most murderers also did many nice things: walked the family dog, baked cookies, gave gifts..." Maybe what she's saying she'd be pals with Hitler if he was as much fun to hang out with these gals are.

One wonders whether Efferson ran any drafts of this essay by her baby-killer friends. Now those are the secret videos I'd like to see!

IS THERE A WORD IN KLINGON FOR LONELINESS?

Now listen, Mike. Listen carefully. I'm going to pronounce a few words. They're harmless words. Just a bunch of letters scrambled together. But their meaning is very important. Try to understand what they mean:

"How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism."

"This essay appears in the Summer 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books."

5092 words.

You sure you have the guts? Alright, buddy, but once we're in we're not coming back till the mission is over.

The best expression of their spirit was John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, with its proud promise to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” 

This could have been declaimed by Captain James T. Kirk...

You weasel, get back to your position! Tie him down, Sliverberg; it only gets rougher from here.

Anyway, the author, Timothy Sandefur, tells us in the beginning Gene Roddenberry and his fellow World War II vets hated the Communists -- the Klingons -- and the hippies -- the Organians -- but then, for reasons no one can explain, in "The Apple"* ("Worst episode ever!" the fat guy cries), Spock spoiled everything by going multicultural:

Spock is more indulgent. “There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created,” he tells the captain, “the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres.” Spock insists he does not share their views, yet he secretly admires them, and devotes his considerable scientific skills to helping locate their paradise planet. Later, he tells one of the few survivors of the acid, “It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.” The skeptical, spirited Kirk could never utter such words.

Roddenberry, for some reason, was giving Spock the good lines! Had the Reds gotten to him? It could be that Gene and the crew knew it couldn't all be heroic Kirk speeches (especially after they got a load of Shatner), and needed some yang for his yin... but no, none of these trivial dramatic necessities occur to Sandefur, who ties Spock's moral relativism to "the New Left" (probably represented by some radical key grip who altered the script to follow the Stalinist line on his gold-plated overtime) and teleports his narrative in a huff to 1991,"months after Roddenberry’s death," so that Kenneroddenberry may remain in memory pure while beatniks trash his neoliberal legacy.

The weaker members of the crew scream "Nerrrrrrrrrds" as we pass these flaming rhetorical dung-satellites:

The dungeon in which Kirk is imprisoned in this film is on a par with Stalin’s jails.

[“Star Trek: The Next Generation"] featured false equivalency on a grand scale. The show premiered a year after feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding referred to Newton’s “Principia” as a “rape manual,” and a year before Jesse Jackson led Stanford student protesters chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

The Ba’ku would have nauseated Captain Kirk. Here is a species that lives “The Apple” not as captives but as willing participants. They have given up growth for stagnation, which they have mistaken for life. Yet the audience is expected to admire this.

Etc.  In the end, Sandefur is retucking his shirt furiously, lamenting that “'Star Trek’s' romance with relativism gradually blotted them out until the franchise came to prize feeling over thought, image over substance, and immediate gratification over moral and political responsibility." And at no point does he betray any awareness that people watched the show, not because the Statist Overlords forced them too, but because they enjoyed it, and if there were a market for Star Hayek, someone would have made it. But the laws of capitalism never seem to apply to capitalists, and the way of the world never makes sense to a dork.

UPDATE. Comments are thus:

"Wait until Sandefur finds out that 'Laverne and Shirley' debuted a year after feminist author Susan Brownmiller declared 'pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,'" hoo-boys Jeffrey_Kramer.  Kordo sees my Star Hayek and raises with Burke to the Future. (Except Burke's not really conservative, see, because -- oh, hell, I guess I'm just a different kind of nerd.)

Sarcastr0 digs up a Sandefur guest-post at The Volokh Conspiracy in 2014 (pre-sellout), in which  he says the welfare state is unconstitutional and we should make it constitutional by amending the Constitution if we really want to have it, but psych, libtards -- "a constitutional amendment can itself be unconstitutional," because there's nothing in the Declaration of Independence about food stamps for moochers; also, "to the extent that the U.S. government operates contrary to those principles, its actions, too, are illegitimate acts of usurpation, and deserve to be treated as such." Wonder if the Kim Davis tsimmis has got him refurbishing his treehouse in anticipation of a Natural Law uprising.

*A few readers point out that Sandefur mistakes "The Way to Eden" for "The Apple." Gary Farber seems to think it was incumbent on me to correct him, but honestly, why would I fact-check a Star Trek reference? I wasn't arguing with his interpretation, which would require understanding of the references, but with the whole crackpot idea that old TV shows should be torn up for wrongthink by political operatives. I mean, most of the people who used to talk down the "Leave It To Beaver" view of family life did it as a joke, not as a 5,000-word essay.

THIS USED TO BE MY PLAYGROUND.

A few people have asked me what I thought of Edmund White’s NYT magazine essay, “Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s?” — which title some youngbloods will probably impudently echo, in the manner of do we have to have leftovers again? I think White, a writer I admire, was doing a job of work here, and I suspect his catalogue of rough street scenes (“rats galloping underfoot or a stickup in broad daylight on busy Christopher Street”) and his Roll Call of Great Names ("the representative figures of this New York were Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, George Balanchine, Robert Wilson, Robert Mapplethorpe” etc. etc.) have more to do with packaging (see NYTM's “related coverage” photo features) than with Wordsworthian commotion recollected in tranquillity.

But I enjoyed it anyway, of course; I enjoy any summoning of the old town as it was in my youth. I don’t get up to New York much anymore, mainly because I miss it too much to even look at it -- it just breaks my heart to be reminded that it goes on without me. But pre-gentrification New York, that’s something that does not go on, but remains as it was. It can be viewed as a gutter-glittering object of exploitation, in simulacra like that crappy CBGB movie and (I assume) the upcoming Scorsese thing and so on. But it also lives in the sustaining blood of old guttersnipe hearts like mine.

As to the question: Why do we still talk about it? I have spoken on this many times before. But allow me to make one or two more points on the subject:

One reason we talk about 70s New York is because there’s not much else to talk about. I’m sure there are plenty of exciting things going on in New York right now. I read, for example, about those painted topless ladies in Times Square, and recognize and admire their place in the time-honored New York Circle of Hype: First, someone aggressively pushes a right, and then someone else exploits that right for money (and the New York Post exploits it as part of their “Democrats bring back Son of Sam” horseshit, and so on).

All well and good. But if we are talking about the arts, and the developments in New York life that cause them to not only survive but also thrive and coalesce into movements that inform and uplift American and even world culture, someone will have to explain to me how the current era is ever going to make that happen. Mind you, that may not be the era’s fault; we are in a famously atomized social media environment, where it’s not as easy as it once was for a few critics and artists to bum-rush the show. But when your idea of the Next Big Thing is not, say, punk rock, which is still happening (albeit in a debased form) decades later, but artisanal hobo bindles from Williamsburg, then you have to at least consider the idea that the problem is not the tide of history, but you and your buddies. (Then again, maybe it is history -- they don't make that like they used to, either.)

Bigger than that, though, in the imagination of a public that still swoons for The 70s City whether they were there or not, is the freedom, I think. They don’t usually mention that in the essays and the biopics. What do you mean, freedom? Isn't safety the first freedom? Aren't we much safer in our lovely gated communities than in any city?

But when ordinary people look through the peep-show glasses at the dirty streets and the sketchy characters of 70s New York, I don’t think they thrill to it because they desire to be mugged; I think they like it because they suspect that the danger came with something they would want, but can no longer get on any terms. And they're right.

White alludes to the fact that you could live cheap in New York back then: “…would-be writers, singers, dancers could afford to live in Manhattan’s (East, if not, West) Village, before everyone marginal was further marginalized by being squeezed out to Bushwick or Hoboken,” he says. “Face-to-face encounters are essential to a city’s vitality, even among people who aren’t sure of each other’s names, for the exchange of ideas and to generate a sense of electricity.”

To get at why we really still talk about New York in the 70s, let’s look beyond what that meant for artistic critical mass, and at what that meant for day-to-day life. Because not everyone I knew back then was an artist, but everyone I knew back then — people I befriended at CBGBs or at after-hours coke bars or in public parks or in ill-lit little apartments with the music turned up — was living where I was and as I was, and we all knew the deal. When I went to New York with some promises of couches to sleep on and $20 in my pocket, I knew I was making a trade: I would be endangered, and in some unimportant ways constrained, but I would be free. I took the trade. The first place I had of my own was a railroad flat on 11th Street between First and Second; it was so roach-infested I had to get a friend who worked in a factory to slip me some industrial foggers (the place smelled of bug spray for months after I used them, but never saw a roach again). Because all the windows were on one wall, which made fans nearly useless for drawing air through the place, and because I couldn’t afford an air conditioner (and it was on the top floor of a six-story walkup), on summer nights I would douse myself with cold water sprayed from a rubber hose in the tub in the kitchen, and immediately go lay in my single bed sopping wet. Some nights I had to get up once or twice and do it again.

It sounds like poverty, and it was — I had a job as a busboy and I still qualified for food stamps, and I didn’t have a lot of walking-around money. But it was an old-fashioned kind of poverty — the kind you could actually work your way up out of (or at least, up into a more self-sustaining kind of poverty) — and still get your kicks. I got that busboy job within ten days of coming to New York. And I was able to save money — cash from tips that I stuck under the cushions of those couches — to put down a deposit on an apartment. And that railroad flat? $125 a month. I think the monthly electric bill was like $12. I’d go to CB’s, have a few beers, go to the Kiev for pierogies after, and be down less than $20 on the night. And when I had a day off, I didn’t have to make plans — I was in New York City. I could walk out my door and be on the best vacation ever. Someone might get me high. Someone might fuck me. Someone might kill me, true. But you took the good with the bad.

This reminiscence sounds highly personal, but really, hundreds of thousands of people at the time, and millions in the aggregate, had a pretty similar experience, and I lived not just in my own private pleasure but in the jet-stream of everyone else’s. The place Edmund White describes was not just a stage on which the 70s art heroes built their careers. It wasn’t just Richard Hell’s and Chuck Close’s and Susan Sarandon’s New York. It was mine. And it was anybody’s who wanted it, pretty much, because it barely cost anything beyond the guts to live it. Maybe it’s too bad that we can’t have another punk rock scene, but it’s a fucking disaster that we can’t have that.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Haven't heard it in decades. Built to last, this stuff.

• AlterNet describes this six-minute disinfomercial as "Insane Video Presented by Kim Davis' Law Group at Extremist Christian Campus." We hear that kind of language all the time, but this thing is literally insane, in an instructive way. "Kim Davis' Law Group" is Liberty Counsel, experts at nuisance suits (and just plain nuisances) intended to lay the groundwork for an American theocracy; "Extremist Christian Campus" is Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's outfit. The film is a non-narrative collage of stock art, music, and news clips -- sort of like the indoctrination scene in The Parallax View, except incompetent -- that strains for a concatenation effect that will ready the viewer to do battle for the Lord. Among the "bad" things in the beginning (you know they're bad because they're interspersed with images of suffering, ominous quotes, and transgender rights) is Barack Obama, suggesting in a 2006 speech that the Sermon on the Mount is a better guide to righteous living than the absurd prohibitions of Leviticus. If it seems weird to you that someone would portray this eminently reasonable and Christian POV as an example of evil, remember, first, that this is blackety-black Obama and, second, that this was exactly what conservative Christians were saying about the speech when it was uncovered for the 2008 election (e.g., "WATCH OBAMA MOCK BIBLE IN 2006" -- World Net Daily). Eight years of repudiation by the American public has not sweetened their temperaments, and the film ends by suggesting the earth with be bathed in a cleansing fire, from which true believers will be saved to listen to inspirational music forever. Don't forget, folks: This is what these people really believe.

• Happy Patriot Day. I used to note each anniversary, and track the increasing grumbliness of conservatives as they found they were losing, in the words of Dick Cheney in The Onion, "the satisfaction of telling people to do things and then them doing it -- not because they want to, but because they are afraid to do otherwise." Sure enough, at National Review, Jim Geraghty marks 9/11 XIV and worries, "Is This Date Starting to Become Too Normal a Day?"

I think I’m starting to understand how the Greatest Generation used to feel when December 7 would come and go on the calendar with barely a mention of the date’s significance. On the one hand, life has to go on. We can’t live in fear. Our foes want us paralyzed and overwhelmed by the horrific brutality of their actions. In 2011, the date fell on a Sunday, and the NFL played games.... 

By and large, those worse terrors haven’t arrived – although assorted malevolent forces like the anthrax mailer, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Fort Hood shooter certainly tried. So have we, as a country, been spending the past f14 years waiting for another shoe to drop that never will? Or will it come some day, feeling even worse when it arrives because we let go of that late-2001 dread?

You can't see it at the website, but in the version of this appearing in Geraghty's email newsletter, he then dons the ghost sheet and warns us 9/11 heathens about all the jihadi stuff that's threatening to blow if we don't abandon our Obamaish ways, including Joshua Ryne Goldberg and "these shootings on Arizona’s highways." Seriously, can you prove these acts of vandalism aren't jihad? Maybe all those boys who used to drop rocks onto cars from overpasses were sleeper cells that are just now awakening. Ah-wooooo! Sigh. Even non-religious conservatives resemble a millenarian sect, in that they live in hope of a cataclysmic event (in their case, the resurrection of 9/11) that will restore them to power and glory.

• Jon Stewart's Moment of Zen may be over, but here's a Moment of WTF from (you probably guessed) The Federalist by Rich Cromwell, whose men-should-be-men-and-women-should-be-helpless riff climaxes thus:

For the continuation of the species, the Philips of the world have to be out there getting stupid and threatening to burn the place down. There may be a Bre next door, maybe even back living with mom and dad, but she’ll be waiting to offer a helping hand instead of encouraging him to burn the place down. Life and society may change, but every man remains a potential arsonist, every woman a potential firefighter.

You can read the whole thing if you're into context but I warn you, it won't help. I will tell you that the "arsonist" bit seems to refer to one of his Federalist bros accidentally burning Minute Rice. There's also a Chesterton quote, but I bet you knew that already. (I wish some hacker would break into all the  Catholic-cons' websites and replace the Chesterton and C.S. Lewis quotes with Erma Bombeck.)

WHERE TRUMP VOTERS COME FROM.

Yeah, it's from the Steven Crowder site, a rightwing fake-poop factory, but roll with me here a second:

This morning, HuffPo ran a photo spread with the kinds of people who inspired the human-like characters in Wall-E (which, by the way, no one I’m aware of decried as mean or “fat-shaming”). But if you dare say anything negative about someone’s unhealthy body of people sized XXXXXXXXL and above, you’re a horrible person for “fat-shaming.” 

Yet making fun of skinny women? Open season. They’re called “skinny bitches” and you can say whatever you want about them, and no one blinks. Jealousy may be a factor. Have you ever heard of “skinny-shaming?” No, not skinny-dipping, that’s something else. Stay focused. Thin women take flak from plus-sized women, yet no one comes to their defense and demands their comedy video be removed from YouTube. And guess what? Some “skinny” women have tried everything they can to gain weight, and they can’t...

I hardly need explain why this is bullshit; in fact, I doubt even Crowder's regulars are dumb enough to buy it -- until the author, Courtney Kirchoff, says the magic words feminist and liberal:

Fat-shaming has become a new third-wave feminist movement and bigger women especially are demanding society not only accept them, but embrace their full figures and lifestyle without judgment...

Liberal Logic: it’s okay to be fat and judge skinny people. It’s not okay to make fun of fat people regardless of your size.

And presto, she's no longer just a rude asshole, she's politically incorrect, the apex of the conservative Pyramid of Honor.

By the way, guess who Kirchoff's a fan of:

Generally speaking, the Crowder site is not completely in the bag for Trump: They defend him when he's attacked by Mexicans and/or homosexuals ("HILARIOUS: Ricky Martin Goes After Trump. We Destroy Him..."), but attack him when he's mean to other Republicans ("Now I’m no huge Megyn Kelly fan, but regardless of where you line up on [Michelle] Malkin... 'dummy' is not a valid attack").

If you're wondering where the growing number of Republicans zombie-marching behind the club-fingered vulgarian come from, don't listen to the pundits harrumphing about how this Trump fellow for all his flaws makes some valid points -- look at the resentment mills where wingnuts manufacture ever more exotic excuses to be jerks. If you want your shitty beliefs passed into law, you can get that from any Republican; but if you want your shitty attitude flattered, there's nothing like Trump. And increasingly that's what Republican voters are deciding they want.

UPDATE. Commenter EndOfTheWorld says, "Complaining about 'skinny-bitches' reminds me of the 90s, when I'd hear these same young Republican types cry foul that some gay guy somewhere called a straight person a 'breeder,' or that a black comedian made fun of the way white people drive." They've been the real victim for years of every despised minority, but lately they've had to confront the fact that even their fellow white people aren't buying it anymore; hence, the additional notes of hysteria.

BIBLE BEATOFFS.

The saga of Kim Davis, bigot-martyr, and her pig-eyed enablers has ascended into legend:

Of the two presidential contenders who attended the rally, it was Mr. Huckabee, making his second White House run, who grabbed the political spotlight. Before Ms. Davis appeared, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Staver took the stage to tell the crowd, in unison, “Kim Davis is free.” 

When Mr. Cruz, who met with Ms. Davis, exited the Carter County Detention Center, a throng of journalists beckoned him toward their microphones, but an aide to Mr. Huckabee blocked the path of the senator, who appeared incredulous.

I'll bet he did! This is such ripe hillbilly Gothic it makes A Face in the Crowd look like Barchester Towers.

Anyway, Davis and her Liberty Counsel lawyers remain belligerent, which promises an interesting first day back at work for Davis as her deputy who's been issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples says he'll go on doing it no matter how hard Davis tries to holy-roll him.

Meanwhile it's not just crackpot Republican candidates who think the law should bow to Goodwife Davis -- here's David French, writer for the once-reputable National Review:

Had her stand happened a few short centuries ago, Huckabee and Cruz would likely have been joined by a few notable figures from Christian history — men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox — the men who first put the “protest” in “Protestant"... 

When rulers defy God, they lose their God-ordained authority. When rulers require lesser authorities to cooperate in and facilitate evil, the lesser authorities must resist... 

...to put things more bluntly, Justice Kennedy can purport to change the Constitution, but he can’t transform Christian conviction. Unless his social-justice church grows more tolerant, the Kim Davis case is a harbinger of more conflict to come. We Protestants are simply returning to our roots.

One imagines French running amok in  sackcloth, crying HELTER JESUS! SHE'S COMING DOWN FAST! and looking for some homosexuals to pummel with slurs in hopes of being arrested by the Pinkshirts, thus hastening the "conflict" that will bring the New Reformation.

Between this and Trump it's been a great pre-pre-pre-election. I wonder what these clowns will come up with after Opening Day? I predict the new litmus test will be that every GOP candidate has to do an abortion clinic bombing.

THE NO-FAIR!NESS DOCTRINE.

John Podhoretz is really mad that Obama locked up 41 votes to stymie his Senate foes on the Iran deal, so he's going to show you libtard bastards a thing or two with the awesome power of his wordsmithery:

Spitting on the Constitution to pass the Iran deal

Already this looks like a winner.

It’s rare for people to celebrate getting 41 percent of anything. If you score 41 percent on a test, you get an F. If you win 41 percent of the vote in a two-person race, you lose. 

Wow, he's really doing this? Saying 41 only counts because you're playing by the stupid rules of the Senate, not something important like high school?

If your tax rate is 41 percent, you’re likely to feel ripped off. 

So 41 was bad because it's too little, but now it's bad because it's too much. I'm beginning to think Podhoretz hasn't thought this through, and we're still on the first paragraph.

In the matter of his Iran deal, President Obama and his team have spent two months working relentlessly to secure 41 percent — and now they’re claiming an enormous victory even though by any other standards what they’ve achieved is nothing but a feat of unconstitutional trickery.

Unconstiwut?

...since this is a treaty and we have 100 senators, Obama should have been obliged to secure the backing of 67 Senators, not 41... 

[Obama] and Congress agreed the deal would be subject to a vote — not of approval, like a treaty, but of disapproval. It would be treated like any piece of legislation. It would be voted on by the House and the Senate, and if they turned thumbs-down, he could then exercise his presidential veto.

The Constitution requires a second vote by the two Houses of Congress to overturn such a veto — and in that case, the vote has to be by two-thirds.

That’s why for months people have been saying the president has turned the Constitution on its head — because instead of 67 senators having to support the deal to make it legal, 67 senators have to disapprove of it to render it null and void.

Wow -- so Obama used hypnosis to give the Democrats a Senate majority just long enough to get his unConstitutional plan accepted in the Senate -- then quickly restored the majority to the Republicans, snapped his fingers, and hid behind a curtain to chortle at their discomfiture as they awoke to find themselves stuck with an unfair deal passed without their knowledge? The man really is a tyrant!

For a while I thought that conservatives only acted this way because the days when absolutely everyone seemed to go along with their bullshit were so recent, and they hadn't yet had time to adjust to the fact that the 2008 collapse left America so cynical about them that wearing a red tie and a Reagan mask didn't bamboozle them anymore. But now I think they're just assholes.

ROOTING FOR INJURIES, PART 329.

One of the creepier developments in the right-blogosphere has been the emergence of a group of white supremacist online losers who think the conservative establishment isn't racist enough; they throw around the word "cuckservative" and get excited when it is repeated even in disgust or derision, because it means attention; naturally they're big fans of Donald Trump. By and large the group has been disowned by the better-known conservative bloggers, who try to steer their readers away from the group, much as Dorian Gray tried to keep people from seeing the picture in his attic.

"Better-known conservative bloggers" and "white supremacist online losers" are not exactly huge constituencies, so any publicity bump for the controversy, however modest, was bound to stir the shit, and under cover of Labor Day Weekend Jonah Goldberg spoke against Trump and by implication his fringier fans -- Stormfront versus stormfart, as it were. Whether Goldberg speaks from conviction or because David Koch held a gun to his head, his nerves are evident. Goldberg doesn't get into the racist stuff, probably because he realizes that, given his own history, he would be laughed off the face of the earth if he tried to claim that particular high ground, so he reminds people that Trump used to be pro-choice, and that he's ill-mannered. Apparently intuiting how little this would mean to anyone,  he embraces martyrdom for the Cause:

...I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause. I have hope they will come to their senses. But it’s possible they won’t. And if the conservative movement and the Republican party allow themselves to be corrupted by this flim-flammery, then so be it. My job will be harder, my career will suffer, and I’ll be ideologically homeless (though hardly alone). That’s not so scary. Conservatism began in the wilderness and maybe, like the Hebrews, it would return from it stronger and ready to rule...

Oh, sphincter up, Mary, one wants to tell Goldberg -- you're a legacy pledge and your Mom will never let you miss any of your dozen daily meals.

Anyway the white supremacists let up a collective shriek and in their Laboratories of Butch developed a nice new hashtag: #NRORevolt, meant to signal their displeasure with Goldberg and the entire rotten establishment. The tweets, like the one reproduced below, have the belligerent yet wounded tone of a 10-year-old boy telling his G.I. Joe doll to go gut-stab his mother in vengeance for his time-out.

Feel the momentum! The mainstream conservatives are mad, but what can they do? After years of throwing boob bait, they find the boobs fording the moat and don't know how to send them back. Some, like The Weekly Standard's Jim Swift, try to portray these white supremacists as just like liberals:

Like a right-wing bastard child of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous, #NRORevolt was popular among the nom-de-plume crowd on Twitter (i.e. cowards). Like OWS, it didn’t have much in the way of stated goals, other than outrage/revolt. But hey, when you have former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman agreeing, what else do you need?

That last bit refers to a column in which Krugman calls Trump "exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be" and his platform in general "viciously absurd," but allows that the idea of taxing the rich, which Trump happens to share, isn't bad. For the equally tendentious Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous references, Swift doesn't even have that much of a fig leaf. I know partisanship requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, but does Swift really think anyone attracted to this Aryan Little-Brotherhood is going to be scared off by the taunt that it will make him look like a liberal?

The fleurs du mal are getting more pungent by the day. Here's something from Taki's Magazine -- a guy complaining about the "faux 'anti-PC' bravery of many conservatives" including... Mark Steyn. Wow, you may be thinking, he's calling out Mark Steyn -- this guy must be really hardcore anti-PC! Buddy, you don't know the half of it:

So here’s the bigger point I’m trying to make. My example proves the emptiness of the braggadocio you hear from many conservative pundits about how fearless they are in the face of political correctness: “Mexican immigrants are rapists. Palestinians are a death cult. Black Americans owe whites a ‘debt’ for being enslaved and then freed” (a gem from David Horowitz, an original FOA member). “Women in higher education will lead to the ‘abolition of man.’ White women need to breed more to overcome an invasion of uncivilized darkies. ‘Sodomites’ are waging ‘gayhad’ against straight people. Offended? Get over it, Mr. Sensitive. We’re being brave and audacious and in-your-face! Oh, but just don’t say anything that might be offensive to Jews. That’s crossing the line. Hey, look how quickly we found our sensitivity!”

I should tell you that the author is David Cole, best known for his unorthodox ideas about the Holocaust ("'The best guess is yes, there were gas chambers' he says. 'But there is still a lot of murkiness about the camps...'"). Now he's complaining that Mark Steyn and David Horowitz are too PC. The old curse may have been mistranslated: Maybe our enemies really wish for us to live in hilarious times.

LABOR DAY WEEKEND 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Work and work and work and work.

•   Enjoy the annual celebration of the fruits of the labor movement -- the 40-hour week may be dead, unions are being crushed even in Harlan County, but at least they can't make your six-year-old work at the mill -- at least not till Scott Walker takes the oath of office, whereupon the NLRB will be packed with little Megan McArdles ("Look at this moocher," Courtney Knapp will say of a plea from a woman impoverished by corporate wage theft, "she owns a tablet!")  and the Koch Brothers will criss-cross the country throwing workers into threshers and conveyor belts, just for the pleasure of knowing they won't get Workers Comp. For the moment, conservative PR shops are using Labor Day as an opportunity to pimp right-to-work legislation. Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (doesn't that sound public-servicey? You see their homey little collection boxes next to cash registers wherever union-busters buy their axe-handles) is especially busy: At the Pensacola News-Journal, his rat face appears with the headline "It’s ‘Labor’ Day, Not ‘Union Day,'" reminding us that those pushy strikers in the early 20th century merely slowed the arrival of workplace improvements the bosses were planning to give us all along, maybe as a surprise gift on Christmas 2000. Mix also appears in a guest column at Penn State's Daily Collegian, where he actually leads with this:

As you watch your children board the school bus for the first day back to classes, consider this: that school bus driver is likely forced to pay fees to a union as a condition of driving that bus.

And that driver probably thinks he deserves a so-called "living wage" for his money! Better the school district should have the freedom to hire non-union employee Rummy Tom to drive your kids -- he's a little shaky behind the wheel, but he'll work all day for a bottle of rotgut! Makes you wonder when this Gilded Age revivalism will also lead to a revival of sash weight bombs.

DOGS AND CATS, LIVING TOGETHER!

We've seen the other Republican candidates, fading in the face of Trump, going "Look at me! I can be crazy too!" What might be the journalistic equivalent?

It would seem a tad overheated to speculate that Hillary Clinton being elected president could trigger an American civil war. Unfortunately, it’s not. If not an outright war, massive civil disobedience would likely be in the offing. 

If our chief executive is assumed to be dishonest by the majority of the population — a solid plurality and possibly even a majority believing her actually to be criminal — before she takes office, what would be the natural outgrowth to society, if not a breakdown of one sort or another?...

Just kidding -- while I'm sure PJ Media could use the attention, this is not really new for Roger L. Simon, he's been totally mental for years. Anyway: Simon thinks "the chances of Hillary’s nomination are decreasing on a near-daily basis," so I guess she would have to win on a third-party ticket, or maybe just ride into the Oval Office singing Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, and when that happens --

Almost no one who voted against her would be giving her the benefit of the doubt. Why should they? They would be looking for ways to reject her presidency.

Not like now!

Tax avoidance would be endemic. Why give money to a country where the president abjures the rule of law? (Yes, that’s already happened but this would, after a political campaign, be a force multiplier.)

Maybe these patriotic tax cheats will be supported by Charles Murray's Honky Freedom Riders. Then Simon dons sackcloth and sayeth the sooth:

With the national treasury under threat, all sorts of results could occur — a stock market meltdown beyond what we are experiencing now, full scale depression like the 1930s, urban riots that make Baltimore and Ferguson look like Kiddyland, nonstop demonstrations of all sorts from all sides, millions of people opting out á la John Galt (most without knowing who he is), an American decline beyond recognition (if you think things are bad now, you haven’t seen anything), little border control with giant Islamic spillover from Europe, terror attacks routine, and, yes, remote a possibility as it may be, a violent civil war between between sides in a hugely split society.

The Go Galt schtick is the tip-off: This is everything these guys predicted for the Obama Administration, stuffed into one big bag of crazy for the next potential Democratic President. They did this when de Blasio got elected, too, and you could conceivably convince the rubes that the mayor really is turning New York into a gritty urban drama out of the 70s because most of them don't live there; getting them to believe the election of Hillary Clinton will lead to armageddon, as opposed to the sylvan glade that awaits under President Cruz (or the woman Simon apparently favors, Carly Fiorina, who wants to bring the skills that nearly destroyed Hewlett Packard to national governance), may take a bit more doing. Perhaps Simon would like to revisit during Halloween? I hear haunted houses can make a good bit of money, and they don't have to be convincing.

ROOTING FOR INJURIES.

In a truckload of Trump articles A-list conservatives have tried in vain to get B-listers-and-lower to abandon Trumpism. They've compared him to everyone they don't like from Obama to John Stewart to Gore Vidal*. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, who previously compared Trump to Allen Ginsburg, shows the growing exasperation this week in a column called "Trump Has Succeeded in Convincing Conservatives to Discard their Principles Overnight." The British transplant sniffs at the salt-of-the-earth Americans who have elevated Trump to the lead in GOP Presidential polls -- why, don't they know Trump is a tax-and-spend liberal? Cooke explains to the lumpen what they're supposed to think:

Contrary to the fevered imagination of the exasperated American Left, conservative candidates for public office do not tend to take a free-market approach to fiscal policy because it helps “the rich,” but because they believe in earnest that it helps the whole country. By and large, this same rule applies to conservative voters, many of whom may not always benefit directly from the lack of meddling and modest confiscation, but who conceive nevertheless that a capitalistic economy is likely to deliver better results in the long term than is a power-hungry Uncle Sam... 

Honesty requires us to acknowledge that had President Obama endorsed exactly the same policies and rhetoric, the reaction from the Trumpkins would have been little short of nuclear. Where are those fawning Paul Ryan memes and indignant Founding Fathers’ quotes now, chaps?

I like to imagine Cooke reading this aloud to the "chaps" at a county fair, through a megaphone and while sporting a straw boater.

Maybe Cooke and the rest of the wingnut welfare top-feeders are upset because they find themselves on the wrong side of conservative history (which, I will tell you right now, ends in fiery ruin either for conservatives or for America). Once upon a time, any bylined rightist in need of an Amen could call out those true believer's mortal enemies, the RINOs, either vaguely or with some Congressional figurehead's name attached, and the whole congregation would have a nice grouse over the not-right establishment that was holding them down. Now the punters consider Cooke and his buddies to be the RINOs. You see it in the comments sections of all their anti-Trump columns. And you can hear it from the commentary choice of Trumpites, rightwing radio, which has seized the market opportunity presented by the occasion. At the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens has his own snarl at Trump-followers ("[Trump] isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue"), and is answered by broadcast shouter Mark Levin:

Freaking out at WSJ -- the editorial page stands for amnesty and open borders, endless debt ceiling increases, hundreds of billions in bailouts for Wall Street under Bush, attacks on the Tea Party movement, etc., and now this guy pretends to hold the banner for conservatism as he smears conservatives and laments the state of conservatism. Many conservatives have not endorsed anyone yet, but are attentively listening to the candidates as the primary season has barely begun. The WSJ editorial page has become mouthpiece for the GOP establishment and an overall joke.

In a year this may all be forgotten. Or it may turn out to have been a hardhats-vs.-hippies moment, leaving lingering resentments and schism. Mister, we could use a man like Mittens Romney again!

*UPDATE. Speaking of those Trump comparisons, about the stupidest has been the comparison with Bernie Sanders made by Glenn Reynolds, Ira Stoll, Nick Gillespie et alia. Well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stuffs it today:

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders faced his own challenge at a political event last month, when two African American women pushed in front of him to use the microphone to demand four and a half minutes of silence to honor the death of Michael Brown. Sanders left the stage and mingled with the crowd. Later, Trump criticized Sanders as being “weak” for allowing them to speak, but truly he showed grace under pressure by acknowledging their frustration and anger. Instead of bullying their voices into silence or ridiculing them as losers, pigs or bimbos, Sanders left. After all, it was not his event; he was a guest. Besides, his voice was not silenced, but came back booming even louder: The next day, Sanders posted a sweeping policy of reform to fight racial inequality. (The timing coincided with Michael Brown’s death and had nothing to do with the two women.)

The two approaches reveal the difference between a mature, thoughtful and intelligent man, and a man whose money has made him arrogant to criticism and impervious to feeling the need to have any actual policies...

All this and the Hall of Fame, too. In alicublog comments, coozledad remind us of Krugman's column on the Trump travesty ("What happened to conservative principles? Actually, nothing — because those alleged principles were never real"), pretty good for a guy with no hoop skills.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

You and I are well acquainted with the awfulness of Rod Dreher, and it's gotten to the point where I don't check his site much anymore, because it's too often the same old lather-rinse-repeat of gay oppression and the Benedict Option and I can't even. But I wandered over there today and came across a paragraph in a post called "Trump, the American Pim Fortuyn" (yes, Dreher managed to top the other ridiculous Trump comparisons) that epitomizes not just what's awful about Dreher, but also what's awful about a certain cast of mind all too common in this great democracy:

When I think of Trump’s appeal, I think about the conversations we used to have at the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News years ago. All of us involved in the discussion had good private health insurance, so none of us had to use the city’s public hospitals, which were jammed by immigrants, many of them in the country illegally, demanding health care. If we were poor or working-class citizens — white, black, or brown — who depended on the public hospitals (or for that matter, the public schools in small towns or non-white suburbs), the immigration problem would probably have looked a lot different. But we weren’t, so immigration more often than not appeared as a matter of socially tolerant liberalism and pro-business conservatism. People of all races who weren’t well-off enough to have good private health care, to put their kids in private schools, or to move to suburbs with good public schools — who spoke for them? Who speaks for them?

Dreher is a Christian of the most strenuously self-promoting kind. Christ's least-of-my-brothers stuff is, of course, also the least-assimilated part of the Gospels for people like him.

But for most of them it's enough just to be a flat-out hypocrite and act as if those poor people who aren't dropping the little extra they've got in their favorite megapastor's collection plate don't exist: No, Dreher acknowledges them, but cunningly finds a way to turn these out-group paupers, these desperate Mexicans who risk death in coming to America, risk uprooting and disaster once they've arrived, and are regularly and viciously exploited while they're here, into the real oppressors.

They can't legally get health insurance, see, so they clog up the emergency rooms that can't turn them away when they're sick -- which Dreher characterizes as  "demanding health care," as if treatment for illnesses were the equivalent of an iPhone or a pair of fancy sneakers. And in seeking medical attention, these immigrants deny native-born Americans the emergency room elbow-room they deserve. No, it has nothing to do with the shitty bottom-layer funding and attention we give to all our public services, including emergency care, in this country -- it's those even poorer poor people who are to blame.

And, naturally, liberals who give a shit about these bums are just pretending to do so because they secretly despise the non-Mexican, legally-working-for-the-most-part, and (most importantly) reliably-Republican class -- especially if those liberals have "good private health insurance." Because if you think everyone should have the privileges you have, then you should feel guilty about having them yourself; but if you don't think everyone should have them, then your possession of them, even in the midst of thousands suffering for lack of them, is just the earned blessing of the righteous.

Evil's not too strong a word.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Maybe I should see them tonight? Everything I've heard is good.

•   I recently noted Ross Douthat's attempt to portray the Donald Trump phenomenon as a boon to reform conservatism (i.e., the latest rightwing nerd jobs program). It appears the longer this thing goes on, the more slide-rule boys rush to offer their services. At the Weekly Standard, after some pro-forma yak about what a boor Trump is, Christopher Caldwell tells that Trump's "economic critique" -- yes, he's talking about Trump's brayings, to which he'd referred a paragraph earlier as "talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are" -- "fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance." Not sophisticated itself, mind you, but it fits into something sophisticated, just as Trump himself may be fitted into a $5,000 suit. Then, at Slate, Reihan Salam has all kinds of exciting ideas for Trump. Apparently inspired by single-issue candidate Larry Lessig's praise of Trump as a campaign finance reformer, Salam suggests Trump embrace Lessig's program, as this "would add intellectual heft to [Trump's] populism, which would force his media detractors to give him at least some begrudging respect." I don't know what's funnier: the idea of Trump's campaign acquiring "intellectual heft," or that of Trump showing respect for an egghead like Lessig who doesn't have his own private jet and probably eats in a school cafeteria like a schlub. Funniest of all, perhaps, is the idea of these pencil-necks hovering around Trump, telling themselves that if only they can press their policy papers into the paws of the Strongman, the Golden Dawn may be hastened.

•   And what can make Trump talk worse? Peggy Noonan! Today she explains Peggy Noonan through the avatar of that Non-Partisan Nameless Friend:

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”?

Hope so -- it'll be easy to beat an imaginary constituency. Also, Hispanics love Trump, Noonan's friend "Cesar" from the bodega tells her:

Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you..." 

I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.

Take Peggy Noonan's word to the bank: Your neighbors from the DR, Trinidad, Sudan, Chile, Vietnam -- they're all raring to vote Republican so long as the party nominates a suitably aggressive TV clown.  Morton Downey Jr. gazes on this from the Hereafter and sighs at what might have been.

•   Stella Morabito, the craziest shrink since Robin of Berkeley, is back to tell us how PC is destroying everything by preventing sensible conservative discourse, like how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is:

A perfect example is how the transgender lobby has saturated the media and pop culture with its talking points through Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and incessant Hollywood shilling. Suppression is the PC practice of quashing ideas that compete with the PC message, usually through speech codes, shout-downs, or smears... The twin processes of saturation and suppression, if diligently applied, can produce the illusion of a public opinion shift, or a “cascade.”

Fans of Morabito's work will understand that these "cascades" are bad because they make you accept homosexuals:

Consider how the Left’s propaganda machine manufactured an “opinion cascade” on the issue of same-sex marriage, by first using “surprising validator” conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, polling pundit Michael Barone, and especially David Blankenhorn, who was one of the most persuasive and powerful supporters of organic marriage until he broke down and published a recantation. Not surprisingly, stealth conservatives—particularly those who work in increasingly politicized professions such as psychiatry, social work, teaching, or the arts—have enormous potential if they come out as surprising validators.

Amazing what how much gay-PC we've accomplished thanks to stealth conservatives like Dick Cheney, eh? (Though personally I think it was the recantation of David Blankenhorn that really turned things around for us.)

Anyway Morabito bids her readers go out and make their own cascades:

So conservatives, engage in those polarized, gridlocked places—like the neighborhood picnic, the local swim club, the farmer’s market, the student union, etc.—and engage one on one. Come out to a neighbor or a classmate.

Oh boy! Is this where we say "I hate faggots" and wait for everyone else to do the same, like Spartacus?

Don’t bother with talking points, because the purpose is not to win the argument but to simply to put a human face on your beliefs. 

Just be who you are and be friendly. In today’s PC-saturated culture, that’s the only way to draw out the lonely like-minded person or to influence a fence-sitter. It’s also the only way to water down PC stereotypes of conservatives. Ultimately, it’s the only way to start those ripple effects that can create cascades of truth.

Wait a minute -- your war against PC is to be nice? I gotta tell ya: 1.) If that's the plan, every other anti-PC conservative I've seen has definitely got the instructions upside-down; and 2.) If your goal is to get people to like you, maybe dispense with the hysterical columns for starters?