LOCAL WOMAN WINS INTERNATIONAL CONCERN TROLLING COMPETITION.

There ought to be a political journalism equivalent of the Bulwer-Lytton Award, if only so Megan McArdle can at last have something to decorate her mantlepiece:

This past weekend, I found myself in the British borough of Luton, pondering a British exit from the European Union. “How did you find yourself in Luton?” you will ask, and I will reply, “That is a long story, and alas, a very dull one, so let’s just proceed upon the assumption that I was indeed in Luton for good and sufficient reasons.” And why was I pondering Brexit? Because the penultimate chapter of this dull story involved many hours spent in a horrible third-tier European airport with middle-class Britons heading home from their holidays.

Christ in heaven. The thinking's just as ugly as the writing: McArdle talked to these "middle-class Britons" (presumably all white, smoking Players, and 'aving a cuppa) and they weren't really racist at all, she assures us, just suffering from "what is often called compassion fatigue" over having to have their buildings cleaned and tea served by foreigners. Now, McArdle herself isn't bothered, you understand -- she's a woman of the world! -- but she understands why these poor white Britons might feel alienated by all those foreign voices and all that curry:

As an American, this did not strike me as odd; this is what our cities have been like for centuries, particularly on the coasts. One group of immigrants moves in, creates an enclave, then gets rich, assimilates and moves out, making way for the next group that will throw a little of their food, their language and their customs into our vast melting pot. But this is not normal in most of the world. Nor is it necessarily welcome...

So it’s not that my food was bad -- it was all quite good -- or that there was anything wrong with the immigrants serving and eating it. They all looked like quite nice people. But it was all very different from traditional British food, traditional British people. And no matter how hard we try to argue that it doesn’t matter, it does -- politically, if in no other way. Especially when things aren’t going all that well for the natives.

Son of a bitch -- she's found a way to outsource bigotry! Whatever the Koch Brothers are paying her, it's not enough.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See, I like new music. Well, new-ish.  Well, and it has to sound like Heaven 17 or something else I recognize from my youth.  Fuck, don't listen to it then if that's how you feel.
• Anti-gun-control conservatives like to portray themselves as the rational, cool-headed ones: Look, I am not flustered by this mass shooting that has you libtards all worked up for some reason! (I think they roll right past the preliminary "of course this is a terrible tragedy" bit anymore because they think it weakens their argument.) But you read something like this, from Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at National Review, where he tells his readers the Orlando massacre shows nightclubs would be safer if you let people bring loaded guns to them, and you have to wonder:

I must say, I find this way of thinking somewhat bizarre. Certainly, one could argue that there would be more accidents/shootings/suicides if more people carried in general (although this isn’t borne out by the data). Likewise, one could argue that nightclubs are bad venues for concealed- or open-carriers because they are dark and loud, and because people tend to drink a lot and/or take drugs while inside them. But those are aggregate, not specific arguments. When one gets to the specifics, can one really say with a straight face that the victims at Pulse wouldn’t have been better placed had one or more of them had been armed?

"One could argue" that loaded guns at the disco on a Saturday night is a bad idea! Motherfucker, talk to a bartender! Ask him or her if it's a bad idea. And "those are aggregate, not specific arguments" is the last act of a desperate man. I bet Cooke has a flowchart showing drunks in a bar turn into "polite society" if you give them loaded weapons. (Though, under a "Bring your guns, ladies drink free" policy I suppose the Mateen shooting might have been prevented by Pulse being shut down long beforehand, due to its frequent dance-floor gun battles.) While I am on the whole glad that our immigration laws are as yet sufficiently relaxed that we still allow even Thatcherite twats to become citizens of this country, I wish the authorities had first taught Cooke some of our folk wisdom.

• I keep saying on Twitter that I have a new funny thing at The Sherman Oaks Review of Books but Twitter obviously is over because my item has not blown up. So go have a look why don't you, and then stick around to look at the other stuff at the Review which is also funny. It's a humor site. We're humorists. And we mean that in the old-fashioned sense of producing laughter, if that's the sort of thing you go for.

• Remember when a couple of posters of Obama as The Joker in 2009 meant Obama was washed up? Well, they work this same routine every so often, and it currently is being worked with a clutch of rainbow-flag "Shoot Back" posters in West Hollywood. Gay folks in the neighborhood don't seem to appreciate the sentiment, per the L.A. Times, but the artist, Sabo, interviewed by PJ Media, tries strenuously to counteract that impression; "it's important that people know that this image came out of the gay community," he says, meaning out of him. This reminds me of the post-Orlando Red Alert Politics story (amplified by the ridiculous Washington Examiner), "Gays rally around Trump after Orlando attacks," based on the testimony of... four allegedly gay guys on Reddit, and two allegedly gay guys on Twitter ("'I am a gay man and this disgusting incident has persuaded me to join the Trump train!' Snowduckling wrote"). It's like they want to co-opt the gay vote but know it's useless and so aren't even putting the usual effort into their propaganda. Maybe they should get a high-ranking Trump surrogate to go on air and talk about how he loves cock.

ROAD TO DUMBASS-KISS.

I know some of my readers who are over the age of 30 may be wondering when conservatives began agitating for the rights of people on the no-fly list? Answer: Very recently! Because back in the day no-fly lists were all the rage among the rageaholics -- in the Bush years, because it was saving us from Terrah, and in the early Obama years because Obama was keeping it from saving us from Terrah. But now that Democrats are craftily using the list against the NRA with their no-fly no-buy bill, conservatives have suddenly (and, I assure you, temporarily) turned into Clarence Darrow.

Let's look at some old National Review items on the no-fly subject for perspective. Here's Greg Polowitz asking, "If [shoe-bomber Faisal] Shahzad Was on the ‘No Fly’ List, How’d He Get on the Plane?" Here's Andrew C. McCarthy lamenting that "a lot of [terrorism-related] information gets exchanged – but a lot doesn’t – and none of it ever makes it to the no-fly list."

Here's Anne Morse complaining that the ACLU was suing because "the 'no-fly list' violates passengers’ right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure," at which she scoffed and said the ACLU was partly to blame for "security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11." (Morse also promoted the Arabs-on-planes-make-me-nervous bullshit of Anne Jacobsen, then popular among wingnuts; Jacobsen later went on to promote an even more bizarre terror-in-the-skies scenario.)

Here's Jay Nordlinger fuming at the ACLU's suit because "The administration is trying to protect us from mass murder, and the ACLU is trying to thwart that effort."

And here's Skree Queen Michelle Malkin raging that the list was not complete enough: If we were truthful, she said, "the 'no fly' list would be known around the world by its right and proper name: the 'go fly' list... to this day, TSA still doesn’t check all domestic and international airline-passenger manifests against the no-fly/go-fly list," etc.

So the NR people were once upon a time mainly concerned that the no-fly list wasn't restrictive enough. But when, more recently, it became apparent that the ability of no-fly listees to purchase weapons could be used against them in the court of public gun opinion, they started to get nervous -- as was glaringly apparent from the very title of this 2015 post "The NRA Is Absolutely Right to Fear the ‘Terrorism Watch List,’" by Charles C.W. Cooke, who was then only recently imported by National Review and so did not have the paper trail of no-fly rah-rah that his colleagues had. The magazine's Cato Institute loaners have also been useful in this respect: Here's Michael Tanner, announcing "the no-fly list clearly violates the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty," to the chuckles of older readers.

This week NR has promoted an anti-no-fly-list article by an intern, which makes sense, because he's probably not only too young to have any embarrassing published opinions on Bush-era civil-liberties outrages to his credit, but also being indulged in the traditional youthful libertarian phase, the conservative equivalent of Rumspringa.

Better late than never, I guess. And who knows -- maybe associating civil rights they're not so hot about with guns will make conservatives more likely to support them. I know: Let's tell them that married gay people fuck each other with AR-15s!

I HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO....

One of the many interesting fallouts from this horrible Orlando situation is the brethren demanding that the President perform a magic incantation -- in this case, "radical islamic terrorism" -- as if it would, like saying "Rumpelstiltskin," immediately destroy the enemy.

This ridiculous demand started with Donald Trump, whom Obama schooled on the issue. Wingnuts nonetheless have been backing Trump up:  For example, Jay Caruso at RedState cries "UNBELIEVABLE: Obama Is More Upset At Donald Trump Than He Is At ISIS!... When people are slaughtered by terrorists he's 'No Drama Obama.' When somebody gets under his skin, he's Stompy McStompfeet." (Yes, someone actually wrote that shit and signed his name to it. Apparently Chris Christie's not the only one who's sold his ass.) "No One’s Looking for ‘Magic Words,’" sputters Commentary legacy pledge John Podhoretz, dimly aware that he's being mocked and spinning defensively like a teased hog:

This is all an effort at misdirection. The problem with Obama’s conduct isn’t that naming radical Islam would solve the problem. Of course, it wouldn’t solve the problem. The issue is that the refusal to name radical Islam is part of the problem. Obama’s refusal speaks to the mindset at work in the White House about the threat we face.

We didn't say saying "Rumpelstiltskin" would fix everything! The real problem is Obama refusing to say "Rumpelstiltskin"!

Does any of this sound familiar? It did to me, so I went back to the alicublog archives and found this from ten years ago:

Oh, this is cute: the boys at The Corner are debating on what name we should give our adversaries in the War on Whatchamacallit. Slow propaganda day! 

[Jonah] Goldberg shows off some of the names he learned while researching his alleged book; he certainly can parrot catch-phrases, but alas, education gives Goldberg about as much real benefit as Cytosport Muscle Milk would give Stephen Hawking, and his proposed name for the dusky hordes is -- get this -- "Bin Ladenism." 

Bin Laden? Isn't he that guy we don't care about anymore? Also, what if we find Bin Laden? Does that mean Bin Ladenism is dead, and the war over? (Fools! Bin Laden is at this very moment enjoying the hospitality of our luxurious American psychiatric facilities!) 

Cliff May sums up:

We are struggling to come up with a term that (1) accurately describes the network of ideologies and movements that have risen up with the “Muslim world” (I hate that phrase) and which seek to defeat America and its allies, a term which also (2) clearly conveys to the average person in the West that this is an enemy who must be taken seriously.

Are you tempted to send in your own suggestions -- but painfully aware that The Corner, which keeps a large bin of prepared "reader responses" next to Goldberg's cooler of Snickers, will never publish them? Drop them in our comments box! Somebody will read them, as I plan to visit an internet cafe later and loudly announce, "Hey check out http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2006_08_27_alicublog_archive.html#115712390303821411 -- they got Shakira fucking a dog!" 

Just try and pick something that can complete phrases like "In our war against..." and "England, alas, is already a casualty of..." in a such way as to warm the willies of warbloggers. I'll start:

• Ooga-Booga.
• Islama-dama-ding-dong.
• Homosexuality. 

Actually, I'll just stick to "Whatchamacallit." 

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter R.Porrofatto, who points out that winger nuthouse Gates of Vienna has just concluded a WOT Slogan Contest. Among the entrants: "Kill 'em All, and let Allah sort them out," "Eradicate or be Eradicated," and "Burn the Koran." The winner was "Allah Akbar -- It's the New Sieg Heil!" Oh, that'll get the crowds on their feet! I imagine half the Cletuses asking, "Whut's Ally Akbur?" and the other half asking "Who's Zig Heil?" 

If they'd only had the humility to ask, I could have told them that FREE BEER! or PARTY! would serve their purposes much better, assuming that the sound trucks from which they blared would also distribute weapons and Pantone chips indicating the darkest acceptable skin tone! 

My own slogan: Death to Dhummitude!

Aaaaaand... scene. Sometime this gift of prophecy [places back of wrist to forehead, swoons dramatically like Victor Davis Hanson]... actually feels like a curse!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Orlando Pulse massacre and the brethren's response, which was in many ways typical for a massacre (i.e., Guns Are Not to Blame, Hate and Fear Muslims, etc.), but acquired an added degree of derp because LGBT people were targeted by the gunman. The brethren can't acknowledge homophobia as a factor because in their world gay and transgender people are their oppressors, forcing them to bake wedding cakes and share bathrooms. So to the extent that they even noticed the obvious target, their responses were mostly unfriendly or passive-aggressive. Their rare attempts to relate were if anything worse: take Baseball Crank Dan McLaughlin's tweet: "It's a small thing, but small things are the stuff of life: how many of the gay Orlando clubgoer victims were looking forward to the Tonys?"  These people like musicals, right? What else do they like? Poppers? I did speed to get through my law boards, so I can relate!

Making everything worse as usual is Rod Dreher:

I expect the emerging story from the Left will be it’s all the fault of conservative Christians and the NRA, because the Left will not be able to bear the tension between two of its favorite causes: fighting “homophobia” and fighting “Islamophobia.”

Dreher can't grasp that a human being can stand against the unjust persecution of Muslims and against the unjust persecution of gay people without any "tension" at all. One of these days I expect Jesus will bring suit against Dreher for false representation.

UPDATE. Longtime anti-gay advocate Maggie Gallagher says this is "not an occasion to score political points" and "today I am not going to attack any of my fellow Americans except the one who killed in cold blood" and "may we learn to love one another, with all our flaws," etc. Then she goes on about "the Left's hypocrisy in downplaying Islamic terrorism" and "the Left's increasingly anti-white racism." I don't think they even know when they're doing it anymore.

UPDATE 2. Rightwing uber-dummy Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit comes out as gay — or as WorldNetDaily puts it, “WND CONSERVATIVE BLOGGER COMES OUT AS 'GAY’” — you have to put gay in quotes at WorldNetDaily, see, ’cause real conservatives only use slurs for such people. Anyway, Hoft wants his previously unacknowledged gay brothers and sisters to vote Trump because he’ll “protect all gays and all Americans," unlike Dummycrats like Obama who expect them to be satisfied with so-called "rights." At Right Wing News, Greg Campbell knows he’s supposed to be happy for Hoft but seems kinda flustered:

Hoft’s admission doesn’t change a thing. He’s still a strong conservative voice at a time when we need strong conservative voices. How he chooses to live his life, so long as I’m expected to celebrate him, is of no concern to me.

”So long as I’m expected to celebrate him” seems like a botched version of the typical Christian complaint about being “forced to celebrate” gayness. Maybe Campbell was flustered at the memory of having shaken the man’s hand once at CPAC. Anyway, Campbell stumbles on:

However, Hoft’s declaration does touch on an important topic. He (and so, so, so many others) have wrongly confused this as an attack against homosexuals. This was an attack against the Western world- an attack against America.

Naseen really wanted to shoot up a Cracker Barrel, but he took a wrong turn and had to make do.

It was homosexuals that were killed this time. Next time, ISIS could target a church... 

…if a neo-confederate doesn’t shoot it up first.

THE CRAZY ONES.

"Conservatives defeat onetime ally," NPR says of Renee Ellmer's GOP primary loss in North Carolina, and you have to wonder why. Looking at her voting record, she seems as wingnutty as a wingnut could hope for. Look at her dossier at Votesmart. This alone tells a lot:

Renee Ellmers was rated 18% by American Federation of Government Employees (Positions)
Renee Ellmers was rated 90% by Associated General Contractors of America (Positions (Lifetime))

Bad gummint workers disapprove: Republican contributors who siphon money from the gummint into townhouses in McLean, Virginia so it'll be more free-market-like, thumbs up! (UPDATE: Turns out the AGC isn't government contractors after all; it's construction contractors. My bad!) And Ellmers reliably votes for rightwing stuff like Repeal-Obamacare and Stop-Iran-Deal bills. She almost always votes with the Republican majority in the House.

So why did she have to go? Some people say it had to do with Trump, who supported her, but check what bigtime conservative factota who pretend issues matter have to say. Veronique de Rugy at National Review lists a couple of conservatives who blame her support of the Ex-Im Bank, then says, "To be fair, Ellmers wasn’t alone within the GOP in supporting many of these misguided policies" -- which is hilarious, as the vote to extend the Bank's charter passed the House 313-118, with puh-lenty of Republican co-sponsors. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner:

While her Chamber of Commerce score was 90 percent, her Club for Growth score was 57 percent.

People who actually need to make money backed her; people who worship capitalism as an unquestionable creatively-destructive god opposed her. Also:

The pro-life Susan B. Anthony List spent five figures against her and knocked on more than 12,000 doors...

Here's the Susan B. Anthony List press-release where Carney got this from. Though Ellmers has a near-impeccable anti-abortion voting record, she and several other female Republican House members got cold feet in January 2015 at the ludicrous "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" -- which according to the Washington Post would have nationally banned all abortions after 20 weeks, at least until the Supreme Court inevitably threw it out -- and swapped in "a bill prohibiting federal funding for abortions."

Not good enough. If you're a woman in the Party of Santorum, you make your bones by agreeing to any indignity against women weaker than yourself they ask you to endorse -- and you have to do it every time they tell you.

I hear a lot from major conservative thinkers about how abortion is the Democrats' "sacrament" but note that a female Congressperson who was willing to embarrass herself by voting for every ridiculous We'll-Show-That-Obama bill couldn't get away with the slightest deviation from anti-abortion orthodoxy without getting the Kiss of Death.

There's a lot of stuff in the press about the "Bernie Bros" and the alleged infighting on the Left over our presumptive nominee. But, as Ellmers' sad case shows, there is nothing on our side that is remotely as weird and Stalinist as what goes on among the Republicans.

UPDATE. Oh, speaking of women's issues and the GOP, NR's Mona Charen on the Stanford rape case:

Here is the truth that the Left will never acknowledge — the hook-up culture they celebrate and defend is the greatest petri dish for enabling rape and sexual assault imaginable. It does women no favors to tell them that the way they drink is irrelevant. It may not be a crime to get blind drunk at a bar or party — but it’s reckless. The Stanford woman’s blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit. Again, that doesn’t make her a criminal, but who can doubt that, but for that, she would not have become a victim?

This is what they say out loud to people as the Democrats prepare to nominate their first female Presidential candidate. They're not just a danger to others -- they're also a danger to themselves.

THE BOYS IN THE BUND.

David French isn't the only rightblogger who's been playing in the (enclosed children's area of the) big leagues. You may know that Jeffrey Lord, a really terrible American Spectator columnist, began showing big Trump love last year ("Donald Trump is seen by many Americans as the very embodiment of the American Dream"), and started going on TV to sing Il Douche's praises, in one instance memorably telling Van Jones that Trump's not the racist Democrats are the Real Racist^TM  infinity. Well, Lord has according to TPM been promoted to Trump campaign "surrogate," which sounds appropriately repulsive, and today he outdid himself:

A top surrogate for Donald Trump said Tuesday that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was "playing the race card" for condemning Trump's recent attacks on a federal judge because of his Mexican heritage. Earlier in the day, Ryan called Trump's comments about the judge the "textbook definition" of racism. 

"Speaker Ryan is wrong and Speaker Ryan has apparently switched positions and is supporting identity politics, which is racist," Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord, a member of the Reagan administration, said on CNN Tuesday when asked about Ryan's concerns.

Trump as a political phenomenon may be unusual, even unique -- but as a political cause, Trump is just the same rightblogger nonsense I've been covering for years: bigotry, self-pity, and tax breaks for the rich. Now that he's turned his racist bilge on a Republican judge, Republicans are up in arms, but in few days some transgender chick will go to the wrong bathroom and everybody will shake hands and head back to the barricades.

No wonder few of French's rightblogger buddies pledged themselves to his momentary cause -- except to bitch that the liberal media was smearing him, a bait they'll rise to anytime for anyone, though Commentary's Noah Rothman was in this case stirred to especially sputterific rage:

Like an amateur anthropologist mishandling an artifact with a cultural significance they fail to grasp, the self-styled arbiters of American political standards glibly denigrated French’s traditional values with a child’s recklessness.

Pee yew.  Rothman also lashed out at liberals "who consider themselves enlightened and effete." Heretofore I have been happy to let others call me effete, but if you guys are starting to own it maybe I will too. Reclaim the E word! Spiro's had it long enough.

Over at National Review Eliana Johnson writes a heroic account of those Six Days in June when French, tormented by "the terrible thought that Americans would be left with the choice of two of the most corrupt leaders in politics," considered a run. There are several highlights. For example:

What counsel did [Mitt] Romney, who has publicly excoriated Trump, have to offer? Well, not to run. “As a data-driven guy, it was hard for him to see how this is possible,” French says.

As a data-driven guy! "Let's see -- zero plus zero, plus zero -- let's not forget the zero -- and here's another zero -- gosh darn it, call me Poindexter but I don't see how this adds up." Also:

“I have no idea who he is, but he’s already got my vote, because I don’t like the other two candidates,” another woman, an African-American, told NBC.

See, he was already doing outreach. Ah, what might have been!

PC FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE, PART 5,292,339.

OK, so what's the latest "waah, everyone's politically correct" glurge... oh Christ, it's Bruce Bawer. First he bitches about how Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Chelsea Handler are all making fun of Republicans when they should be, I don't know, marching around in prison stripes going "Rawr, I'm Hitlery Klintoon and I killed Benghazi." (I'm kind of shocked at his focus on female comics -- I thought beating them up was a straight wingnut obsession. He even goes on about "the odious Lena Dunham," normally a tell. Maybe he's had conversion therapy? Or perhaps he just knows what his audience craves.)

Then he gets to the meat: He used to like this English comedian Jimmy Carr because "he seemed utterly indifferent to audience sensitivities and wasn’t remotely political." Sounds good to me too! So Bawer went to see him in Oslo, and at the show Carr got into the local Muslim situation. But to Bawer's dismay:

Carr’s line was that Norwegians are being inhospitable [to Muslims]. Sitting there listening to this, I couldn’t help reflecting that in his own country, the kind of policies he was promoting have made things even worse than they are in Norway — they’ve quashed speech freedoms, turned more and more urban areas into no-go zones...

Yeah whatever buddy. But here's the worst part:

I was appalled by Carr’s glib, PC drivel. But I was pretty much alone. Almost the entire audience, which consisted not of the kind of ordinary, hard-working Norwegians who oppose mass immigration but of affluent-looking, snappily dressed, patently urban 20-somethings (I didn’t see a single non-white face)...

An all-white audience in Oslo! There's a switch.

...laughed and applauded lustily.

They were laughing at something Bruce Bawer didn't agree with! That's double PC!

Plainly, these kids were the spawn of the privileged, pro-immigration left-wing elite and will soon join that elite themselves.

I don't know why Bawer didn't climb on stage like Kenneth Mars in The Producers and yell "You are the victims of a hoax!"

(Carr, I surmised, has advisers at his tour stops who know his demographic and know exactly what kind of material will get them going.)

Wow, he does material he thinks the audience will enjoy. And him a comedian! Is there no end to the PCness?

Eventually Bawer pretends he has an aesthetic case against Carr too ("instead of the tight, snappy sets I’d seen on TV, what I saw was terribly padded-out, including a lot of uninteresting back-and-forth with audience members...") but really he's pissed because they weren't making the jokes he likes -- you know, like that Achmed the Dead Terrorist Guy. But Jeff Dunham is still touring with Achmed -- why not go see him, or Larry the Cable Guy? Why so pissed that other people like different jokes?

The answer is that the people who yell the loudest about political correctness think "other people being open-minded" means "other people agreeing with me." And nothing makes these pecksniffs madder than to hear people laughing and find out that the joke's on them.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the late, lamented David French alt-alt-right Presidential campaign. Most people knew all along it was a lost cause, but I see at least one reason why someone (if not Billy Kristol, whose idiocy remains inexplicable except perhaps by neuropathologists) might have wanted to pimp French, who as my studies have shown is among the worst rightbloggers: Seeing that the Republican Party has gone utterly mad, they expect freaks like French may play a role as possible future avatars of "true" conservatism, and hope his military background and cute adopted African daughter will distract future voters from the stark insanity of his politics.

THE UP SIDE OF DROWN.

The other day Megan McArdle published a column about how "global-warming alarmists" were mean to "lukewarmists" (her prefered name for people who don't want to do anything about climate change, because "denialist" is so mean).

Alarmists "can’t run experiments where they test one variable at a time," says McArdle, so their labors rely on "guesswork." Lukewarmists, however, are operating on the very solid premise that alarmists rely on guesswork! See how that goes? Also lukewarmists offer "constructive input," and their avatar of the moment is "calm, measured, very thoughtful" and his blogposts are "a model of how to talk about the subject," etc.

Also, alarmists are always talking about "the science." That can't be right, because "one does not believe in 'science' as an answer," sniffs McArdle; "science is a way of asking questions. At any given time, that method produces a lot of ideas, some of which are correct, and many of which are false, in part or in whole."

So how can one really know anything? By whether they're nice, that's how. Since this is McArdle, there is a thick larding of passive-aggressiveness, with "angry people on both sides," "these are not differences that can be resolved by name calling," etc. But it's all just a set-up.

A few days later, guess what:

A Sad Fact From Today's Bag of Hate Mail

Michael Mann called her column "the most intellectually bankrupt & misguided #climate piece yet." Which was mean! Also other people said mean things to her and to her editor about her! And after she was so even-handed.

Then McArdle gives us one last little both-sides wiggle ("long years of hurling increasingly angry imprecations has radicalized both sides"), which is probably meant to soften up anyone dumb enough to take it at face value before she rips into the alarmists again, harder than before: "the increasingly angry delegitimization of the skeptics" continues even though "skeptics have moved toward the activists" (no link, naturally) (wait, "skeptics"? what happened to "lukewarmists"? Wow, maybe they did write to her editor!). Finally:

A scientific approach would be to acknowledge that advocates' initial hypothesis -- that name calling will advance the cause -- has failed to be borne out by the experimental evidence. And to start looking for another hypothesis for how to move forward on climate change.

Hard times in the mill, indeed! At least she can console herself that neither words nor science will sort this out, but the market -- that is, the rich fucks who expect either to corner the market on alternative energy, or manage to afford a seat on a rocket to Elon Musk's space colonies when it all goes to shit.

PARDON MY FRENCH.

Are you shitting me:

Conservative columnist Bill Kristol is working to recruit David French, a writer for National Review, as a third-party presidential candidate, CBS News has confirmed.
"A group approached French, he's considering it seriously and is in contact with lots of serious people," a source with knowledge of the effort told CBS News.

I have followed French's career at National Review for years and will just quickly tell you that he's not only against gay marriage, he's also against Griswold v Connecticut, the decision that invalidated laws against contraception ("Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?" French thundered); that he denounced the widespread mourning of Prince's death on the grounds that "Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture... notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience"; that he has compared Kim Davis, that crazy clerk who refused to sign gay marriage licenses, to "men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox — the men who first put the 'protest' in 'Protestant'"; that he -- well, I'm out of time for the moment, but you can peruse the archive for more if you can stand it. The point is, he makes Trump look like Eisenhower.

UPDATE. I see Kristol's plan to elect David French President of the United States is getting a lot of press, from reputable outlets as well as from rightbloggers. Already there has been some controversy and an accusation of dirty tricks.  T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner announces, "Politico reporter badly mangles anecdote about David French's marriage, Iraq deployment." Kevin Robillard of Politico, it turns out, posted a screenshot -- a screenshot! -- of a passage from a Kathryn J. Lopez item on French in National Review that claimed French wouldn't let his wife communicate with men by email or use Facebook at all while he was deployed overseas because "David knew, with his 'stomach clenching,' that 'the most intimate conversations a person has are about life and faith' — and that 'spiritual and emotional intimacy frequently leads to physical intimacy.'" The screenshot is not faked, but Adams claimed Robillard "badly misrepresented" the passage  on the grounds that... well, he has no grounds; maybe he meant it was quoted out of context, but Adams reproduces more of Lopez's story and it doesn't make it look any less weird. I guess Adams means that when a wingnut's own words make him look bad, it's a smear job. (Update: A commenter notes the issue is the implication that Pere French laid down the rules for Mere French, as it was portrayed as a mutual decision. Good point, but still weird, and The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway doesn't make it less weird, raging that the Liberal Media think "David and Nancy French coming out of a deployment with an intact marriage is something we need to highlight and scoff at," whereas Bill Clinton had sex with an intern etc.)

Anyway I don't care about the guy's personal life, I only care about his ideas, which are insane. I'll be back with more, but for now I'll leave you with another screenshot, which I assure you is also not faked:

 

I know, authors don't choose their heds or graphics, but believe me, the article doesn't redeem it.

UPDATE 2. For French newbies, more on his interesting beliefs: After Dylann Roof's racial mass murders in Charleston, French wrote a post called "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed . . ." and it's just what you imagine, ending in a Paean to The Gun:

Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it... Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy...

Shudder. When people started feeling creepy about Confederate symbols because of Roof, French offered a qualified defense of the Lost Cause ("We of course agree that the Confederate states should not have left the Union, but it should be noted that the notion of secession was hardly universally condemned, even in the North").

French is also sour on academic tenure because it lets liberal professors teach without getting fired, but doesn't want it ended until he and his buddies are done "overhauling departments" (i.e., stuffing them with conservatives affirmative-action hires). He thinks you shouldn't worry that black people get killed so often by cops because, after all, so many of them are criminals, or at least suspected of crimes. And Lord how he hates them Mooslims.

In short, he's wrong about everything -- sometimes in entertainingly loony ways, but always wrong, which may explain his attraction for William Kristol. Nothing else does, though. The only thing French's candidacy can possibly achieve is the further normalization of the psychosis on the right.  Hmm -- maybe Kristol's smarter than he looks and this was his plan all along?

UPDATE 3. Well, he's got the crucial Quin Hillyer endorsement.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Libertarians' nomination of Gary Johnson for President and why rightbloggers find him an unacceptable Trump substitute. About the closest thing to a Johnson endorsement I've seen among the brethren comes from Aaron Goldstein at the American Spectator, and it's not all that close: After revealing that he once attended a Tea Party rally at which Johnson spoke but "didn’t really hear his remarks because I was busy speaking with Tea Party activists and being interviewed" -- wonderful life he lives -- Goldstein says he's "willing to consider voting for him in November" cuz Trump Hillary yuk. However:

While I have some sympathy for the libertarian point of view, I think they are generally naive on foreign policy. They can talk military non-intervention and the elimination of foreign aid all they want. They can’t wish away the United States’ position in the world.

With this in mind, I can only hope that Johnson has some degree of pragmatism and realism in his thinking. Specifically, I have questions particularly where it concerns the Iran nuclear deal...

Yeah, you get it: Goldstein's like a guy who says he's okay with gay marriage but do they have hold hands where his kids can see them etc. I've said a lot of mean things about libertarians in the past, but I must admit this Johnson thing is really distinguishing them from the conservatarian phonies at least.

SORRY YOU'RE SUCH A DUMBASS.

It gets tiresome:

• Wingnuts like Sarah Palin spread bullshit (Obama apology tour Hiroshima skreeeee!)
• The bullshit is blue-checkmark-verified as bullshit.
• Credentialed conservatives deliver a qualified defense of the bullshit in the form of harrumphs ("[Charles] Krauthammer: Obama's 'Implicit Apology' in Hiroshima 'Dishonored Our Nation'")

We get an especially creepy version of that last stage from Claudia Rosett at PJ Media:

No, Obama did not explicitly apologize for America's dropping of the atomic bomb. Rather, he worked around to it by implication, stripping the act of almost all historical context, lumping together all civilizations and nations, and all wars -- whatever the reasons -- in one big stew, and urging, as his solution for the planet (imperfect America included), a "moral revolution" of which he evidently considers himself the prophet...

On and on she goes with this elevated speech ("one of Obama's prime rhetorical tools, here on full display, is the logical fallacy," yecch) for thousands of words, eventually getting to this:

Obama ended his speech by calling on the world to choose a future "in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare, but as the start of our own moral awakening." 

That's a neat rhetorical flourish, a dollop of whipped cream on the narrative jello. It's also an apology for America. It resets the world's clock to Obama-time; implying that Truman was morally asleep when, as this narrative has it, out of the blue sky he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima. As one more slap at America from America's own president, it is far more likely to embolden America's enemies than to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons.

So, an anodyne sentiment at a public event encouraging men of good will to look to the future is reinterpreted as a gesture of contempt toward the past. Stands to reason -- if you think things might get better, then you must think everyone who came before you was stupid, fighting World War II was a mistake and Truman was an asshole! Well, you can do what you want to us, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!

No one will attentively read Rosett's whole skein, but true believers will scan the end and see that someone who knows big words said Obama's speech was "an apology for America," and that's what they'll remember, even years from now in their survivalist bunkers -- that time Obama apologized for Hiroshima, between the time he made Islam our national religion and the time he got a judge to go after a perfectly innocent Donald Trump.

One of the good things about this wretched election cycle is that the propaganda has gotten so shitty, if it still works we'll know there's no hope.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yo La Tengo does John Cale. What's not to like?
•   Not yet feeling the holiday weekend zest? Then figuratively haul your sorry ass to The Sherman Oaks Review of Books which has plenty of fresh-enough content including a bagatelle by me and other yukworthy objects including "John Fogerty Doesn’t Understand This Thing Called Rain" and others. If that doesn't work, there's always liquor.

•   Just the other day Jonah Goldberg was telling us how he'd never vote for Trump but Hillary was worse than Trump but he would never vote for Trump, wink fart. This appears to be his #NeverTrump modified limited hangout route for the election cycle.  Today Goldberg offers another example:

From the earliest days of this [email] scandal — and it is a scandal — Clinton has lied. Unlike Donald Trump’s lies, which he usually vomits up spontaneously like a vesuvian geyser, Clinton’s were carefully prepared, typed up, and repeated for all the world to hear over and over again.

I would think this is an important distinction.

Really? Why? (Besides this is how you ever got a job in the first place.)

Neither of the candidates is worthy of the office in my eyes, but voters might discount many of Trump’s deceits as symptoms of his glandular personality. Much like Vice President Joe Biden, who always gets a pass for launching errant fake-fact missiles from the offline silo that is his mouth, Trump is often seen as entertainingly spontaneous.

Meanwhile, Clinton — who lives many time zones away from the word “entertaining” — is marketing herself as the mature and upstanding grown-up. She does nothing spontaneously. And that means all of her lies are premeditated.

At least it'll be fun boy Hillary whattabitch huh fart.

A MOMENT OF REFLECTION.

Sometimes you have to wonder... 

Obama’s Fancy New Mansion Is Located 1,000 Feet From The Islamic Center Of Washington DC

...do they really mean it? Can they really mean it?

The mammoth, multi-million-dollar mansion where President Barack Obama and his family will reportedly live after the first family exits the White House is located 1,096 feet from the Islamic Center of Washington — one of the largest mosques in the Western Hemisphere...

I mean, can anyone intelligent enough to write complete sentences be that stupid? This has to be a willful impersonation of a stupid person, yes? So as to attract people like the person he's pretending to be?

The Tudor-style residence is just a 10-minute drive from Sidwell Friends School, Sasha Obama’s school. (RELATED: The School Lunches Malia And Sasha Eat Vs. The Crap Michelle Obama Has Foisted On America)... 

Or is there another explanation? Maybe "education editor" Eric Owens is new, and being hazed by his colleagues?

In addition to the Islamic Center of Washington, the embassy of Oman and the former embassy of Iran are very close to Obama’s new mansion. 

Could it be that their cynicism goes even deeper? That not only the editors but also the readers know that they're full of shit? That somewhere along the line the Daily Caller just decided, you know what, there isn't even any point in trying to make it look good -- hell, let's just make these propaganda stories ridiculously obvious, so obvious no one could take them seriously, and we'll all just have a laugh about it and then punch out at five and go on with our lives?

Follow Eric on Twitter. Like Eric on Facebook. Send crazy conspiracy theories and tinfoil to erico@dailycaller.com. 

We must consider the possibility, overgenerous as it may seem.

DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:

Don't Blame the Republican Party for the Rise of Trump

Because he's the Democratic nominee presumptive? No. Because he's the nominee presumptive in some other party that isn't the Republican Party? No. Because [throws a handful of dirt in your face, runs]. This may be the worst thing McArdle has ever written. Seriously, look at this:

Or maybe those liberals shouldn't be forgiven so easily. I’ve been pondering these theories -- advanced by everyone from Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Bill Maher -- and the thing is, they don’t make a heck of a lot of sense. They seem to posit a Republican electorate that is, on the one hand, so malleable that the GOP leadership could create the emotional conditions for a Trump candidacy -- and on the other hand, a Republican electorate so surly and unmanageable that it has ignored the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals, in order to rally behind Trump.

That there is some bullshit, and not just because what she presents as either-or choices are not mutually exclusive, but also because both the "either" and the "or" are gibberish. GOP voters don't have to be "malleable" to turn from covertly pyscho to overtly psycho: They only needed to suffer through two Black President terms, bookended by the humiliation of George W. Bush (hey, wonder if the Republicans will finally invite him to a convention this year?) and the recent Gay/Trans Apotheosis, for their psycho-sap to rise and run over all by itself.

Neither is there anything weird about the Trumpenproletariat "ignoring the horrified pleading of conservative leaders and intellectuals." Who, aside from some National Review cruise-goers and Inner Circle party donors, has ever cared what Jonah Goldberg and Billy Kristol said or thought? The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up -- hell, they were hot for President Sarah Palin until she decided to run a safer grift. And before Ronald Reagan's elevation to sainthood, he was just a talking doll with a nice smile and strong appeal to the Strom Thurmond wing of the Party -- which wing never went away, but only got older, grimmer, and mad that they can't say the n-word anymore because of political correctness.

The rest is also crap and who has time, but I will say that anyone who writes "triple-distilled balderdash … high-test twaddle … self-congratulatory swill … nonsense on stilts" ought to be sent to a young-fogey rest home and given plenty of sedatives.

Believe it or don't, McArdle was still out-crazied -- but, less surprisingly, by David French:

The American people need the chance to make a better choice. Given the stakes of the election, to simply leave the race to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is to guarantee a terrible presidency marked by incompetence and cronyism. There is just one hope — however slim — of avoiding this national disaster: America needs a third option.

And at this point, Mitt Romney is the only man who combines the integrity, financial resources, name recognition, and broad public support to make a realistic independent run at the presidency.

Does French actually think Romney has a chance in hell? He has at least enough brain cells left to be sneaky with his answer:

A third-party Romney bid would introduce the chance of a different outcome, giving millions of Americans the important option to choose a man of integrity as their president.

Similarly, millions of Americans had the important option to choose windshield washer fluid over Coca-Cola as their beverage at lunch. It could happen!

But the goo-goo ga-ga winner is David Marcus at (where else?) The Federalist:

How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

Long story short, liberals are talking about bad things white people do, and how else can a rational honky react except by going neo-Nazi?

White people are being asked -- or pushed -- to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more.

I see a crying cowboy in Oklahoma, who can't watch TV no more without seeing them Key and Peele fellers talking down His People -- and since you libtards injected race into things, this is forcing the cowboy to "identify with it more." Marcus laments:

This is a remarkably bad idea. The last thing our society needs is for white people to feel more tribal. The result of this tribalism will not be a catharsis of white identity, improving equality for non-whites. It will be resentment towards being the only tribe not given the special treatment bestowed by victimhood.

When we start lynching people, remember who started it! Why must you always provoke us.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' slow, shuffling shift from #NeverTrump to accommodation. It's not like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so much, as like what happens in real life to people when they convince themselves that, say, $4.49 a pound isn't too much to pay for tomatoes. Except, you know, sinister.

UPDATE. I am delighted to see my column promoted in a tweet from the John Hospers Foundation. Now that's a name I'd not heard in a long time! The preface to the Foundation website begins, "Ayn Rand and John Hospers had a stormy intellectual love affair," but alas it does not deliver on that racy promise. I can tell you, though, these cowboys are not going Trump.

A HAND-JOB, NOT A HAND-OUT.

So, why are conservatives all het up over Facebook and its alleged prejudice against them? I don't normally give much credence to the totally mental Glenn Beck, but something in his whining coverage of the meeting Zuckerberg arranged over the affair with prominent wingnuts struck a nerve:

I sat there looking around and heard things like:  

1) Facebook has a very liberal workforce. Has Facebook considered diversity in their hiring practice? The country is 2% Mormon. Maybe Facebook’s company should better reflect that reality.  

2) Maybe Facebook should consider a six-month training program to help their biased and liberal workforce understand and respect conservative opinions and values.  

3) We need to see strong and specific steps to right this wrong.  

It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges... 

What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?

"What happened to us?" Oh Glennda, where have you been? Conservatives are constantly demanding affirmative action, and have been for years. They want affirmative action on Ivy League faculties. They want affirmative action in the mainstream media. They want affirmative action in Hollywood. And so on. Whenever they don't dominate a field, they shriek and wail that it's because they're being oppressed by all-powerful liberals.

And the funny part is, what's really going on is they just can't compete in those marketplaces. If conservatism were what everyone wanted, then they wouldn't need to force Harvard to hire more wingnut professors -- they could just put a little more money in the marketing budgets of Bob Jones, Liberty University, and various other Bible colleges, and watch them become the new Ivy League. This solution to the "Academic Discrimination against Conservatives" that guys like David French of National Review complain about is obvious, indeed self-evident, and completely consonant with supposed free-market values -- surely the Invisible Hand will reward wingnut schools over socialist ones? -- yet they never even bring it up for some reason.

Same's true with Facebook. Why are conservatives blubbering over their underrepresentation on this corrupt liberal social media site they hate so much, anyway? Hasn't the current crisis alerted The People to Facebook's communist provenance? And since The People are with the Right, surely they'll abandon these commie sites toot suite for rightwing ones. Look, here's Freedombook -- which started as Reaganbook and came back in 2014 with its new, freedom-loving name. Since America loves conservatism, surely citizens must be abandoning Facebook in droves -- especially now that they know it's prejudiced against the comedy stylings of Steve Crowder! -- and flocking to Freedombook. Yet I haven't been reading about this new social media phenomenon,  even in National Review and Commentary. Why not?

Because they know it's bullshit, that's why not. Yet everyone, including Zuckerberg, indulges them, because it's easier to make believe they have legitimate grievances than to tell them, "If you don't like it, fuck off to Freedombook and see how far you get," and bear their tantrums afterward. Sigh! This political correctness will be the death of us all.

THE PRIVATES WAR OF ROD DREHER, CONT.

"Yes, Sir, welcome to Mellor's, what can I do for you?"
"It's Miss."
"Excuse me?"
"It's Miss, thank you."
"Nah, I'm going to keep calling you Sir."
"What?"
"You look like a dude to me. I'm not calling you Miss."
"Well, that's rude."
"Take it or leave it, Mister."
"I'm going to report you to the HRC."
"Shriek, wail, you're oppressing me."

"Seriously," Rod Dreher complains of the requirement that New York businesses refer to the customer by his, her, or (why not) hir pronoun of choice, "how does a business owner operate under these conditions, even a business owner who wants to do the right thing?" I suppose for Dreher just not being a douchebag isn't an option.

COGITO ERGO SOME ASSHOLE.

We do make fun of Victor Davis Hanson, Professor Emeritus of Stolen Messican Chainsaw Studies at National Review, for his addiction to ancient rightwing tropes. But it's hard not to. I mean, talk about long memories -- Obama made a crack about the Special Olympics in March 2009, and Hanson was still going on about it as recently as February 2016. Hanson can to this day be counted on to summon the ghosts of slur-campaigns past such as Jeremiah Wright's "God Damn America" as if they were still in the first bloom of youth. But today he outdoes himself:

The Pajama Boy White House

Honest to God, Pajama Boy -- that object of butched-up wingnut rage from three years ago! Long shitfit short, Professor Hanson associates the Obama Administration with sundry unmanly phenomena -- "prolonged adolescence," "the disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor," "the shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media," etc. -- which, to the extent they have anything at all to do with objective reality, go back decades, not to 2009; the decline of real-man occupations like manufacturing, for example, really kicked into high gear during the Reagan Administration.

But no matter -- there was an OFA employee named Ethan Krupp who appeared in an Obamacare ad in his pajamas, and hadn't the decency to feel ashamed about it! Professor Hanson coldly intones:

 Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas...

Dayton or Huntsville are butch places, see -- the masculine signifiers "Hunt" and "Ton" appear in their very names.

...with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

Then, killing Japs; now, trans-chick craps! Vanitas, vanitas, moans Professor Hanson with the back of his wrist pressed to his forehead, but in a manly way. As he further contemplates the unapologetic cocoa-sipping sissy, he works himself up to a fine, Dr. Smith in Lost in Space lather:

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.

Professor Hanson bets that electrician would whale the tar out of Pajama Boy! Hanson has the card of an electrician in his Rolodex! That man is a fine specimen, and Professor Hanson could tell by the cruel way he once balled up a napkin and forcefully threw it in the trash that he'd beat up Pajama Boy, and perhaps let Professor Hanson hold him while he did it! (Pajama Boy, he means.)

Krupp is emblematic of an entire class of young smart-asses found in Silicon Valley, on campuses across the nation, and in Hollywood, and now ensconced at the highest levels of American government and journalism. Do we remember Jonathan Gruber...

Gruber -- ooh, I see we're headed back down Memory Lane, and Professor Hanson has thousands of words left; he keeps mashing Ethan Krupp into Obama, going "See that guy? That's what you look like!" ("​Pajama Boy arrested-development references? 'I’m LeBron, baby'... Pajama Boy ignorance? If you forget that the politically correct version of the Falklands’ name is 'Malvinas,' then just plug in 'Maldives'..."), before collapsing into a Euripides quote, a goblet of Opimian wine, and perhaps, to keep from having to live in this rotten effeminate world, a knife to his own guts -- but ha, mater facit, as if! In Professor Hanson's fantasies, it's always someone else who gets it, just around the corner.