Tuesday, September 13, 2016

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I saw this Yahoo headline...
Trump campaign brings on A.J. Delgado as a senior adviser
...and thought, oh no -- not our A.J. Delgado! I first noticed her in 2012 when Breitbart.com pimped her culture-war book called, I swear to Christ, "Hip to Be Square: Why It's Cool to Be a Conservative." This repurposed press release tipped us to some of Delgado's hipsquare proof points: "An analysis of three 'South Park' episodes blasting the Left," "'The Lord of the Rings' and its conservative message," "Johnny Rotten, Siouxsie Sioux, and Bob Dylan defending Israel," etc. When I made fun of her about it, she came to alicublog to say I'd proven her point "about the general nasty tone of liberals these days."

I should have known then that Delgado was a rising star of her movement. She got picked up by National Review, for which she produced a bunch of Kulturkampf crap -- for example, a review of a film about Jim Jones and the People's Temple in which she asked the crucial question, "Does the film represent the truth — i.e., Jones’s leftism?" and decided it had because in some scenes Jones "bemoans issues at the top of any leftist’s top-gripes list: 'poverty, violence, greed, and racism.'" And what conservative would think those were bad things?

For National Review Delgado also did a screed against Nicki Minaj with lines like "gents might need a cigarette after watching the video," "How is this even sexy, rather than sad, desperate, and repulsive?" "This openly sexual, anything-goes mentality may have taken off several years ago, with Katy Perry’s 'I Kissed a Girl,'" "Beyonce, who once profited off her good-girl image, buried that persona last year under half-naked magazine covers," etc. Pitchfork really missed the boat on this one.

Delgado tried her hand at bullshit libertarianism, too, with "It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police," presumably to give herself plausible deniability in case that Libertarian Moment thing that was going around took off. It didn't, of course, and now Delgado is with Trumpbart, where she is peddled as Trump's "Latina" advisor, e.g. "A.J. Delgado: Why this Latina is for Trump." She's also involved with Trump's female-voter outreach and was front-and-center for the unveiling of Trump's maternity-leave scheme -- which would be awkward if anyone knew what she was saying about maternity leave a few years ago.

But it doesn't really matter -- Trump's plan is just another grift, as is Delgado's support for it. And Trumpbart is just another place for for junior wingnuts to earn their stripes. Well, as those stressed-out-looking birds on The Flintstones used to say, it's a living.

Monday, September 12, 2016

RABID.

Let's see what's on at National Review's front page. Their top five stories:
Hillary’s Health — Let’s Talk about the Facts
Hillary Clinton, Allergic to Transparency

The Most Ridiculous Reactions to Hillary Clinton’s Fainting
  
(Spoiler: The "ridiculous reactions" are the ones suggesting she's not about to die)
Hillary Can’t Afford a Repeat of Sunday Morning’s Health Issue

The Historical Amnesia about Hillary’s Health
Notice a pattern? Rather than wade through each of these pieces of shit, let's take one equally emblematic example at Commentary by Jonathan S. Tobin. He starts with some phumphery about how the health problems of Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy demand Clinton's pneumonia "be treated with the greatest seriousness." But he knows he can't keep that up -- even Commentary readers have gag reflexes -- so he tries some more reliable shtick. For example, how about the old Questions Remain?
While most serious people dismissed the rumors about Clinton’s health that were being circulated by Donald Trump’s supporters, what happened Sunday morning will deepen suspicions both about her health and whether her campaign has been telling the truth about it...
It's not that we serious people really think something's wrong, but it's leaving deep suspicions, you see, into which somebody might fall and hurt themselves, and whose fault will that be? Besides which, since we're always calling her a liar, you pretty much have to believe our crackpot theories about her:
On hot days, people can get dehydrated standing around under the sun. But for Clinton to falter in this manner undermines her campaign’s preferred narrative, which characterizes all questions about her health as smears. And if people are prepared to believe the worst about Clinton’s health, it’s due in part to her consistently lying about matters such as her email scandal and the conflicts of interest involving the Clinton Foundation...
Guess they've left off #Benghazi for good. Eventually Tobin gets relaxed enough that he can afford to admit, "up until now, Clinton has actually been far more forthcoming about her health than Trump." Sure, why shouldn't he? After all, it doesn't matter, because she could be as transparent as The Visible Woman and it wouldn't make any difference:
It is no longer possible for her to refuse to give us more until Trump is equally forthcoming. Clinton must now come completely clean with detailed medical reports and allow her doctors to be questioned by reporters with medical expertise. Given his age, Trump should do the same. As is the case with his tax returns, it’s doubtful that the billionaire will release a single document. But he’s not the one whose health is currently in question. [emphasis mine]
Trump literally phones in his interviews, he's observably obese, and his face looks like corned beef from a Blarney Stone steam table, but if he refuses to give us his health records, well, whattaya gonna do? That darn Trump! OK, lady, pee in this cup.

The brethren have entered that weird phase of nontroversy -- the blind spot between polls, where they know everyone's paying attention but they don't know how everyone's taking it. They do know, however, that since their target is Hillary Clinton, Villagers such as Cokie Roberts ("it has [Democrats] very nervously beginning to whisper about her stepping aside and finding another candidate") will happily give them some big paddles with which to stir the shit.

This explains the hysterical edge in their coverage; they feel that, if only they can stir violently enough, the resulting stink will awaken the masses.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' 9/11 and how it perked up when Hillary Clinton got sick. The revival of the wingnut trope that Hillary is too infirm to serve as President was almost as funny/sad as their pivot, once it was revealed that Clinton had pneumonia, to outrage that she had briefly concealed a temporary illness and thus made them all look like idiots. National Review's Rich Lowry, who earlier in the day had disputed Clinton's claims of dehydration ("It isn’t a particularly hot day in New York City today; in fact, it is gorgeous"), upon being informed of her illness sputtered:
Here’s hoping she gets well soon, but...
Ugh, that quick "but" says so much, doesn't it?
...1) not for the first time, a Clinton has made his or her supporters look silly -- they spent a lot of time and energy pooh-poohing the health concerns...
Sure, it was Hillary's people who looked silly.
...2) she was diagnosed on Friday -- when did she plan on letting everyone else know?
I wouldn't be surprised if she had loose stools sometime during her illness. Would Lowry like updates when these occur? Maybe they can send him samples. The rest of the brethren are doing what they can with it; the New York Post says her diagnosis "settles nothing" because OKAY BOYS BREAK OUT THE ALEX JONES SHIT AGAIN: "We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too..."

I guess these days, fed as they have been on a diet of crap pseudo-news for decades, wingnuts are sufficiently addicted to conspiracy theories that they'll read something like that and go, "It's just like the black helicopters -- my friends told me they weren't real but then I saw that Transformers movie..." But are there enough of them to win a national election?

UPDATE. Rod Dreher brings the porch-biddy perspective: "A new angle. That poor woman." (Ha ha, oh please.) "Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?" Earlier Dreher published one of his famous reader letters, in this case purportedly from a doctor:
It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you...

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.
It's like those "I never believed Reagan coins would cure my cancer until today" stories popular in wingnut media. Was Rod conned, or is he the con artist? Why not both?

UPDATE 2. That Dr. Vinnie Boombatz gets around! Like Dreher, Scott Johnson of Power Line also has an anonymous alleged doctor -- a "prominent internist" who, based on his study of YouTube videos, diagnoses possible "aspiration pneumonia," which is "commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease" -- both, as it happens, popular wingnut conspiracy theories. Dr. Boombatz ends by saying "someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records... Every voter should know what’s at stake," which is a curiously stark political pitch -- but I suspect Dr. Boombatz had some assistance from his scribe.

Friday, September 09, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Saw Television at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday; they were in pretty good shape. 
But they didn't play anything from Adventure, which I love.
So here's some of that.

•   Matt Lauer is getting pounded from several directions for aggressively questioning Hillary Clinton while failing to impede Trump's river of bullshit.  One such complaint comes from Jonathan Chait, who says that the problem is Lauer's false equivalence: "television personalities like Lauer... are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian..." At National Review Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke leaps on this; Chait has written against political correctness before, he informs us, and that the entertainment industry is full of liberals! Yyyeah, A. Normal Person might respond, so? What's that got to do with a lame journalist letting Donald Trump steamroll him? Because Matt Lauer is more widely seen than your average New Republic writer, says Cooke; hence he is pop culture, and since pop culture is you liberals' fault so is Matt Lauer:
Or, to put it another way: Most people aren’t reading “elite print news sources,” they’re watching mainstream television and going to the movies, and these sources are both teaching them what to think in ways that political-opinion magazines never will. 
Today, Chait is less “may or may not be unfair” and more “horrified.” Why? Well, because now he believes that pop culture — which is just as shallow and dumb as it’s always been; Lauer is no anomaly — is hurting him and his party. And we can’t have that!

Welcome to the club, comrade. 
Because Cooke has a British accent, some people may assume him cultivated, yet he lumps journalism in with "mainstream television" (as opposed to edgy, fringe television like The Five, I guess) and movies, just like your average dumbass culture warrior who takes it on faith that Field Marshall Chomsky Cloward-Piven Alinsky is conducting everything that appears before the public (except some brave truth-tellers like the staff of National Review) in one grand symphony of socialism, and that if one Liberal Cultural Agent does something that fails to advance the cause, all libtarddom is thrown into a tizzy, or at least will be when Charles TMI Cooke calls them out. How a grown man can get through life without apparently meeting an artist and understanding why he does what he does (hint: it's not on orders from Moscow), I can't guess; more evidence, I suppose, that these changelings are raised in vats and educated in Skinner Boxes before being sluiced into their editorial pens and wingnut sinecures.


• To some sad specimens of humanity, everything is politics. At The Federalist Rachel Lu gushes at first over the Minnesota State Fair, where she had the opportunity to display her vegetables, which make her proud if not eloquent ("My tomatillos were bursting with freshness, still wet with morning dew, and packed with the trademark tomatillo tang" -- sounds like a cigarette ad from the 50s) as well as some ornamental gourds, which won her a prize. But then, after the ceremonies, Lu is told that they throw away the exhibits and she can't have hers back. She has an extended fit, and finally reveals that this condition appeared in the rules of the competition, presented to her ahead of time; since she is a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility, this naturally cuts no ice with her:
I had read the rule book. My eyes had passed over those words. If I had back-checked all the numbers, I could have deduced that my display would be peremptorily confiscated against my will. I just made the ridiculous mistake of assuming the rules would make some sort of sense.
When it comes to entitlement, Lu makes Megan McArdle look like Albert Schweizer. But the best part is the inevitable connection of Lu's personal inconvenience with sociamalism:
As a conservative, I do feel a little foolish for having learned the hard way that bureaucratic rules are unreasonable. Hadn’t I read about the Sacketts and their fight with the Environmental Protection Agency? Did I need a personal one-on-one with Clive Bundy to get this?...

It could have been worse. I lost eight beautiful gourds that I grew with my own hands, and gained a salutary reminder that nothing lovely should voluntarily be delivered into the clutches of the state. When bureaucrats are involved, the rules will trump beauty, truth, and human feeling every time. Even at the Minnesota State Fair.
Maybe next year she'll start her own, privatized state fair, safe from the clutches of the collectivist Minnesota State Agricultural Society. The entry fees might be a little higher -- nothing good happens without a profit motive! -- but it'll be worth it because you won't have to follow rules that don't make sense (to Rachel Lu, anyway).

Thursday, September 08, 2016

GRADING ON THE CURVE.

Fuckin' Dreher, man. He's just too rich a subject. There's his post about Brown University providing free tampons in its unisex bathrooms -- which he finds an outrage ("virtue-signaling at its finest, from tomorrow’s generation of American elites") and closes with a link to a video of Putin laughing, no doubt because this is how great civilizations fall: by failing to require females pay for sanitary products, the way St. Paul intended. (The really creepy thing about that post is, Dreher doesn't even bother to explain why anyone should find such a modest change a threat to society -- it's like free tampons are ungodly or something.)

Anyway, today Dreher pimps a Peter Hitchens First Things essay about how sure, Putin is bad, but the Soviet Union was worse so shut up about Crimea. One of the sections Dreher quotes is particularly worthy of note:
A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre [in Moscow], is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.
Very poetic, but if the grass and trees were being fertilized by human bodies, wouldn't they be flourishing, not stunted and bad? I guess maybe their growth was actually suppressed by totalitarianism, in a sort of reverse miracle.


Anyway Dreher swallows this whole, and then tells us about some kid who played Pokemon Go in a Russian church and, under the enlightened reign of the current not-Soviet leaders, faces five years in prison for it. Dreher:
They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.
If only the Bolsheviks had possessed Pokemon Go, and expressed their barbarism by catching imaginary creatures instead of Christians!  Later, after (apparently) even Dreher's fans protested, he updates:
Since so many of you asked, I would not give this guy five years. I would not give him five weeks. I would give him five days, max. What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces.
Sacred spaces yes, safe spaces no!
It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.
Next time you read some of Dreher's "You will be made to care," "Law of unmerited possibilities" bullshit about how transgender Hitler is trying to curbstomp Christianity with the power of the State, keep this in mind.


Oh, and if you can take any more, get a load of Dreher's post on the author of Eat, Pray, Love leaving her husband for a woman, and this update:
In an earlier version of this post, I had some very caustic commentary about Gilbert’s words here. A friend and reader of this blog e-mailed me to point out that I was guilty of the sin of ingratitude. Gilbert had generously blurbed a book of mine, and in this reader’s view, I was wrong to be so nasty about this affair in her life...
I like to think the "friend and reader" was his agent.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's trips to Mexico and Detroit, and what they were meant to achieve. Though rightbloggers may pretend to think so, no one really believes Trump will make much headway with black and Hispanic voters. It’s now axiomatic that Trump talks about non-white people as a way of talking to white people.

What’s more interesting is to consider why he bothers to talk to them. It's possible that Trump’s people are trying to remove any embarrassment from the decision to vote for Trump; if, for example, white folks are embarrassed by his racially-insensitive statements, maybe if his team shows him in a black church  or standing at a lectern next to a Mexican President, that’ll ease their minds -- the presumption being that white people really want to vote for Trump and will do so if only you remove these perceptual roadblocks with a little theater.

As I mention in the column, there's a problem with this theory: It's hard to believe anyone who might vote for Trump would also be thinking, 'I dunno, maybe he's too racist."  But maybe I've been looking at it the wrong way: Maybe the Trump team's presumption is that a majority of voters really want Trump just because he's a famous TV star and a classy name brand, and the things he says don't really matter -- they're just mistakes he keeps making; or, rather, he's doing what he's supposed to by acting brashly "politically incorrect" -- the problem is, he has to be offensive to achieve that effect. It's a dilemma!

This might explain the vagueness and vacuity of his policies, as shown by the recent confusion over whether he was "softening" or "hardening" his immigration plan.  To him, it's a nuisance that policies have to be part of the pitch in the first place. If only he could be silently resolute-yet-compassionate and let that be the end of it! If he can't, then the next best thing is to treat that whole part of the job, the meaning part, with such breezy contempt that eventually no one knows what to believe except that Trump is Trump.

It may turn out that immigration was never, as it was commonly portrayed back at the outset of his campaign, the come-on for Trump; maybe neither populism nor racism are important to it, either. it was always Trump himself as the gold-plated, silk-suited avatar of Americans’ hopes and dreams. I leave it up to you whether that’s more or less depressing than thinking he's a fascist.

Monday, September 05, 2016

HAPPY LOST PRODUCTIVITY DAY!

My Village Voice column, usually seen on Mondays, is delayed a day for the federal Labor Day holiday. As I have observed in the past, conservatives used to let this official recognition of the labor movement pass quietly, or with a grudging show of respect -- hell, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post used to print the lyrics to movement anthems like "Pie in the Sky" on its editorial page!  But in recent years they've gotten tetchy about it. Today's Post ed page concentrates instead on demonizing gay people -- in other words, it's just another day! And elsewhere in the alternative rightwing universe, the brethren dream of getting rid of Labor Day, or at least the reason for it.

At Front Page magazine, Matthew Vadum rejoices that Grover Cleveland's institution of Labor Day diverted attention from the redder May Day. (Vadum also rejoices that during the Pullman strike Cleveland "deployed U.S. troops to Chicago to preserve property rights," i.e. to mow down strikers.) He seems to think the holiday's inception helped bring down labor unions, which would make it very slow-acting poison indeed; but mostly he's just glad that nobody knows anymore what the IWW is:
Americans don’t care about the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them. They don’t care that the movement is dying, and in most cases aren’t even aware it’s in rough shape. And that too is a good thing.
Too bad he didn't follow his logic all the way out, and call for citizens to celebrate Labor Day by going to work -- then we'd really know they'd gotten the message!

At Conservative Review, Nate Madden is closer to the mark with "INSTEAD OF LABOR DAY, WHY NOT MAKE CONSTITUTION DAY THE NEW NATIONAL HOLIDAY?" "Innovation" and "market forces" have made unions obsolete, he declares: "Thanks to modern technology and market innovation, workers are better equipped to look out for their own rights, make their own hours, and negotiate their income than ever before in human history." Get with the gig economy, comrades, and maximize your pre-dawn hours driving for Uber instead of parasitically sleeping! In place of labor, Madden says, we should celebrate the Constitution, or rather the rightwing talking points with which such as he always frame it, e.g., "We have a federal administrative state that usurps power from the several states at every turn..." Hell, maybe he can convince citizens that unions and the Civil War were both huge mistakes!

Trey Sanchez of Truth Revolt, alas, cannot bring himself to dream big like that, and mainly grumbles that the Kenyan Pretender went on and on about "workers" and "labor" in his holiday address: "He left no time to thank capitalism, the free market, American entrepreneurs, innovators, or risk-takers. Just himself and organized labor," Sanchez sulks. Don't worry, guy -- when Trump gets in, the Presidential Labor Day Address will be replaced by a sale flyer.

At the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer presents us with "A Labor Day Conundrum: What Happened to American Productivity?" U.S. productivity has been climbing for decades, even as wages have stagnated, but Stelzer sees it dropping off a little and says it won't do:
The economy has created more than a million jobs so far this year, but it hasn't increased its output of stuff very much. If millions more workers can only manage to produce the same amount of goods and services, output per worker— productivity—is declining. Think of it as a 12-inch pizza that once required two chefs to produce, but now has three on the job, perhaps because the oven is old and prone to break down (or the chefs are busy taking selfies, but that's another story for another day).  
Goddamn lazy pizza makers! Two on a pizza, so they have plenty of time to goof off and take selfies -- hmmph, must be millennials too! Anyway, they'll get theirs, because "the two original chefs now have to share their pie with another worker because their productivity has declined." And don't come crying to Paul Ryan for calzone benefits!

Leave it to National Review to find the heartstring-tugging angle:
I was Forced to Join a Union
Now it can be told! Ripped from today's headlines!  “As a condition of my employment as a professor at George Washington University, I must pay the SEIU every month,” wails Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who apparently couldn't find employment at some right-to-work college like Liberty University and so was forced to accept the onerous terms of a top-tier D.C. university.

“Of course, the SEIU will say that I am not forced to join the union and pay the $36 monthly dues,” she laments. “Instead, I can pay a monthly agency fee of $29.38. But I have to do one or the other.” How will Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a lowly former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, make ends meet? Maybe she should ask the SEIU-repped security guards and nursing home aides (from whom you never hear these kinds of complaints, doubtless due to censorship) how they do it.
The SEIU might also say that in return for the dues or agency fees, they bargain on my behalf with George Washington University. I have no need for anyone to represent me. I can represent myself. If GW does not offer me enough to make it worthwhile for me to teach, I can look elsewhere or find other employment.
If Diana Furchtgott-Roth can do it, so can the bedpan-cleaners and watchmen. But whatever they do, they absolutely shouldn't band together to increase their bargaining power -- because, as Furchtgott-Roth's case proves, that only leads to unfairness.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

THE LONG-AWAITED END OF #NEVERTRUMP.

So Il Douche went to Mexico, couldn't get them to pay for the wall, and slunk back home -- and changed from being a fearless advocate for America in the Trade Wars to an advocate for our "hemisphere."

Seems to me like just another olio in the Trump vaudeville -- but look at the heretofore Trump-skeptical conservatives who think it was fantastic:

I mean, sure, you expect auto-sellouts like Byron York, who got on the Trump train last year, to suck up ("Mexico Gamble a Huge Win"). Ditto Hindrocket from Power Line ("TRUMP'S TRIUMPHANT TRIP TO MEXICO"). But what about Legal Insurrection's Kimberley Kaye? Back in January she was trembling like Lucy in The Searchers over the Trump invasion:
Watching the rise of this new populism, one of my many concerns is whether the charlatans wearing the cape of Conservatism will damage its value, diminish its meaning, and in general, confuse those who know no difference. But then I see people like Sen. [Ben] Sasse and I’m somewhat relieved.
Today Kaye's a lot more fair-and-balanced ("WATCH LIVE: DONALD TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION SPEECH... Did they talk about the wall or didn’t they? THE MEDIA WANTS TO KNOW" -- haw haw, that stupid media!), and her commenters are even easier to read ("I can hear the Jacobin Rags head exploding now").

Let's visit Erick Erickson -- surely this #NeverTrump leader ("it is important to go on record now, while he can be stopped, that we will play no part in his rise") sees through this nonsense?
Two Things Donald Trump Got Absolutely Right
GTFO.
First, Donald Trump and Mike Pence went to Louisiana. In the midst of terrible devastation, while President Obama was on vacation and Hillary Clinton was fundraising, Team Trump went to Louisiana. They drew positive media exposure and looked Presidential.
The Play-Doh that Proved a Presidentiality!
Second, Trump went to Mexico and Hillary did not. I think the positives of the trip outweigh the negatives. The Mexican President’s refusal to contradict Trump on stage about whether they discussed the wall only made him look petty and meek afterwards.
Clearly in a Presidential runoff between Trump and Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump has the edge.
Trump’s speech this evening has, I think, done him no favors outside his base, but going to Mexico today worked.
To paraphrase Sam Houston, Erickson has all the qualities of a prostitute, except hard limits. But surely there's someone at erstwhile #NeverTrump HQ National Review who can at least face up to Trump's failure? Not so far! Jim Geraghty:
Part One of Donald Trump’s busy Wednesday is complete and the meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto went pretty well...
The headline is that Trump and Pena Nieto discussed border security and building a wall, but didn’t discuss Trump’s frequent pledge that Mexico would pay to build the wall. But the brief press conference between the two men was cordial, and no shoes or rotten fruit were thrown. Trump may have read aloud his prepared statement with all of the sincerity and comfort of a hostage tape, but all in all, it looked like any other meeting of an American leader at an international summit.
In other words, Trump didn't seem to know or care what he was saying, but we grade Republicans on the curve and that gets a "P" for Presidential! Also, why would Geraghty acknowledge that Pena Nieto called Trump a liar?  It's not like they're paying him for updates.

I know there are still a few poor minor-league souls out there acting like resistance is anything but futile, but let's face it: There is no #NeverTrump movement left to speak of. Not that you'll see any "I was wrong about Trump" essays from them -- at the moment they can afford, and would understandably prefer, to spare one another that embarrassment -- unless Trump gets elected, in which case they'll start accusing each other of apostasy and some will be forced into ritual confession.

And to think, just months ago we were talking about them as if they might have some principles! Well, you always want to be scrupulously fair to them, despite all experience. Otherwise you might as well be a Republican.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

WHINING ISN'T EVERYTHING, IT'S THE ONLY THING.

It's a small thing really, but writing professors are always talking about the Telling Detail, so: wingnut Cornell Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has acquired a new second home -- not bad, the life of a tenured radical! -- and talks about it thus:
For the past six weeks I’ve been back and forth several times, and expect to split the year between Ithaca and Rhode Island again like I did for five years prior to selling our prior RI home in June 2013. During these breaks from Ithaca I’ve come to understand how living full time in Ithaca is a political pressure cooker.
Really? I know the place as the rich, cultivated home of two colleges, hard by Lake Cayuga and dotted with parks and awash in natural beauty. Plus you have two houses at least, and your adjuncts probably do all your work. What pressure?
In Ithaca, everything is political. You can’t escape it. You will not be left alone.
You will be made to care.
Oh yeah? Can you give us an example?
Even about your coffee, as I joked when we left RI for Ithaca full time:
Please excuse me while I go cry into my organic fair-trade soy latte served in a compostable eco-friendly sustainable cup, a portion of the proceeds of which will go to help indigenous mountain farmers in Central America.
So... you will be made to care by something written on your paper coffee cup? This is the outrage? Couldn't you just bring a mug to Starbucks that says I HATE HOMOS WHATSAMATTER YOU AGAINST FREE SPEECH and make them pour it into that?
There is no non-political life in Ithaca. It’s Obama’s America, compounded by geographical isolation and liberal homogeneity:
And the Professor links to Michelle Obama's "Barack Obama will require you to work" speech from 2008, which just seems eerily prescient today, since we're all slaving in work camps and some of us only have one home.
The personal life is dead, history has killed it.
With this he links to, I swear to God, a clip from Doctor Zhivago.

All these ominous cliches, and nothing, not one blessed thing of substance, to back them up. And the punchline is, he's spewing this self-pitying, Obama's-America, all-is-lost guff even as he informs us of a spectacular manifestation of the fact that he is the polar opposite of persecuted.  You can just imagine -- actually, you can only imagine him doing this while inwardly laughing at the dopes who take him seriously.

The massive grifts pertaining to the Trump campaign have been instructive, but let's not forget it didn't start with Trump; not by long shot.

Monday, August 29, 2016

GENE WILDER, 1933-2016.

Everyone says he was a lovely man, and I don't doubt it. But I never knew him, and if I did know him and he turned out to be a louse, I'd still love him for his films. There are many great comic movie actors, and all of them have that thing called timing, but while many of them make it look easy, few of them make it look as natural as Wilder did. True, his characters were often outsized and manic, but they were grounded maniacs -- you always knew each of them had a very good reason for his fits. When Leo Bloom in The Producers does that weird gibberish over the loss of his blue blanky -- "ungh nuhngnuhngnuhng, ungh nuhngnuhngnuhng" -- it's not just crazy nutso shtick; you really feel the loss of that blue blanky and want him to get it back. (How awful Max Bialystock would have seemed if he didn't give it back!) I love Jack Lemmon, but great as he is I think he wouldn't have elicited the same feeling in that role; Lemmon, when manic, was clearly operating somewhere above the normal spectrum of human behavior ("Security!"). Wilder, on the other hand, made even his most outre behavior look perfectly normal. He was perfect for the post-psychedelic era; he made you comfortable with psychological wreckage.

Yet he could also surprise you with the unexpectedness of his readings. I'm not just talking about oddities like "Stop, don't, come back," but his offbeat way of realizing classic comic builds. Look at the "do not open that door" scene, rendered below: the payoff would probably be funny no matter what, but the absurdly inappropriate mildness of "let me out, let me out of here, get me the hell out of here" just kills me every time. He constantly gave you something fresh, yet after the initial shock it usually made perfect sense. For a performer, that's not too bad a definition of genius.




NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

....about Hillary Clinton's "alt-right" speech, and the less-alt racism that revealed itself in the wake of the Colin Kaepernick affair. Say what you will about the weird, LOL-nothing-matters racism of the alt-right guys, racial politics has been electoral bread and butter for just about everyone on the right, from the buzzcut Goldwater squares to the Breitbart frogs; the new breed have just found a way to make it superficially creepier. What's really interesting is, that creepiness makes the alt-right thing a great opportunity for mainstream conservatives to finally drop their dog-whistles -- to make the Nazi nerds a scapegoat in the old Greek sense, tie their sins to them, and drive them from the agora -- and lose the stigma of racism they're always complaining about. Alas, they seem incapable, and none of the possible reasons why are flattering to them.

Friday, August 26, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



I like their sound. h/t @sethdmichaels


•  There can be none more Rod Dreher: Apparently Clay Higgins, a rightwing Baton Rouge character currently running for Congress  ("Looking to be a 'loud, angry voice' in Washington, D.C.," per The Advertiser), wanted to go into Red Cross centers where flood refugees were staying and conduct prayer meetings; Red Cross politely declined, and explained themselves thus:
Is it true that the Red Cross doesn’t allow people to pray in shelters? 
We have been so moved by the outpouring of care and kindness we’ve witnessed among Louisiana residents. At the Red Cross, our priority is also providing comfort to all that reside at our shelters. We recognize and are sensitive to the fact that hundreds of people from different backgrounds are often sharing a large space with limited privacy. It is of the utmost importance that we respect people’s individual needs, backgrounds and beliefs in accordance with our Fundamental Principles, which state that we bring assistance without discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinion. With this in mind, and for the privacy of our shelter residents, we do have policies in place on who can enter shelters to ensure that people have a private, secure place to stay as much as possible. Please know people in the shelters are also welcome to pray and gather among themselves.
Dreher quotes these very words, and responds:
So much for the “Cross” in Red Cross. No wonder south Louisiana people are pissed off at them.
Elsewhere at his blog -- check the caption:


Maybe his whole Benedict Option off-the-grid malarkey will in the long run be a blessing to us all.

•  I see people are debating the efficacy of Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech. I of course am fully on board -- she's adopted my method! I've been telling the world about the very large racist component of conservatism for years, starting from back before they had a fancy "alt" name for themselves. I've also told people how they take small stories like the "knockout game" and inflate them into harbingers of race war, and how more mainstream wingnuts promote such loony ideas as a hi-sign to the neo-Confederates in the back room. I have been vilified for it by VDare and other such like, which is just gravy -- I really do it for the Moscow Gold, and also because I think it's  important that we cut the crap and acknowledge where all their crocodile-tear hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you social welfare and policing policy ideas really come from. Hillary's not all the way there, of course -- her husband was a big part of the bullshit, after all -- but I'm for anything that pushes the ball along.

•  Speaking of the alt-right, D.C. McAllister of The Federalist tells us "It’s important, therefore, to step back and analyze exactly what the truth is about race in today’s politics," and the truth is that conservatives aren't the racists liberals say they are -- in fact, liberals summon racism (or something that looks very much like it) by invoking its name:
Those accusations increased so dramatically during the Obama presidency that I would also add it has created an emotional backlash that has caused many Americans to develop negative feelings toward minority groups. We are seeing much of this negativity expressed in politics today. It is important to understand this development in the right context. It doesn’t stem from white supremacism, but frustration born of racial identity politics...

Polls that show Trump supporters having negative feelings toward minorities reflect this backlash. Unfortunately, too many conservatives have misinterpreted such polling, using those errant interpretations to promote the false narrative that Trump supporters on the whole are racist, when they’re actually reacting to the charge of covert racism and to racial identity politics.
When you accuse someone of racism, how else is he supposed to react but with racial slurs? But that isn't the half of it -- apparently, in addition to making these poor people look racist, liberals are also behind the recent murders of cops, and are coming for Rush Limbaugh and D.C. McAllister next:
Today, the violence is directed against police. Tomorrow, other stigmatized groups will be targeted. The question is, what is all this leading to? What’s the endgame? What happens when you stigmatize a group, negate it, make it powerless, and then blame it for all your struggles? They must be annihilated. 
Boy, I remember when they used to call us sissies -- now we're storm troopers! Well, you live long enough, you get to see all kinds of weird shit. Anyway, on to McAllister's solution:
For conservatives to successfully de-stigmatize their identity, they must do something that is not happening right now. They must unite with all stigmatized out-groups. Everyone who opposes the Left has been labeled by the same brand. To fight back, they must unite, overcoming differences to face a common enemy.
Alas, McAllister doesn't say who those other out-groups are. Maybe it includes people who hate gay people -- excuse me, people who are made to look as if they hate gay people. OK, but what other liberal stigmatees are there? Billionaires who want even more tax breaks? Pretty sure they're already with the conservatives. Oil and gas executives? Ditto. I suppose the real play here is to convince white working class people in general that liberals are denigrating them -- Obama said that bitter-clinger thing once! -- but that'll be stretch, since conservatives are these days busy telling those folks their problems are nobody's fault but their own. You know, it's too bad no one in that movement knows anything about community organizing.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

BEARING WESTBORO.

I know, fellas, he's in here a lot, but once more, David French:
Debunking the ‘Born This Way’ Myth
It about time someone smacked down that Lady Gaga or Googoo or whatever she's called!
A new study challenges progressives’ tall tales about sexuality. 
Here is the world according to the LGBT Left: Just as there are black and white, there are gay and straight. One’s sexual orientation, like one’s race, is fixed and immutable at birth. The process of “questioning” one’s orientation isn’t a process of deciding but of discovering...
Cut to the chase: Libtards think gay people have to be gay, and there's such a thing as "transgender," and they call it "science": "This, you see, is science. Anyone who contradicts it...isn’t just ignorant, but bigoted," says French, echoing his passive-aggressive "denying that science not only makes you a Neanderthal, it makes you a bigot" shtick from the previous week. Liberals are always using science against the godly, and it's so unfair, because they also have "the academy, pop culture, progressive corporate America, and, lately, the Supreme Court" on their side. What a bunch of bullies!

Well, this time David French will show them some science: Behold, a study, from The New Atlantis, a wingnut "journal of science and technology" which is not peer-reviewed (indeed, is against peer review as a concept), but whose authors have gone through a bunch of papers and found that gays can be straightened and a good thing too because being gay makes you sick. Q.E.D., faggots!

There's a little pantomime of nuance ("Human sexuality is not so neatly and cleanly divided and determined") to give readers who are unfamiliar with French's shtick the impression that it's really the homosexualists who are rigid and inflexible -- but inevitably French can't keep it up, and he returns to the Old Rugged Crock of theocratic certainties:
Here’s ["the Left's"] vision, in a nutshell: Consenting adults should be able to do what they want with their bodies, and the resulting physical or emotional harm is either reasonably tolerable or can be alleviated through a combination of government programs and public re-education.
It may sound like freedom to you sodomites, but it ends in re-education! See, it's right there at the end of the paragraph. Be grateful French didn't put "the Holocaust" instead -- Jesus put him in a generous mood!
The Judeo-Christian model, by contrast, is aspirational, calling on people not to do what they want, but what they should.
And the reason they should is something something hey where's everybody going.
Admittedly, this path is far easier for some than others...
Some of you men do not love the cilice. Weaklings!
...but there has always been some play in the cultural joints.
???
The Left’s response is alluring, but it offers a self-indulgent path down which lies cultural ruin. The LGBT Left is driving us there just as fast as it can depress the gas pedal, but thanks to [study authors] McHugh and Mayer, we now know they most assuredly are not doing so in the name of “science.”
I have to ask: What is this intended to achieve?  No one who isn't already standing on a pillar with maggots in his legs, or aspiring to pretend to do so, will find the proposition attractive as French puts it. This is strictly "the heathens will be sorry" material. All I can figure is, the idea is to keep the Saving Remnant seething with resentment at the unbelief of the unbelievers so that, if an opportunity arises (such as global conflagration, fantasies of which wingnut grifters like to use to shake down suckers, and which French might just be crazy enough to believe in), they'll be juiced and ready to fan out and effect the gay-straightening themselves, with pliers and pruning hooks.

Again, remember that in addition to being a National Review writer, the man was considered by Bill Kristol and other prominent morons to be Presidential timber. And they wonder why the whole rotten enterprise was vulnerable to Trump!

Monday, August 22, 2016

THE COMEBACK KID.

As I noticed some months back, Jonah Goldberg has been off his feed lately -- shoved off it, I assumed, by the goons and musclemen of Trump Inc. who took over his beautiful conservative Playland. But today he's showing some of the old stuff. His topic is Trump's transparent and offensive pretense of a play for black and Hispanic voters.  (Relevant quote: "You'll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot. Look at the statistics.")

For a second, Goldberg actually seems to see what the rest of us see:
The conventional wisdom is that Trump isn’t trying to reach out to African-American voters. Rather, he’s trying to signal to moderate and suburban whites, particularly women, that he’s not the racist some have painted him to be.
But then:
I think the conventional wisdom is right, though it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump himself thinks his pitch his sincere.
What? What makes you think --
I would also note that I think the strategy is very Kellyanne Conway, but the words sound more like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.
?? So... he's sincere about mouthing the script of his latest campaign advisors?
Shouting at blacks that they all live in poverty is not exactly a nuanced or persuasive way to go. It’s more like a guy losing his temper in a bar argument.
Oh, so that's why you think it's sincere. But then why did you --
But at the general level, some people seem to think it is a terribly cynical thing for Trump to reach out to whites by making an overture to blacks. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. Just because one has cynical motives doesn’t mean one’s actions are objectively bad. Lots of people cynically give to charity to make themselves look good to the public, that doesn’t mean charities should refuse money from anyone not of pure heart.
Keep in mind that Goldberg is comparing "shouting at blacks that they all live in poverty" to charitable donations. One may seem worse than the other, but you gotta look to motive! Similarly, when the guys from The United Way shakes their canister at Goldberg, he tells them, "HEY WHATTAYA CALL A PUERTO RICAN TEST TUBE BABY! JANITOR IN A DRUM!" and offers, as they withdraw in disgust, to explain why this was an appropriate response.
...George W. Bush campaigned with Colin Powell in 2000, not because he was under any illusions that he would pick up a big swath of the black vote, but to reassure those very same moderates and independents that Trump is after. The differences between Bush and Trump on minorities, immigration etc. are deep and wide, but the tactic was similar.
Bush only got 9% of the black vote in 2000, but he won 35% of the Hispanic vote, and in 2004 he won 44% of it. Trump will be lucky if they don't deduct votes from his totals on behalf of those communities.  You only have a couple lines left, Jonah -- play us home!


He's still got it!

UPDATE. I should add that putting quotes from rightwing columnists into Frinkiac is something I learned from @ralphdouthat.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the allegations that Hillary is too sick with some unidentified disease to be President. I'd been seeing shit like this for months but thought it beneath notice, like those creepy "Here's a picture of Hillary with an Ay-rab -- now here's one of Bill next to a chick with big tits!" slideshows that you find in the clickbait zones of rightblogger sites. I should have known nothing is beneath anything in this campaign; now, with Rudolph Giuliani pushing this sick-HIllary shit, I guess it's worth talking about, at least as a lesson in abnormal psychology.

Among the outtakes: At the New York Observer, a paper run by Trump’s son in law, Austin Bay complains “the media is 'flat-out' unfair,” which has been “only just discovered” by a certain prominent media reporter who “emerged (at least momentarily) from the New York-Washington-Los Angeles media jungle” to acknowledge bias against Trump. The punchline: The reporter in question is Howie Kurtz. That's right -- the reliable Fox News pushover Kurtz is Bay's Mr. Media Bias Insider! Next up: The scales fall from the eyes of Mickey Kaus! (Bay goes on for over 2,000 words, rehashing Hitlery's Greatest Hits, and closes with a series of links to his own work: “SEE ALSO: WAR ON HONESTY I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X.” C'mon, Austin, you can grift better than that -- offer them parchment editions bound in Corinthian leather!)



Thursday, August 18, 2016

TRANS DERP EXPRESS.

I hate to go to that well again but goddamn, David French is on a roll. In this case he tackles the transgender menace. Apparently a lot of kids are goin' trans nowadays -- it's "fashionable," a fad, like pop rocks and rainbow parties -- and like them incredibly dangerous!
Indeed, transgender diagnoses have become so fashionable that doctors are sometimes stampeding to prescribe life-altering drugs even to kids — and then later, when the kids grow up, recommending mutilating surgery. In other words, doctors aren’t necessarily waiting for evidence of “consistence, insistence, and persistence"
"When the kids grow up" means "when they're adults," by the way. Oddly, I haven't heard of any American parents being forced to let their kid's dick get sawed off -- please let me know if you have! -- nor even to let him or her take the initial "life-altering drugs" (I assume French means hormones, but he doesn't specify, perhaps hoping his readers will imagine an Instant Pussy Pill that alters your young'un in a puff of smoke and with a sound effect like twink).

In fact, so far all French can offer for data is a vague reference to the number of minors in the U.K. some anti-trans group says are seeking counsel for gender dysphoria, which is up hundreds of percent -- though when you trace his source you see that means it's gone from 94 to 969, out of a population of 64.1 million.

So what does he have as evidence that the Transmanian Devil is sweeping America?
Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal...
Uh huh.
...but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher...
Rod Dreher! There's the tell. You may have read some of Brother Rod's anecdotal Tales of Trans Terror, but if you know his work at all you'll know that for hysteria he outstrips even French, especially when it comes to sexual apostasy.

Now assuming, as I said, that no one is forcing this stuff on the families of the prototrans kids, what is French's beef? It's not as if people can't judge for themselves whether they want it for their kids; aren't Republicans, after all, of the party of personal responsibility? Even a whiner like French can't pretend that Ma and Pa Kettle would let their boy Jethro take pussy pills just because he saw Caitlyn Jenner on the teevee and felt unbidden feels.

It seems what's really enraging French is really that transgenderism is acknowledged and (especially) that it is acceptable among people he can't successfully marginalize. The tell is in lines like "It’s all science, you see. And denying that science not only makes you a Neanderthal, it makes you a bigot," of which the wretched thing is full.  His sputtering rage is not that something is being forced on him and his, because it isn't, as much as his desire for unearned sympathy compels him to pretend -- it's because someone else chooses it, and when he tries to bully them he finds himself unsupported, because bullying such people has gone out of style. How that must sting!

UPDATE. Early in the morning and already comments are glorious. Here for example is Big_Bad_Bad_Bastard, with an apposite reference to French's earlier obsession: "Anecdotally, the vast majority of male-to-female transpersons are millennial boys who were ashamed of their low grip strength. Now they have perfectly acceptable female boomer grip ranges."

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

BUTCH, PLEASE.

A new study shows grip strength among young people today is not as good as it was among people of their parents' generation.

Part of me interprets this to mean that the Modern Youts are sissies, not like me when I was a lad -- well, actually I was kind of a sissy, but still I was compelled by the social pressures of that get-out-the-house-kid era to perform physically demanding jobs, loading trucks and slinging hash and the like, and I bet my grip-strength then could beat the band (had I but known to have it measured so I could wave it in you young punks' faces!).

That is, as I say, how part of me interprets it, for a few seconds anyways; but, like any sensible, grown person who is still troubled by ridiculous, juvenile reactions like this, but also has matured enough to take them in stride,  I remind myself that every generation feels the succeeding generation to be degenerate and weak by comparison; and that even if I don't approve of the way modern parents raise their kids, it's their business how to raise them, not mine.

In other words, not that being a little less of an asshole than I might be is much to brag on but I'm apparently a little further along the evolutionary scale than erstwhile Presidential can'tdidate and eternal pain in the ass David French of National Review, who reads the grip-strength report thus:
If you’re the average Millennial male... You’re exactly the kind of person who in generations past had your milk money confiscated every day — who got swirlied in the middle-school bathroom... Welcome to the new, post-masculine reality
Once upon a time it was only selected sissies who got the dick-wagging locker-room treatment -- now David French will take all you millennials on! Look what a tough guy he was in high school:
I look back to my own childhood. In 1985, I was 16 years old, and I was a nerd’s nerd. I toted graph paper and 20-sided dice to school to play Dungeons & Dragons at lunch. (I like to think I was the finest dungeon master Scott County, Ky., had ever seen.) When I wasn’t playing D&D, my nose was buried in Lord of the Rings, or the Shannara books by Terry Brooks, or the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey...
[Blink. Blink.] I'd like to give him credit for 'fessing up, but still I have to ask: if French was such a numpty as a teen, why is he barking out butchness lessons to young people now?
But none of my nerdiness relieved me of the responsibility of learning how to be a man — a protector, builder, and fixer. So that meant spending my Saturdays hauling out the ramps to change the oil and oil filters on all our cars.
Cars, plural? Look-surey!
That meant helping my dad build a new back porch or constantly wrestling with immense piles of firewood. (We heated our house with a wood stove.) I made extra money working in neighborhood yards. Being a guy meant doing manual labor...
Ah, so like many of us fossils French had chores, and after-school and summer jobs. How nice. But so what? Some generations back, kids could count on being bound to their parent's serfdom and poverty till the day they died. That was manhood then. We have progressed, and now that fate is less common in America than it was -- including for French (Harvard Law, 1994! Dungeonmaster's come a long way).

So why does it bother French so much that the new breed have it easier than he did? If you're a generous sort, you might think he's just concerned that kids today are deprived of the pleasurable experience of useful labor -- of joy in their own physical strength and a job well done. But French is a wingnut: Promoting pleasure, let alone the physical kind, is the furthest thing from his mind. He snarls, he nags, he kvetches -- never does he suggest they're anything rewarding in physical labor except the opportunity to escape his bitching about it.

You can see hints of what's really eating French when he leaves off grousing about yardwork and starts... veering in an interesting direction. For example:
In the age of zero-tolerance school-disciplinary policies — where any kind of physical confrontation is treated like a human-rights violation — [young men] have less opportunity to develop toughness. Today’s young males don’t have common touchstones for what it’s like to grow up to be a man.
The modern boy's teacher helps him get out of the locker into which, doing only as God and nature intended, bullies have stuffed him, and thus is he emasculated! Why didn't these teachers-union ballbusters let him figure out himself how to deal with bullies? Chances are he'd come out tougher -- well, actually chances are he'd come out emotionally crippled, perhaps suicidal, but at least he'd be a man! Perhaps even a Dungeonmaster! Speaking of which, later French brags that he and his D&D buddies could, despite their nerdom...
...pop the hood of a car and get to work right alongside the future mechanics of my high-school class. We weren’t as good or as knowledgeable, but we held our own. And there were no social-justice warriors shrieking that there was no such thing as distinctively male or masculine pursuits.
Social justice warriors! So that's the problem! Modern boys might be manly enough to suit French -- they might want to work on car engines -- but they're being stopped by Zoe Quinn, Sarah Silverman and their fellow SJWs, who swarm like emasculating Valkyrie over Shop Class, wrestle the boys away from their Ford Fairlanes, and make them write essays for Vox. In their pajamas!

Bottom line, French is a rightwing hack factotum, in fact a hacktotum, and this latest stray datum is only meaningful to him as an excuse to shake his fist at feminists and non-homeschool-educators -- and, mostly, at millennials, because it seems they've turned against conservatism in a big way. In other words, the butch is a bitch.  And not even the fierce kind.

UPDATE. Comments are all very funny, but if you must choose start with the dialogues invented by Pere Ubu and Andrew Johnston ("You are enjoying tankards of fine ale when two orcish barbarians who look just like those assholes who hang around on the north side of the building come up...").

Monday, August 15, 2016

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the CryptoTrumpers and their sneaky third way of promoting the GOP candidate, or at least his ideas. There are a lot of columns out there about how of course Trump is a wrongo but still you must admit [insert bullshit here] and call me cynical but this is, in most cases, an admission that you'd openly support Trump if your careerism and social anxieties weren't preventing you. Have a read and see if you don't agree.

I should mention the latest NeverTrump fantasy object that emerged last week, Ted-talking former CIA officer Evan McMullin, Presidential candidate. At National Review Josh Gelertner gamely offers a winning scenario for McMullin, which begins with “If, among swing states, Trump wins Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania…” so I didn’t read it. Kidding! Long pathetic-fantasy short, if McMullin wins Utah and neither Trump nor Clinton has enough electoral votes to clinch, the vote goes to the House, where Gelertner speculates the Republican majority would naturally vote for a nobody rather than for the nominee of their own fucking party. (As David A. Graham’s useful tally at The Atlantic shows, very few GOP Congressmen have come out against Trump.)

“Note, however: If McMullin were to run anywhere but Utah, he will tip the race to Hillary, Ross Perot–style,” closed Gelertner, “…Which means, if he does run anywhere besides Utah, he’s making it clear that he isn’t interested in winning, just in guaranteeing that Trump loses. Which would be perfidious, to say the least.” Enemies everywhere, even in their own fantasies! I hope this guy has his post-election electroshock booked -- interventional psych wards are going to be filling up their calendars quickly this year.

Friday, August 12, 2016

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Been listening to a lot of Dave Dudley lately.
This one's my favorite. Written by Mr. Tom T. Hall

• If you've been reading Rod Dreher lately, you know he's been quoting at length (everything he does is at length) letter writers who wish to remain anonymous for reasons you can only guess who claim their children and/or other people's are faking a transgender identity. Here's one who says her daughter is only pretending to be a trans boy because "she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen" -- in which case it would seem sham trans claims are the least of their problems in whatever hick burg she's stuck in. The correspondent also quotes an anti-trans source that says there's been a "930% Rise in Child Gender Identity Referrals" in the UK; read the source and it shows that in five years such referrals rose from 94 to 969 -- out of a population of 64.1 million. The letter-writer suggests that physicians are "ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor" but does not tell us whether the child can be given these treatments against her mother's will; I strongly suspect this vagueness is intentional. Another claimant in the same post says he was an adolescent psychotherapist but had to stop because of all the fake trans kids Big Homo was forcing him to validate:
The children are all absolutely confused, rightly terrified of being linked or in any way associated with beliefs that have been deemed toxic and contaminated – anything from the western tradition. They are desperate to rid themselves of the contagion of their own history. Being “queer” is the new salvation, it is the new blood in which the children are to be cleansed of the sins of their fathers; the youth are celebrated mightily for their embracing of any lifestyle that erodes the power of the individual to stand alone – that erodes the sacredness and sovereignty of our very humanity...
Plus they all listen to that "rap" music. It may be this fellow was actually forced to stop practicing by a state medical board or a restraining order. There's more, oh so much more, in this post and others but if you had to choose I'd say check out the one where someone who "grew up in an American expat family living in a Persian Gulf monarchy... a conservative Islamic society with strict standards and codes for sexual purity"  revisited the Gulf and found that, thanks to the "corrosive" influence of Western culture, the place had gotten all porny and gay:
At the wedding we attended, members of the village performed a very traditional dance where a group of men and a group of women congregate on opposite sides of an open space. The two sides call out responses to one another while they dance on their separate sides, and it’s virtually the only contact men and women have during the whole of the celebrations. During the dance, two young men who had grown out their hair (very unusual in this culture) participated flamboyantly on the women’s side. In a society where women and men are kept strictly separate, no one even bothered to try to prevent them from joining, because it was widely known that they were gay and wouldn’t bother females.
These young fellas should have been out decapitating infidels for ISIS, like real men! Then you get to hear Brother Rod preach about how settlers kidnapped by Native Americans in the Old West often declined to be rescued, which he does not read as desperation or Stockholm Syndrome but as a sign of some sort of spriritual superiority over the Enlightenment-sickened West. Well, I think he's got the Ghost Dance part down, anyway.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

I WILL EXPRESS MY CONTEMPT FOR LIBTARDS WITH THIS ACTION FIGURE BALLET.

How goes the Culture War, soldier? Hilariously! Kurt Schlichter, aka Wild Man, has up a piece of ordnance called "Liberals Are Neidermeyer and That Team the Bad News Bears Played." Real rebels are right-wing, see! The Bears were "incredibly politically incorrect," just like the Delta boys in Animal House, meaning if they were real live people instead of movie characters they'd want to build a wall & no Mooslims:
In other words, they are kind of like Trump voters. They are deemed unfit for polite company, begrudgingly accepted, and generally treated like dirt by their betters. And they are expected to go hang out forever with Muhammed, Jugdish, Sidney, and Clayton, with whom they will have plenty to talk about.
Especially Muhammed! "What you doin' in our country, raghead? Pow pow pow!" As for the Bears, didn't they have a girl on their team? Yuck, PC cooties! But Schlichter keeps at the fanfic:
And Hillary? She’s the sorority mean girl, a frosty, neurotic, mid-western over-achiever whose freaky daddy issues compelled her to marry a guy who treated her with the same contempt as Pops. She’s the a bitter, striving, hard-four Mandy Pepperidge who hooked up with a cleaned-up Bluto because she knew he was going places, but then finally broke him and forced him to become a vegan.
I was sort of with him until he introduced Bill Clinton as Bluto. Canon has to count for something, Wild Man.

Considering he's always bragging on his "hot wife," I don't get why Schlichter's so hung up on angry-teenage-nerd fantasies. Maybe he believes he owes it to La Causa. But who's going to be convinced by this stuff? Are any of them old enough to vote?