FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Former colleague Rob Harvilla made a great case for Twenty One Pilots; They make a great case for themselves here.
• Here's your new talking point, wingnuts: The San Francisco Court of Appeals! Reliable propagander Jim Geraghty at National Review:

For Trump Foes, San Francisco’s Court of Appeals Is Cloud Nine
The Trump administration’s loss in the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit — it might as well just be called “the San Francisco court” — isn’t surprising, and the tone of the decision isn’t really a surprise, either...

Cuz they's Sanfrancisgy sissy-men! Jeanne Kirkpatrick, greybeards may recall, got a lot of mileage out of "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. A few things have changed since then -- notably, Russia's the Republicans' buddy, and the number of people you can set off with Cisco as a perjorative has declined drastically -- in fact, that population may overlap substantially with the readership of National Review.

• So much of my humor is of necessity grim these days, so how about a genuine ray of sunshine? St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones is running for mayor, and as is customary was offered an interview with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which she declined, sending instead a letter which she shared with the St. Louis American, and oh boy:

Two weeks ago, you used some of your ink to outline what questions you would be asking of mayoral candidates. You complained that “decades of sustained, abject neglect by city leaders have allowed a bombed-out graffiti-covered, war-zone image to prevail.” You said you were afraid to walk your dog at night and you called for a plan to “address blight and abate the graffiti that’s killing our city.”

You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet. And graffiti is not what’s killing it.

What is killing our city is poverty. Since you’re new and you live in a great neighborhood, you probably don’t know that the poverty rate doubled during Mayor Francis G. Slay’s 16-year tenure.

What is killing our region is a systemic racism that pervades almost every public and private institution, including your newspaper, and makes it nearly impossible for either North St. Louis or the parts of South St. Louis where African Americans live to get better or safer or healthier or better-educated...

The whole thing is good and may just bolster your faith in the future of this country.

AN INSPIRATION TO US ALL.

A heartwarming story from Bre Payton at The Federalist and then -- record scratch!

To Poe, all of the hate is worth protecting her customers from exposure to unnecessary vulgarity. Recently, one of her female customers confided in Poe that she had been sexually assaulted as a child. Poe says these women shouldn’t have to relive their painful experiences in her store by being confronted with vulgarity. These women — her customers — have been through so much, Poe tells me. They don’t deserve to have a man or a woman come in here and ask for a ‘P hat.'”

Puts me in mind of Mrs. Doyle on Father Ted: "And of course, the p-word, father, the bad p-word, worse than 'puddy-tat' -- you know the one I mean!"  Let's go back to the beginning -- what is this Poe (oh, it's lovely she's called Poe) on about?

When Elizabeth Poe saw video footage of the Women’s March in Washington DC the day after President Trump was inaugurated, she was horrified by all of the vulgarity on display. Women carried signs emblazoned with genitals, many repeatedly chanted curse words, and celebrities delivered speeches riddled with explicit content and threats of violence.

By "threats of violence," a link reveals, she means Madonna's speech. Typical Federalist readers won't click it, of course, and will go away assuming the March, at which no arrests were made, was all bonfires and menstrual blood feasts, just like everything those crazy people do in the urban liberal fleshpots where they have communism, libraries, and dental hygienists.

Poe, who has owned a yarn store in Franklin, Tennessee for five years, was frustrated that so many women wore knitted “pussyhats” to the march, ruining what once was a “cute little pattern.” When a woman visited her store the very next day asking for pink yarn to make a hat like the ones she had seen women wearing at the march on TV, she took to Facebook and asked customers who wanted yarn to make a pussyhat to go elsewhere.

And for this simple act of courage, claim Payton and Poe, "she’s been screamed at, called names, and threatened with rape and other violent acts." Police reports or GTFO, I'm tempted to say, but that's just the sort of rudeness we rootless cosmopolitans go in for; if we doubt the word of this sweet yarn store lady, how will we ever win back the trust of other embittered honkies who voted for a TV reality show clown because he was white and vicious? I mean, there are almost as many of them as there are of us!

Anyhow, Payton has a high tolerance for Poe's folk wisdom, as evinced by this:

Some people have tried to throw Poe’s Christian faith back in her face by insisting that Jesus would’ve marched to empower women. That may be true, Poe tells me, but “Jesus would’ve marched with his clothes on.”

Poe also claims that her financial losses in the p hat trade have been more than made up for by "orders and support from Hong Kong, Great Britain, and every state in the United States." I like to imagine Brit expats in Red China's Biggest Little City-State crying through megaphones, "'ere, you lot! There's a woyt lady in th' States wot needs a few bob ta fight lesbians!" This is perhaps my favorite part:

Before opening The Joy of Knitting, she worked at Community Health Systems, which operates 158 hospitals in 22 states, according to its website. Poe says she worked at CHS for “18 of the longest months of my life,” before tensions with another co-worker got too stressful, driving her to seek a job she enjoyed, even if it meant going into business for herself.

I marvel that Payton left "tensions with another co-worker got too stressful" in there for creeps like me to interpret in an unflattering way. Why couldn't she just say Poe was called by the Lord?

TRUMPISM WITHOUT TRUMP.

Remember the brave-looking stand National Review took against Trump and Trumpism last year? Ha ha, now look: their front page is devoted to articles like "Approve the Cabinet" by noted free-thinker Kevin D. Williamson and the Trump-flattering encomia of Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew C. McCarthy.  One imagines Trump in doublet and hose: "Was ever loser in this humor woo'd? Was ever loser in this humor won? Sad!"

Worse still are the NRniks who peddle Trumpism without Trump. Get a load of Ramesh Ponnuru's and Rich Lowry's "For Love of Country":

"Dark,” “divisive,” and “dangerous” were a few of the negative descriptors that critics attached to President Trump’s inaugural address, and those were just the ones that start with “d.” (A few threw in “dystopian” for good measure.) The critics took him this way in part because he depicted the last few decades of American life as a hellscape from which he would shortly deliver us: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” But the critics also had this reaction because the address had a theme — nationalism — that has itself long been assumed in many quarters to be dark, divisive, and dangerous.  

That assumption has never been justified and should now be discarded. Nationalism can be a healthy and constructive force. Since nationalistic sentiments also have wide appeal and durability, it would be wiser to cultivate that kind of nationalism than to attempt to move beyond it.

Just because Trump is a monster doesn't mean every ignorant xenophobe strongman has to be one! Surely someone someday might-could declare "Xland for the Xlanders" without the fascist chest-beating. Then comes the history lesson:

Fear of nationalism became very widespread, especially in Europe, after the world wars, and it remains a core premise behind the sputtering drive toward further European integration.

Hitler made nationalism ick,  at least to those sputtering sissies at the EU. They go on: "Nationalism has a bad odor even among some conservatives" because "economic conservatism, particularly as influenced by libertarianism, can come to see borders as barriers to free markets" and some are "influenced by the notion that America is an 'idea' or a 'proposition nation,'" but...

Ugh. You almost want some brute like, oh, Richard Spencer to bust through the flimsy premise of this essay like Kool-Aid Man busting through a wall and go TOUGH SHIT CUCKS I AM YOUR CONSERVATISM NOW! Because that would be cutting to the chase, and who wouldn't prefer it;  after the early, moony grafs about a "benign nationalism" that "includes loyalty to one’s country" and "the revulsion that most people feel when protesters burn an American flag" even the most sympathetic reader must realize this isn't so much an essay as a Country Time Lemonade commercial for NR's milky country-club conservatism.

Who would even read it all, besides me? Some nervy souls may hang in through the Roger Scruton and (Lord help us) Chesterton citations; some bravos may persist past the unexplained assertion that the European Union "has a democracy deficit and always will"; a stalwart few may endure copybook sludge like "the appeal to national pride has also been important to conservative politics"; the dimmer of the half-mad survivors, clawing through the crumbling logic and reek of special pleading, may be encouraged to find themselves washed up on the What's Wrong with Trump's Nationalism section ("He’s not a limited-government conservative, nor does he appear to be a religious man"), but the smarter ones will realize with horror that they've been conned -- the only meaningful difference between Il Douche and Lowry and Ponnuru is that the latter bother to use big words to make the animal appeal of nationalism sound to suckers like philosophy instead of gangster movie monologues. Only relatives and sycophants of the authors will get to the end undamaged.

Bad as it is by itself, this piece of shit has been glossed by Jonah Goldberg. His column is one long wind-tunnel fart and I haven't got the time, but this section will give you some of the flavor:

It is true that nationalism is part of the equation, but it is the less important part. And by mistaking the tail for the dog, we lose sight of what is important. Think of it this way. All, or at least most, marriages require some level of physical attraction, particularly at the outset — that is only natural. But any marriage purely based on physical attraction will struggle to last. No happily married couple I have ever met has confessed that the secret of their long marriage was mutual lust.

No comment. (Loser.)

Marriages endure for a host of complicated reasons, but among the most important is surely a commitment to an ideal, be it religious or otherwise. Nationalism is a bit like lust — a natural human passion that, absent proper channeling, is at best morally neutral and more often a source of unhealthy temptation.

Thank God the writers of National Review can always get some Trump-love on the down-low without violating their vows of intellectual celibacy! Meantime in the real world, Trump's-brain Fat Goebbels is mind-melding with Mencius Moldbug and other nerd-Nazis to create the newer new nationalism, so Goldberg et alia better pay attention so they know exactly how far away to stand -- and exactly where they're expected to be in, oh, six to twelve months.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Super Bowl and the brethren's traditional culture-war bitchfest over it. They have unitary control of the government, and they're still mortally offended that people can express contradicting opinions in TV commercials.

Among the outtakes, John Nolte complains at The Daily Wire that liberals were “ruining” the Super Bowl by allowing its producers to hire leftists like Lady Gaga and the Hamilton cast as entertainment, which he finds perverse because the Super Bowl “reeks of thematic (not partisan) conservatism.” Thematic conservatism, Nolte explains, means “masculinity, patriotism, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, a winner and a loser, the pursuit of excellence, men of all races competing in an environment where skin color isn't an issue” -- things of which no woman nor liberal could possibly approve, apparently; when we play poker, it's not for money but the journey, and Lord knows we're not butch specimens like Harlan Hill. Anyway this is why libtards are always “intruding into, childishly stomping on, and just plain ruining everything that once meant relaxation and coming together as a country.” Future generations will ask the tough question: Who lost concussionball? And what answer shall we give?

UPDATE. They kept bitching into Monday, natch. Tucker Carlson, mid-dudgeon about the Hamilton women, claiming "I'm as pro-sisterhood as anybody, more than most women, probably, actually,” would be the highlight, but Conservative Review had a story called "THE PATRIOTS DIDN’T JUST BEAT THE FALCONS. THEY CRUSHED THE LIBERAL MEDIA," which is like when your asshole friend wins a talent contest by farting into the mike.

But let's give a participation trophy to the insufferable David French, who explains why the heartwarming Super Bowl ads about immigrants and little girls whose fathers want them to succeed just make conservatives angry:

The ads above are like college brochures, full of smiling, happy faces from every nation, tribe, and culture. But behind the smiles is all too often an icy, heartless resolve. The diversity that matters is only skin deep. The “diversity” they celebrate is one where communities of different colors, genders, and sexual practices come together around a uniform ideology — and there is zero hesitation to be as intolerant as necessary in the name of tolerance. (I once sued a major public university that actually declared that “acts of intolerance will not be tolerated.”) My fellow believers look at those ads, understand the worldview they express, and rightly know there’s no room for them in the Left’s utopia.

Translation: No one liked them in college -- even minorities were more popular! -- and they've been buttsore about it ever since.

HOES AND TRICKS.

Gonna show you some National Review covers. You've probably seen these before:

OK, now let me show you what National Review has up now:

Ain't even kidding.

Yet this isn’t a Republican “war on women,” as some predicted. It is, rather, progressives and left-leaning media elites who are targeting conservative women. Take the recent Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing Kellyanne Conway, the first woman to have led a successful Presidential campaign...

Maybe this is just the old-fashioned conservative in me talking, but I think in some cases making fun of a successful woman is not misogyny, but an appropriate response to stupidity. Case in point: My several posts about the writings of Carrie Lukas, author of that column. They're not about her characteristics as a woman, but her characteristics as a rightwing shill. I would never dream of, for example, calling her an empty pantsuit.

Know how else you can tell the difference? If you have been sentient during the past 25 or 10 or five years (or even just the past election cycle), think of the reeking shit you've seen constantly expressed about Hillary Clinton not only by internet morons but also by Republican spokesmen. If you don't see the difference between that and the gentle ribbing Conway gets on SNL, you're either dim or paid to act like it.

SOMETIMES THERE'S JUST NOTHING YOU CAN SAY.

Worst new trend:

David P. Goldman's Trump-Lincoln comparison last week was pretty hair-raising, but this thing by Rich Cromwell is just shit. It's so bad that I can't really make fun of it, just as you can't catch a fart and pin it down, as the song from The Sound of Goldberg goes. I will mention that Cromwell's is not entirely a friendly comparison: he talks smack about Lincoln's statism, but instead of taking the usual neo-Confederate line about the Woah of No'thun Aggression -- which might get some PC types triggered --  he chides Abe for other, less loaded offenses, like creating the Department of Agriculture. Thus the dummies who usually read The Federalist will go, "see like my stupid grandpa thinks Lincoln was great cuz he freed the slaves but really he's the reason I can't take laetrile to make my boobs bigger," and the Southrons who find it on Google while looking for history texts to take back to their Battle-Flag-draped survivalist treehouse homeschools will go, "nod's as good's a wink, hoss!" Everybody wins.

Here's where Cromwell's prose really shines, in the John Randolph sense:

So maybe Trump hasn’t called for this to be suspended yet, but apparently it’s time to let our imaginations run wild, so let’s do that. 

Habeas corpus, Latin for “Yo, we’ve got the body"...

Ugh. If you can do anything with this, feel free.

LIBERAL TOTALITARIANISM RUINED MY SAG AWARDS SHOW.

Sometimes, when I feel that my life isn't all it should be (<Laramore> and it isn't </Laramore>), I console myself that I am not as miserable as my subjects. Consider their current position: They have in the White House Il Douche and Fat Goebbels, who will sign every pauper-, LGBTQ-, woman- and minority-immiserating measure the Republican Congress sends them so long as they are left free to (on the part of the former) steal and (on the part of the latter) Nazify. If I believed the twisted shit they believed, I'd be ecstatic.

But are they happy? No! They're constantly bitching that some of their fellow citizens -- okay, most of their fellow citizens, but that's only if you count black people -- disagree with them. That should make their victory even sweeter! Still they seethe and act hard-done-by. They cannot rest so long as one libtard defies them.

Which just makes it funnier that Joy Pullman of The Federalist thinks this makes liberals the real totalitarians. "Trump’s Immigration Order Triggers Left’s Cultural Totalitarianism" is her title and here's her lede:

By now Federalist readers are well-aware many leaders on the Left don’t appear to have learned anything from the election of their once-beloved, now-archnemesis Donald Trump. Their behavior recalls the dramatic, incessant mind-messing reversals from “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia” to “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia!” of the famous novel about totalitarianism, George Orwell’s “1984.”

See also that famous novel about war and peace, "War and Peace." But anyway, first outrage: a lady refused to make a dress for Melania Trump. I should think the appropriate conservative response would be "Who cares, bitch, we're about to make Boss Hogg the Attorney General, Fat Goebbels is splayed out naked in the Lincoln Bedroom screaming the Horst Wessel Song and leaking coke-spit from his asshole, and The Leader's chief concubine can buy a zillion dresses once we loot the Treasury!" But Pullman, bless her, goes instead for wounded irony:

People who refuse nonessential services to others based on deep-seated conscience conflicts are bigots. No, you dummy, they’re heroes, and don’t even need a two-thousand-year global philosophical tradition informing their capricious transaction refusals!

These liberals won't sell a rich lady a dress, yet they want us to serve fags. Hmmph!

Further insults to Trumpkins are catalogued -- for example, a basketball coach questioned The Leader's Muslim Ban:

Excuse me, but did anyone elect Gregg Popovich to represent Americans? No. Popovich is a private citizen who has rights and duties equal to those of every other citizen. So where does he get off presuming some special political authority over fellow Americans? That basketball job has gone to his head. Please deflate that ball, Mr. Popovich. Bouncing it doesn’t give you power to manipulate my political choices.

We've gotten so used to talking about Trump's "distractions" that you may be tempted to think "Please deflate that ball, Mr. Popovich" is, similarly, just a stratagem meant to erase our memories of the insanely stupid shit she said in the first part of the graf. But you could say that about everything she says. As with the current junta, it ain't a strategy, it's the best she can do. She's mad that Buzzfeed is covering the companies who have and have not reacted to the Muslim Ban; she's mad that actors ruined the SAG Awards for her by making speeches about the Muslim Ban instead of about their agents and heterosexual love partners. She ties all this in to her other wingnut martyrs: "Brendan Eich; ALEC; the Heartland Institute; and Memories Pizza, just for starters." Three of these entities are rolling in dough -- excuse me, since the fundraisers I guess all of them are -- and soon the anti-gay policies they favor will be the law of the land, but because a few people chose to defend helpless war refugees instead of an internet multimillionaire Pullman swoons under the yoke of totalitarianism:

...This is coercion. They’re using power they earned in nonpolitical spheres to manipulate their fellow Americans, to socially shame us into at least outward compliance with their political preferences. Intentionally induced intense public shame is a form of manipulation because it engages emotions, not persuasion, which engages the rational faculties. They are politicizing private spheres. They are being cultural totalitarians.

These celebrities made us feel something and it wasn't good!

Jesus Christ, whatta buncha snowflakes.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's executive order on immigration and the degrading lengths to which the brethren went to make it look like something other than a complete catastrophe. Some measure of the disaster is that the more craven shits have already ducked and covered: Rich Lowry, for example, clears his pencil-thin throat and pips, "The reaction to Trump’s executive order has been enormous, so it’s useful to remember that the scale of what happened over the weekend was not..." Translation: It's really not such a big deal, what are you getting so bent out of shape about it... Excellent! Keep it up.

RETURN ENGAGEMENT.

I'm not great at crowd estimates, but we marched from Lafayette Park down Pennsylvania Avenue to about 7th Street, and when we left the street was filled with people in both directions. Looks like we have to keep this up until they get it right. 

UPDATE. In case I wasn't clear, this was not from last weekend's march, but today's organized-at-the-last-minute march against the Trump Muslim ban -- excuse me, the Trump "danger" ban. And bad as I am at crowd-guessing, I'd say this one drew more than 10,000 and perhaps substantially more. On 48 hours notice. Good to know it can be done. 

THEY MADE ME A NEO-NAZI!

Hey it's another Rod Dreher "Reader" Mailbag! As with previous editions, you have to believe everyone who writes to Dreher has approximately the same literary style and language skills level. It's possible! And anyway it's more fun if you suspend disbelief. Ready? Good! Today's a double feature -- two guys who are thinking of joining a White Identity cult because the blacks and the liberals turn them off!

This is from Baby Skin #1:

I’m a white guy.

Let's get that straight right off the bat!

I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

Dunno, but I have a feeling once you start talking the mystery's over, Mr. I'm A White Guy.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it.

Well-educated, and smart and informed! And white! I can see why we're all paying attention to him.

It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

Then maybe it's time you made new friends. Maybe try that before becoming a Nazi! I mean it's a big decision.

After telling us he's not rolling in dough, and has to mow his own lawn despite his brains and education -- ha, tell me about it, bro! -- Baby Skin #1 tells us what's really ticking him off.

But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Maybe he's more broke than he lets on and the only "media" he has access to is an old Black Panther newspaper he found at a yard sale. More likely he's one of those conservatives who lost his TV remote during the Clinton Administration.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

But though intellectual effort should come easy to a bright feller-me-lad like him, he's not sure how long he can hold out against the pull of his Aryan heritage. And if he can't, guess whose fault it'll be?

...It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza. Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

And we're about to lose him -- he, who might have been such a ornament to The Left! -- because we were too nice to blacks and Latinos and the TV was mean to Mr. Charlie. But I gotta ask: if he's so mad at liberals and so torn about going White Pride, why can't he compromise and just become a regular conservative?

Sorta answers itself, don't it?

We don't have to spend much time with Baby Skin #2, since he seems cut from the same cloth (or typed on the same laptop) -- he says libs made him Bund-curious, and you'll be real sorry when it happens (he even ends, I swear to God, "What follows from all of this cannot bode well"), but let me give you the flavor:

I totally get where [Baby Skin #1] is coming from. I’m in his shoes for the most part: white, Christian, male, straight. Add to that that I’m a Southerner. But I’m also a PhD candidate in the humanities...

The new Nazis -- they're so schooly!

...in a discipline where my whole demographic configuration is routinely and openly disparaged as being the fount of all evil in this world.

I've been saying this for years, but why do these guys never take their studies at Liberty University or Bob Jones instead of liberal hellholes where everyone hates them? It's almost like they seek this treatment out -- maybe so they can write about it in wingnut magazines and websites! Maybe both these guys are just woodshedding for their eventual gigs at The Federalist. Or for a book: White Like Me! They better hop to, I bet Dreher's already shopping it.

UPDATE. Comments to this post are up to the usual glorious alicublog standards. Don't miss one by Jeffrey_Kramer that begins, "Maybe we aren't even meant to imagine there's an individual consciousness behind these 'letters'; maybe it's sort of along the lines of those old Reader's Digest pieces like 'I am Joe's Kidney.'"

DEFINING REPUBLICANISM DOWN.

There's been a lot of sucking up to Trump, God knows. Matthew Continetti is making a specialty of it ("He draws strength from his gut connection with Jacksonian America" -- imagine Trump responding to that: "Yes, Michael Jackson was a tremendous entertainer, absolutely terrific. Ben Carson reminds me a lot of Michael Jackson").

But history should specially note this offering by David P. Goldman -- author of "Jay Z's American Fascism" and other gibberish ("Why can't we get 14 million people into the streets to proclaim that Obama is an idiot like the Egyptians did?"). In "Donald Trump, American hero," he invokes Jackson, of course, and also characters created by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, John Bunyan, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Capra, and David Peoples. What do they have to do with Il Douche? Why, like them Trump is an American hero -- see, it's in the title. And what distinguishes these heroes? Maybe Goldman's comparison of Trump to Abraham Fucking Lincoln will clarify. Yes, he actually does, and Goldman knows what you're thinking:

That seems blasphemous, for Trump is no Lincoln; he is brittle where Lincoln was tolerant, resentful where Lincoln was self-deprecating, Philistine where Lincoln was intellectual, and often cruel where Lincoln was unfailingly kind. But the parallel remains.

Seems like everything we admire in Lincoln has been ruled out. So what's left?

Not since 1860 have American voters rejected their elite and chosen a candidate without apparent qualifications.

Ah, I see; so in 1860 Americans (40 percent of them, anyway) were sick of this shit and rolled the dice on a former Congressman at the head of a burgeoning movement and party who had stood for the Senate and whose debates with Stephen Douglas, a watershed in American political discourse, had been widely circulated... which lines up pretty good with "former reality TV star" and "famous bankrupt rageclown."

That is, they are both "outsiders," in the same sense that Cincinnatus and Rod Blagojevich were both outsiders. Unlike Lincoln, the new model outsider is unencumbered by toleration, self-deprecation, intellectualism or unfailing kindness. Neither Goldman nor his fellow Trumpkins seem to miss these attributes. In fact, from what I'm seeing they consider it good riddance.

WOMB AT THE TOP.

Welcome back to the pages of alicublog,  Ashley E. McGuire of Acculturated!

Is Ivanka Making Motherhood Great Again?

Is Ivanka Trump America’s Kate Middleton?

Quick primer for the uninitiated: Acculturated is one of those wingnut ladymags commissioned by culture warriors to make young female conservatives feel less lonesome. Their philosophical tradition is Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, but they seem to worry their target will find this dowdy and depressing in its pure form -- like Woman's Day meets Soviet Life -- so they try, as here, to glam it up.

In this viral photo posted on Ivanka’s Instagram page the day before the Inauguration, America’s new first daughter channels the Duchess rather mightily.

In the picture, Ivanka is rocking the whole Duchess package: walking down the red-carpeted steps of a private jet in nude stilettos and a gorgeously tailored outfit, with an incredibly intact blowout with a babe on one hip and a child holding her other hand.

There are entire Google image archives devoted to pictures of the Duchess coming down airplane steps with babies and toddlers in tow.

Great thing about the Internet -- something for every kink! McGuire cites one of her fellow Kate 'n' Kids furries who thrills to the Duchess towing tots in heels, specifically; "a bit precarious," he swoons. McGuire responds:

It is precarious. It’s also precarious trying to be both a mom and a public figure in today’s world: yet another parallel of mastery between Trump and Middleton.

Kate Middleton has done an exceptional job of making motherhood glam again. Unlike American celebrity moms, she doesn’t post on social media about being covered in throw up and never getting any sleep. She doesn’t complain in interviews about the travails of parenting. She doesn’t post the makeup-less 3 a.m. selfie that is supposed to make us think she is a “real mom” like the rest of us. Yes, she has the royal P.R. straight jacket on...

Straitjacket, surely? Or does she know something we don't?

...and yet, she demonstrates her authenticity in motherhood with the obvious care she puts into her children and the genuinely warm way she behaves with them, even under the camera’s glare. She commits the ultimate crime in today’s post-feminist world: She appears to enjoy being a mom, and lets the media run with that perception.

Being a mom must be heaps of fun if you're married to royalty with an army of nannies and minders to take the kids, clean you up, rub your shoulders, and put cream on your nipples as soon as the photographers leave. Speaking of promo, now to suck off The Leader!

Like Middleton, Ivanka has allowed herself to be very much defined by her role as a mom. While Ivanka has a demanding career, she seems proud to let the paparazzi make a fuss over her family life too, occasionally doing what Middleton does not, sharing a more candid and makeup-free moment with her kids with the world.

Which is gross when less conservative celebs do it but she has a way don'tcha think?

...It’s easy to scoff at Middleton’s lack of a career, but she is one of the most scrutinized women in the world.

"Object of male gaze" has been a career for many women, honey, but rarely so remunerative; that it's a crap deal only gets more obvious (thanks in part to the gruesome example of Ivanka's dad!). That's why Teen Vogue is woke and you're a snore.

A TINY FINGER POKING A GREASY TOUCHSCREEN -- FOREVER.

Washington (CNN) -- The Badlands National Park official account tweeted statistics about climate change on Tuesday that could contradict how President Donald Trump's administration may want to present it. 

The tweets were up for a few hours before they were deleted.

But that's been taken care of.

...and no wise guys, get me?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Inauguration and the Women's March and the unflattering comparison between them that set off the Trumpkins.

Among the outtakes, a RedState writer new to me, Mickey White, on Saturday's event: “Why women in Paris are protesting Donald Trump is beyond me, but when have these people ever made sense?” Also, the place is full of furriners. White further claims that at the DC march, “after a rousing musical performance that concluded in a drum circle, an aging hippie asked the crowd to chant ‘Hello, Charlie’ to him.” I don’t know why White did not, while he was at it, also claim that some hippie punk told a cop, “come on, pig, I know my rights,” as he lit his joint with a burning flag; lack of ambition, perhaps.

Among my favorite bits of wingnut reportage was Kira Davis', also at RedState, covering the inaugural entertainments:

The Trumps looked on dutifully as performers like Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood entertained onlookers.

Party of the year! (I will add that, despite the fun I've had with them, Trump's problems with the celebrity community are among the least of his negatives. For one thing, Meryl Streep et alia are reliably brought up in every bog-standard ThisIsWhyTrumpWon thumbsucker, so they're of at least marginal benefit to him as objects of ressentiment. For another, it's not the areas in which he is a failure that bother me so much as the areas in which he is a great success -- i.e. grifting and wrecking entities he's in charge of.)

UPDATE. The conspiracy goes even deeper than George Soros, says The Daily Caller:

Women’s March Organizer Recently Met Ex-Hamas Operative, Has Family Ties To Terror Group

And the wingnuts are whooping it up ("THIS is what Linda Sarsoul wants for America," arrgh blarrgh). I take it as a good sign -- this is exactly the sort of shit they were writing about Obama as he was cruising to the presidency.

PUSSY GALORE.

Even on North Carolina Avenue over a mile away, there was a steady stream of them -- nearly all women, nearly all wearing that hat, some carrying signs, all looking resolute and cheerful. They went to the space they'd been licensed and they owned it -- half a million flooding the avenues, spilling onto the sidestreets, chanting and cheering and ululating like Xena. They were strong without being macho -- that is to say, without being assholes. This was the biggest demo I've attended since the 2004 RNC protest in New York, and certainly the one with the biggest f-to-m ratio, and perhaps for that reason it was the most polite (no crowding, no shoving, every jostle came with an apology) while being at the same time the most fierce -- no one would expect a limo to be set on fire, but each time the ladies raised their voices by God you heard every one.

And this was replicated around the nation and around the world. Millions of women took the time to answer Friday's atrocity. I'm pretty sure that's why Trump's flak Sean Spicer lied his ass off so splenetically about the feeble attendance at Il Douche's douchination -- he knew that, as he'd been outnumbered in the election, so he would be outnumbered in the streets. And he tried to head this off in the only way chunkhead thugs like him know how: Bullying and bluster. That works with some of the more suggestible and insecure guys in this big high school we call America. But the girls, whether they're on the student council or smoking behind the gym, know better, have always known better. Of necessity they've gotten pretty good over the centuries at keeping their own counsel. But that is changing, and by the minute. 

IDAY NOTES.

I bike to Union Station weekday mornings to get the Metro to my job. Throughout the early part of the week they'd been polishing up the Great Hall at the station, setting out tables and erecting these grim-looking, 20-foot-tall, dark-grey replicas of the Washington Monument. Big deal inauguration-related dinner, thought I. Friday I left my bike parked as usual at the station's east end bike racks and as I headed for the Metro noticed the station's portals had been sealed up, which seemed a bit much. It wasn't until later that I thought to check the news and found that this was to be the site of a "candlelight dinner" for Trump donors and that Trump and Pence families would be there to press their cold, cash-rich flesh. Sure enough, when I got back to Union Station last night there was massive security -- cops and concrete barriers everywhere, with a five-block perimeter of parked, darkened buses and wire fencing -- and a long line of men in tuxes and ladies in gowns waiting to take their tables. I imagine them there, candles guttering, their light casting fluttering shadows from the dark Monuments like spectral hellgates.

I had to go wide around all this to get to the bike racks -- or to within fifty feet of them, as they were locked down too. So that's something else I have against the new Administration.

Buses being interrupted and cabs unavailable, I walked home, and back to the station this morning to get the bike (being blessedly granted home-labor on account of the Day). The station is just above the Red Zone where locomotion becomes difficult today. There were about a hundred of these #ResistJ20 guys on the plaza, giving the stream of inauguration-goers coming from the station something to scowl at. There were also lots of porta-potties, and lots of hawkers. "PONCHOS!" yelled one guy walking around in one as some drizzle came down, holding folded clear and yellow plastic in each hand. "You got it, buddy!" yelled another guy at his folding table of Trump t-shirts and hats.

Then back home through Northeast D.C., where all was the same as on any Friday except maybe a little quieter; I could hear birds filling the bare trees on F Street, singing.

UPDATE. I couldn't watch it; from the transcript the speech appears to be the same roaring gibberish as usual. The usual suspects are all like, hmm, he didn't pivot to Classy Presidential Mode, that's certainly a surprise -- like they were born yesterday and slow for their age.

As I alluded last night, conservatives are at the party but standing near the door, hoping to preserve plausible deniability when Il Douche does something too ham-handed; hence their coverage of the inauguration is a bit stiff and lacks the joyful rush you'd expect from people whose dream of wrecking the country is coming true. Take Dan McLaughlin at National Review:

I suspect the part everyone will remember is his invocation of “America First,” repeatedly and as a theme of his foreign and domestic policy and even as a theme of his calls for unity: ”When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” The implication here is that America is a family: outsiders viewed with suspicion, but everyone within treated with love and respect. Obviously, we’re a long way from the latter goal, and Trump has hardly been innocent of exacerbating that, but it’s at least a worthy aspiration.

Aspiration! Run that by Trump; he'll say, "Yes, that's 90% of success, I believe Thomas Jefferson said." People of all persuasions pretend to see the Emperor's New Clothes sometimes, but even McLaughlin cannot hide his embarrassment at having to project an aura of Lincolnian patriotism onto this brutal oaf. I expect he'll eventually get the hang of it well enough and with time his flopsweat will dry, but the smell of bullshit will never quite go away.

THE DIFFERENCE.

If you look at the Big Conservative Sites now, you will notice a trend. At National Review, along with stories of what a monster Obama was, you'll see stories of how the media was unfair to poor Rick Perry, the former Texas governor about to be in charge of a federal department he once swore to destroy ("the Times peddles fake news"), and to Trump himself ("Democrats will do everything they can to create disunity from the inauguration on"). It seems a lifetime ago that National Review declared itself implacably opposed to Trump; now they're his best friend, because his only effective opposition is liberals -- and vice-versa.

At The Federalist, along with stories of what a monster Obama was, you'll see stories of how an artist was unfair to Ivanka Trump (and how artists owe him allegiance), and how the media was unfair to Trump himself. The Federalist once promoted a less Trumpified conservatism ("Ted Cruz's Donald Trump endorsement reminds us never, ever, ever to trust a politician"), but they too have gotten with the new realities.

But it's not enough that these guys celebrate Trump's victory over the liberals; they seem to need to blame liberals for Trump, too. They did it earlier, but it's weird to see their need to keep at it as their despised champion blunders into the White House. Occasional NR contributor Peter Wehner recently went on the radio to tell us whose fault Trump really was -- but prefaced it becomingly with tears of regret:

I wish Trump had not won. I'm - lifelong Republican. I'm a conservative, and I was Never Trump from the moment he announced his campaign all the way through. But he wasn't elected in a vacuum. There was a lot of acrimony, a lot of division. A lot of Americans, particularly blue-collar Americans, felt dishonored and unheard and voiceless during the Obama years.

Touching! Or take The Federalist's David Marcus in his "Progressives Destroyed Normalcy And Now They’re Shocked Trump Isn’t Normal." Marcus claims to disapprove of Trump ("I say this as a dad who has to explain to my son why the President-elect is calling people rude names, when I teach him that is wrong"), but on the other hand liberals are in favor of "abolishing the police" and "running for president as a Socialist" (yeah, I don't know either). Plus Marcus read about some guy at Think Progress who was worried about the politics of his redneck plumber; Think Progress guy apparently didn't even say anything to the plumber, but even just thinking uncharitably of such people is the great sin of the Age of the WWC Whisperer, so instead of just dismissing Think Progress guy as a doofus, Marcus indignantly claims he was "indulging in the same kind of irrational racial bias that gets black kids shot in America" -- no, I'm not kidding -- and says this explains why America embraced an asshole-in-chief:  "Trump thrived in a culture that now accepts that rudeness, judgment, and condemnation of those with the wrong political views is justified." He doesn't approve of that thinking, you understand; he just understands it -- and takes pleasure in the lamentations of the libtards, presumably not while the kid is watching.

You get this same two-faced shtick from other factota like Andrea Ruth at RedState ("As a conservative, I still hold much skepticism of anything Donald Trump does" -- wait for it; wait for it -- "but this squirming and crying from the left is enough to make the fiscally conservative side of my heart smile for now"), Bernard Goldberg ("I was and still am not a fan of Donald Trump. I find him to be both a narcissist and a braggart" -- get on with it; get on with it -- "...But, I find it more than a little ironic, that the people who have brought me closer to the president-elect are liberals..."), et alia. They're happy to have won but... but... but they feel they have to say something to distinguish themselves from... people who don't need to distinguish themselves. After all, they have media jobs!

I just want to remind you, on the eve of this new era, that you folks of the defeated majority are not the only ones who know what a horrible mistake has been made; even these idiots know it. The difference is you have the balls to admit it. And that's all the difference in the world.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG.

"Why National Unity Remains So Elusive," by Jonah Goldberg. Did you guess libtards? Congratulations! But Goldberg makes us go through a detour -- specifically, the early part of his word count -- before we can get there. It's about how we're all mad at each other, despite Goldberg's attempts to bind up the nation's wounds with books like Liberal Fascism.

The front-padding done, Goldberg gets to the John Lewis thing and gives us a dull recap of the conservative take I described on Monday: Lewis "earned his icon status on the Edmund Pettus Bridge" but now he's just a mean libtard and did you know that "the goons who cracked Lewis’s skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were acting at the behest of a Democratic governor and Democratic local officials"? Lewis is just confused as to who his friends are, apparently; I bet he doesn't even know Robert Byrd was a Klansman.

All this would not be worth noting were it not for a choice Goldberg Easter Egg of the sort he often drops when he's in a hurry to finish up a column and get to the Cheeto trough. Here's today's:

Now, Lewis is going further still, refusing to attend Trump’s inauguration and arguing that Trump cannot be a legitimate president because of Russian meddling in the election. Lewis may have reason to believe that Trump did not win fair and square, but questioning Trump’s legitimacy is exactly what the Russians probably wanted from the beginning: to undermine Western and American faith and confidence in democracy.

Not only does John Lewis not appreciate the Republican Party's continuing commitment to civil rights, he's playing into the hands of the Russians -- like Edward Snowden! Maybe Trump should have him charged with treason. It'll show he's serious about foreign policy.

GAYPOCALYPSE NOW!

Good ol' Rod Dreher is predicting (based in part on the perorations of some guy who has Charles Bronson in Death Wish as his Twitter avatar) that the left will go crazy with violence soon:

[Fake Paul Kersey] says another big takeaway from his tweetstorm to that point are that political violence can come from anywhere, and that the left has the infrastructure to make it happen more than the right does, in part because there are mainstream leftist leaders who would accept it. These don’t exist on the right.

Ahem ahem ahem ahem ahem --  but I expect my throat-clearing is wasted on Dreher, who believes that since liberals are "allowing courses that teach students of all races how terrible white people and their culture is," the only possible result is SJW Violence and Ooga Booga unleashed across the fruited plain.

[Fake Paul Kersey] gets very dark in this series, and says that the actions of the left on Inauguration Day may prove decisive. He links to this article about how various left-wing and anarchist groups are organizing to disrupt the Trump inauguration. If that goes down in a significant way, you can bet that Trump is going to break heads over it — and that a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be on his side.

I wonder why he's so confident liberals will riot at the inauguration -- wishful thinking, perhaps, or maybe he's got some inside information from James O'Keefe.  But more provocative than the blacks and the college students is Dreher's Pubic Enemy Number One:

There’s a report that queer protestors are going to start the ball rolling with a gay dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s home. If that happens, and there is anything lewd about it, then you can bet that the Christian Right, even people who aren’t fond of Trump, will begin to migrate solidly to Trump’s side...

Lewd gay dancing -- the thin, erect end of the wedge! When Mr. and Mrs. America get a load of gay people working it to "Bounce" in the presence of Vice President Pence, there'll be hetero hell to pay. Then maybe Dreher will get the Great Re-a-Straightening he's been dreaming of -- hell, maybe they can turn Milo!

I know we're supposed to be scared of Trump, but I can't imagine being as scared of anything as Dreher is scared of everything.

UPDATE. Dreher always brings out the best in my commenters. "Fidel from the Castro: 'History of Disco, Volume 3 will absolve me,'" and "RuPaul Revere: 'One if by glam, two if by glee,'" contributes J---. "Maybe Rod should drop Logo from his cable package," suggests AGoodQuestion. And Fats Durston gives us a sneak preview of the forthcoming classic, Rainbow Dawn:

Sergeant: The Bisexuals reinforced with some weird division. Subarus across the plains. Thrusting ever forward, right down our throats. Cut the pipeline we needed. Dykes overran the dikes we had set up round N'Orleans. Just when it stabilized, then six million screaming ladyboys.

Kid: I thought there were ten million screaming ladyboys?

Sergeant: There were.

Go look just to see what he uses for "Wolverines."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how conservatives celebrated MLK Day by beating up King's old comrade John Lewis.

The column came too soon, alas, to cover as alicublog has done in the past the more general rightwing Martin Luther King Day tributes. But some of the brethren stepped up early. At Laura Ingraham's LifeZette, Lee Habeeb, whose gibberish has been examined here before, claims "the media" doesn't want us to know that King was a man of God.

"Leaving God out of Martin Luther King's life," a friend once told me, "is like leaving naked young women out of Hugh Hefner's. It's like leaving the story of segregation out of Jackie Robinson's."

Yet the filthy media takes the segregation from Jackie Robinson's story and puts it in King's too, which is double-dipping!

But that won't stop the media from redacting any and all references to the source of King's inspiration. You'll hear endless references to Dr. Martin Luther King this week — but never to Reverend King.

The lesson is that King has been hijacked by race hustlers who think he was about equality or social justice or some shit. Similarly, at National Review Ian Smith says King was a fan of Cesar Chavez, so he would have been against illegal immigrants, just like You Know Who, and that's his Real Message, never mind this race nonsense. He looked forward to the day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by The Conscience of a Conservative!

Somehow these guys never bring up that King advocated a guaranteed national income.