A SAD CASE.

Victor Davis Hanson has delivered his most incoherent column yet, starting with the title, "White versus White America." It's just buzzwords and catchphrases floating in rage. Analysis is impossible, so let's just ladle out some specimens:

"Does a Kim Kardashian suddenly stop flashing her boobs on YouTube in worry over what others might think?" (Reference to Trump, elitism; not sure why she can't worry while flashing, but okay; also, first recorded Hanson use of "boobs")

"...convicted child-assaulter Jeffrey Epstein..." (Reference to Clintons as font of all evil; only such reference that is not about them being rich, which suggests someone pointed out the irony to Hanson)

"For an angry Arizonan, ridiculing 'low energy' Jeb is not as crude as Jeb’s own crude 'act of love' description of illegal immigration. An act of love for exactly whom?" (First time I've heard that Bush bit called "crude" -- maybe Hanson imagines an explicitly sexual meaning, which sort of makes sense if you hear it in a Will Ferrell as Roger Klarvin voice)

"Our popular culture is one of Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and the whiny, nasal-toned young metrosexual with high-water pants above his ankles and horn-rimmed glasses who 'analyzes' on cable news." (Reference to depraved youngs, unmanly/unwomanly as case may be but still fornicating on Hanson's lawn)

"Is it any wonder that millions sympathized with the heroism of Benghazi’s middle-class defenders rather than with the contortions of the far better-educated, smoother, more sensitive, and wealthier Rhodes scholar Susan Rice, novelist Ben Rhodes, or former First Lady Hillary Clinton?" (Reference to God knows what; no poll results linked to demonstrate relative popularity of Hillary's peeps vs. "Benghazi’s middle-class defenders," which sounds like an abandoned PR trope found in a shredder with "Benghazi's ruggedly handsome defenders" and "Trey Gowdy, watch him bite the head off a chicken")

"Whom do these sometimes incoherent Trump supporters likely despise? I would wager anyone who has never been sideswiped in a hit-and-run by an illegal-alien driver but lectures others on why 'illegal alien' is a racist term... anyone who freely uses the word 'white' in a way and context that he would never use 'black' or 'Latino'..." (Fight the real enemy, fellow honkeys! Full paragraph goes on to characterize Trump's anathema as rich liberals, as if Trumpkins don't worship all rich guys except Judge Smalls from Caddyshack)

"In an age of La Raza ('The Race') and (only) Black Lives Matter, how exactly did the Republican establishment think the white working classes would eventually react to the new hyphenated America? With a week’s escape to Provincetown or commiseration at a B-list D.C. party? Tribalism for thee, but not for me?" (Cabbages, knickers, it's not got a beak!)

"There are two characteristics common to popular uses of the term 'white': It is almost always used pejoratively, and it is mostly voiced by elites of all backgrounds..." (Mostly voiced by elites? Ol' Vic doesn't get around much)

"As is true of most revolutionary movements, the aggrieved are not as angry at their perceived opponents as they are contemptuous at the enablers of them." (Holy shit my metaphor makes no sense and I've already written a thousand words, better "explain" it with a mangled sentence that might throw them off the scent, and hope no one asks me what "enablers" the American Revolutionaries were angrier at than the British -- you think they'll buy "the Dutch East India Company"?)

Hanson's closing:

Given his cruelty, obnoxiousness, and buffoonery, Trump should have been a three-month flash in the pan, exactly as most of his critics had prophesied and dreamed. I hope he will still fade, as he should. But the fact that he has persisted this long may be because the hatred our elites so passionately claimed was aimed at the Other was actually directed at themselves.

To sum up, The Elites, a gang made up of rich liberals and Darkskins,  bamboozled the white working class into hating themselves, but Trump (while still objectionable! This is National Review!) taught them better, and now the scales have fallen from their eyes and they'll vote for Ted Cruz as soon as we gank this convention. Good night!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the return of Andrew Sullivan to our telescreens, and what's changed between his heyday and today. When I started on this, I was surprised by how little his work had stuck with me; I could hardly remember what I had against him, besides the fifth-column thing. But as I got into it, all the nauseating rage came back. Experience it with me, won't you?

THIS FALLEN WORLD.

David French seems to have taken over National Review's Rod Dreher Chair for Manic Street Preaching. Today French tells us that some observers believe young men should be kept away from porn because it warps their sexuality. This French dismisses as "progressive morality":

When sexual liberation in one area leads to less sexual pleasure in another, no one on the left knows quite what to do. After all, the new anti-porn activists “are all at pains to make it clear that they are not anti-sex.” Well, that’s a relief...

Lost intimacy, however, is but one piece of the puzzle. Step-by-step, pornography decays moral character, and when character decays, so does culture...

Yet our nation builds morality around consent, not character, and it is strangely puzzled when the result is an ocean of heartache.

Don't eschew porn because you want a healthy sex life -- eschew it for the "culture," which from all I can tell means a world where no one laughs when David French yells from a soapbox through a bullhorn, and all the balls are blue.

Rare is the person who lives the libertine life but suddenly becomes responsible the very moment they "fall in love."

If you've been impure, you are rendered incapable of falling in love except in scare-quotes. But here's the bestworst part:

There’s a reason why so many romantic comedies end mere minutes after the promiscuous jerk vows to change his ways and runs through the rain to carry his “true love” to the world of happily-ever-after. Keep the camera running for six months, and you’ll find that same guy alone in a dark room watching celebrity sex tapes on his iPad before flipping through his Tinder options.

Oh God, wouldn't you like to see those Director's Cuts? Like, I don't know, Silver Linings Playbook -- six months after the dance contest, Bradley Cooper's back up in his attic bedroom whacking it to hentai and Jennifer Lawrence has joined a convent in despair. "That's a crap ending," says some kid in the audience; "No better than you deserve," says Feargod French, taking down the kid's name. "Wait'll you see what we've done with Bridget Jones."

THE SITUATIONAL ETHICS OF ROD DREHER.

Back in 2012, Jesus people were fighting the Battle of Chick-fil-A, changing their purchase decisions to make a statement  -- and Rod Dreher was right in there with them:

Last night I took my two younger kids to see a movie. Afterwards, they asked if we could eat at Chick-fil-A, which is one of their favorite restaurants. I’m more of a Raising Cane’s guy when it comes to fried chicken products, but with the example of the most recent View From Your Table in mind, I said sure. It felt like the right thing to do, given all the crap the company has had to take this week from gay activists over its Christian president’s opposition to gay marriage... 

I don’t for one minute begrudge anybody getting ticked off at a corporate leader for things he or she believes, says, does, or pays for. And if you want to withhold your trade from that person and their company, you certainly have that right.

Well, recently a number of companies have decided to take their business elsewhere than North Carolina in light of the state's recent transgender-in-restrooms legislation, and guess how Brother Rod feels about that:

Can’t you see this kind of thing coalescing into a national movement of activists, sympathetic politicians, and corporations, to bully any state that passes any RFRA, no matter how mild, into backing down? This movement is premised on the idea that orthodox Christianity is so evil that a state that makes a law showing any respect whatsoever for one of its now-controversial teachings must be treated like a pariah, and made to suffer culturally and economically. I told you they would do this kind of thing. It’s the Law of Merited Impossibility: It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you bigots are going to deserve it...

I don't know why so many of his posts are thousands of words long -- his philosophy really isn't that complex. Any toddler can show it with a tantrum.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Trump's abortion gaffe and the rightblogger reaction to it.  Trump was wrong to say pro-lifers want to "punish" women, the bethren insisted, when all they want to do is strip them of their reproductive rights.

They weren't all passive aggressive like that -- some were just straight-up aggressive. Gina Loudon at WorldNetDaily:

I have been a post-abortive counselor, and what Mr. Trump may not know is that many women are victimized by abortion, because the abortion industry spends millions of taxpayer dollars teaching little girls that pregnancies are just a bunch of tissue. Their $9 billion per year, taxpayer-funded industry depends on vulnerable women believing that lie. 

But there are women who are older, wiser, repeat aborters who definitely know better.

You can spot these hard cases in a line-up: Slouching, cigarette dangling from their lips, "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirt.

Is there a pro-lifer out there that doesn’t think that in a perfect world – where we agreed abortion was, for example, illegal after the first trimester – that the woman could, if working with full knowledge, be held accountable for her complicity in the abortion? Shouldn’t this, like any law that is broken, be considered in a case-by-case manner?

So let the judge decide, case-by-case: the aborter-with-a-heart-of-gold, a good kid led astray by her bull dyke roommate and Society, gets probation, reporting twice a week to the judge's place in the country for "chores," while the hardened hussies get prison. Ain't that what justice meant before the ACLU got hold of it?

But this was a minority opinion: Most of our subjects were able to conceal their hatred of autonomous women for propaganda purposes, though they sometimes had to go to ridiculous lengths to keep up the act. Have a look at the column and you'll see.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fuck it, this is still great.

•     In the wake of Donald Trump's brief advocacy of "punishing" women who have abortions, there have been several stories published asserting these women are already being punished by absurd restrictions in several states. In Texas, for example, you have to get a medically-unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound, a shaming lecture, and a 24-hour waiting period. Soon, in Indiana, you'll have to give your fetus a funeral. Many states make it so tough to open a clinic that they have only one abortion provider; Kansas has three, down from four when Dr. George Tiller was murdered in 2009. (And some states make women go to the clinic twice for one abortion.) Meanwhile conservatives are always trying to make it worse: last year North Dakota tried to make abortion illegal after six weeks, and was only blocked because they got a good judge -- who knows what future graduates of the Scalia School of Law will do. But don't tell this to National Review's David French, who things abortions in America are like a sweet trip on the good ship Lollipop:

These writers aren’t making a serious argument. They’re simply following the standard leftist playbook by redefining words in service of shrieking hyperbole. To “punish” typically means to make “someone suffer for a crime or for bad behavior.” But if it serves a woman’s right to kill her unborn child, the Left will happily stretch “punishment” to include any minor inconvenience... 

...Yes, some women are inconvenienced in their quest for an abortion, but not so inconvenienced as to prevent abortionists from plying their deadly trade more than 700,000 times per year. No, women are not punished, and neither are their unborn children. To argue otherwise is to imply that an aborted fetus is guilty of some transgression, when in fact it’s the opposite: the innocent fetus is simply killed.

That last part is merely Jesus-gibberish, but note the similarity of "it serves a woman’s right" to "it serves a woman right" -- composition can be psychologically revealing. Their current shtick is to pretend they'd never, ever punish women who want abortions; it's just their accomplices who'd get the chair. But, as is proven by the crazy laws they've managed to pass, they'll torment women who defy them any way they can.

•     It's hard to pick a Wingnut Whine of the Week as all their weeks are whiny these days, but I'm short of time so I'll just say they're all winners/whiners and leave you with this one by Steve Berman at The Resurgent, in which he gets a load of all the youngsters going for Bernie Sanders and commences to sputter:

The word “socialism” has lost its boogeyman quality to these young people who grew up with No Child Left Behind, Hope scholarships, Obama phones, and heathcare as a right. Basically, they see daddy-nanny-government as the way things should be, and the left is happy to hand them even more goodies. 

Even Trump likes to play candyman (“nobody will die in the street”).

"Nobody will die in the street"! God, way to encourage the moochers, Donny!

....We (me being among the last of the baby boomers) have screwed them and they know it. Sanders’ appeal is just the beginning of the trend, if conservatives can’t force-feed a government grown fat and comfortable some very bitter medicine.

"Force-feed"! It's the revenge of the Down Our Throaters! Yeah, expect to see this guy with his head shaved and crying for a Golden Dawn next election cycle.

NO RIGHT BUT THE RIGHT TO LIFE.

Establishment conservatives (that is, the ones blessed with phony-baloney jobs at National Review and elsewhere) were outraged yesterday when Donald Trump (briefly) asserted that once abortion is made illegal -- the fervent hope of all wingnuts -- women who have them will have to be "punished." Cuz duh it's murder, as they keep telling us, right? Some of the brethren were honest enough to admit they were outraged because Trump was spoiling their traditional line of bullshit -- like Matt K. Lewis, who probably isn't smart enough to know that's what he was doing:

In truth, like the notion that there should be exceptions for rape and incest, the notion that only the abortion doctor (not the woman having the abortion) should face penalties, is inconsistent with the notion that “abortion is murder.” 

Yet these political compromises are necessary in order to cobble together a palatable and defensible (if admittedly inconsistent) public policy position that might someday actually be able to win the argument in mainstream America. 

Part of the goal is to remove the ability for pro-choicers to demagogue the issue by scaring vulnerable women. Now, thanks to Trump, that’s back on the table.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Donald! To win back whatever credibility they had with female voters, conservatives rushed to assure them that they love women and consider them too dumb to share culpability in what, from their perspective, is a hit job on an innocent and autonomous fetus. At the New York Daily News, Charles Camosy says women are not the victims of politicians who would strip them of reproductive rights, but of abortion mongers like Hugh Hefner and the men of the Supreme Court who inflicted Roe upon an unwilling womankind:

Someone who is coerced into having an abortion as a means of having social equality should not be put in jail. Women, like their prenatal children, are victims of our horrific abortion policy.

[Pause to let that comparison sink in.] 

Instead, physicians who profit from the violence of abortion ought to be punished. Philadelphia’s Dr. Kermit Gosnell...

When they start waving the bloody fetal-parts, you know they've got nothin'. Most of the brethren just stick with the pre-arranged story, which is basically "we would never say such a thing about our beloved broodmares."

Meanwhile out there in Jesusland these lovers of women, frustrated in their attempts to flatly ban abortion, keep themselves busy thinking up new ways to fuck with women who have them, and even with women who have miscarriages, I guess as a demented way to emphasize the superior rights of fetuses over those of their incubators; in the latest such exercise, Indiana passed a bunch of bizarre restrictions, including these:

Provides that a person who knowingly transports an aborted fetus into, or out of, Indiana commits a Class A misdemeanor, unless the aborted fetus is transported for the sole purpose of final disposition. Provides that a miscarried or aborted fetus must be interred or cremated by a facility having possession of the remains. Requires a person or facility having possession of a miscarried or aborted fetus to ensure that the miscarried fetus or aborted fetus is preserved until final disposition occurs.

These people are nuts, and their loving-caretaker routine won't last long once they return to federal power.