DEMENTIA '16.

That Egyptian river ran through Columbia Heights today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

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

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

A HAND-JOB, NOT A HAND-OUT.

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

I sat there looking around and heard things like:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PRIVATES WAR OF ROD DREHER, CONT.

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

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

COGITO ERGO SOME ASSHOLE.

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

The Pajama Boy White House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the trans bathroom baloney that's been riling the rightbloggers. (The Voice, alas, cut my original title, "Trans Urine Express," and didn't even replace it with "Rightbliggers Wet Themselves Over etc." or the equivalent. Mailer wept! They did a good job on the column, though.)

My instinct is conservatives are taking a flyer here -- the issue is unlikely to sway the masses much, but they can take this opportunity to test some lines for the convention and campaign that might stir certain constituents (you know, morons) to useful outrage.

Their major play, it seems so far, is that Obama's literally exposing little girls to harm of molestation. You can't get more overt than The Federalist's headline, "Obama Threatens Schools: Let Men In the Little Girls’ Room Or Else." It's like grown women don't piss or shit, but merely send their tiny daughters to Obama's Sex Toilets to be mowed down by opportunistic penises. Of course men invade ladies' rooms as it is, without the help of LGBT activists, which the brethren seem to think makes their case. I wonder if they wake up sweating in the middle of the night with the realization that some of the guys in the men's room are gay -- which, by their logic, leaves their little boys (and themselves!) ripe for predation.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The situation's hopeless. You know it's true.

• Krystle Schoonveld at The Federalist:

6 Reasons To Sext Your Husband

Um.

...There are many reasons you should send your husband pictures of yourself scantily dressed, or racy text messages reminding him of the night before. After all, sex is important in a marriage. It is the physical representation of the way you feel about one another, and it’s fun. Sexting can enhance the experience of making the beast with two backs, and can help your marriage be even stronger than before.

Here's another tip: Stop calling it making the beast with two backs.

1. Foreplay
Are you planning a romp in the sheets later that night?

To do: 1. Laundry 2. Lunch with Jill. 3. Canning. 4. Romp in the sheets. 5. Write Federalist column. 6. Me-time!!!

Sexting him during work, or perhaps on his way home, will prime him for the event.

"Went right through the crossing gate just as the train was coming, Detective. We found this on his phone."

Lucky for you, there is a good chance he will reciprocate with hot texts and pictures.

"What're you doing, Len?" "Taking a dump, same as you." "Yeah but your foot's all the way inside my stall!" "Just trying to get a good angle." "What?" "Oh, come on. You're a married man yourself!"

...Sure, he has seen you naked a thousand times. But your man won’t turn down seeing you nude if he has the opportunity. A man is a visual creature, and a woman has the visual assets to intensify the attention she receives from her spouse, if she so chooses...

I could go on (I'm tempted, believe me -- I haven't even gotten to "Yes, this refers to the all-important Spank Bank", nor her reference to the "coitus arsenal"), but I have to ask: Who is this for? Some lady who doesn't know men like homemade porn? Is it like a rightwing version of Joan Allen in the tub in Pleasantville? Here's what I think: After the 2012 election, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds called on conservatives to take over ladies' magazines, on the theory that they could be used to hypnotize women into voting Republican. Maybe Schoonveld is a sleeper cell. (Picked a bad year to activate her, if so!) Either that --

Your goal is keeping him focused on your skills and assets, proving to him that you still think about taking his skin bus to Tuna Town too...

...or it's a Poe. Won't be the first time one has fooled me.