The unforgiving minute: I'll believe it when he leaves Fox News for the QVC channel

So George Will has declared that the GOP "is not my party" because it's about to sanctify Trump's presumptive status as their presidential nominee. He's now technically an unaligned voter.

What does that mean? It simply means that, now that the primary season is over, he can create a nothing-but-symbolic distance between himself and his life-long party – at least until the November election is over, at which point he can quietly return to the fold. So what if he's probably not going to cast a vote for Trump, in an election where even the negatives-burdened Hillary Clinton stands fair to clean his clock in both the popular vote and the electoral college? (And Trump, who's called Will a "loser" anyway, won't care either way).

It is the emptiest of empty gestures. All it means is that Will's going to leave the top of his ballot blank and vote Republican the rest of the way down. Trust me: It's still his party.

Nice try, George, but Jen Sorenson has got your number.  And, albeit from a different direction, so does J. D. Crowe.

Minute's up.

Quote of the day: Honest confusion

As we’ve seen, most elite conservatives have fervently declared themselves against Trump. Some claim it’s because they consider Trump a liberal — albeit a liberal who favors tax breaks for the rich, war with Iran, and a ban on Muslims; maybe they’re confusing him with Joe Lieberman.

- Roy Edroso, demonstrating that the principle difference between the days when his weekly Village Voice column on the right-wing blogosphere came out online late Sunday night and now, when it comes out Monday morning, is that in the old days he made me snort chamomile tea out my nose, and now it's English breakfast tea.

Eight years ago in p3: He slimed us. I feel so funky.

(Update: Link fixed. My bad.)

If it attacks a Clinton -- either Bill or Hillary will do, both would naturally be better --  and it's significantly short on verifiable details, and above all it has a nasty adolescent sexual spin that makes you want to take a shower and burn your clothes, chances are it came from the Sultan of Sleaze, the Impresario of Ignominy, the Archduke of Dirt, old Roger Stone himself.

His reputation as a right-wing dirty trickster goes back to the Nixon administration. Now that is a credential.

He's been back in the news lately, promising great big Republican head Sean Hannity that he has two dozen women on ice ready to go public with the claim that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted them, a two-rail shot toward candidate Clinton.

In 2008, he came out with an especially juvenile attack directly on Hillary. (Perhaps it's redundant to say "especially juvenile," since "juvenile" defines his standard. It's like calling one individual banana slug "especially slimy," when it's simply what they all are.) This week in 2008, I wrote about it here, in a little piece called "Heh, heh, heh."

Quote of the day: Shooting off the third toe

Giving Glenn Beck history is like giving a tree sloth a flute. You'll get noise but, pretty soon, it will eat the thing.

Charlie Pierce – p3's own Sultan of Similies, Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors – looking over this week's own-toe-shooting-off edition of the National Review in which the rightest minds of a generation were destroyed by madness.

Sunday morning toons: Short and sweet

(Updated below.)

Since a number of cartoonists are taking a little time off this week (although a few managed to do so while still sending out work, if you know what I mean), we're going to keep this edition of the p3 Sunday toon review short, too.

Part One:

Whatever they're paying Fred Hiatt, the nominal editor of the editorial page at the Washington Post, not to do his job, I bet I could not-do it just as well for a lot less money. Seriously, guys – call me.

It all began innocently enough on Tuesday. Washington Post editorial cartoonist (and p3 favorite) Ann Telnaes had responded to a surprisingly-sleazy-even-by-the-contemporary-standards-of-the-genre TV ad that Ted Cruz was running in Iowa. You can see her cartoon here at the Post's site.

Well, actually no – you can't see it there at all, because Hiatt decided to dodge any heat coming down the pipe by pulling the cartoon, admitting in the process that he hadn't bothered to look at it, you know, before it went out. It must leave him more time to carry out his editorial duties if he spends less time actually carrying them out. Think about it.

If you want to see the Telnaes cartoon, and the original Cruz ad that it responds to, you can go to Comic Strip of the Day, who correctly points out that Telnaes' piece was a fair hit because it was not directly about the children; it's about the utter cynicism on the part of Cruz himself when he put them front and center, using them – as Telnaes points out – as little more than performing monkeys to attack his rivals.

Meanwhile, the board of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement supporting Telnaes and concluding with this astonishing bit of understatement:

While the editors at The Washington Post are free to edit how they see fit, in our view it would have been best to defend the cartoon once it had been published. Retracting it risks the appearance of caving to political pressure.

"The appearance of caving"? Gee, you think? Good lord. What would the reality of caving have looked like?

The Right Wing Cult of Victimhood is indeed a wonderful thing to watch in operation. Step 1: Cross the line with something offensive -- ideally it should be red meat for the base, but simply tactless and crude, or even just obviously untrue will do fine. Step 2: Shed a bitter tear when you're called out about it publicly. Step 3: Point to the calling-out as proof that the Liberal Media, as usual, has treated you unfairly. Mention "political correctness" at every opportunity. Repeat this claim in every venue in your considerable media armory, again and again and again. Step 4: Continue repeating it and trumpeting your victimhood forever, even after the object of your displeasure buckles, takes it back, accepts blame, begs forgiveness, and where possible hangs some convenient target of your wrath out to dry for it.

Telnaes' fellow cartoonists Darrin Bell, Clay Bennett, Steve Benson, and Clay Jones – all of whom are presumably able to do their work without fear of being Tuesday morning quarterbacked by Fred "Tower of Jell-O" Hiatt – proudly Stand With Ann. We at p3 do too. So should you.

Part Two:

And we've got year-end reviews! Bob Gorrell cuts directly to the chase with a primal-scream economy of word and image. Clay Bennett, Matt Weurker and Adam Zyglis each serves up a collection of his 2015 high points. Dave Barry, with an assist from ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman, presents a 2015 review which -- he swears! -- he is not making up.  Kevin Kallaugher finds a disturbing sense of going around and coming around in a large and lush piece. And Tom Tomorrow makes it to mid-2015 in his annual multi-part Year in Review.

Update: Ann Telnaes has posted her year in review. Only thing missing is my favorite image of hers: The Evil Old Bastard. Maybe her 2016 review will feature the EOB getting dragged into The Hague. One can always hope.

Enjoy.

Gaudeamus igitur: Void where prohibited

So it turns out that Senatobia, Mississippi's high school commencement exercises were interruped by a handful of friends and family who cheered either to loudly or at the wrong time (accounts seem to vary). This, in turn, exercised the district superintendent, who had asked audience members to hold their applause to the end of the ceremony, and who not only had the briefly exuberant family members escorted out, but later filed to have arrest warrants served against four of them for disturbing the peace.

Something superficially similar to this happened at commencement exercises at my little farm-town high school the year before I graduated. As one senior – not known for his distinguished academic record; I suppose you could call him a rowdy – crossed the stage at the end of the gymnasium to receive his diploma, a group of his younger peers cheered his name and clapped briefly. They were laughing; it was disruptive, and they knew it, but no big deal, and they knew that too. The principal – no spare-the-rod disciple of Dr. Spock, he – gave them what I suppose we would have called the stink-eye, but as with the Senatobia incident, it was over in a moment. Unlike Senatobia, though, no warrants were issued and small-town life moved on. I imagine no one who was there has thought about this in all the years since; it only came to my mind because of the Senatobia story.

Today, of course, in an age of weaponized social media, it's easier for things like that to gain a life of their own, and a lot of the seemier parts of the right-wing dial have been all over this story, as Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog documents.

Personally, I think the lesson from the story is obvious: They were cheering because, for the first time in American history, graduating seniors in Mississippi can think "Thank god for Oregon!"

Quote of the day: Selfies among the ruins

He's being a tourist of the lost world of morality, posting selfies of himself amid the ruins.

Yastreblyansky, in comments, musing on the sad spectacle of NYTimes colunmnist David Brooks attempting to lecture the rest of us on morality while maintaining his sweet gig as a highly-paid narcissistic blowhard.

Of all the David Brookses in the world, he's the David Brooksiest.

The unforgiving minute: Economic backlash concentrates the mind wonderfully

Well, the – Indianapolis Star -- no haven for candy-assed liberalism, let the reader be assured – has weighed in prominently on the debacle following passage and signing of Indiana's anti-LGBTQ law earlier this month.

And yet, and yet, and yet . . . Where was the equally bold front page "STOP THIS NOW" message when the law was first proposed by legislators who candidly admitted its discriminatory purpose, or as it was working its way through the legislative process, or when it came up for a final vote (where it won handily on party-line votes, 40-10 in the Senate and 63-31 in the House)? Nowhere to be found, that's where.

I imagine the Star was caught by surprise by the commercial and media backlash the law triggered, just as the bill's proponents and the governor were. Sure, the instigators knew enough not to parade their success – key homophobes joined the governor for a "private" signing ceremony. But the Star, unlike the somewhat challenged Governor Pence, was apparently quicker to see which side its bread is buttered on: Indiana's economy isn't in great shape anyway, and boycotts and high-profile pullouts, as long as they continue anyway, mean less money from advertising. Hence the editors now find themselves shocked – shocked! – to find legislated homophobia going on in their state!

Minute's up.

Quote of the day: They end in blood, always

This is the mass, unbridled, brainless Id of the barbarian at war with modernity in all its expressions. This is where anti-science leads, where a contempt for education leads, where the suppression of women leads, where marrying political fanaticism to religious fervor almost always leads. This is where theocracy brings us, over and over again. In 1572, in Paris, on St. Bartholomew's Day, 3000 French Huguenot Protestants were butchered by Catholic mobs. (The death toll throughout France is thought to have been over 70,000.) None of this is new. It rises from the same foul ground it always has. This is why Mr. Madison believed that the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine to be one of the worst things that ever happened to both religion and government. Official religions end in blood, always. That's why we don't have one here.

- Charlie Pierce on the Charlie Hebdo murders this week, and the animating forces behind it. (But wait – "almost always," Mr. Pierce? Marrying political fanaticism to religious fervor almost always leads to this kind of mindless self-righteous bloodletting? How did that adverb get in there?)

For a look at the bloodthirsty delight over at Fox News, read Steve M.

For a know-your-terrorist-sympathizers pop quiz, read John Cole.

I believe Sean Hannity! I do!

I totally believe his father beat him with a strap, and I totally believe he's never been to a shrink.

What's so hard about that?

They're here!

Rod Serling pitched the idea of "The Twilight Zone" (I'm not going to call it "the original") in part because of his suspicion that science-fiction and fantasy offered a way to explore social and moral themes that even Golden Age television couldn't or wouldn't handle right. History has judged him kindly on that decision.

On the other hand, here's something I discovered by accident while doing some digging on Sinclair Lewis' 1935 satire/jeremiad It Can't Happen Here, in which Lewis imagines how fascism might take hold in America.

Inspired by the book, director–producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation titled Storm Warnings in 1982. The script was presented to NBC for production as a television miniseries, but NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too cerebral for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm of science fiction. The revised story became the miniseries V, which premiered May 3, 1983.

So. Nothing "too cerebral."

Mission accomplished, NBC.

Funny, though – I don't remember the right-wing commentariat ever pitching a hissy that "American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials" constituted further proof, as if any could possibly be necessary, that the American entertainment industry has always in thrall to its liberal hippie overlords.

Perhaps it was too, you know, cerebral.

(Also, I find it interesting to read that the American fascist parts were "re-cast" as man-eating extraterrestrials, rather than rewritten as man-eating ETs. It suggests the almost-Calvin-and-Hobbesian picture of a big folder down in Central Casting labeled Flesh-Eating Other Worlders – perhaps it's filed between Child Stars and Ingénues – all of whom are SAG members with résumés with head shots.)

A quantum of umbrage: A day late and a dollar short

But the Public Editor of the NYTimes admitted this morning that Ann Coulter's publicist, right-wing author Craig Shirley, played them like a violin.

Margaret Sullivan's post had this headline:

Was an Accusation of Plagiarism Really a Political Attack?

A fair-minded but less-thorough public editor might simply have typed "Yes," and headed off for the gym.

(And that editor might also have noticed that, by being phrased as a question, the headline subtly reproduces the very "cover-the-controversy" ethos that her post itself decries.)

But anyway, after laying out the facts of the case, Sullivan concluded:

There’s a problem here. An article about polarized reaction to a high-profile book is, of course, fair game. But the attention given to the plagiarism accusation is not.

Yes, the claim was “out there” but so are smears of all kinds as well as claims that the earth is flat and that climate change is unfounded. This one comes from the author of a book on the same subject with an opposing political orientation. By taking it seriously, The Times conferred a legitimacy on the accusation it would not otherwise have had.

And while it is true that Mr. Perlstein and his publisher were given plenty of opportunity to respond, that doesn’t help much. It’s as if The Times is saying: “Here’s an accusation; here’s a denial; and, heck, we don’t really know. We’re staying out of it.” Readers frequently complain to me about this he said, she said false equivalency — and for good reason.

So I’m with the critics. The Times article amplified a damaging accusation of plagiarism without establishing its validity and doing so in a way that is transparent to the reader.

Digby identifies the defense served up by the reporter of the original Times article and her editors as an invocation of Cokie's Law, by which, if a tabloid or partisan internet source makes a scurrilous claim, the "respectable" media are then allowed to repeat it in the guise of "reporting on the controversy." The fact that Sullivan seizes upon the phrase "out there" strongly suggests that she's well aware of Cokie's Law, although she's too polite to invoke the name of one of the highest-ranking Villagers in such a context.

In a few years, historian Rick Perlstein will publish the fourth and final book in his history of modern American conservatism ("The Invisible Bridge" is the third.) By then it will probably take a Google search to remember the name of the Times reporter who mainstreamed Shirley's swift boat-style attack on Perlstein. But we can confidently predict the second paragraph of any published report or review of that book.

It will feature the phrases "marred by controversy" and "allegations of plagiarism." The final sentence of the paragraph will discharge the writer's ethical responsibility by mentioning that the "controversy" was a right-wing character assassination job, and the "allegations" were baseless, but it won't matter. Yes, Perlstein will be respected, and his books will sell and be read. But the "p-word" will, however unjustly, be tied to his ass like a tin can.

Because, you know, it's "out there" now.

Thanks, Times.

Good news everyone! Perlstein's at his tipping point

I've been following the release of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the third book in historian Rick Perlstein's four-book history of the modern conservative movement. (I was working my way through the first two some four years ago.)

Perhaps because the right-wing smear-merchants have honed their skill set since 2010, or perhaps because they could look the other way when the truth about Goldwater and Nixon got laid out in almost quotidian detail but they're not going to sit idly by and watch anyone reduce Saint Ronnie to human scale again, the rightwing defenders of the faith are after Perlstein with everything they've got, at a level of acrimony that the first two books never excited.

It's reminiscent of the toxic gifts of Karl Rove when he was at his peak, because they're attacking Perlstein from the side of his greatest strength: They're questioning the fundamentals of his scholarship by accusing him, wildly improbably, of plagiarism. (A handy guideline established during the Clinton era: If Republicans accuse their enemies of doing something, it's a safe bet they've already been doing it themselves. We continue.)

The claim is preposterous. But then so was the swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004, and look how well that succeeded. Still, for a variety of reasons – The attackers' claims are more specific and more easily refuted with the documentation at hand? This sort of organized smear-campaign just looks and sounds (and smells) too familiar even to most of the mainstream media who will greatly the commercial and critical fate of The Invisible Bridge? – the attempts to drag the book and its author down are getting a fair amount of play, but they're not being taken very seriously, despite the aid and comfort lent by a disgraceful on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand review from The New York Times (you can easily find the link yourself).

Readers can disagree in good faith about the wisdom and utility of removing citations from the physical book itself and putting them online (Me? I'm evidently in the minority: I don't want to have to read it with my wifi tablet at my elbow, but I will.), but one thing is clear: The source notes are there, online, searchable, and click-throughable. Hence Perlstein, who seems to have been caught by surprise by this hatchet job (again, thanks so much, NYTimes.) can avail himself of the classic defense in such a case: The truth. (Plus the fundamentals of copyright law.)

You can read Slate's David Weigel's account of the general story here and the exchange of hostile and threatening letters (from Perlstein's chief attacker, currently Ann Coulter's publicist) and bemused but firm replies (from Perlstein's attornies) here.

I just want to point out one bit of data and note a historical parallel.

First, the conservative attackers can whine all they want, but Mammon is going to smile on Perlstein.

Second, there is some precedent, going back to 2003, for the situation Perlstein finds himself in, and it invites optimism:

Al Franken got the glad tidings while vacationing in Italy. He had fallen asleep reading "The Tipping Point" and mulling marketing ideas for his forthcoming "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," when a friend staying in the villa walked into his bedroom and woke him up. "Al!" he said. "You're being sued by Fox!" After a second-and-a-half of considering this, Franken responded: "Good!" Then he fell back asleep.

If Fox's intention was to break a large, undercooked ostrich egg on its corporate face while pouring streams of golden ducats into Franken's pockets, it carried out its plan to perfection. As everyone who pays attention to such matters knows by now, a judge laughed its copyright-infringement lawsuit (Fox claimed it trademarked the phrase "fair and balanced") out of court -- even adding insult to injury by warning the right-wing media behemoth that its ownership of the phrase it claimed to have spent $61 million developing was extremely dubious. And sales of Franken's book soared sky-high on the publicity, hitting #1 on Amazon's list Thursday.

Here's wishing Rick Perlstein a good night's sleep.

Impeachment? Paste this in your hat

For the next time someone tells you that all this "impeachment" talk is really a reverse-psych instigated by the Obama White House, cynically trying to wrong-foot the gullible but innocent Republicans in and out of Congress for political and fund-raising gain (but I repeat myself).

You probably knew some or most of this, but here it is, all in one place. Follow David Weigel's links at the site:

On Tuesday, after the conference meeting, Speaker John Boehner told reporters that “impeachment” was “a scam started by the Democrats at the White House.”

It wasn’t. If impeachment is a scam, it was started on the right, early in the Obama presidency. Some of its early adherents believed in it; some thought they were merely responding to the passions of constituents; some, obviously, wanted to raise money. At the start of this summer, the conservative book-publishing industry churned out two new tomes about why Republicans needed to start an impeachment conversation, to stop pretending that it was crazy to accuse the president of high crimes and realize that it was consistent with the rest of the party’s arguments. Republicans mostly refused to listen.

Then, on July 8 of this year, came Sarah Palin. Her PAC (this is important—see above, re: fundraising) placed an op-ed at Breitbart.com, announcing that the time had come for the I-word. For inexplicable reasons, Palin can still shift a news cycle; in a lucky synchronicity, the Senate campaign of Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley chose July 8 to release a tape of his opponent calling for impeachment.

Nothing will stop a movement quite like the other party noticing it. “Should Obama be impeached?” had been a slam-dunk kook-spotting question for years.

Like the House GOP's Impeachment Lite lawsuit against Obama, officially launched today, the only cause for delay was the tedious business of deciding what he would be found guilty of.

Fun fact: Former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, who was starting the paperwork calling for Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1997, making him first out of the gate by months, hoped to stage a political comeback this year – perhaps sensing that the time was right for someone with his impeach-for-whatever-reason street cred – but he got his ass whupped in the GOP primary by Tea Party candidate Barry Loudermilk. Sorry, Mr. Barr; but there'll be no resting on your laurels. The new GOP slogan is Who have you impeached for us lately?


Weigel's Salon article about the frantic efforts by Republican leadership to distance themselves from all the talk – but not the underlying intent – of Tea-Party fueled impeachment fantasies, is going on the p3 Readings list.

No more trick questions, no more arugula! (Updated)

Here's Tbogg, explaining some of the ins and outs of signing up for "Reaganbook," a Facebook wannabe (modestly called "Facebook for Patriots") whose birth was recently announced by the president of the anti-LGBT group Faith2Action.

Be forewarned though, there is a trick question to get you through the door:



If you can answer “what color is the ocean,” you are not a bot.

Or Reagan in his second term…

I feel slightly guilty lifting both the line and the image – it's Tbogg's gag, after all – but it redlined my Milk Out The Nose Meter and in the end I simply had no choice. Read the whole piece, in which he marvels that rightwingers have the free time to launch a project like this, what with the amount of effort already being expended rejecting Obama, and all his works, and all his empty promises.

It's fascinating that rightwingers still work so hard to create media in which they have, by design, no one to talk to but one another – as if that hasn't already been the case for well over a decade. There was the launch of Fox News Channel in 1996, followed by Conservapedia in 2006 (when Wikipedia proved itself too "liberal" for them), followed by Twitchy (the "groundbreaking Twitter curation" site, because Twitter has too much stuff founder Michelle Malkin doesn't agree with) in 2012. And I haven't included talk radio, right-wing web-sites, right-wing vanity presses and imprints, and so on.

Perhaps eventually the day will come when they've duplicated all political, news, social, cultural, and crowdsourcing institutions as simulacra in which only they can participate. Their own music awards (no Dixie Chicks!). Their own grocery stores (no arugula!). Their own elections (no – oh, wait a minute . . . ).

Update: Well, that didn't take very long:

ReaganBook, the conservative social networking site that recently pre-launched, has already been taken offline. [...]

According to The Verge's Colin Lecher, who joined the social network while it was still up, the site's design was highly susceptible to trolls. The site did not require individuals to prove their identity and status updates could be viewed by anyone on the site, not just those you were friends with. This gave way to chaos.

"[E]veryone seems to be either using real names, the names of famous conservatives, or the names of famous conservatives paired with sex acts. Some are earnest; some are parody," Lecher wrote.

Quote of the Day: You go to war against the culture you've got

Culture War, which is what rightbloggers have instead of culture.

- Roy Edroso at Alicublog, nicely capturing the ongoing struggle by conservatives to "take back the culture."

A quantum of umbrage: Maybe honest wins are just no fun

While we're waiting on pins and needles (or torches and pitchforks) for the outcome of the Great Mississippi Senate Primary Do-Over, here's a question:

Is there a part of the modern conservatives' wiring that they can't even enjoy a victory unless there was some ratfucking involved?

The thought was planted by a story that historian Rick Perlstein has probably been dining out on, deservedly, for almost a decade:

The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist [long-time conservative activist and apologist] Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

Warping ahead, that story came to mind a week or so ago when Charlie Pierce was gleefully watching Mississippi put the "Guignol" in the "Grand Old Party."

This is going to work. Honest to god, it is. Chris McDaniel, the Mississippi Tea Party cockfighting aficionado whose supporters have odd hobbies like videotaping people in the final stages of dementia and getting locked inside buildings where votes are stored, looks to have put some daylight between himself and longtime incumbent Thad Cochran. If this isn't the living proof of the maxim that all publicity is good publicity -- to say nothing of being the living definition of the political concept of "Mississippi" -- I don't know what is.

And now – ripped from today's headlines, as they say:

The [Milwaukee] Journal-Sentinel reported that 50-year-old Robert Monroe was caught as a result of an investigation into a possible illegal voting by his son in Waukesha County. But after his son denied requesting an absentee ballot from his father’s address in Shorewood, suspicion turned to Monroe.

A complaint claimed that Monroe voted five times in Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) recalled election. He also was accused of voting illegally in a 2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a 2012 primary, and the 2012 presidential election.

Although the complaint did not state who Monroe voted for, WISN determined that he had donated money to Republican state Sen. Alberta Darling.

Prosecutors used Monroe’s cell phone records to prove that he traveled all the way to Indiana to cast a second vote in the 2012 presidential election. Prosecutors also tested some of the ballots for genetic material, and only found DNA belonging to Monroe. […]

Monroe faces 13 felony election fraud charges in all, including voting more than once, voting as a disqualified person, registering in more than one place, and providing false information to election officials. He could spend up to 18 months in prison, and pay a $10,000 fine for each charge.

Now, I suppose we might hope that True the Vote will parachute in to make sure that white middle-aged insurance executives don't abuse the franchise.

Or we could grab an egg timer to see how long it takes for conservatives to explain that flagrant right-wing voter fraud (with DNA evidence! Remember how they used to love DNA evidence?) is still somehow the fault of Democrats rather than a structural feature of modern conservatism? Oh, never mind; you can put the egg timer back.

The unforgiving minute: Street cred

When George Will posted his column last week about how unfair it was that rape survivors sometimes try to hang on to a little of their dignity, most people simply treated it as a stupifyingly misogynist rant of potentially career-derailing inappropriateness. (After all, Helen Thomas became an overnight unperson for something that's only different according to your political taste.)

But Roy Edroso has it nailed: Before he knelt chin-deep in the fever swamp of Fox News, whenever George Will wanted to assure his audience that he was a regular guy, just like them – and not, say, an effete, sanctimonious prig – he'd write a column on baseball. But at his new home, they don't give a rat's ass about baseball; it's not the American pastime they're most interested in.

So goodbye ruminative considerations of U.S. policy, hello war on women, only with a bow-tie, and the brethren may consider their cause uplifted by the endorsement of a genuine intellectual. (Camille Paglia must be kicking herself.)

The "Paglia" capper made milk come out of my nose.

Minute's up.

(Phil's image source.)

Quote of the day: Why is the Iraq War like using a CB radio?

No elite voice in this country seems capable of coming to terms with the fact that the Iraq war was "lost" the moment it was launched. It was lost because it was based on lies and deception. It was lost because it violated international law. What a pathetic narrative people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham regurgitate this late in the game: that things were "won" in Iraq by Bush the Younger and then "lost" by Obama with the US withdrawal. We lose IQ points even listening to that drivel.

- Joseph A. Palermo, winding up one of the best – of many, many, many – essays this week on why no one anywhere should be listening to the opinion of the Zombie Iraq Warhawks.

Palermo's piece is going on the p3 Readings list.

Quote of the day: Think of the animals!

This is a perfect reductio ad wingnut: If a government agency has problems, it's proof that government can't do anything right, including things that governments pretty much have to do, like veterans' services. Who's going to take them over, the guys who run the outsourced prison industry? As I've said before, normal people can easily imagine what a for-profit medical corporation would do with uninsured veterans -- shove their gurneys in the general direction of a county hospital, probably, or secretly grind them down into pet food.

- Roy Edroso, on the right-winger response to the dysfunction at the Veterans Administration. (At least it's their response before they inevitibly realize the problem wasn't VA mismanagement it was . . . Obama.)