280+

Mind if I elaborate on some of my tweets?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten a little sick of my This is Hardcore roundups of rightwing email stories. I mean, it’s salutary to be reminded, I guess, that so many of our fellow citizens of voting age are sufficiently addled that they’ll gobble up stories like — let’s see what comes up when we spin the wheel here — “American Retailer Now Publicly Supporting ‘Sharia Law’. Are You Shopping There?” and send them on to with lots of !1!1!1! to their family and friends. (The Sharia-supporting retailer, by the way, is Macy’s, which showed fealty to Islamic law with “the launch of a clothing line aimed at its Muslim shoppers that will include dresses, tops, cardigans, pants, and hand-dyed hijabs.” FORBID IT ALMIGHTY GOD!)

But it gets a little depressing to live among those people even virtually and for just a few minutes each week. And even more depressing, it reminds me that a lot of our own nearest and dearest are pretty retrograde, too. I think about Joe Biden wandering, in his figurative bathrobe, into 2019, asking Meathead and his little girl what was so bad about his old buddy Jim Eastland. Out of sentimental affection for Handsome Joe I like to think he’s just trolling with this — that he knows people like me will hear him going “Lemme tell you about my old buddy the racist monster, why I remember when I got to the Senate and he told me ‘I hear you oppose busing them jungle bunnies into white schools, I think you and I can be friends,’” and blow a gasket, and he thinks it's funny, or maybe politically advantageous in some primaries. But in a way it’s just depressing to think that one of our own Democratic family, as it were, is out here acting like some buffoon from the 70s talking about hippies and bra-burning kooks who can’t land a man anyway.

So tell you what: I’ll pull out some of the tweets I put out this week and talk about what else I might have said were I not limited to 280 characters.

I can sort of get why kids might think wingnuts like Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot are “allies” because they talk smack about Trump. (We can leave sometime-Trump-critic Andrew Sullivan out of it — as I’ve said before, Sullivan is so full of shit I’m not even sure he’s really gay.) But even when Boot sounds sensible, denouncing Trump and the racism of the Republican Party, if you’re over the age of consent you have to know that it’s a con — whether he’s just conning the rubes or also conning himself. And since none of these people have actually changed fundamentally they will, when their gimp string is pulled, vomit something up that betrays them. Woke Boot has shit the bed before this and he’ll shit it again. And that’s why it’s pointless to say “Well, even Max Boot etc.” It’s worse than pointless — it betrays a Sorkinesque desire to believe that diehard conservatives will surely see reason and come together with liberals for the good of the country. You know, the theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

I have a strong position in the utter awfulness of David French, and he never disappoints. It’s always worth noting that though he will sometimes do his mincing JustTheTip Trump act — telling us how shameful that man in the White House is (while approving of nearly every policy he emits) — he can always, always, always be counted on to side with racists against the people who noticed they were racist. He doesn’t even try to make it look good anymore. I was reminded by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ appearance at the reparations hearings Wednesday of the days when French would attempt to “engage” Coates’ writing in his National Review columns with titles like “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Eloquent Hate Is Still Hate” and laugh lines like “Is Coates’s widely applauded and highly profitable rage more ‘authentic’ than Ben Carson’s quiet peacemaking?” I guess it was part of the contrarian cred he was working then, like the little black African girl he adopted, that he hoped one day would make him seem like a Jack Kemp Negro-friendly Republican candidate. No wonder he’s pissed at Trump — there’s no market for that in the GOP now! I suppose his new plan is to wait until Republicans deny they were Trump supporters like small-time Nazis telling the Nuremberg commission they were in Switzerland the whole time.