NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the North Korea scam and child prisoners of immigration control, among other subjects. The Nork thing was obviously designed, not to deliver any diplomatic or national security benefits, but solely to impress dummies, and there's something almost poignant about the clumsy defenses offered by those few remaining conservatives whose careers rely on Making It Look Good -- they seem already to belong to another time, back before every Republican became a MAGA choad incapable of absorbing any analysis not entirely flattering to their own Dear Leader.

The GOP is also being hustled down the road to Nuremberg by the brown-family-splitting policy: a new poll shows that, while Democrats and Independents are horrified, most Republicans approve of this nightmare. I see that Ann Coulter is tying it all together by calling the caged kids "child actors" -- which suggests that the old famehound has intuited that her and Trump's base are ready to buy the "crisis actor" conspiracy theories of the extreme right, which would put them very far beyond the reach of reason. It's a high-stakes game for sure: On the down side, this small group of crackpots may actually destroy American and Western Civ; on the upside, thanks to these revelations -- and also the weasel behavior of Republican "moderates" -- we at least know for certain where the virus (or as Charlie Pierce calls it, the prion disease) is isolated, and how voters may eradicate it.