PMC Commentary

"Gunsmoke," social conservatives, and American silliness

Taking a break from the usual madness, this afternoon I watched an episode of "Gunsmoke." In it, a cowboy wished to marry a "saloon girl." This was deemed by 1975 television to be a rather shameful communal act.

Until I read Tom Clavin's fascinating, 2017 work, Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West" about six months ago, I would have assumed the production's assessment of rowdy Old West types marrying prostitutes was correct.

Clavin corrected that. Many of the law enforcement officers of that era, such as Earp, married whores, as the historian and former NY Times journalist detailed. Their additional income to the officers' pay was appreciated by the husbands, and their "profession" was scarcely looked down on.

Later, American Puritanism. Which Clavin, understandably, hasn't space for. But it's the — or one — foundation of our ludicrous culture wars.

It's all coming into focus: The Democratic defamation of Matt Gaetz.

Sure, for now the scandal bombs are dropping on mostly the QAnon crackpots. But given the rife, incestuous contagion of zaniness among the larger GOP clan, Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart and other goofweed organs of sheer lunacy will be disseminating QAnonThink.

Poor Matt Gaetz. Insidious Democratic victim of the week. Dems have been running their child-sex rings for years, say QAnoners, and wouldn't you know it? Like the devious little shits they are, they have grabbed the table, and turned it. Oh, they're a wily bunch.

"This kind of setup or smear campaign is consistent with evil," wrote one QAnon [member]. "The [deep state] will try to destroy all their opponents in any way possible. See ALL the FALSE accusations levied against the GOAT — DJT. Evil accuses good of what they themselves do."

"Gaetz is working WITH FBI to catch an extortion racket," said another. "The deep state media is using Matt Gaetz to distract us from the recent Ghislaine Maxwell [indictment]."

Notes Vice News: "Another user said the story was a smear campaign designed to undermine Gaetz’s ambitions for a possible 2024 presidential ticket with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis."

Please tell me that's true — the presidential ticket, that is.

So tune in Tucker and Sean tonight. They'll get to the bottom of this. Guaranteed.

This is why American conservatism is dead

Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen, who "focuses on American conservative thought," has a few thoughts of his own on Georgia's recently passed voting law. His piece is shockingly blind.

"Democrats have been tarnishing Georgia’s new voting law, saying it represents a return to Jim Crow," he writes. "That calumny besmirches an effort that largely succeeds at balancing extensive voter access with strong election integrity."

Later, there's this: "Democrats’ objections are an answer in search of a problem."

With that, Olsen turns the entire controversy on its head. The 2020 election is known as perhaps the most flawless in history. Federal, state and local election officials have confirmed this, repeatedly. Yet Olsen proceeds to detail the harmlessness of Georgia's law — all of it designed, he says, around securing "strong election integrity," which, in 2020, was perfectly healthy.

The invisible subtext of Olsen's piece is that Georgia's Republican legislators were kicking around ideas one day on how to make voting easier for Democratic constituents. And so the liberating elements of Georgia's new law fell into place. Well isn't this nice, they said to one another: We may get our butts hammered for making voting so easy and carefree, but at least we'll know we have done our part to ensure "extensive voter access" to the polls.

There's another subtext; this one more visible. As long as conservative columnists who "focus on American conservative thought" so brazenly deceive the electorate with their asinine tales of innocence, American conservatism will remain a dull, blunt force in politics. Nothing more. And with that force, they're just digging themselves deeper. How blind.

Gaetz, Carlson, and the death of irony

​​​​​The word "Schadenfreude" was coined just for this dude.

Dudes, I should say. In these clips, other than Gaetz compounding his troubles by adding rumors of "pictures of me with child prostitutes" to his extortion tale, Carlson articulates this enchanting, characteristic Fox News line: "I don't really understand this story very well." So he does an interview, seemingly with no research. I read a couple pieces on this, and the story is not that bloody difficult to fathom. In fact, it's pretty straightforward. (Except for the way Gaetz tells it.)

Gaetz concludes by saying he's a victim because "I'm a well-known, outspoken conservative, and I guess that's out of style in a lot of parts of the country right now." (The investigation of him began when Trump was still in office.) pic.twitter.com/9RwHspQEwX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 31, 2021

Oh my. It runs in the family.

My daughter reports she and her friend got lost last night, drove 2 extra hours, heading for S.D. It appears this is genetic. The Navy, after rejecting me for combat-jet training (color blindness), suggested I become a navigator. Ha! I could get lost in my driveway.

— The Carpentariat (@CarpenterPM) March 30, 2021

That nice little island, which never before threatened anyone, is arming to the teeth

Oh, good. What could go wrong?

[Japan's] military is now one of the world’s best-equipped and trained, increasingly visible on exercises around the globe. A close partner of the U.S., Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has moved the country away from its strict pacifism during his 8½ years in power over two stints. China’s military rise, along with the threat of North Korean missiles, has been a major catalyst….

Retired Lt. Gen. Koichiro Bansho, a former adviser to Japan’s National Security Council, said there was no question Japan is prepared for combat.

"This is a normal military," he said. "We carry body bags."

For Christ's sake. From the Pentagon: "On February 10, 2020, [the president] sent Congress a proposed Fiscal Year 2021 budget request of $740.5 billion for national security,… which drives the Department's decision-making in reprioritizing resources and shifting investments to prepare for a potential future, high-end fight."

Only a military mind would write of a "potential future" fight. The future is loaded with potential. The future is potential.

Point being, though, if three-quarters of a trillion dollars isn't enough to prepare for an ally's security, what in hell is?

A blast from the past: The NYT opinion page actually has some good stuff today.

It appears the virtue warriors at the NY Times opinion department took a day off, allowing some editor to publish some interesting writing. A little wrap-up, generously rewarding ...

Krugman:

I suspect that the absence of true populism on the right has a lot to do with the closing of the right-wing mind: the conservative establishment may have lost power, but its apparatchiks are still the only people in the G.O.P. who know anything about policy. And big money may still buy influence even in a party whose energy comes mainly from intolerance and hate.

In any case, for now Republican politicians are doing Democrats a big favor, clinging to discredited economic ideas that even their own supporters dislike.

We may be seeing something akin to this on the international stage, if I may take that liberty with Bret Stephens' column:

Communism aided the West because it saddled an imperialist Russian state with an unworkable and unpopular economic system that could not keep up with its free-market competitors. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" — the quintessential Russian joke about working life in the workers’ paradise — goes far to explain why a regime with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads simply petered out.

Now China. The new USSR. And a whole new bundle of internal, self-destructive tendencies.

Also former Democratic senator Mark Pryor — remember him?

As Mr. Biden considers his choice to lead the department’s crucial antitrust division, he should look to Mr. Roosevelt’s choice of Robert Jackson, a lawyer in private practice, for the role as an example of what strong, progressive leadership in the agency can accomplish. Though Mr. Jackson is best known today for his tenure as attorney general and later as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court Justice, it is perhaps his role in transforming America’s antitrust laws and institutions where he made his biggest impact.

I have always loved Mr. Jackson. Not, however, because of his role as attorney general, or later as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, or his historic involvement in transforming America’s antitrust laws and institutions. No, Mr. Jackson has always held a special place in my heart because of what he reputedly announced on the eve of the Nuremberg trials, in which he acted as U.S. chief of counsel for the prosecution: If you want to line up the bastards against a brick wall and machine-gun them down, fine. But let's not pretend there is such a thing as international law.

That story, told by one of my undergrad profs, may be apocryphal. Who knows. Who cares. It perfectly mirrors Jackson's lovably unlovable personality. President Biden needs more hardass grumps like that — to decisively shut down the "conservative establishment," electorally powerless, but whose "apparatchiks are still the only people in the G.O.P. who know anything about policy."

I once counseled a political candidate to not use, please do not use, that tired old cliché, "It's time for a change," which he very much wanted to use as his campaign slogan. He did. He lost. Today, though, the sentiment if not the words themselves, could not be more apt.

"Too stupid to live"

Imagine a room, which a physician points at and says, "You step into that room, you'll contract cancer. Not only that, when you leave the room, you'll spread your condition to every other person you meet." Would you step into the room? Of course not. Yet that warning is essentially what health officials have been saying about the pandemic for a year.

Sunday, on downtown streets, I saw dozens of people — maskless. A day later, President Biden told governors that "the failure to take this virus seriously is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place." Hours before, the CDC director "appeared to fight back tears as she pleaded with Americans to 'hold on a little while longer…. Right now,' she said, 'I’m scared.'"

"The back-to-back appeals reflected a growing sense of urgency among top White House officials and government scientists that the chance to conquer the pandemic, now in its second year, may slip through their grasp."

As Biden suggested, the pandemic was always containable. The failure to take this virus seriously is precisely what got us into this mess in the first place. You-know-who had taken the mess and rendered it political, so naturally the obsequious ones stepped into that room, then spread and died from the virus.

I once knew a lady whose generalized saying was, "Too stupid to live." My God, they're everywhere. And they are the virus.

How to earn millions about nothing: Andrew Sullivan and the seduction of cash.

The next tedious outrage.

Expect the Sullivans of "conservatism" to sweep up the profits. The NY Times:  

"The last time Republicans in South Dakota made a serious push to bar transgender girls from school sports, in 2019, their bill was known only by its nondescript numerical title, Senate Bill 49. Its two main sponsors were men. And it died without ever getting out of committee, just 10 days after it was introduced.

"But when Republicans decided to try again in January, they were far more strategic in their approach. The sponsors this time were two women who modeled their bill after a template provided by a conservative legal organization. They gave the bill a name that suggested noble intent: the 'act to promote continued fairness in women’s sports.' Supporters from Minnesota and Idaho traveled to the Capitol in Pierre to testify that a new law was urgently needed to keep anyone with male biological characteristics out of female competitions, even though they acknowledged only a handful of examples of that happening in South Dakota."

Here, though, is the key passage:

"Studies have shown that the majority of transgender students report feeling unsafe at school because of bullying and harassment."

And with that, one can say, Fuck the conservatives and opportunistic Sullivans.

Monday, can't trust that day, Monday, Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way

I'm unsure if I'll be posting Monday. This is Sunday. Tomorrow is doomsday, for me. And a liberating day for my daughter. I suspect I won't handle it well, though I'm supportive of her move thousands of miles away, and excited for her.

Perhaps some of you will understand. Were I a father still with her mother, naturally we would stand together at the doorstep — or in my case, scattered gravel and patchy grass — waving goodbye as she pulled out of the driveway and into the road, her car loaded with stuff she had accumulated over 21 years. But she has no mother, and I have no wife; there is no loving companion with whom, after the leaving, I can throw my arm around and say, What a bittersweet day — then hearing the selfsame, comprehending reassurance of the good over the bad.

It's that kind of closeness, as we spawning antecedents go farther into the dimming twilight, that makes the heartbreak of flying fledglings bearable. There ain't no such closeness here, and maybe there was no such thing in your little family as well. If so, you likely grasp what I'm saying.

One other item. It's true I once lived a boozy, brawling, fuck-whomever, high schooled-expelled, ghetto-oriented life, one in which human emotion and streetwise manhood never met — and were not supposed to. Yet at some unidentifiable moment, after plumbing the philosophical, historical and literary canon of human existence, I understood I was living the shallowest of it. I can't say I've yet evolved into a "good" person — some of those old wonts still reduce me to the aggressively animalistic — but by God I have tried to overcome, and believe I have conquered the motherlode of, shall we say, disagreeability. (Recent female relationships might differ from this self-assessment.)

Which is to say, I just know I am going to undergo a torrent of weepy, perhaps umanly emotionalism tomorrow, burdened as the day will be with daughterly parting. So if my baseline emotionalism interferes with my customary, daily posting about political shit, well, fuck it. Oops, there I go again, behaving like an animal.

Should desperate Trump clones, such as Josh Mandel, be covered?

​​​​​"We do not knowingly publish ridiculous and idiotic claims."

So says a Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial, as the paper grapples with the distasteful presence of Josh Mandel. The Ohio senatorial candidate is a cross between a punk and a clown, an ignorance-über- alles huckster who, writes the editor, "is given to irresponsible and potentially dangerous statements on social media."

In other words, Mandel longs to be Trump. Until he achieves that, all his energy is focused on gaining Trump's attention, Trump's admiration, Trump's endorsement. No one else's attention is worth much to Mandel, since no one else is held in such divine reverence by the ignorance-über-alles Republican base.

Thus Josh runs around the state blathering reckless stupidities, begging for GQD's blessing and hoping he scores some television coverage and print stories. For a newspaper editor, how to cover — or even whether to cover — the clownish punk.

Having noted that Josh "is pretty much a nobody right now," the Plain Dealer's editor issues a ruling: "We ultimately decided not to write about Mandel’s [latest stupidity]…. Just because he makes outrageous, dangerous statements doesn’t mean it is news." The editorial later becomes a bit hazy: "If a candidate makes statements that endanger the lives of Ohioans, as Mandel did here, that’s the story. That’s the news" — a passage that contradicts the first.

The editorial's thrust, however, is that Josh Mandel is better left neglected, at least for a while. Which is wise. If cable news and major newspapers had just ignored Trump in 2015, he would have never become the Trump of 2016-2021.

"Stop the Steals." (It seems we ain't woke enough.)

So much for Georgia ever sending another Democrat to the U.S. Senate, or certifying a Democrat's presidential victory.

The state enacted a law this week that bounces the secretary of state from his or her voting position on the State Board of Elections, whose membership is now given over to a majority appointed by the state legislature.

The law also permits the board to suspend local election authorities and dominate procedural decisions, such as those pertaining to mail ballots, early-voting hours and the number of polling venues.

Nice knowing you, Fulton County.

Doubtless the new board will "find" needed votes for Republican pols, or throw out however many legitimate Democratic votes are needed to steal elections. Or shut down early voting. Or provide the city of Atlanta with one voting booth, open 10:15 a.m. to 10:59 a.m.

The secretary of state will still certify election results, but the state board will be free to intrude on certifications, since it alone will possess ultimate power.

While some conservatives are freaking out about woke activists imagining white supremacy everywhere, Republicans are actively, openly, demonstrably using white supremacy to crush American democracy. 

Georgia's Jim Crow legislature and its state election board "will make what we all lived through in 2020 child’s play," says an Atlanta elections activist.

Then, the Democratic presidential candidate won by less than 44,000 votes in three states, including Georgia. By only a hair did we escape an incomparable American catastrophe: the end of a political system — however much antiquated — in which voters are free to choose the nation's leader.

In Georgia and other states with majority Republican legislatures, that freedom is being dismantled, one statute at a time. They can shanghai the presidency, the U.S. Senate, whatever office they target.

And sorting out the constitutionality of these statutes (as if there's any question) will be Trump's Supreme Court.

For now, perhaps I'll just go back to bed.

Still here, but …

If, on occasion, for the next few days, I seem a bit discombobulated, it's because my daughter, Ellie, 21, has decided to seek her life's fortunes 2,087.5 miles away, in Seattle. Small towns and 21-year-olds seldom mix.

I have raised her alone since she was 12, for better or worse. For me, I reaped all the best; for her, well, what would you, as a teenager, think of a middle-aged parent hounding his culture-synchronized daughter to read Shakespeare and watch Humphrey Bogart movies. Right.

Nevertheless, we're close — quite close, much closer than I ever imagined we'd be when we found ourselves stranded alone, what seems like decades ago.

I won't get mushy. I'll just say I already miss her, as we spend our time together, till Monday. I shall still post mornings, mind you, though my mind may be somewhat adrift. With thanks for your toleration, I am,

Yours,

— Papa Carpenter

Fleeing the degenerate vortexes of Twitter

Behold a man who earns $174,000 a year so he can spend that time producing vapidity like this.

pic.twitter.com/ZYLYcFTKPz

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) March 25, 2021

A few months ago I dumped from my Twitter feed several Jordanesque buffoons. I specifically recall purging Dinesh D'Souza, who had taken to posting rapid-fire missives of clinical insanity. Even his slivers of the right's monolithic pathologies were, for me, too much. I must have retained Jordan merely as a reminder of my judicious slaughter.

I also retained several of the right's presidential aspirants — Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley and Josh Hawley are some. I did so believing it was my masochistic duty to track the pathetic yearners. But honestly, I'm unsure if I can cope with three+ more years of these ghouls. Virtually every tweet alerts us to bad, very bad things under Biden.

I'm thinking Andrew Sullivan will be the next to join my ethical cleansing. This once rational, balanced, comprehensive thinker has discovered the profitable magic of marketing borderline hysteria about one topic: wokeness. Feed the bears. Crank up the outrage. Obsess relentlessly over something that deserves occasionality. And especially feed those potential Substack subscribers. Perhaps I moan only with envy. Boy, is he ever raking it in. 

But let's do answer that proffered question. Do we miss Trump yet? I shall borrow from President Biden: Look, I don’t know where you guys come from, man.

A one-hour Biden press conference I happily missed

I have a habit of watching presidential press conferences​. Yesterday I could not. After reading several wrap-ups and bits of the transcript, my habit may be at an end.

It appears the most trenchant question asked — met by an appropriately trenchant answer — came from a reporter wanting, needing to know, as all of America needed to know, if President Biden is content with migrant children "sleeping on floors," "packed into these pods": "Is what’s happening … acceptable to you?" The president's reply came in the proper form of a swift kick in her ass: "That’s a serious question, right? Is that acceptable to me? Come on."

Another exchange of immense urgency was initiated by CNN correspondent Kaitlin Collins. "You just made some news by saying that you are going to run for reelection." I said that is my expectation. "So is that a yes, that you are running for reelection?" Look, I don’t know where you guys come from, man.

Then the all-important follow-up: "Do you believe you’ll be running against former President Trump?" I don't know how, but somehow Biden screwed up the energy to groan, again: "Oh, come on."

No questions on the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than a half-million Americans. Not one.

Perhaps the biggest story of President Biden's press conference came from another, thoroughgoing non-happening. He let loose no "gaffes." This disappointing non-occurrence will require eminently skillful dissections from Fox News. In fact, Tucker was on it like Trump on a cheeseburger.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it a “scandal bigger than Watergate,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused President Biden of “thoroughly faking mental sharpness” for more than an hour during his press conference on Thursday.