"I said I might have to run all the way/Because the bus might be slow today."Props to a brother who knew what it was like.
At my newsletter (SUBSCRIBE! CHEAP! ™) I sometimes do these little White House dialogues, and in so doing I employ to the best of my limited abilities skills I learned in school, and over years as a practicing artist, and over decades as a professional writer, to make the characters sound like distinct, individualized human beings whose plight may be interesting to audiences. So let me tell you that when I see David Brooks create a dialogue between "Urban Guy" and "Flyover Man," I'm not just derisive and contemptuous, which is the default reaction of any intelligent person to David Brooks, I'm also embarrassed as a craftsman.

F.M.: ...Listen, do you remember those months just after the election when people like you were briefly curious about people like me? You sent your reporters out on wild safaris into the hinterlands to interview Trump voters. You read “Hillbilly Elegy.” Back then it was fashionable to say that Trump is just a symptom of real problems in America. He’s the wrong answer to the right question. 

It didn’t take you long to lose interest in all that. Now we’re just a block of concrete you call “his base.” Now, all you care about is Trump, not his supporters or the issues driving us. Your whole media is Trump-O-Centric 

You might say this feller's pretty eloquent for a Trumpkin, but actually he's not eloquent at all -- merely stiff. "Now, all you care about is Trump, not his supporters or the issues driving us," ugh. What's the point of being Flyover Man if you have to talk in clumsy complex sentences like a New York Times columnist? I thought them fellers all sounded like (consults Book of Boomer Cool) Matthew McConaughey.

U.G.: We became Trump-O-Centric because his daily outrages undermine norms, spread xenophobia, degrade public morality. 

?????

F.M.: You think that because you have the kind of jobs that allow you to follow Twitter all day. I don’t have that luxury. So all that passing nonsense seems far away. I have to deal with the actual realities of life. 

Really? You don't "have the kind of job that allows you to follow Twitter all day"? Because you sound like a Heritage Foundation intern. What does Brooks think this guy does for a living? I like to imagine him scribbling a little checklist -- "Supervises operations where men sweat/ Sometimes breaks up fights on the 'shop floor,' but not by violence, rather he uses homespun wisdom and Christian values/ After the factory whistle blows, enjoys a hearty lambic with the 'boys' but always comes home on time to his younger second wife."

One, mass immigration is changing my town, region and state...

ARRRGH why not "my greater metropolitan area"?

Doesn't Brooks realize that "Flyover Man" and "Urban Guy" sound like the exactly the same person, except one has been hired to misapprehend Trump voters and the other to misapprehend Democrats? Here is perhaps the worst section:

F.M... Let’s face it: Bashing Trump is the media’s business model. That’s what drives eyeballs and profit. 

U.G.: We can’t have a productive conversation with Trump around. He lies with abandon. He slanders and insults. He pollutes the water near and far. 

On my honor as an Urban Guy and an impudent snob, I have never heard anyone talk like this. Not even at a "cocktail party"!

F.M.: We can’t have productive conversations if every time I open my mouth you call me a bigot...

For a second I thought this was Brooks being ironic -- because in fact "U.G." had not called "F.M." a bigot -- and maybe in his psychologically crippled way Brooks was alluding to it with this follow-up:

U.G.: O.K. I get it. You’re not the first person to spin the right-wing victim narrative in front of me.

But Urban Guy neither gets not asks for an answer, and instead asks:

Why don’t we focus on impeachment? On rule of law. 

 Again: Who the fuck are these people, and why are they having a conversation, unless it's because they're on some cable talk show where the liberal is supposed to take a dive?

F.M.: Fine. Bottom line: I would be open to impeachment if you cared about my problems...

Neither you nor I have all day, so bottom line: Flyover Man never says anything like "I suppose you think you're somethin' better than me, you Jew faggot bastard," and Urban Guy never says anything like, "Why don't you stop fucking your cousin long enough to notice Trump is fucking you in the ass, you stupid redneck peckerwood," so it ain't interesting.

King of the JustTheTip Trumpers Rod Dreher, shortly after doing one of his highly outraged Look What Trump Has Done This Time posts, says good conservatives should defend Trump because he's like Edwin Edwards, because he's crooked but acceptable as opposed to "the Left" -- that is to say, Democrats including (I shit you not) Joe Biden, whom Dreher excoriates for his defense of "radical transgender rights" -- which is like David Duke, the Klansman Edwards defeated in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race:

It’s hard to express strongly enough how much both conservatives and good-government liberals despised Edwin Edwards. He was, and remains, a clever man, but also a symbol of good ol’ boy Louisiana political corruption. To find oneself in a position to have to vote for EWE because that was the only way to keep a Klucker out of the governor’s mansion was revolting. I can remember to this day standing in the voting booth and pulling the lever for Edwards — something I never, ever imagined doing.

I bet that's not to only time Dreher had to overcome his disgust before "pulling the lever."

As regular readers know, I did not vote in the 2016 presidential race (it didn’t matter; my state was heavily pro-Trump), but if I end up voting for Trump in 2020, it’ll be a VFTC:II thing.

"If I end up voting for Trump"? He must think his readers are awfully stupid. With good reason tho!

It’s easy to see how Trump is analogous to EWE (though unlike Trump, EWE was quite competent).

Oh for fuck's sake.

But how can the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates possibly be analogized in any way to David Duke?

A non-lunatic would have stopped there, balled up his laptop and thrown it in the trash. But not Dreher: He argues that even though "Duke’s political positions were mostly boilerplate Reagan conservatism... everybody knew that Duke was no ordinary Republican." (Boy, there's a statement that could use some examination!) So many Republicans rebuffed him to avoid "mainstreaming a truly hateful figure."

Of course, from my vantage point in 2019, it looks like mainstreaming a truly hateful figure is Republican strategy and David Duke -- now an ardent Trump fan -- was a prophet of the party's future. But Dreher says no, the Democrats are the Klansmen, because abortion and whatnot:

What about immigration? Am I happy with the way Trump has handled the immigration issue? No. But unlike Elizabeth Warren, his likely 2020 rival, he is not for open borders. Biden has been evasive on his immigration stance, but I have every confidence that he will move to the far left.

As a Christian, it's important to maintain the baby cages to prevent a Mexican from working at my local gas and go.

Oh, and before we leave the topic I have to include some classic Dreherisms. To wit:

Remember Nina Burleigh? She’s the journalist who, back during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, said that she would fellate Clinton herself to thank him for preserving abortion rights. At the time, conservatives (including me) cited that as an example of how corrupt liberals were. Just look at that so-called feminist, carrying water for that dirtbag Bill Clinton! we said. Where are her morals now? 

In retrospect, Burleigh was right... 

Yeah, it was gross. But from a pro-choice feminist point of view, it was defensible. Trump has turned a lot of us into Nina Burleigh Conservatives.

Just close your eyes and think of the Rapture! On the other hand:

UPDATE.2: I’m struggling with this. I’m going to think out loud here for a minute.

It's 4 a.m. and he's still got his pants on. But when your date is Donald Trump, I imagine the idea is to hold out until he gets rough.

It could all go to shit, but meanwhile it's sure fun to look at the front pages of wingnut welfare make-work sites like RedState:

He's not mad, he's laughing actually! Also at RedState:


Ha ha, way ahead of you, buddy. You ain't getting away with that Bill Barr bullshit again.

Ol' Ham-Face is taking it well at The Resurgent:

His pleasure centers starved, Erickson snuggles memories of the time they drove that BITCH who tried to take down St. Boof into hiding.

The whistleblower, we know, did not have direct knowledge of the President’s communication with Ukraine’s President.

No citation, natch. If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, etc. like Bill Fields said.

The whistleblower is going to be represented by a former staffer who worked for both Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

Scary rattling of chains! Whoo-oo-oo Pelooooosiiiii.

The Democrats have been trying to use partisan whistleblowers in the bureaucracy to discredit President Trump and, conveniently, a year before the election they’ve found one.

Again, no citation; I assume Erickson means that any time a whistleblower files a qui tam suit to bring a corrupt organization to justice, he or she is attacking Trump, as he is the very spirit of corruption.

Democrats will focus on the President and what the whistleblower claims the President did. But we should wonder about Democrats trying for two years to weaponize the whistleblower statute against the President.

This is going to be the Christine Blasey Ford of whistleblower allegations. There’ll be no direct knowledge, no corroborating witnesses, and the Democrats will insist it is the truth with helpful assists from the New York Times and Washington Post.

If he's going to fantasize that this'll go just like some past event went, why doesn't he do the Clinton impeachment? But then I doubt even Erickson can imagine Trump's polls going up afterward. As I said two years ago, even the few voters who support Trunp have long been kinda sick of him, and will happily throw him over during this season of fire and dream of a shot at electing Honey Boo-Boo or Joey Salads or some other less overexposed creep who will do just as good a job of destroying the country.

Okay, one more -- let's make it a twofer: