i see a dead candidate

As blogger/Village Voice columnist Roy Edroso has noted, the National Review is rarely funny.
But with Hillary Clinton suddenly back in the media every day after her failed campaign, serving up a cornucopia of self-justification, we'll have to take our laughs where we can find them:

Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesn’t know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments — too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesn’t need briefings. She doesn’t need to do interviews. She doesn’t need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesn’t need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comey’s firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. She’s done. (Kyle Smith)

If only. She's not Bruce Willis but Michael Myers in Halloween, endlessly resurrecting no matter how many times Jamie Lee Curtis stabs him.

bad leftwing humor, clickbait, and/or articles with the phrase "in the age of Trump" in the headline

The websites I followed in the Bush/Obama years are struggling for the right tone to deal with Trump.

Many just use his name and image for clickbait, to get outraged liberal juices flowing. Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment site currently has the T-word in 14 out of 40 headlines on its front page. This isn't necessarily cynical but it is mindless.

These earnest lefties confuse cause and effect: The disease is oligarchy, Trump an egregious symptom.

He's also a walking caricature. That's one reason cyber-commentator Lauren Weinstein's attempt at a meme, Trump the Thug (at NATO headquarters), falls flat.

Thug isn't the right word -- clown maybe. Trump did in fact play a narcissistic boss on TV.

Weinstein's GIF misses the clueless unintended satire of the fake-gladhanding-turned-camera-conscious-posing on display in that clip. As macho swagger goes, it's preferable to Hillary Clinton's attempts to talk like a gunslinger -- at least it's funny.

The US system posed a grotesque set of candidate choices in the 2016 election. To personify this failure in one strutting buffoon is ultimately lazy.

RIP Steven Stokes

Belated RIP to Steven Stokes, an electronic musician who ran Record Gallery in Dallas during the bleak Reagan Years, before moving to Seattle in 1989. (He ultimately wound up in Portland). His record-store-plus-art-gallery was an oasis of "downtown" culture in Dallas's dystopian sprawl of malls, sports stadiums, topless bars, and Baptist churches. Eventually even Stokes had had too much of it: "Nothing's ever going to happen here," he told me just before he moved. I kind of liked the negative inspiration but moved to NYC a few years later (which now has 7/11s and K-Marts).
A boingboing BBS post features reminiscences by a then-teenager from suburban Arlington, TX, who made pilgrimages into Dallas to visit Steve's store on Greenville Avenue.
I lived a few blocks away and bought many vinyl records, a few cassettes, and a painting there. Talking to Steve about music was always enjoyable.
The boingboing piece links to Mark Zuckerberg's crayon scribble site for teens and seniors, which has more info and a "Steven D. Stokes and the Record Gallery" page.

him bomb good

Some choice bits from Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo on our deranged commentary class (edited slightly for the post-Snowden landscape):

[T]he minute [Trump] starts bombing foreigners he’s suddenly not so bad after all. Over at the Washington Post, David Ignatius ... says he’s “becoming a credible foreign policy leader.” Ruth Marcus opines that we’re witnessing “the normalization of Donald Trump.” Finally, she enthuses, “rationality is dawning” on the forty-fifth President! Among the liberal elite, the hosannas were well nigh universal.

And

Fareed Zakaria’s joy over the bombing seemed to indicate that, for him, it was practically an erotic experience. And this weird bloodlust wasn’t limited to the liberal precincts of the commentariat – far from it. When we dropped the MOAB on Afghanistan, Kimberly Guilfoyle practically had an orgasm over at Fox News. Sitting there in her low cut red dress, her breasts heaving with passion, her lips parted, and an ecstatic smile plastered on her heavily made-up face, she hailed the bombing as if it were the climax – so to speak – of a pornographic movie: “America is back!” Oh, yeeeesssss!!!!

Just to keep some balance here, Fareed Zakaria's breasts were also heaving.

around the web

Ex-Billmon commenter-turned-blogger "b." at Moon of Alabama offers detailed, generally plausible counter-narratives to the media's insidious fictions of the moment. One such popular trope is "North Koreans are so cra-a-a-azy." Perhaps, b. suggests, the threat of imminent invasion from the South, egged on by you-know-who (us), forces the North to commit so much labor to the military that they are starving for lack of farm hands. Having a credible nuclear deterrent allows them to build their civilian economy, in particular, food production. That's not so crazy.

Clintonite crazies (speaking of crazies) have been huffing and HuffPo-ing about Steve Bannon as the next Goebbels, pumping this Breitbart amateur up to superpowered levels of Machiavellian skill. Ian Welsh suggests some of Bannon's nativist schtick wasn't such a bad thing, and with him out, the neocons and neolibs are rushing in: "He was the guy, along with Trump on the campaign trail, who wanted the Muslim ban, aye. But he also favored rewriting trade deals, hitting China on manufacturing (it is true that China no longer keeps its currency low, but they did for ages and gutted US manufacturing), bringing those jobs back to America, improving relations with Russia, and, oh yeah, not getting involved in stupid Middle Eastern wars other than fighting ISIS."

Benjamin Studebaker has a Political Strategy for a Better Europe that sounds wrong to me: "In this way we can partner the integrationist and protectionist lefts together -- by pairing a genuine threat of exit in the periphery with a strong push for federalism in the core, we can split the neoliberals off from the right nationalists in the core countries and force them into making concessions. What the left needs is a good cop, bad cop routine, where the British, French, Dutch, and German leftists are the good cops and the Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese leftists are the bad cops." You'll have to read the whole post to make sense of that excerpt but surely he has this backward: his "bad cops" have everything to lose by acting up; it's leftists in the fat and sassy countries who should be causing trouble (and making alliances with nativists, even) to thwart the globalist leeches.