HEY, IT’S TIME FOR A QUADRENNIAL COLUMN THEME: American journalism is collapsing before our eyes, Michael Goodwin writes in today’s New York Post.

I’m so old, I remember reading this column when it was titled “Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline” in October of 2008 by ABC and PJM contributor Michael Malone, and even when it was titled “The ‘Media Party’ is over”, by Newsweek and MSNBC contributor Howard Fineman at the start of 2005.

But if you think of the vast majority of “journalists” as being, in reality, Democrat operatives with bylines working feverishly as king- and queen-makers for their party, there’s no need to write columns tut-tutting the demise of Beltway journalism, which died a very long time ago, indeed.

CLINTON CAMPAIGN MANAGER ROBBY “JOE MCCARTHY” MOOK IS AT IT AGAIN: Yes, he’s pushing a new version of the treason innuendo he trotted out a month ago. Note Mook is talking to ABC’S George Stephanopoulos, a Clinton operative with a by-line. It’s a deflection operation, to erase discussion of the Clinton Foundation’s shady donors and Hillary’s grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.

AMERICAN IDIOT: (Yawn) Another Celebrity Plays Hitler Card Against Trump.

Related:

• “Because of Trump magazine, I was a cancer patient without health coverage.”

—Politico tweet, yesterday.

• “Harsh new Priorities USA ad ties Romney to lost health insurance, cancer death.”

—Politico tweet, August 7th, 2012.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1200.

OF BOONDOGGLES AND BARRACKS: All Aboard This History Piece on the Queen Mary at War.

Read the whole thing.

(H/T: Virginia Postrel, who tweets, “I love Art Deco & want to like it, but I’ve always found the Queen Mary dingy and sad.”)

WELL, TO BE FAIR, OBAMACARE ITSELF WAS NEVER DEFENSIBLE: Obamacare’s Public Option Is No Longer Defensible.

Could a “public option” fix the problems on the exchanges? More precisely, the question is: What problem would a public option solve?

Way back in 2010, when the idea of a government-run nonprofit health insurance option was hotly debated, supporters gave three answers to that question:

A public option does not need profits, so it can sell insurance cheaper than an insurer that wants to mark up coverage for profit margin.
A public option will have lower administrative costs than a private insurer.
A public option can force providers to accept below-market reimbursements for their services.

The first argument turns out to be irrelevant, because with the exception of Medicaid managed-care plans, few insurers seem to be taking sizeable profits out of the exchanges. Indeed, since the public option was conceived as self-funding (meaning it covers its costs out of premiums, with no subsidies), there’s a high risk that the public option would prove as doomed as the co-ops, because it would have neither the experience in caseload management to make money nor the other lines of business to subsidize losses on the exchanges.

However, supporters argue that a public option would have competitive advantages that would allow it to break even where others are currently losing money. One of those competitive advantages is lower administrative overhead — in theory, at least. I’ve already outlined, however, why I’m skeptical of this: While Medicare does have lower administrative costs than insurers, a lot of that benefit lies either in outsourcing normal administrative costs to other parts of the government (where they are still costly, but not on Medicare’s books) or in not doing things that insurers have to do, like all the boring customer service and billing that comes with selling to the public, rather than enrolling every citizen over the age of 65.

The notion that one reduces overhead by putting the government in charge of something is itself pretty indefensible.

THE WHITE-MINSTREL-SHOW VERSION OF HISTORY: Kevin D. Williamson reviews (read: eviscerates) Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class:

She does not even seem to read her own sentences, at least as they relate to one another in sequence, e.g.: “[Benjamin] Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries.” I found myself blinking and rereading that sentence, and wondering how and why a man who was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor should design a charity hospital for their benefit. It is true that Franklin, like charitable men before and after and now, distinguished between different kinds of poor people, between the so-called deserving poor and ordinary bums, partly as a moral exercise and partly as a kind of philanthropic triage, resources being limited. But there is not an ordinary reading of the English words “was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor” that describes a man who undertook to relieve the plight of the poor through charitable works.

Franklin particularly perplexes and vexes Isenberg. He was a fugitive from an apprenticeship to his older brother (a form of indenture) and was from a family of modest means. Isenberg writes: “He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.” Given this fact, she is scandalized by Franklin’s later complaints about “vagrant and idle persons” congregating in Philadelphia. (The more things change . . .) One wonders whether Isenberg has ever been to America. Franklin, as Isenberg might learn from reading Isenberg, was a man who began with very little and who managed to rise in Philadelphia — and rise and rise until he became its most celebrated resident — despite being an outsider to the Quaker mafia that ran the place and having no real connections to the “Proprietors,” the Penns and allied families who dominated the colony socially and economically. How did that happen? Isenberg knows: “Quaker patrons,” including the lawyer Alexander Hamilton (no relation to that guy Aaron Burr shot), “a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party,” along with “liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party.” Which is to say, Franklin rose in no small part through his own hard work and cunning but was also enabled by an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, commercial society in which one’s original station in life was not necessarily one’s final station — i.e., he rose because of the very American order whose liberality this daft book was written to debunk.

Read the whole thing. And for a far better look at the same topic, check out J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

PUTIN’S PERSONNEL MOVES. Great pun in this article — buddy guards.

IRONY SQUARED: Could Donald Trump Be the Savior of Black America?, asks Roger Simon.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Dallas College Of Law Is Either a Brave Little Law School That Could or a School for Scoundrels.

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THE WAR ON HONESTY: So many lies, so little time to combat them.

The last four in the series.

War On Honesty 8: Treason, sir? Given her emails?
War On Honesty 9: Introducing Media Privilege to the lexicon.
War On Honesty 10: Mouth versus Crimes.
War On Honesty 11. The strategic weakness exposed, with footnotes.

DANA PERINO: LET ME DROP A TRUTH BOMB ON YOU ABOUT THESE POLLS.

DID THE BREXIT ARMAGEDDON OCCUR?: Why, no it didn’t. A lot of dire predictions made by academic, political and media elites don’t happen, do they?

AMERICANS ARE ABOUT TO GET THE FIRST LANDSLIDE PRESIDENT WE DON’T WANT, Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:

We’ve got a presidential campaign that stars one of the most polarizing, divisive and talked-about figures in American life, an international celebrity and lightning rod for all sociopolitical topics going back a quarter of a century.

And she’s become a bystander in this race.

On Thursday, after the usual barrage and tumult of nuttier-than-a-Skippy-factory stories about the Donald Trump campaign, Hillary Clinton didn’t show up until page A15 of that day’s edition of The New York Times, in a story in which she practically begged America, “Hey! Over here! I’m in this thing too!”

It turns out Clinton has some sort of tax proposal. (She wants to raise them.) Nobody cares. It won’t pass. Nothing she says matters.

The leftwing reboot of the Supreme Court she’ll perform over the next four to eight years will. Good and hard, as Mencken would say.

PROFILING’S BAD — EXCEPT WHEN DEMOCRATS DO IT! Feingold campaign outs an infiltrator by profiling her.

A young Republican attempted to infiltrate the Russ Feingold campaign but was quickly discovered. The reason she first raised suspicion, however, appeared to be due to profiling.

The Feingold campaign began suspecting that Allison “Moss” (real name Allison Maass) was not sincere in her attempt to volunteer for the former senator because, according to Huffington Post, she “was blonde and drove a big white pickup truck.”

So there are no blondes working for the Feingold campaign? And no one on the campaign drives a truck? Those are some strange suspicions, and one can imagine the outrage if Feingold’s opponent, incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, caught an infiltrator by making assumptions about the way his supporters looked.

When Republicans do it, it’s stereotyping and profiling. When Democrats do it, it’s savvy cultural literacy!

THE PERFECT MEDIA MANNERS FOR MALIA, as explored by Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, who note that “when Radar Online published blurry pictures of 18-year-old Malia Obama puffing some sort of cigarette at a Lollapalooza concert in Chicago on July 31. Radar’s 18-year-old eyewitness cried ‘weed.’ Video also showed Malia dancing suggestively to a rap song. The press refused to touch the story. Praiseworthy? Yes – if you’re willing to applaud media hypocrisy:”

In the middle of 2001, the media pointed and mocked presidential daughters Jenna and Barbara Bush when they were cited for underage margarita drinking in Austin at age 19. The New York tabloids loved it. It was headlined ”Double Trouble” by the New York Daily News and ”Jenna and Tonic” by the New York Post. The networks jumped all over it, underlining that this was the public’s business because the twins had entered the police blotter, and because their father was a recovered alcoholic.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer sounded the alarm: “Police in Austin, Texas today cited President Bush’s twin daughters for violating state alcoholic beverage laws. Questions about the incident remain off limits at the White House. As CNN’s Anne McDermott reminds us, all first families struggle to retain a little privacy.” Apparently CNN believed the Bush family should be an exception.

Even back then, there was a police-and-progeny double standard. The year before, 17-year-old Al Gore III was cited by police for driving back to Washington from the Outer Banks at 97 miles per hour in a 55-mph zone. Network coverage? Zero.

Malia Obama gets much kinder treatment than the daughters of Republican presidential candidates. Consider the liberal website Slate in 2012 holding a caption contest for a picture of presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s daughters Elizabeth (then age 21) and Sarah (age 14). Sadly, liberal commenters predictably leaped to imagine these conservative Catholic daughters — yes, including the middle schooler — were on contraceptives, or wearing chastity belts, or touching themselves sexually.

The daughters of Sarah Palin have faced all kinds of media shaming and mockery, starting with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy at 17, revealed just hours after Palin was named to John McCain’s ticket in 2008. Palin never achieved national office, but her family’s been mocked ever since.

In reference to Slate, that Website is the last Internet journalistic bastion of the Graham family, which owned the Washington Post for decades, until offloading their failing assets to Jeff Bezos in 2013. So any attacks on Santorum’s daughters can be said to represent their official policy when it comes to attacking children of prominent conservatives and Republicans.

Incidentally on Friday, Radar Online had quite an interesting phrase contained in their headline on their follow-up story of Malia sparking up:  “BUSTED! Angry Dad Barack RIPS Malia For ‘Pot’ Smoking Video Scandal.”

Scandal. Obama apparently isn’t angry that his daughter smoked reefer — assuming that’s what Malia was holding in the Radar Online video — but over how the outrage of her being caught led to his “carefully crafted image of a world-beating family…unraveling right before his eyes” in the last months of his presidency.

But then when it comes to youthful pharmaceutical experimentation, like father, like daughter, apparently.

IF LIBERTARIANS WANT TO BE RELEVANT, MAYBE THEY SHOULD FOCUS ON PROMOTING LIBERTY.

It’s an idea so crazy, it just might work. But perhaps not with all audiences:  “The End of the Liberal Tradition? A new paper suggests young Americans are giving up on democracy,” First Things notes.

America has seen how this story ends once already. But began at the dawn of the 20th century with three terrifying words: “Individualism means tyranny.”

ANDREW BREITBART, ANTI-SEMITE? No. Next question?

SO MUCH FOR ‘MINNESOTA NICE:’ Trump donors harassed, spit on at Minneapolis fundraiser.

Related: VIDEO: Agitators bang on doors at Trump fundraiser, punch attendees in ‘gauntlet.’

More: Protesters push, spit on Trump donors at Minn. fundraiser.

ANALYSIS TRUE: “If a terrible natural disaster in Louisiana can be blamed on a Republican president, then it’s one of the biggest stories of the decade. If the lack of a public statement on a Louisiana disaster during a presidential vacation might reflect badly on a Democratic president, it’s best to treat the flood as a ‘page A4’ story, check-the-box journalism.” Which is why, as Jim Geraghty writes, “The Cultural Isolation of the Elites Is Primarily Driven By the National Media.”

NOW IT’S FEMINISTS condemning those Naked Donald Trump statues.

The Daily Show mode of liberal politics has encouraged us all to succumb to mockery when we no longer have the refuge of logical argument; of a political opponent that understands neither reason nor empathy; of a political space so tragically fragmented there can be no dialogue, only derision. There’s a temptation to exert power over the oppressor by telling him he is nothing but a joke to us.

But when we laugh at naked Donald Trump in Union Square, tug at his penis, stare, point, and mock, who are we really laughing at? Are we laughing at Donald Trump because Donald Trump is naked, and fat, standing in front of us? Are we mocking the fact that anyone who has cellulite or a gut or a figure that’s not valued by a capitalist, health obsessed, body-shaming society dares to be nude in a public space? Are we laughing at Donald Trump because we believe that men should be manly, and that manly means to have a big penis, and that anybody who doesn’t fit into that violent, cissexist masculinity is worthy of contempt?

Are we really turning the tables on the oppressor, or are we continuing to stomp on the oppressed? . . .

Nothing is being said by the piece that is difficult for one in the current political climate to say – that Trump is a joke, or that fat people must be shamed, or that male bodies that don’t conform to masculine notions of genitalia deserve scorn. Indeed, the real naked emperors seem to be the installation’s smug audience instead, parading around in seeming robes of progressive politics, which actually, upon closer inspection, are their own naked delusions of open minded, non-oppressive grandeur.

For Jon Stewart Democrats, smugness is its own reward.

FORMER GAWKER EDITOR: NO ENEMY WAS ‘MORE EFFECTIVE’ THAN #GAMERGATE.

I’m not sure if Peter Thiel would agree 100 percent with that statement, but point taken, nonetheless.

EATING CAKE WITH HILLARY CLINTON: “Check out this 2007 Hillary Clinton for President radio ad, in which she rips into George W. Bush, saying that Katrina victims were “invisible” to him, but aren’t invisible to her,” Louisiana-based journalist Rod Dreher writes. “How times change. Here’s why Hillary Clinton cannot be bothered to come to Louisiana: she’s got a slew of fundraising events set up with coastal elites.” And as Dreher adds later in his post, “You cannot make this up! Hillary Clinton is on Martha’s Vineyard tonight at a $100,000 a plate fundraiser at the home of Lady Rothschild.”