BOOK PLUG SUNDAY: Selling Books is Hard. Bad Blurbs Make It Harder.

From Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin.

CHANGE: Why cops are standing down all across America.

PANDORA’S BOX: Trump/Russia May Expose Extent of “Five Eyes” Allied Spying.

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S.G. CHEAH: In Defense of Publix against the Attacks of David Hogg. “Here is one thing we should remember about Publix. Publix is a company wholly owned by its present and past employees. To understand this in the most concrete sense, the cashiers, shelf stockers, clerks, butchers and bakers, along with the administrative workers and management of Publix supermarket are the partial and direct owners of that company.”

THE PROF. IS GWU LAW PROFESSOR JOHN BANZHAF: Law Prof: Trump can pre-pardon all in Russia probe, kill Mueller’s inquest.

OPEN THREAD: Rejoice in each other’s company.

GOOD NEWS: For Some Breast Cancer Patients, The Chemo Decision Just Got Easier. “A study published Sunday finds that many women with early-stage invasive breast cancer could safely forgo chemotherapy, if they score in the midrange or lower for risk that their cancer will recur, as measured by a commonly used genomic test.”

THIS LOOKS INTERESTING: “This course is about the interplay between pistol and rifle (or carbine) applications in urban defensive contexts.”

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THIS IS CNN. CNN ‘Cultural Critic’ Guest: ‘All of The People’ Who Voted for Trump Are Racist.

BUT IT WAS ALL RIGHT, EVERYTHING WAS ALL RIGHT, THE STRUGGLE WAS FINISHED. HE HAD WON THE VICTORY OVER HIMSELF. HE LOVED BIG BROTHER. Steve Bannon on his ‘Revolution’: Never Mind.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Freshmen’s Self-Reports Of Psychological Disorders Doubled Since 2010.

GRAY LADY FORGETS TO TAKE HER LITHIUM AGAIN: NY Times: Motherhood Is Hitler. In response, Stacy McCain writes:

The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, but it’s also the conservatism of fools.

So here comes the New York Times with “Motherhood is Hitler” — using a handful of Internet extremists to smear all defenders of the traditional family as Nazis — but what else are we to expect? This should be interpreted as evidence of desperation and despair on the Left.

The defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the subsequent policy successes of the Trump administration, have caused a panic in the degenerate intelligentsia. Leftists in academia and the media have taken off the mask, revealing themselves as totalitarians, who do not recognize the legitimacy of any opposition to the “progressive” agenda.

What the Left would like to do is to delegitimize every possible source of opposition to their cultural hegemony. One way to do this, of course, is to attach a stigma of Nazism or “white supremacy” to anyone who rejects what Thomas Sowell has called The Vision of the Anointed. Conservatives must resist this effort, by refusing to play by the rules that the Left wants to impose on political discourse. If the Left is able to dictate the rules, they guarantee that they will win the game. They know that there actually are neo-Nazis over there in the shadows, but we know this, too. Knowing that the Left will always use this kind of guilt-by-association smear against us, conservatives should prepare in advance to deal with these attacks. Don’t let yourself get caught in a situation where you panic, become defensive, and discredit yourself with absurd apologies.

It’s 2018. Everybody is now “literally Hitler.” And if everybody is Hitler, then nobody is Hitler. Therefore, relax. You haven’t lost your mind. The world has gone crazy, and sanity is now a hate crime.

Speaking of which, that quite an interesting binary by the Trump-era Times: “The Housewives of White Supremacy,” versus the swinging free love back in the days of the Soviet Union. Sanity certainly appears to be a hate crime in the Times’ writers bullpen.

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN MAKING FUN OF OUR PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER WOULD RUIN YOUR LIFE.

The morning after the uneventful pardoning, my news feed began blowing up with stories about a GOP hill staffer named Elizabeth Lauten, who worked for a backbencher congressman. She decided to criticize the Obama daughters on her Facebook page. Lauten attacked their fashion choices, writing in part, “Dear Sasha and Malia, I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.”

Her post made the media world go apoplectic. It began a 72 hour outrage cycle. Lauten was called racist, bigoted and insensitive. The cultural zeitgeist would not be satisfied unless it received due punishment for the crime. Lauten was of course fired, even though she apologized the same day.

Her political career was ruined forever.

As I wrote at the time, “In a city where image is everything, this is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. To this day, Lauten has found it impossible to get re-hired in the public sector. The media got its scalp and the precedent was set: Do not attack a President’s children.”

Since then, the cultural paradigm has shifted.

Judging by CNN’s Brian Stelter, I’m not sure what the problem is:

Has it come this? I’m sorry, I thought this was America — are we not allowed to say “feckless” anymore? The “scooplet” is also a nice touch, since Stelter is being fed information by an affiliated network so that he can aid  in their PR cleanup effort.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, IF TRUE THIS MEANS THERE WILL STILL BE HUMANS IN 6491: Man who claims he’s a time traveller from year 6491 but stuck in 2018 ‘PASSES lie detector test.’ On the other hand, his future sounds rather un-compelling.

ARE YOU SURPRISED? Obama-era FAA hiring rules placed air traffic controller diversity ahead of safety, lawyer says.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING. Chuck Todd: Isn’t Trump sort of responsible for Samantha Bee’s tone? In response, Allahpundit writes:

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the activist wings of both parties, which includes entertainment on the left (go look again at how Bee described her own show last night), genuinely despise each other and feel no common ground. That’s where the nastiness comes from. To the extent Trump makes it worse, it’s because he embodies the things lefty activists most despise about the right, not because he likes to make fun of Chuck Todd’s “sleepy eyes” or whatever. The interesting question is whether late-night would have been a bit less oppositional politically under someone like Romney or McCain than it’s been under Trump. I can see it both ways but I’m inclined to say no — not because they’d hate Romney or McCain just as much but because the influence of Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” is so heavy on all of them that they would have felt compelled to do some woke truth-to-power shtick no matter what. The left expects it of their daily comic commentators now.

As awful as the left acted after the 9/11-era timeout on the culture war ended around 2003 with, as Charles Krauthammer wrote, the left’s superheated pressure cooker exploding, the real tipping point in retrospect was their win-at-all-costs response when John McCain asked Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008.

As with the George H.W. Bush administration, when the left couldn’t excoriate Bush, a WWII hero, and used Dan Quayle as a nonstop surrogate piñata, the left couldn’t aim both barrels at McCain because of his legendary POW status. Instead, Palin took the brunt, including Todd’s then-fellow MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann insinuating that she should be shot. Reebok’s once apolitical advertising character “Terry Tate Office Linebacker” was shown brutally slamming a Palin lookalike stuntwoman to the concrete in a YouTube clip. Obama supporters were photographed wearing “Sarah Palin is a C*nt” T-shirts (plus ça change; and no, the asterisk doesn’t appear on the originals.) Five years after McCain and Palin were defeated, Martin Bashir was fired by MSNBC after he suggested that Palin should be defecated and urinated on.

As Glenn has written, Trump is “a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.”

WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BUY the second-fastest car. “The second-best cars often feel more harmonious, better balanced, at ease with real life rather than 200-mph autobahn fantasies. When you stop chasing the biggest number, you just might get the most enjoyable vehicle.”

Hmm.

HOLD ON! THERE’S MORE TO THE PAIGE PATTERSON STORY: Bible-thumping reactionary or aging icon victimized by the liberal media? Regardless which side of the controversy surrounding now-former Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson you stand on, it looks very much like another illustration of drive-by journalism. 

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GOOD: California’s efforts to restrict Elon Musk’s flamethrowers go down in flames.

REMEMBERING TOM WOLFE: “Too high-octane to pass muster in our timid, querulous, and self-asphyxiating age.”

KATHY GRIFFIN: SAMANTHA BEE IS THE REAL VICTIM.

Shockingly, alleged comedian Kathy Griffin is not only backing Samantha Bee for her vicious attack on First Daughter Ivanka Trump, but suggesting Bee is the victim in all this. Griffin, who once posed in an ISIS-style photo with a bloody, mock decapitated Donald Trump head, slammed TBS for apparently forcing Bee to apologize; Griffin tried to launch a campaign of support for Bee, noting the alleged harassment the “Full Frontal” star is receiving.

“Spineless,” wrote Griffin on Thursday. “Support your talent TBS. Instead, you made her apologize.”

C’mon though – deep down, isn’t Griffin jealous that Time-Warner-CNN-HBO allowed Bee to keep her job via a perfunctory non-apology apology, while immediately firing Griffin last year, after her own épater le bourgeois moment?