One Of Many Days In Snide & Snotty

Bill "Wrong-Way" Kristol's rag starts thinning the 2016 Republican herd & lashes out at America's favorite artistes cultural workers, perhaps to distract from the heresy of denying candidate perfection, or maybe it's mere Kulturkampf gastric reflux at this point.

The writer stood by as Christie hopped up and down, as best he could, and waved his beefy arms, and mouthed the words to Springsteen’s tuneless anthems, and then tried, without success, to score a meeting with Springsteen himself. The jets, the meals, the concerts, the parties with celebrity pop musicians—we have at last learned that Christie is neither a populist nor a plutocrat, but a man striving to live out the fantasies of a teenage boy.

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Huckabee’s book is now most famous for his denunciations of such sewage-workers as the lip-synching dancer Beyoncé and her repellent husband. Good for Huck! But in his book he uses this as an occasion to comment on how the president and first lady are failing in their role as parents, allowing their teenage girls to listen to the “toxic mental poison” of contemporary music. Bad for Huck: Any parent who is trying to bring up a kid in the crappy culture of 21st-century America faces the same dilemma as the Obamas, and many of them have uneasily resolved it in the same laissez-faire fashion as the first couple. The proper response to such a parent, if any is called for, is sympathy. But no response is called for, since Huckabee wasn’t asked.

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Huckabee manages to avoid hostile interviewers, usually, but they seem to seek out Rand Paul, who over the last few weeks has shown himself unskilled in dealing with them. With his impeccable libertarian credentials, he has posed as a different kind of Republican—uniformed in the post-hipster rig of jeans, dress shirt, and poorly knotted tie, nonjudgmental in all important matters and a bicycle rider by choice. Such people inevitably make overuse of Twitter, and they fall helpless before its awesome power to expose its users’ most unappetizing weaknesses.

Enslaved by the need to tweet, Paul and his campaign have shown themselves to be unaccountably and prematurely combative. When his potential rivals Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney had a private but well-publicized meeting, Paul tweeted out a picture of a friendship band inscribed with their names, suggesting that the two former governors were adolescent sweethearts. In the tweet, “friendship” was spelled “frienship,” but it’s Twitter and who cares. Even the misspelling couldn’t disguise the whiff of envy, though: I didn’t want to go to your stupid meeting anyway because you guys are probably in love .  .  . Later Paul linked to a mock recording his campaign had got up, depicting sweet talk between Bush and Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t quite as funny as a Saturday Night Live skit, if you can imagine such a thing. But the lady who imitated Hillary was very good. Maybe it’s his mom.

Kee-rist, what an asshole, as they say.