Rittmeister Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, 1892-1918.

Futility Closet:

What it was like to be attacked by Germany’s Red Baron:

Richthofen dove down out of the sun and took Dunn by surprise. The first notice I had of the attack was when I heard Dunn from his seat behind me shout something at me, and at the same time a spray of bullets went over my shoulder from behind and splintered the dashboard almost in front of my face.

I kicked over the rudder and dived instantly, and just got a glance at the red machine passing under me to the rear. I did not know it was Richthofen’s. … I endeavoured to get my forward machine gun on the red plane, but Richthofen was too wise a pilot, and his machine was too speedy for mine. He zoomed up again and was on my tail in less than half a minute. Another burst of lead came over my shoulder, and the glass faces of the instruments on the dashboard popped up in my face. I dived again, but he followed my every move. …

Another burst of lead from behind, and the bullets spattered on the breech of my own machine gun, cutting the cartridge belt. At the same time, my engine stopped, and I knew that the fuel tanks had been hit. There were more clouds below me at about six thousand feet. I dove for them and tried to pull up in them as soon as I reached them. No luck! My elevators didn’t answer the stick. …

I was busy with the useless controls all the time and going down at a frightful speed, but the red machine seemed to be able to keep itself poised just above and behind me all the time, and its machine guns were working every minute. I found later that bullets had gone through both of my sleeves and both of my boot legs but in all of the firing, not one of them touched me, although they came uncomfortably close. I managed to flatten out somehow in the landing and piled up with an awful crash. As I hit the ground, the red machine swooped over me, but I don’t remember him firing on me when I was on the ground.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

David Cole, at Taki Mag, thinks the unthinkable.

Last week was not a very good week for Donald Trump’s poll numbers. In fact, I had several Trump diehards—not bloggers or pundits, just private nobodies who are friends of mine—tell me that these days they find themselves thinking the once unthinkable: Trump might lose. Trump’s multiple recent statements speculating about the possibility of a loss have not helped soothe some of his followers’ growing anxiety. With so many Trump supporters framing the election as the “last hope for Western civilization,” it’s not exactly encouraging to hear your man say, “It’s okay. I have a yacht and a mansion; I’ll be fine.”

Now, I know that some of you are thinking, “The polls are wrong, the polls are biased, the polls lie.” You keep thinking that. Because by all means don’t listen to those of us with a little more experience in these matters. I mean, for a lot of pro-Trumpers, especially those who come from the alt-right fringe, this is their first time feeling like an active participant in a national presidential election. As a longtime GOP party hack, I can tell you that the “lying polls” line is not something you want to fall for. In 2008, many GOPs had convinced themselves that the polls were not to be believed because Americans were being untruthful with pollsters, as no white person wanted to admit he wasn’t gonna vote for the black guy. “But wait till they get in the voting booth,” we smugly assured ourselves. “Then they’ll vote our way.” And we all know how that turned out.

The “lying polls” rationalization made an encore in 2012. I wrote about it in my book, as I recalled the events of an October 2012 Condi Rice banquet:

I was taken aside by Derek Broes. Broes had been a senior VP at Paramount, and senior director at Microsoft. By 2012, he ran his own consulting firm, and he was a contributor to Forbes. “It’s a lock, David,” he told me. “It’s going to be a Romney landslide.” He painstakingly explained the polling numbers and the context and meaning. “We can’t lose.”

We lost.

So take some advice that I know you’re not going to take: Don’t buy the “lying polls” claim. Polls are imperfect, but generally they’re accurate.

An excellent collection from the Daily Mail.

Hat tip to Roger de Hauteville.

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Sporting Classics:

It was roughly three years after Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. Thompson was visiting the late author’s home, trying to find what had made the area so attractive to Papa in his final days. Over the entrance to the cabin was a 6×6 set of elk antlers (it’s unclear if they were from a Hemingway hunt, but they are presumed to be). When the admiring journalist left Ketchum and headed to his home in Aspen, Colorado, so did the antlers.

That was in 1964. Some 52 years later, the antlers are back in Ketchum, returned not by Thompson himself, but by his widow.

Anita Thompson recently gave an interview to BroBible.com in which she said, “He got caught up in the moment. He had so much respect for Hemingway. He was actually very embarrassed by it.”

Hunter, 27 at the time, wanted to understand what brought Hemingway back to Idaho after years as an expatriate in one country or another. He visited Papa’s Ketchum home while on assignment for The National Observer, then headed back to write an article about his conclusions. The antlers came off the cabin’s front doorpost and along for the ride.

Thompson never boasted about the theft; never invited friends over to see his prize. As much as the gonzo journalist loved to insert himself into stories and “tell it exactly as I saw it,” he was less than forthcoming about the antlers. They stayed in semi-seclusion for the remainder of his life, hung unceremoniously in his garage.

Read on.

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Chicago Tribune:

A young Hunter S. Thompson went to Idaho to write about Ernest Hemingway and decided to take a piece of his hero home with him — a set of trophy elk antlers.

More than half a century later, the gonzo journalist’s wife returned the antlers to Hemingway’s house in the mountain town of Ketchum.

“He was embarrassed that he took them,” Anita Thompson said Thursday, noting the deep respect her husband had for Hemingway’s work. “He wished he hadn’t taken them. He was young, it was 1964, and he got caught up in the moment.

“He talked about it several times, about taking a road trip and returning them,” she said.

She gave back the antlers Aug. 5 to Ketchum Community Library, which helps catalog and preserve items in the residence where the author took his own life. It’s now owned by the Nature Conservancy.

In 1964, Hunter Thompson, then 27, came to Ketchum when he was still a conventional journalist. He had not yet developed his signature style, dubbed gonzo journalism, that involved inserting himself, often outrageously, into his reporting and that propelled him into a larger-than-life figure.

Thompson was writing a story for the National Observer about why the globe-trotting Hemingway shot and killed himself at his home three years earlier at age 61. Thompson attributed the suicide in part to rapid changes in the world that led to upheavals in places Hemingway loved most — Africa and Cuba. …

In the story, later collected in his book “The Great Shark Hunt,” he noted the problem of tourists taking chunks of earth from around Hemingway’s grave as souvenirs.

Early in the piece, he wrote about the large elk antlers over Hemingway’s front door but never mentioned taking them.

For decades, the antlers hung in a garage at Thompson’s home near Aspen, Colorado.

“One of the stories that has often been told over the years is the story of Hunter S. Thompson taking the antlers,” said the library’s Jenny Emery Davidson, who helped accept the trophy. “These are two great literary figures who came together over the item of the antlers.”

Davidson said historian Douglas Brinkley, who spoke at the library in May and was familiar with the antler story after interviewing the writer, contacted Anita Thompson. She called the library on Aug. 1.

Davidson said the antlers have since been shipped to a Hemingway grandson in New York who wanted them. It’s not clear if the antlers came from an elk killed by the author, who was a noted big game hunter, or if they were a gift.

Sean Hemingway didn’t respond to emails or phone messages seeking comment.

Like Ernest Hemingway, Thompson ended his own life by shooting himself, dying in 2005 at age 67 at his Colorado home.

His widow wants to turn the house where he lived and worked into a museum, planning to open it next year by invitation only. Like Hemingway’s home, it’s much the same as it was when Thompson was alive.

“I couldn’t open it with a clear conscience knowing there’s a stolen pair of antlers,” Anita Thompson said, noting the theft was unusual behavior, even by her husband’s standards.

Papa Hemingway’s Elk Antlers

Erick Erickson, like myself, refuses to take the blame for the impending debacle.

There really are not going to be very many silver linings for conservatives coming out of this election season. Hillary Clinton is going to be President. That is a given. The Supreme Court is going to move left. That is a given. The regulatory state is going to expand. That is a given. Congressional Republicans, in an effort to appear reasonable, will cut bad deals. That is a given.

All of these things are the logical outcome of Donald Trump’s disastrous campaign. His supporters are now fixated on the idea that those of us who warned them of the consequences of their actions are to blame for those consequences. It is akin to being blamed for a death when you warned the person the gun was loaded so they shouldn’t point it at their head and pull the trigger.

Michael Walsh yesterday published an outrageously intellectually fraudulent essay that claims that I’m supposed to vote for Donald Trump and am guilty of moral cowardice, forsooth! if I decline to support him.

Walsh starts off, with jaw-dropping insolence:

For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Donald Trump is what the small but obsessive, increasingly deracinated, band of “never Trumpers” says he is. He’s not a “movement conservative” – true. He’s often crass and vulgar – true. His quasi-grammatical flights of oratorical fancy often get him into trouble –also true. “Words matter” they remind him, while calling him a “witless ape,” a “white nationalist,” and — most childishly — a “turd-tornado,” who’s “dark,” “condescending,” and a “lunatic,” to list some of the more printable epithets in the conservative press. …

Okay. Therefore… what?

“For the sake of argument”!? We have to “stipulate”!? You are “deracinated” if you recognize that Donald Trump is not conservative, unprincipled, unethical, badly educated, a bully, a pathological unhinged narcissist, and a habitual liar? And “therefore… what?”

Therefore, we do not support someone who really does not believe in any principles, let alone the basic, fundamental ideas that the Conservative Movement came together to defend. Therefore, we do not support someone unqualified for the presidency additionally on the basis of a flawed character and inadequate education and intelligence.

Like President Adams, we should desire that only honest and wise men ever rule the United States.

Mr. Walsh then tries to prove that I have to support Trump because Hillary is leftist, corrupt, and also unacceptable. Unfortunately, this argument does not work for a variety of reasons.

It happens to be the case this year that not one, but two non-conservative, unprincipled, corrupt candidates have the nominations of both parties. If you are facing the prospect of Bubonic Plague, that actually does not make Ebola suddenly acceptable.

Donald Trump might make some policy concessions to conservative Republicans, but… the unlikely event of Trump winning the election would fatally confirm the separation of today’s Republican Party from the party we are familiar with and would mark the starting point of a new kind of populist, nativist, protectionist, and isolationist Republican Party, a party resembling much more the Know Nothing Party of the early 1850s than the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.

Hillary’s election would condemn the country to another four years of corrupt democrat misrule, but Hillary is a known commodity. She is a conventional democrat politician. She will be progressive in her policies, but her policies will fall within recognizable limits. Hillary Clinton may campaign as a populist, but she will never repudiate international trade agreements, destroy NATO, or cancel the US alliance with Israel. On the other hand, nobody knows what Trump might do. In campaigning, Trump has spouted all sorts of radical Buchananite BS. You never know: Donald Trump might decide to endear himself to the yobbos by shredding all our trade agreements and re-instituting the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Donald Trump might possibly out-do Barack Obama in deepening the recession by provoking the first grand international “beggar-your-neighbor” trade war in many decades.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka vacations with, and was fixed up with her husband, by Vladimir Putin’s mistress. Putin has been leaking material damaging to Hillary. How can anyone be sure that Donald Trump won’t trade Ukraine for a casino monopoly in the Russian Federation?

What Trump might or might not do is, of course, imponderable. We have no way of predicting his policy decisions accurately. But we have had plenty of evidence of his character, his behavior, and his knowledge and intelligence. Donald Trump is totally unqualified for the presidency and even the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s election does not make him qualified.

Faced with two unacceptable candidates, I’d say the responsible thing to do is to vote for neither. Hillary’s flaws do not make Trump desirable or qualified and vice versa.

Michael Walsh is obviously living in Trumpkin-kuckkucksheim. He thinks that because Trump got a plurality of low information, commonly cross-over-democrat, votes, leading to capturing delegates in badly-arranged winner-take-all primaries, conservatives like myself are somehow obligated to support him. If I don’t vote for Trump, he says, I will have “stabbed him in the back.” Baloney! I’ve been attacking Trump quite consistently directly from the front. I do not owe Walsh, the Alt-Right, or all the Trumpkins in the trailer park a damned thing. When I was first of age to vote in a presidential election, the Republican Party was running Richard Nixon. I would not vote for Richard Nixon, and I’m certainly not going to vote for Donald Trump.