Sharks versus Jets in “West Side Story” (1961).

Charles C.W. Cooke, tongue firmly in cheek, has loads of fun joining Bree Newsome and Lebron James in sticking up for teenage knife fighting.

Since when do we need the cops to intervene in the recreational stabbings of our youth?

Just when I thought that America couldn’t possibly get any softer, people start suggesting that there’s a role for the police in preventing knife murders. The snowflake generation strikes once again.

Is there any tradition that the radicals won’t ruin? As the brilliant Bree Newsome pointed out on Twitter, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons.” And now people are calling the cops on them? I ask: Is this a self-governing country or not? When Newsome says, “We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon,” she may be expressing a view that is unfashionable these days. But she’s right.

Disappointingly, my colleague Phil Klein has felt compelled to join the critics. In a post published yesterday, Phil asked in a sarcastic tone whether the police should “somehow treat teenage knife fights as they would harmless roughhousing and simply ignore it.” My answer to this is: Yes, that’s exactly what they should do — yes, even if they are explicitly called to the scene. I don’t know where Phil grew up, but where I spent my childhood, Fridays were idyllic: We’d play some football, try a little Super Mario Bros, have a quick knife fight, and then fire up some frozen pizza before bed. And now law enforcement is getting involved? This is political correctness gone mad.

It’s hypocrisy, too. Who among us hasn’t come within a second or two of murdering someone else with a steak knife? My best friend in school, Bobby “The Blade” Simpson, used to throw shivs at the smaller kids in the music room. Did we need the authorities to step in when that happened? No, we did not. As MSNBC’s Joy Reid argued smartly on her show last night, pranks such as these were dealt with by our teachers — just as we all expected they would be. And if something went wrong? Well, that’s why we had substitutes.

In all honesty, I worry that this sort of helicopter policing is making us weak. Back in my day, the people who survived a good stabbing came out stronger for it.

RTWT

Charles C.W. Cooke nukes Jennifer Rubin until she glows for her everlasting Never-Trump-ism, which is turning her into a liberal tool.

The era of Trump has been as hard on the mind as it has been good for the muscles in the chest. Ours is a moment in which millions rush breathlessly to exclaim. In defense! In resistance! In bloody-minded persistence! “I will not back down!” we are told, by people who have not been asked to, and could not be compelled to. They won’t be “intimidated” either, nor “silenced,” nor “bullied” nor, it seems, pushed to any form of self-reflection. Indignation, not analysis, is the perennial order of the day, and the tone of our debates is ineluctably Twitteresque. Retweets are points on the board, and hyperbole gets you oodles of them. The worst. Ding! Insane. Ding! Crisis. Ding, ding, ding! Congratulations, you have been promoted to the next level. Time for some game theory . . .

From this self-laudatory funhouse has emerged a host of cynical entrepreneurs, each with the same approach to our dismal, fractious moment: Take no prisoners, brook no opposition, and never, ever step away from the umbrage. These people end their sentences with “Really.” or “In 2017.” or “Let that sink in”; they pepper their analyses with eschatology; and, as is apt for a cult, they are promiscuous with their accusations of heresy. Like Lewis’s busybodies, they are convinced to a man that they are saving the country, and insistent that the dissenters are miscreants or weaklings. They have little sense of history, no instinct for context, and no meaningful faith in the system they want to save. They are marching in an army, and damn does it feel good.

Which brings us to Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s ostensibly conservative blogger.

Rubin is not the only example of this president’s remarkable talent for corrupting his detractors as well as his devotees, but she is perhaps the best one. Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene, Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well.

RTWT

Regular, long-term readers will recall that, right up to Election Night, I was anti-Trump myself, and I did not even vote for him. I voted for that Mc-Somebody-or-other guy from Utah.

But, I did indulge in some private gloating Election Night as Hillary went down in flames. And, as Inauguration Day arrived, I sat down with a large drink, and reflected. I realized that I had been wrong: Trump really was evidently not a democrat Q-Boat. He was actually sincere, and he was proposing to do a lot of good things. And, while Donald Trump was never going to measure up to the ideal form of President of the United States, if you compare him to the great majority of presidents in my own lifetime, he’s not really so awful as all that.

He isn’t really any more plebian than Truman. Trump was never a bagman for a crooked urban political machine. He is not even close to being as worthless and fraudulent in every way as JFK. He isn’t a total poltroon, and he probably won’t be banging hookers in the White House pool. He is not as vulgar and just plain nasty as Lyndon Johnson. He will not humiliate his underlings by making them talk to him while he’s on the can. Trump also will probably refrain from waving his male organ at the White House press corps. And he is not even close to being as nerdy and neurotic as Nixon. He won’t drink himself to sleep every night on taxpayer-funded Haut Brion.

He actually is more consistently conservative in his policies and is keeping a lot more of his promises than the Bushes.

The trick to enjoying the Trump presidency is simply never watch him speak, just sit back and watch all the liberal heads exploding everywhere, pour yourself another drink, and laugh.

The way I see it. Conservatives like me did not elect Donald Trump. The Liberals did by driving ordinary working class Americans round the bend with their left-wing insanity, their incredible arrogance, and their contempt for America and Americans. Trump is the ordinary American-in-the-street’s rejoinder. And they obviously deserve it.