David Harsanyi proposes a much-needed solution to the incivility and low personal integrity of our current politicians.

Right now, the leading candidate in the GOP race is celebrated by his fans for his vulgarity and eagerness to attack the dignity of others. People confuse this incivility — and he’s not alone — as a statement against political correctness. It isn’t. That would entail using ideological or cultural rhetoric that others have deemed morally unacceptable. Not calling a rival candidate a “pussy.”

Yet, the more personal and boorish his invective gets, the more Trump fans are awestricken. The belief that tough-guy Trump is a “fighter” propels his candidacy, even though pampered scions of wealth rarely have to fight for anything. And his success will only produce others who’ll ape this strategy.

I think we can all agree dueling would be a much-needed corrective.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying violence is the answer. I’m saying violence is an answer.

Read the whole thing.

Just picture Sarah Palin calling out Hillary.

The New Yorker’s Andrew Boynton has a go at trying to edit Donald Trump’s response to Pope Francis into something more closely resembling conventional English syntax.

Trump candidacy predicted by Gilbert Shelton in 1967.

P.J. (in 2016) sends a letter to Pat (in 1968) instructing him how to save America from the disaster looming in the former’s time.

You can get next to these people.

The awful Republican is named Don Trump. He’s a senior at Penn.

The awful Democrat is named Hillary (two l’s) Rodham. She’s a junior at Wellesley—exactly the same age as us.

It’s possible we know Hillary already. She went to Maine East High in Park Ridge outside Chicago, right up Harlem Avenue from Oak Park where we went to high school. She was in a Methodist Youth Group. We were in a Methodist Youth Group. We may have dated her. And erased the memory.

So I have a plan. I’ve enclosed money. (No, you didn’t get rich. A buck is only worth 15 cents in 2016.)

This Don Trump is the easy part. Skip some classes. I seem to recall you’re ahead of me on that part of the plan. But (I checked our transcript) your grades are shit this semester no matter what. Fly Youth Fare standby to Philadelphia.

Trump is the campus loud mouth New Yorker. You won’t have trouble finding him. Tell him you’re part of a commune that wants to pay too much rent for a crappy place in a bad part of town.

He’ll be glad to have coffee or a mu tea or whatever with you. (You’ll have to pay.) Slip the STP in his java. He’ll freak. He’s on the verge anyway. The cat’s been a space case since birth. Skip town before he starts peaking.

Way to go!

I just checked the mental hospitals in New York. A “Donald Trump Jr.” has been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue since January 1968. Good karma, man.

Getting rid of Hillary Rodham is more complicated.

Read the whole thing.

Justin Raimondo is cheering as the mob bearing pitchforks and torches advances on the castle.

The results of the New Hampshire primary are in, and the big winner is the new populism: that mysterious pro-“outsider” phenomenon that has the political class in a panic, and which no one has adequately defined – including its current practitioners. …

Ideologically, what New Hampshire tells us is that the “centrist” anti-“extremist” political paradigm that has restricted our political perceptions – and choices – for lo these many years is obsolete. For months, voters have been told that someone who defines himself as a “democratic socialist” could never mount a credible challenge to Queen Hillary, and that the victory of the Clinton Restorationists is inevitable. Now, however, nothing seems inevitable, as voters ignore the media and its version of the conventional wisdom, and the “political revolution” led by Sanders seems fully capable of upending the Democratic party.

On the Republican side of the equation, it’s much the same story – only more so. While the Sanderistas are a movement of the “left,” Trumpism is less easily categorized as a rightist phenomenon. On domestic economic issues, Trump is all over the place: he wants to lower the tax rate, but penalize the financial speculators: he opposes Obamacare, and wants to allow competition between insurance companies over state lines, but he also wants to take care of the indigent. He is protectionist on trade, tough on crime, and even tougher on immigration – all stances one would normally associate with the paleo-conservatives. And yet when it comes to defense spending and foreign policy, on close inspection he is remarkably “left”: he opposes a new cold war with Russia, doesn’t’ want us in Syria, highlights his opposition to the Iraq war, and has recently declared that he opposes hiking the military budget. He wonders aloud why we are pledged to defend both South Korea and Japan while they “screw us over’ on trade.

Indeed, when it comes to foreign policy he is a lot closer to Sanders than to any of his Republican rivals. And on trade policy, too, the Sanderistas and the Trumpists sound eerily alike: both movements are protests against the hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity and the rise of paper-pushing financiers as the robber barons of a New Gilded Age. The divide between them is not so much ideological as demographic: Sanders holds the loyalty of the under-30 crowd, while Trump garners the allegiance of their parents and grandparents. What unites them is their rebellion against the political class and a system built on cronyism and perpetual warfare.

What the twin victories of these two protest movements prefigure is the rise of a new nationalism in America. Not the outward-looking aggressive militaristic nationalism of pre-World War II Europe, but the introspective insulating “return to normalcy” nationalism of prewar America: wary of foreign adventurism, almost exclusively concerned with bread-and-butter issues, resentful of a “meritocracy” that rewards anything but genuine merit, and in search of a lost greatness they may never have experienced but only heard about. …

The political and corporate elites that have ruled, unchallenged, since the end of World War II, and whose perspective is globalist, imperialist, and mercantilist, is facing a serious insurrection: the peasants with pitchforks are gathering in the shadow of the high castle, their torches illuminating the twilight of the West. Whether they succeed in penetrating the fortress and violating the inner sanctum matters less than the destructive effects of the battle itself. Does our ruling class have the will to fight and win? We’ll have the answer shortly.

Yes, it’s all lots of fun, and a revolt against the American pseudo-intellectual, urban community of fashion establishment is long overdue, but neither a geriatric hippie communist nor an egomanaical vulgarian is a leader fit to be entrusted with power. If you don’t like the current frozen economy, just go elect Comrade Bernie or Smoot-and-Hawley Donald and see what you get.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Ian Tuttle describes the repulsive dynamic driving the largest percentage of voters in the current election.

[E]nvy sells. And make no mistake, that is what Sanders is selling. After all, socialism is inevitably a politics of envy: Wealth is by definition finite, so more in your pocket means less in mine — and if I have less than I want, it must be your fault. Because Sanders has no room in his cramped understanding of the world for the complex interplay of free economic actors, he must default to simplistic moral explanations — Greed!: of Wall Street bankers, pharmaceutical companies, and America’s 536 billionaires — and simplistic solutions: to wit, frog-marching Goldman Sachs executives down Fifth Avenue and divvying up their stuff. They’ll have less, so you’ll have more. …

Unlike Sanders, Trump has no determinate position on any matter of public policy, but that’s of little importance. He is not pitching a movement; he is pitching himself. His promise is not any particular slate of policies; it’s Donald Trump writ large. An America with Trump at the helm is one in which America “wins,” like Trump wins; makes good deals, like Trump makes good deals. In Donald Trump’s America, everybody gets to live a little like Donald Trump. This is at least partly why Trump’s supporters are so vicious toward his detractors: The latter threaten their chances to live bigger.

It’s envy, en masse, on both sides. Somebody else has it (cheaper tuition, cheaper health care, business-class tickets, a Mercedes, &c.), and I want it. Under Sanders, top-hatted Uncle Pennybags will do the perp walk; under Trump, we’ll put the screws to Beijing and Uncle Pennybags himself will cut me in on the deal; but in either case, I get what should’ve been mine all along. And all for the low, low price of a vote. Those who believe that politics is little more than personal psychodrama played out on a grand stage might be closer than usual to the truth this election cycle. Neither Trump nor Sanders, despite their claims, is ushering in a revolution. They are ushering in a politics more petty, vulgar, and low — more animated by voters’ base inclinations — than any in recent memory. If New Hampshire is any indication, voters are not about anything so high-minded as constitutional government or national security or racial justice or even “hope and change.” They’re about me getting mine, by hook or by crook. Free college, free health care, and winning. This election is the Gollum-cry of the masses: WE WANTS IT.

Quinn Hillyer, like a lot of the rest of us, is tired of listening to sore losers whining.

[T]here was Ben Carson calling a press conference to complain about Cruz’s somewhat misleading email to caucus captains that could be read, between the lines, to be suggesting Carson would soon withdraw from the race. But once he got into the presser, Carson tried to make it sound as if he wanted to move on, but that it was the media trying to pit candidates against each other like gladiators in an arena. Neat trick: Call a press conference to complain while saying you’re not the one complaining.

But of course, nobody could top Donald Trump for over-the-top sour-grapeness. The surprise loser of the Iowa evening went so far as to demand a re-vote vote in the Hawkeye State or, barring that, a disqualification of all Cruz’s votes, on the grounds that Cruz supposedly “stole” the election. “If you think about it, I really finished first,” Trump claimed to a crowd in Little Rock.

Yeah, right — and when Muhammad Ali knocked Sonny Liston to the canvas, it was really Liston who was the victor.

All of this is a sorry spectacle. It contrasts with the dignified exits of candidates Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum, with Santorum also offering an entirely positive endorsement for Rubio with nary a bad word about anybody. While Republicans should of course want candidates who don’t like to lose, they surely don’t want candidates who don’t know how to take a loss.

Forgive the old-fashioned use of gender images, but there was a time when real men would move on from a loss with gracious fortitude. Think of golfer Jack Nicklaus smilingly congratulating rivals Lee Trevino and Tom Watson when they broke his heart with unlikely chip-ins, and you get the picture of how setbacks ought to be handled.