(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

It seems like it was only Thursday night when we heard how presidential He, Trump was beginning to look, and how all of the ruckus he brings along with him really is the fault of the president, or an expression of the justified anger of the embattled white working class, or some such other phantom scapegoat.

Yeah, maybe not so much.

It is time for reasonable liberals to stop making excuses for this barbarism. No, I don't have to understand the frustration these people are feeling. Or, more to the point, I can understand the frustration, but I don't have to understand this kind of expression of it, which is only going to get worse as this year goes on. TPP is an awful trade deal that I hope never makes it through the Congress. But it's not an excuse to call women "whores" and take swings at people who just are standing there. I can understand the economic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler, but those conditions exist in many places at that time but in only one place did they lead to Auschwitz.

"These are people that punch. People that are violent people," Trump said. "The particular one where I said 'I'd like to bang him,' that was a very vicious—a guy who was swinging, very loud, and then started swinging at the audience." He continued: "You know what? The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that's what we need a little bit more of."

It is quite simple. Sanders gives his audience opponents to defeat. Trump gives his audience enemies to hate. Sooner or later, someone's going to get seriously hurt (or worse) at a Trump rally. That person will be blamed for his or her own injury, or worse. It will be said they had it coming to them. And we will cross another line that we never noticed was there, and there will be no going back again.

CNN is running this series about tumultuous presidential elections of the past, and it's produced by Kevin Spacey, so that's a good thing. But, alas, spurious balance dumps dung in the well even here. The first episode concerned the 1960 election, and there was the usual recounting of all the deceased Chicagoans who helped put JFK into the White House. But then the program veered into the conventionally anesthetic account of how noble Richard Nixon put his own ambitions aside for the good of the country and declined to contest the election. (We heard a lot of this drivel during the extended denouement in 2000.) The problem, of course, is that any attempt to rehabilitate Nixon, who remains history's yard waste, is doomed to fail. Rather typically, he took up a squatter's residence on the high ground while his operatives—particularly a guy named Earl Mazo—went digging around for evidence of Democratic chicanery with which they could challenge the election. The Republican party screamed for recounts in 11 states. A Nixon Recount Committee sprang up in Chicago. Actual recounts were conducted. He, of course, wrapped himself in clouds of counterfeit virtue while all this was being done on his behalf, and gladly accepted an ersatz martyrdom thereafter.

Worse, at the end of the CNN episode, Larry Sabato attempted to make the familiar case that losing in 1960 had led Nixon directly to the crimes of Watergate. Leaving aside the fact that Nixon was natively criminal all on his own, it is far more likely that what led to his sweet-tooth for bugging was the knowledge that LBJ, that crafty old bastard, had bugged Nixon's campaign plane in 1968 and discovered that Nixon and his people were committing outright treason by monkeying with the Paris Peace Talks regarding Vietnam. That right there, folks, is the real Nixon. CNN should have known a lot better than this.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Egyptian Fantasy" (Allen Toussaint): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's a one-man UFO that our Navy designed, probably by reverse engineering a toy popular with alien children. This is what the Venusians have for soapbox derby, I think.

National Review, America's flagship journal of white supremacy, has endorsed Tailgunner Ted Cruz for president, and it has done so while apparently placing its nose in a vice.

We are well aware that a lot of Republicans, and even some conservatives, dislike the senator and even find him unlikable. So far, conservative voters seem to like him just fine. We do not wish to adjudicate all the conflicts between Cruz's Senate colleagues and him. He has sometimes made tactical errors, in our judgment; but conflicts have also arisen because his colleagues have lacked direction, clarity, and urgency. In any case, these conflicts pale into insignificance in light of Republicans' shared interest in winning in November and governing successfully thereafter.

Cruz '16: Yeah, He's a Creep But He's Not That Creep.

The well-oiled Rubio campaign machine gets its strategery on.

"John Kasich is the only one who can beat Donald Trump in Ohio," Rubio said. "If a voter in Ohio is motivated by stopping Donald Trump, I suspect that's the only choice they can make."

The Kasich camp seems unimpressed by this act of unselfishness.

Kasich spox Rob Nichols on Rubio news: "We were going to win in OH without his help, just as he's going to lose in FL w/o ours."

A mark, that will surely leave.

What Hillary Rodham Clinton said about the Reagans and AIDS is actually worse history than anything said at the GOP debate Thursday night and probably the single dumbest thing she's ever said in public. Do better, HRC. Fast.

(She has since walked things back on Twitter):

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Hillary Clinton’s statement on her comments about the Reagans' record on HIV and AIDS: pic.twitter.com/RtIs0zpJfk — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 11, 2016

Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

You see, chickens have a detached and diminished fibula. It's the tiny pin-like (not a coincidence: fibula is Latin for pin) bone we hate in chicken legs. Suppressing one of the genes responsible for the differences between raptors and chickens—in this case, it's a gene called Indian Hedgehog which is important to bone development—resulted in chickens that develop a full-length, tubular fibula connected at the ankle. They ended up with chickens possessed of bone structure that matches the lower leg anatomy of a raptor.

Chickens with dinosaur legs? Genes with cute names like new Crayola colors? There is no way this ends well. Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now, not to contribute boneless chicken legs to our compendium of cheap Chinese cuisine.

This week's Top Commenter Of The Week goes to Top Commenter Glenn Hendricks who, while commenting on the guy who shot the preacher because he thinks many famous people are hypersexual amphibian-humanoid Martians, and trying to define "hypersexual" for a fellow Top Commenter, contributed this bit of genuine frontier gibberish:

Do you remember the guy in High School, the one we'd say would hump a pile of firewood if he thought there was a snake in it? Worse than that guy.

I had never heard that one. Alligators and drained swamps, yes. Motherfcking snakes in the motherfcking firewood? New one on me. You are hereby awarded 81.73 Beckhams for the pure disgusting poetry of it.

Staying home this time to watch the festivities on the electric teevee machine. Could be the end of Young Marco. Be well and play nice, ya bastid. Stay above the snakeline, or I'm replacing all your fibulas with Twizzlers because science!

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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