Kurt Schlichter writes at Townhall:

You liberals and your Fredocon lackeys need to get this through your heads. You are not purging this guy. He’s purging you. Just look at James Comey, who has gone from Tower of Integrity to Looming Doofus. The winding trail from the bottom of that famous escalator to right here and now is littered with the twitching bodies of those who thought they could take on The Donald and win.

And it’s a delight to watch you hacks go nuts about it.
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It’s got to frustrate liberals and their Never Trump buddies to know that they are never deposing our elected chief executive. Nor are they ever putting any of these innocent people in jail, and that means the Deep Staters can’t effectively intimidate them into giving false testimony, sadly something the feds have shown themselves willing to do again and again to convict people they dislike.

This whole campaign to undo the 2016 election is a scam and a fraud and we all know it, but unlike the principled Decorumcons who refuse to see the truth of the putrid corruption within their beloved Beltway, Donald Trump (and those of us who support him) feel absolutely no obligation to go along with the charade that this isn’t a corrupt, slow-walking coup pushed by a disgruntled establishment. Our “system” is not endangered by us calling out the lies, or by the President using his power to prevent and/or correct manifest injustices. The danger is the corruption.

They’ve hurtled past the point where there is the appearance — at least the appearance — that the “coup” has nothing to do with principles at all, and everything to do with keeping the public from finding out about something. At least, that’s how it looks to me. I don’t know if that’s how it looks to the country-at-large. I’m sure it doesn’t look that way to them, and they’re falling prey to False Consensus Effect.

I’m also sure of something else: They’ve lost the battle of the hearts & minds of the “big middle,” those among us who don’t pay attention to politics, or pay attention only casually. They’ve lost possession of the “default ideological positioning.” The rib-rib nudge-nudge we-all-know sense & sensibility, that The Donald has to go and it’s only just a matter of time. This looks like what it is: There is a swamp that doesn’t want to be drained, defending itself with tooth and claw. If it were not Trump arriving to drain it, the oh-so-righteous attacks would be directed at whoever else it would be. That’s always been true in substance. But it looks that way in appearance as well. This is a bigger loss to them than the actual election.

They’ve got the speech all worked up, drafted, finalized, memorized, rehearsed and re-rehearsed: Sorry the representative of whatever it is you’ve got to say, had to be impeached for being a Playboy, or sleaze bag, or slope-forheaded Cro-Magnon retrograde, or insufficiently stable/enlightened. Go find another one! We eagerly look forward to finding out what your message is, once you find a suitable messenger for it! But there’s no opportunity for delivering it because the removal has yet to take place.

From here on, they go full-throttle, further & further past that point of no return…wondering why public sympathy is moving away from them…

So this squish does a surprisingly fair job of looking at the whole not-controversy controversy of “men looking at women.” I call him that because he comes out and says “I admit that I find a beauty pageant to be derogatory toward women,” which is something I find to be just silly. I envision a line here; “Women should be treated with respect” doesn’t cross it, “Women are deserving of the same opportunities as men” doesn’t cross it, but usually anything having to do with “Men shouldn’t look at women” does. I take offense against their offense.

Beautiful women? I’m not supposed to look? Or if I can’t get away from the sight, I’m not supposed to like what I see? That’s just dumb. Any and all variations of this are preordained to be daffy, dumb and unworkable. How are you going to enforce? And beauty pageants? They are what they’re called, nothing more or less. They’re celebrations of female beauty. Who’s against that? Point them out to me. I don’t want those people deciding anything that affects me or anyone else.

But then he says some very well-thought-out, rational things.

Male humans tend to be visual in their sexual interests, not unlike female birds. Yes, I get it that this has led to a host of problems for women trying to live up to photo-shopped ideals, but the vibrancy of the pornography industry suggests that this is not about to change any time soon. Instead of looking for pro-social ways for men to gratify their visual interests, however, the Left seems to say that men should not have these interests at all. The Left seems to say that since all rape starts with sexual interest, all sexual interest must lead to rape. The Left seems to say that if a man enjoys a woman’s looks, that must be all he enjoys about her…

No system of values — psychological, political, or moral — can work by ignoring reality. Human aggression and men’s visual sexual interests are often treated, especially by the Left, as dispensable inconveniences rather than as core elements of the human condition.

You know, the thought occurs to me. This doesn’t have anything to do with sex, or men & women, at all. Not really. It’s about power. Haven’t we been learning that the hard way for years and years now?

“He looked at me/her and made me feel uncomfortable.” The Human Resources and legal wheels grind away, fast or slow, and when it’s over the offending ogler is dutifully punished, and removed. But the insecure-feeling person is still feeling insecure. The work environment is NOT made any more inviting or comfortable for anyone, compared to how it was before. In fact it is considerably less so. Men still appreciate the sight of a good looking woman, and why shouldn’t they? So no human vices were cured. And was it ever a vice?

We’re all here, I’ve said before, because some man did so appreciate.

No, to understand this, we have to understand power. Power is allocated according to two different systems, which we might think of as a “hard” way vs. a “soft” way. The hard way has definitions. Og the Caveman gets most of the meat, because he’s the one who killed the beast. The boss says you gotta go, he owns the company. For every milligram of power or privilege somewhere, there’s a commensurate milligram of responsibility or achievement to go with it.

The “soft” way is the province and invention of the undefiners, those pitiful wretches who live among us who bristle at the formation of new definitions we’ve figured out we need, and busy themselves mostly with efforts to eradicate the definitions we have already. It works on the wavelength of wink-wink nudge-nudge we-all-know. What s/he wants s/he gets, everybody knows!! It’s [insert name here]’s world, the rest of us just live in it. So it’s cult-of-personality power, “magical-person” power. We could call it “Oprah” power?

With this understanding of the schism within the concept of power, we see this is no longer a man-woman issue. Both men and women work with and perceive power according to the “hard” rules explained above, and both men and women work with and perceive power according to the “soft” ones. Our passions are here, not in some battle between the sexes. “Up with men/women, down with women/men” is something for the third-grade playground. Nearly all of us left it behind way back there.

The undefiners, both men & women alike, are laboring to build a world they can never have. “I don’t want you looking at pretty women because I want YOU TO SEE women this way, and I want YOU NOT TO SEE them that way.” This means the object of derision is inextricably intertwined with the goal, and can never be vanquished, can never go away. If the ogling male were ever to go away, there’d be nothing to reform, no righteous struggle to engage. It might feel good to defrock some powerful man of his status, occupation or social position, but it’s only like a cocaine addict and his latest snort. What’s the dog do after catching the car?

So they need us. We don’t need them.

Of course, since they’re constantly making new rules for us to follow and not too much else of anything we could use…we aren’t allowed to discuss this. It’s not really necessary for us to do so. It’s simply true. They have goals that depend on our continued existence…our goals are to get something done, which we could do quite handily without them around.

The single most memorable line in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, addresses this directly. The villain Ellsworth Toohey confronts the hero Howard Roark, with the confirmation that Toohey has been destroying Roark’s prospects and livelihood. He then demands to know, “What do you think of me?”

Roark replies, “I don’t think of you.”

That’s the situation. Those who seek power this way are never going to have it. Those on the other side, we who rely on power being connected link-for-link and dram-for-dram with associated responsibilities…don’t think of them. We don’t think about the wink-wink nudge-nudge ethos of power-sharing. We can’t afford to, we don’t have time. We have work to do.