Stories that begin "Trump Won Because" and name some specific thing can't be right.

Here's an example, from Reason.com, which might make some good points, but it's just annoyingly overstated: "Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash/What every liberal who didn't see this coming needs to understand."

And over in the sidebar, I see: "Trump Didn't Win Because He's Trump. He Won Because Clinton Is Clinton/While many will call this a mandate for Donald Trump, it's better read as an anti-mandate for Hillary Clinton."

Other "Trump won because" headlines I'm seeing:

"Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook" — New York Magazine.

"Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch" — a professor published in The Washington Post.

"Trump Won Because Democratic Party Failed Working People" — according to Bernie Sanders.

"Trump Won Because Of An ‘Under-Educated Electorate’" — according to Wendy Davis.

"Dear America, This Is Important -- Trump Did Not Win Because of Racism" — David French at The National Review contradicting Van Jones on CNN.

"Donald Trump won because he listened to the people" — a columnist at MarketWatch.

"Trump won because voters believed the system was corrupt. They were right" — a columnist at the UK Telegraph.

"Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally/Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?" — Foreign Policy.

Deploying the French language when you're trying and not trying to talk about prostitutes.

Here's an article I found in the UK Independent when I googled the awkward French-ish phrase "belle du jour": "The truth about student sex workers: it's far from Belle Du Jour."

"I hate the word prostitute – when you think of a prostitute you think of someone on the street who is causing a public nuisance..."

Sophie* is 22, studying at university and paying for it through sex work... By advertising on an adult site, she can pick who she sees depending on the feedback from girls and customers. They try to establish legitimate clients from potentially dangerous ones, alongside rating and ranking the workers themselves....

Sophie is resigned and bitter about the perception of sex work – particularly the character of Belle du Jour. "I hate it. Because, say I work for a hundred pounds an hour, that it makes it sound very classy, whereas I tend to be going to real s***holes...." 

I take it that by "Belle Du Jour" Sophie and the Independent are referring to the movie "Belle de Jour," in which the young Catherine Deneuve plays "a respectable young wife who secretly works in a brothel one or two afternoons a week." The word between "Belle" (beauty) and "Jour" (day) is "de" (of) not "du" (of the). The title is premised on "belle de nuit," which means prostitute, in the sense of "lady of the night." Deneuve's character works during the day. I don't know why "the" is left out of both "belle de nuit" and "belle de jour," but I don't think "belle du jour" is a phrase that means anything, an opinion I'm basing on Google's changing my "belle du jour" search to "belle de jour" and not even asking if I really meant "belle du jour."

Enter Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post columnist, who's got a new piece titled "The silly, selective 'war on women.'" She begins with the unbelievable assertion: "The war on women is based on just one thing — abortion rights." Maybe no one reads any further after that. (Whatever you think of the packaging of the Democratic Party's gender politics as a "war on women," it obviously includes at least a couple other issues like employment discrimination and violence against women.) But I kept reading until I hit this:

I promise, this isn’t another abortion column, not that the horrific number of abortions performed each year shouldn’t make one’s stomach turn. Instead, extremists on the pro-choice left celebrate the “right” to terminate a 20-week-old fetus. Google an image of this stage of fetal development and try to comprehend the glee we witnessed when state senator Wendy Davis, now running for governor, became the belle du jour upon her filibuster to protect that “right” in Texas.

Belle du jour? You'd think after all the trouble Rush Limbaugh got into when he said something that sounded like he called a young woman a prostitute that conservative pundits would be more careful!

I realize that Parker was slapping "du jour" on "belle" in the old "soup du jour" way and meant to say that Davis is the Democrats' darling "du jour." It's a dismissive way of saying that people keep getting a new (whatever) every day the way a restaurant gets a new soup. And somehow Parker decided that the word before "du jour" ought to be in French too, even though the word "soup" in the phrase "soup du jour" isn't French. (In French, it's "soupe.") If you're going to tart up you prose with French, at least Google you're words and see if you've said something stupid. (Or maybe she didn't think "belle" was French at all and was really using the old "soup" format, and "belle" was the "belle" of "Southern belle" and "belle of the ball.")

And how's old Catherine Deneuve doing these days? Here she is at a fashion show in Paris 2 days ago, wearing, among other things, a sweater with the shape of a marijuana leaf knitted into it. And here she is, almost 50 years ago, as Belle de Jour:

Greta calls out Erick Erickson as "such a jerk" — "a repeat offender" with a "pattern of being disrespectful to women."

"I don’t care how much you disagree or agree with Texas’ Wendy Davis, you have to agree that this guy, Erick Erickson, is a real jerk and is really lousy at being a spokesperson for his views."

His tweets read: "So Abortion Barbie had a Sugar Daddy Ken. Not exactly the bio she claimed." And: "Wendy Davis is upset you want the truth and she can't handle it. She's so cute when she's lying."

This isn't about me, this is about me being you....

A journey into the mind of Wendy Davis, who thinks people have a lot of nerve to look into her life story, which after all is only a story that exists to be a story about everybody:

The story of my life is also the story of millions of single mothers... millions of young dreamers ... millions of families.... Your stories are why I’m running....

It's the old "I'm you" routine. I remember it from election year 2010. Cue the tinkling pianos:

"My paraplegic opponent... 'hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.'"

There's a gaffe for the ages.

"Wendy Davis is a trendsetter, like Carrie of ‘Sex and the City’ making Manolos a household name."

"This time, it’s Mizuno, and this time the shoe is for comfort, not sexiness."

Says the fashion editor. The shoe company's PR person says: "We love seeing our running shoes on all consumers, regardless of their political affiliation or beliefs."

Here's the shoe, Wave Rider 16 running shoe, now the #1-selling women's running shoe at Amazon.

For all the talk of Wendy Davis's pink shoes, the color is "Rouge Red."

"Wendy Davis: Surgically Constructed 'Human Barbie Doll'?"

"Most people — at least those without a plastic surgeon on retainer — do not become more good looking as they age from their late 20s to their early 50s...."

Now consider Texas state Senator Wendy R. Davis, who has recently been in the news being touted (however dubiously) as the Left’s technologically enhanced "feminist superhero." She is 50 years old.... If she has not found the Fountain of Youth, at minimum she has found very talented plastic surgeons and image consultants who have readied her for her closeup.

Remarkable! It's like she's aging backwards. I wouldn't criticize her for this, though. The blogger at the link says:

For someone who in the early 1990s was a feminist activist in law school, and who is currently posing as a champion of women’s rights, standing up to men who seek to dictate the way women should live, she seems to have devoted an unusual amount of attention to her physical appearance.

I assume the blogger is male. Maybe you are too and you need somebody to spell it out. The difference between the present-day pictures and the old Harvard Law School picture is attributable mostly to 2 things: hair and makeup. In the old photo, from 1991, she's wearing no (or almost no) makeup and natural hair. I remember 1991, and it was a real peak of feminist ideology. She fit her time. And she's fitting her time now.

Few American women today go on TV without makeup. It's not "Human Barbie Doll" to wear foundation and add definition to your eyes. It's distracting when a woman doesn't do that. Note that her eye makeup is far lighter than what has become the norm among TV news women, and she's doing that thing of emphasizing her eyes while leaving her lips almost natural — glossed, with no significant color. That's the well-known approach to toned-down makeup.

As for the hair, she's taken the simple and obvious steps of going blonde, straightening, and getting a somewhat competent cut. Blonde hair has a powerful effect, as many women have experienced. Who knows why it brings such glamor? The effect may be uncanny, but it's far simpler than a Fountain of Youth or plastic surgery, and it's available to anyone. You have to spend a little money to get it done with appropriate streaks, and so forth, but it's really not that big a deal. And for all I know, it's a wig Davis has got on.

Bottom line: Remarkable, but within the norm of reality.