Incompetent malevolence and its friends

Marion Davies and William Haines in King Vidor's Show People (1928). 

So the Ninth Circuit Court has upheld the temporary restraining order on the imperial decree to Not Order a Complete and Total Ban on Muslims Entering This Country Until We Figure Out Just What in the Hell Is Going On but Something That Reminds People of That.

Conservative Trumposceptics are having a hard time processing it. On the one hand, because it's Trump, they've given themselves permission to see one aspect or another of how bad the decree was, its terrible drafting, its incompetent execution, even some of its hideous consequences; but on the other hand, the court decision is an example of dread JUDICIAL ACTIVISM, or a violation of the sacred constitutional principle that judicial review applies only to the actions of Democrats, and thus ipso facto bad in its own right. So how is a true conservative to respond to a dilemma like that? What would Cato the Censor do?

Jonah Goldberg on NPR offered some dizzying footwork trying to manage the problem, which I may get to after the transcript comes up, but the funniest thing of the morning is a piece by Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare, which Trump thought, embarrassingly enough, was on his side. The piece acknowledged that