In the span of about an hour Tuesday, two big dominoes fell in President Trump's world. First, a jury found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on eight felony charges of financial crimes....
Minutes after the verdict against Manafort was read aloud in a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony charges of his own, in a Manhattan courtroom....
The president, meanwhile, was several miles above the fray Tuesday — but only literally. Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to a rally in West Virginia virtually simultaneously to the two cases reaching their ominous end....
Here's a smart prediction:
So it looks like Trump will deflect on today's news at this West Virginia rally with...
Immigration and of course, MS-13.
With a focus on the recent news that and undocumented immigrant has been charged with Mollie Tibbets (Iowa college student) murder.
At Breitbart, the convictions are reduced to sidebar stories:
This is what Trump will talk about tonight and this is what the right-wing media will talk about for at least the rest of the week. And then the GOP will spend the rest of the campaign trying to make Tibbetts's killer into every Democrat's running mate.
At the order of President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents removed 95-year-old Jakiw Palij from his Queens, New York, home on Monday.
Justice Department officials say Palij served as an armed guard at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland....
Palij was ordered to leave the country more than a decade ago, but deportation never happened during the Bush and Obama years:
First tracked down by investigators in 1993, Mr. Palij was stripped of his American citizenship 10 years later when a federal judge found that he had falsely claimed in his visa application that he had worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis.
Germany had long refused to do so because Mr. Palij, whose birthplace was once in Poland and is now part of Ukraine, is not actually German. Poland and Ukraine refused to take him, saying he was Germany’s responsibility. On Tuesday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, acknowledged as much.
On Twitter, Sarah Sanders is gloating ("Past Administrations failed to deport him"). For once, I guess the gloating is valid. The administration got this done -- though I'm reminded of the Jack Johnson pardon, which was also an administration effort to conspicuously acknowledge past racism even as Trumpers fuel racism in the present day.
But the hottest take on this story goes to the right-wing news source IJR Red:
... Palij has been living in Jackson Heights, Queens for 13 years.
Let's see: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 28 years old. She was 14 years old in June 2004, when Palij was ordered to leave the country. Ocasio-Cortez currently holds no elected office. She's worked as a waitress, an education strategist, and the founder of a small publishing firm.
In none of these capacities did she have any responsibility for getting Nazis deported.
But if a large portion of your party's platform going into the midterms is "Eeeek! Eeeek! Hispanic socialist chick!," then you gotta go with it no matter what the news story is.
Oh yeah, I guess this is relevant, if barely:
... Ocasio-Cortez's platform includes abolishing ICE to “clear the path to citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together.”
... However, ICE agents were the one's helping in the deportation of the former Nazi.
“I think people don't realize how important and valuable ICE is,” Acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello told Fox News on Monday.
He added that 20,000 Americans working for ICE risk their lives to protect the U.S.
Palij is a 95-year-old man who was removed from his home on a stretcher and has now been taken by ambulance to a Düsseldorf nursing home. I don't think any ICE agents "risked their lives" when they carried out this operation, and I'm sure it could have been carried out by employees of a different and better agency that behaves in a decent, humane manner toward people who aren't Nazis.
And lest anyone say this was history, note that this was put up in 1913, 48 years after the end of the Civil War, which is the equivalent of a Nazi statue being erected in 1993.
A New York Times story notes that a speech delivered at the monument's dedication is controversial today, but doesn't quite explain why:
At the time of the statue’s unveiling, in 1913, one speaker declared that “the whole Southland is sanctified by the precious blood of the student Confederate soldier” and boasted of how he had treated a “Negro wench” after his return from Appomattox. That speaker said the statue was raised to honor Confederate soldiers....
In 1913, Julian Carr, a prominent industrialist and supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, was invited to speak at the unveiling of a statue of a Confederate soldier on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill....
Carr’s lengthy address made clear the symbolism of the statue. First, he credited Confederate soldiers with saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” adding, “to-day, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.”
Then, he went on to tell a personal story.
“I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal,” Carr said. “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.”
The Post story goes on to note that the protestors who toppled the statue hung several banners, one of which "listed victims of racial violence, beginning with 'Unnamed Black woman beaten by Julian Carr.'"
If you decide to mention Carr's speech in a news story about this protest, why would you go easy on the details, as Alan Blinder of the Times did? Why would you say that Carr "boasted of how he had treated a 'Negro wench'" without explaining that he boasted of whipping her "until her skirts hung in shreds," an act he described as a "pleasing duty"?
Does the Times consider that level of detail unfit for a family newspaper? I don't think so. Simultaneously, another Times story quotes a memo Brett Kavanaugh wrote to Ken Starr during Starr's investigation of President Clinton that included explicitly sexual questions:
Mr. Kavanaugh listed 10 possible questions based on Ms. Lewinsky’s testimony.... Among them were these:
... “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
“If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trash can in your secretary’s office, would she be lying?”
A notice of intent to sue said that after Ms. Argento was left alone with Mr. Bennett, she gave him alcohol to drink and showed him a series of notes she had written to him on hotel stationery. Then she kissed him, pushed him back on the bed, removed his pants and performed oral sex, the document says. She climbed on top of him and the two had intercourse, the document also says.
If all that is fit to print, so are the violent details in Carr's speech.
Blinder linked to the speech, so he had access to the full text. Did he just not read it all the way through? Also, the account of the horse-whipping is at the Silent Sam Wikipedia page. It's not obscure knowledge if you're writing about this monument. But it never made its way into the story.
****
UPDATE: The paragraph I quoted from the Times story now reads:
At the time of the statue’s 1913 unveiling, one speaker boasted that, just 100 yards away, he had “horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds” after his return from Appomattox. He also declared that “the whole Southland is sanctified by the precious blood of the student Confederate soldier,” and that although the Confederacy was defeated, “the cause for which they fought is not lost.”
I'm pleased that the changes were made. But why wasn't the whipping mentioned in the first place?
Some sites that reprint syndicated Times columns still have the original version (here and here, for instance).
I told you that Trumpers would insist Rudy Giuliani's "truth isn't truth" was a reasonable statement and not a gaffe. Now, via the right-wing blog Freedom's Lighthouse, here's alleged liberal Alan Dershowitz defending Giuliani on Fox Business today:
DERSHOWITZ: Can I talk a little bit about Rudy Giuliani, though? You know, Rudy may have used an inartful phrase when he said, "Truth isn't truth," but he was absolutely right in the point he was making, and that is: say the president were to be asked the question "Did you discuss Flynn with Comey?" and he says no. And let's assume that's truthful for a moment. But Comey says yes. Or let's assume he's asked, "Did you know about the meeting in the Trump Towers?" [sic] and he says no, and then Cohen says yes. So you have two statements. Now, they can't both be true, that's for sure. But we're human beings and we're not sure we can determine what's true or not. The prosecutors may decide that the truth is with Cohen and Comey and not with the president. And that's why we defense lawyers call that a perjury trap. You never allow your client to answer a question truthfully if someone else will answer the question differently and that person may be believed over the truthful answer. That's what Rudy was trying to say. Inartfully put, but the point of it was something every defense attorney would agree to.
Dershowitz is refraining from saying, "Trump may tell the truth and be deemed a perjurer because the lies of Comey or Cohen will be believed instead," but that's what he means. That's certainly what Giuliani meant. Giuliani assumes his audience believes that the Mueller investigation is being conducted completely in bad faith by people who'd lie if you asked them what day of the week it is. They call it a "perjury trap" because poor, innocent, completely truthful Donald Trump will be nailed to the cross for lies that were actually the truth.
It's a Bizarro World point of view, but that's what Giuliani was trying to convey, and it's what rank-and-file Trumpers believe.
Trump's early mentor Roy Cohn was McCarthy's chief counsel. Trump's ex-advisor Steve Bannon has defended McCarthy, as has another advisor, Ann Coulter, who praises him highly. And as Politico's Michael Kruse notes, Trump has quite a bit in common with McCarthy:
McCarthy, after all, was “an essentially destructive force,” according to biographer Richard H. Rovere. He was “a chronic opportunist.” He was “a political speculator.” He was “a Republican who had started as a Democrat.” He was “a fertile innovator, a first-rate organizer and galvanizer of mobs, a skilled manipulator of public opinion, and something like a genius at that essential American strategy: publicity.” He was “a vulgarian.” He was “a man with an almost aesthetic preference for untruth.” He “faked it all and could not understand anyone who didn’t.” He “made sages of screwballs and accused wise men of being fools.” He was “the first American ever to be actively hated and feared by foreigners in large numbers.” He “favored the third person.”
But how much of this do you believe Trump knows? Do you think he could pass even a basic quiz on McCarthy? Do you think he could name McCarthy's state, or his party, or even the approximate years McCarthy served in the Senate? Do you think he could describe what McCarthy did, whom he accused, or who ultimately challenged him?
To Trump, McCarthy is a brand. He's the gold standard if you want to drop the name of a political persecutor. Trump doesn't know any more about Joe McCarthy than he does about George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, generals whose names he also likes to drop. Trump just knows that they're the ultimate generals. If they were jewelry stores, they'd be Tiffany. If they were cars, they'd be Rolls-Royce. If they were décor accents, they'd be large amounts of gold.
So don't read too much into the McCarthy tweet. Trump has only the most primitive idea of what he's saying.
E.J. Dionne believes America is "slouching toward autocracy" -- but although what Dionne describes is terrible, "autocracy" isn't the right word for it. It has autocratic elements, however:
... Trump revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance in retaliation for Brennan’s criticism of him (and, as Trump confessed in a Wall Street Journal interview, because he objected to Brennan doing his job in 2016 by probing connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia)....
The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing....
The purges at the Justice Department are certainly autocratic -- though a true autocrat would have long since ended the Russia probe, and Trump hasn't. Trump's White House counsel seems to be cooperating with the probe, as is the lawyer who was Trump's fixer for years. Trump cooperated with the probe early on, even though advisers told him not to.
Trump has stripped one critic of a security clearance and is said to have plans to do the same to others, but in that he's courting the Streisand effect -- he's raising the profile of Brennan (and possibly others), thus helping them get their message across.
Much of what Dionne describes is demagoguery, not autocracy. Trump is poisoning minds through speech, but he's misusing a power all presidents have. He fights his enemies, and he doesn't fight by the rules, but it's clear that he'd rather have the enemies as foils than crush them. (Last week, Politico reported that Trump and his inner circle actually believe losing the House to Democrats would be beneficial to Trump, because he could then rally his base against the party that set out to impeach him, assuming Democrats do that. What kind of autocrat lets the opposition party win elections?)
I don't like Dionne's "autocracy" framing because much of what he (rightly) laments is the work not of a lone autocrat but of his party, and for the benefit of the party primarily:
... long before Trump ran for office, Republicans were eager to change the rules of the game when doing so served their purposes.... Consider just their aggressive voter-suppression efforts and their willingness to block even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
Call it "autocracy" and readers will think we've solved the problem whenever Trump leaves office. What we really have is a mix of problems: Trump is autocratic when he wants to save his own ass; Trump and his see-no-evil party are doing serious damage to institutions and norms even though they're not destroying them; and, possibly most important, the GOP is attempting to institute permanent one-party rule through anti-Democratic means, an effort that began long before Trump decided to run for president. That's bad, especially all at once, but it's not pure autocracy.
This seems like a really bad gaffe, but conservatives won't see it as one:
President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed "truth isn't truth" when trying to explain why the president should not testify for special counsel Robert Mueller for fear of being trapped into a lie that could lead to a perjury charge.
“When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning
“Truth is truth,” Todd responded.
“No, no, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth. The President of the United States says, “I didn’t ...”
A startled Todd answered: “Truth isn’t truth?”
Giuliani: “No, no, no.”
Todd said: “This is going to become a bad meme.“
WATCH: Rudy Giuliani tells Chuck Todd that he doesn’t want President Trump to be caught in a perjury trap by speaking with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. #MTP#IfItsSunday
It was appalling when Kellyanne Conway talked about "alternative facts" last year, but nobody cared apart from people who already disapproved of Trump. This will be more of the same. We can have a laugh over it, but it won't matter in the long run.
Some on the right may have been embarrassed by "alternative facts," but what Giuliani said today won't be embarrassing to them because they believe what he said afterward.
RUDY GIULIANI:
Donald Trump says I didn’t talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says you did talk about it, so tell me what the truth is.
CHUCK TODD:
Don McGahn might know.
... RUDY GIULIANI:
-- they have two pieces of evidence, Trump says I didn’t tell them and the other guy says that he did say it, which is the truth? Maybe you know because you’re a genius.
CHUCK TODD:
At that point, you’re right. Under two people, I, no, you’re right. I don’t read minds on that front. Let me ask you this final question.
RUDY GIULIANI:
No, we have, we have, no, no, no, let me finish. We have a credibility gap between the two of them. You’ve got to select one or the other. Now, who do you think Mueller’s going to select? One of his best friends, Comey, or the president who he has been carrying on a completely wild, crazy--
CHUCK TODD:
It it possible--
RUDY GIULIANI:
--unorthodox investigation.
In the eyes of the right, everyone connected to the Russia investigation is a liar. To them, it's obvious that Trump will tell the 100% scout's-honor truth if he ever testifies, and Mueller will twist it into a lie because he's pure evil, as are all his Deep State friends and associates. To right-wingers, the entire investigation is an exercise in bad faith (and a projection of guilt on the part of the Clinton campaign and the Justice Department, who are the true colluders with Russia). So, to the right, of course "truth isn't truth," because the people deciding what truth is are evil Democrat liars.
After Watergate, Republicans conceded the guilt of Nixon and his associates. Modern Republicans will never acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of Trump and his circle, and will never talk of the Russia investigation as anything other than an act of raw politics.
So I guess this guy got stuck with the job of trying to prepare the ground for a Donald Trump N-word tape, unless he volunteered:
A Georgia state lawmaker said he would not have an issue if President Donald Trump used the n-word in the past and argued that holding a president accountable for mistakes made before entering office would "set a bad precedent."
"I will always say using the n-word is wrong, and it's bad, and should never be accepted in our society. But just because (Trump) might have done it years ago, not as our president, doesn't mean we need to continue to berate him because he used it," GOP state Sen. Michael Williams, who is white, told CNN's Victor Blackwell on "New Day Saturday."
Williams said it is "always wrong to use that word," but that Trump, as President, has not used that word.
He added, "To hold somebody accountable for something he did years ago as our president today, I think it sets a bad precedent."
I assume Williams was invited on just so he could make this point. There's no other reason he should be of interest to a national audience -- yes, he just ran for governor of Georgia, but he got only 4% of the Republican primary vote. He attracted a fair amount of national attention because he campaigned in an anti-immigrant "deportation bus," but the primary winner, Brian Kemp, also suggested that he'd personally round up "criminal illegals" (in a pickup truck), so Williams never broke through.
I assume that the national party wants somebody out there trying to minimize the impact of a potential Trump N-word tape, and that no Republican with a national profile wants the job. Me, I don't understand why Republicans are afraid of the tape at all, or why there's a perceived need to explain it away preemptively -- it'll go over just fine with the base.
In other words, I hopeBrian Beutler is right, but I don't believe he is:
As revealing and embarrassing as Trump’s enduring popularity with Republican voters is—as easy as it is to imagine them as a kind of unbreakable dam—I trust Trump to know where he’s vulnerable better than I trust my own cynicism about self-identified Republican voters. Those voters have cheered or tolerated all of Trump’s racism. But that is racism as it should be defined. As I noted last week, millions of Americans believe racism only describes people who use forbidden slurs in casual conversation. Hearing Trump do that would, as a matter of almost mathematical certainty, be a turning point for some of them, and Trump can’t really afford to lose even a small sliver of his remaining support.
Like the Access Hollywood tape, an n-word tape would thrust Trump into a severe crisis, and like the Access Hollywood tape, we might then confront the possibility that Trump survives it, leaving his millions of dead-enders feeling further empowered in their bigotries.
But I don't accept the notion that the members of Trump's base "believe racism only describes people who use forbidden slurs in casual conversation" -- i.e., that you're not a racist until you utter a racial slur. I think they believe Trump wouldn't be proven a racist even if he were heard on tape saying the N-word. They'd think the tape was a fake. Or, as Williams says, they'd think it was unfair "to hold somebody accountable for something he did years ago," when he wasn't president -- after all, years ago he was pro-choice and a Clinton donor, so surely he's changed! And besides, Obama said the N-word! (Never mind that he was doing it to make a point about racism.) And Hillary Clinton said "superpredators"! And Robert Byrd was in the Klan! And Dinesh D'Souza says the Democratic Party has always been the party of racism! And ... and ... and ...
I'm not saying that there won't be some immediate fallout. Beutler cites the Access Hollywood tape -- and he's right, it did "thrust Trump into a severe crisis." But it did so temporarily. A couple of weeks later, the Republican electorate had rationalized it into insignificance, because nothing could be worse than electing Hillary. So if there's an N-word tape, Trump's poll numbers will drop back to the mid-30s for a week or so. And then we'll be on to the next (probably Trump-generated) story, and it'll be yesterday's news.
The GOP shouldn't even bother looking for someone to pre-minimize this. Unless it lands a week or so before the midterms (or the 2020 election), it just won't matter.
The White House has drafted documents revoking the security clearances of current and former officials whom President Trump has demanded be punished for criticizing him or playing a role in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to senior administration officials.
Trump wants to sign “most if not all” of them, said one senior White House official....
When I read about Brennan, I assumed Trump's ultimate goal might be Robert Mueller's team -- a thought that also occurred to Senator Mark Warner a couple of days ago:
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned on Wednesday that President Trump revoking former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance could set a precedent for taking similar action against special counsel Robert Mueller.
"I worry whether this precedence will lead to the president trying to take away Mueller and his whole team's security clearances...," Warner said....
But the Post story says that there's only one currently serving official on Trump's list:
Trump [said] Friday that he intends “very quickly” to strip the clearance of current Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump, speaking to reporters as he left the White House to spend the weekend at his New Jersey golf club, called Ohr “a disgrace,” charging that he is tied to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the Russia matter....
Ohr is the only current official on the White House list of clearances Trump wants to lift. The others are former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.; former CIA director Michael V. Hayden; former FBI director James B. Comey; Obama national security adviser Susan E. Rice; former FBI officials Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok; and former acting attorney general Sally Yates. Several of them have said they no longer have clearances.
I don't know why Trump isn't targeting Mueller in this way. I'm not sure Trump understands that Mueller and his team have security clearances. So he still attacks them on Twitter and in public statements, but he's not using this recently discovered executive power against them.
But Fox has been telling him that the others on the list are evil Deep State creatures who are abusing their security clearances. So he'll target them for clearance revocation.
A true tyrant would conduct a sweeping, massive purge of critics. What Trump is doing is terrible, but he doesn't quite have a real tyrant's broad vision. So he's revoking clearances slowly, and focusing on a list of people Fox has told him shouldn't have those clearances.
Trump would be a more effective tyrant if he weren't so obsessed with TV. Fox generated his target list. He's revoking clearances now, according to the Post, because another enemy is dominating TV:
The senior White House official acknowledged that the step against Brennan had been prepared in late July.... But the decision to take that step was made this week to divert attention from nonstop coverage of a critical book released by fired Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.
And Trump is revoking the clearances slowly because that's how you'd do it on reality TV -- you'd want to prolong the drama.
No real tyrant would do that. But effective tyranny is bad television. So Trump is a slow-acting tyrant. That's why there's still a Mueller investigation at all.
Giovanni de Min. Spartan women wrestling, fresco, 1835-36. Villa Patt, Sedico, via .scclub.
Victor Davis Hanson denounces the educated classes for the enjoyment and edificaton of the unlettered readership of the National Review: T
rumpism is sometimes derided as an updated know-nothingism that rejects expertise and the input of credentialed expertise. Supposedly, professionals who could now save us tragically have their talent untapped as they sit idle at the Council on Foreign Relations, the economics Department at Harvard, or in the offices of the Brookings Institution — even as Trump’s wheelers and dealers crash and burn, too proud, too smelly, or too ignorant to call in their betters to come in and save Trump from himself.
But do the degreed classes, at least outside math, the sciences, engineering, and medicine, merit such esteem anymore?
You can tell by his plain, colloquial language that he's a hardscrabble man of the people himself, at ease with chainsaws.
For the record, 75.4% of National Review readers have a bachelor's degree or better, and 42.5% a postgraduate degree, according to the magazine's media kit, and Hanson himself has a Ph.D. from Stanford, in classics, specializing in military history of ancient Greece, and a perch at the Hoover Institution. Though given that the median age of the National Review reader is 66, I guess it's possible that they were all educated before "the education brand" got "deflated".
Only that can't be what he means, because his critique also applies to people who went to college before he did himself, like John O. Brennan (Fordham '77), James Clapper (U. of Maryland '63) and Robert Mueller (Princeton '66, U. Va. School of Law '73)
The Mueller team — along with a group of now disgraced, reassigned, and retired officers at the top echelons of the FBI, the descent of ex-CIA head John Brennan and ex-DIA chief James Clapper into caricature, the shenanigans of unmaskings and leaking at the Obama National Security Council, the warping of the FISA courts, the disingenuous operatives at Fusion GPS, and the implantation of informants into the Trump campaign — recalls the arrogant self-righteousness of the degreed geniuses who took us into Vietnam.
Not to mention Robert S. McNamara and Dean Rusk, who are so old as to be beyond the reach of the National Review entirely.
Also, there is no multiplicity of "FISA courts", just one Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and no informants were "implanted" into the Trump campaign (unless he's referring to something other than Professor Stefan Halper, in London, entertaining Carter Page at the Garrick Club in July 2016 and George Papadopoulos at the Travellers Club in early September—he was certainly not implanted anywhere, and there was only one of him). And I don't see how he can assert without explaining what he means that Brennan and Clapper "descended into caricature" at some point or that there was something shenanigan-like in the decision to find out what Trump transition official was discussing Russia sanctions in NSA-recorded phone calls with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (unmasked, the party turned out to be Michael Flynn) or the FISC got "warped". When I was in college, we were taught to say what we meant, not hint at it with insult words and guilt-by-association, and to be able to back it up with evidence.
I just thought I'd post this, my own best Aretha moment of recent years, at the 2015 Kennedy Center honors, when she was introduced by some chick pretending to be Carole King, and the real Carole King, who was getting one the awards, was in the audience and going nuts at the way this great artist was taking her own work and transmuting it—if you were listening, you were listening through King's ears and King's gratitude, which we should all share, because we're very fortunate to have had her among us all these years.
like an old publicity photo from Dr. Strangelove, or what?
Remember Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars Initiative? Back in the day, it drove the scientists at Lawerence Livermore Laboratories crazy.
An old friend who worked there at the time, complained to me that “every college professor in America who was out looking for a grant for himself would scribble something on the back of an envelope and send it to us as a proposal.”
It then befell the folks at the labs to put aside their own national defense projects to do Professor Back-Of-The-Envelope’s physics for him and explain why it would be a multi-billion dollar flop.
Sometimes, the profs would get political and send along an endorsement from an eager friend in the military. This would force the lab people to initiate contact with the military and inform the brass, as gently as they could, that, “You realize, General, that if you blow up an enemy rocket armed with this kind of plutonium bomb over the United States, you’ll be scattering enough carcinogenic radioactive dust to make an area stretching from Chicago to St. Louis uninhabitable….”
There would be a soft harrumphing and the brass hats would move along to some project a little more suitable to their pay grade.
Now an Air Force General named Carlton Everhart, has come up with a back-of-the-envelope idea of his very own. He’s head of the Air Mobility Command, and according to a publication called Defense News, he wants to ship military cargo to far-flung battlefields via outer space. And I guess, what with President Trump pumping for a Space Force, this might bring Everhart to the Trumpster’s favorable attention. It might even speed Everhart’s butt to a seat at the Joint Chiefs conference table.
SpaceX executives “tell me that they can go around the globe in 30 minutes with a BFR,” Everhart said, referencing the next-generation, reusable rocket under development by the company.
“Think about this. Thirty minutes, 150 metric tons, [and] less than the cost of a C-5,” he continued. In comparison, it would take the service’s cargo aircraft take anywhere from eight to 10 hours to get to the other side of the world.
Uh, General? Small problem. Where do you get your figures for “less than the cost of a C-5?” You first have to develop the technology, right?
For which Everhart has an answer:
“The concept of how this works? I want industry to do it,” he said. “They will come up with innovative ways and they won’t be encumbered with a long acquisition process. They’ll do it in the speed of war that I need. The question is, how do I incentivize them? I incentivize them by [contracts for] carrying the DoD cargo [during peacetime].”
So, what kinds of things could the Air Force preposition in space, and where would it go?
“I’m willing to stick anything up there,” he said, although hardware and materiel that could survive in space are the most obvious options.
And furthermore….
And the logistics of how the Air Force would guard its cargo in space, or how its terrestrial bases would accept it? Well, Everhart said that hasn’t been figured out yet.
“The technology is there, now we need to experiment with it,” he said. “What kinds of fuel does it need? What parts do you have to have? Does it go offshore? Does it go onshore? What kind of a footprint does it take? All the logistical things that go with it from the logistical side, that’s what I’m working [on] with industry.”
In other words, write a blank check to private enterprise and costs be damned. No wonder the private industry folks love it. Who needs an IPO when you can finance a massive boondoggle with taxpayer money instead? The Federal deficit? Hell, we can always cut Social Security.
Defense news also reported:
Everhart has a reputation in the Air Force community for talking about big — and some critics would say ill-advised — technological leaps such as autonomous or stealthy aerial refueling tankers.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America.
Whoa, that sounds pretty extreme. What is the substance of the proposal?
Warren’s proposal is dishonestly called the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” Accountable to whom? you might ask. That’s a reasonable question. The answer is — as it always is — accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends.
Okay, again, that description sounds like it could be bad, but it really depends on the details. So what is the plan?
Under Senator Warren’s proposal, no business with more than $1 billion in revenue would be permitted to legally operate without permission from the federal government. The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more.
You know, maybe someone should tell poor Kevin about the SEC, the NLRB, and the EEOC. On second thought, that's a bad idea. Anyway, how about those details?
In a shocking plot twist, it turns out Kevin never actually says what the bill does. I sure didn't see that coming.
Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.
The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades....
More concretely, United States Corporations would be required to allow their workers to elect 40 percent of the membership of their board of directors.
Warren also tacks on a couple of more modest ideas. One is to limit corporate executives’ ability to sell shares of stock that they receive as pay — requiring that such shares be held for at least five years after they were received, and at least three years after a share buyback. The aim is to disincentivize stock-based compensation in general as well as the use of share buybacks as a tactic for executives to maximize their one pay.
The other proposal is to require corporate political activity to be authorized specifically by both 75 percent of shareholders and 75 percent of board members (many of whom would be worker representatives under the full bill), to ensure that corporate political activity truly represents a consensus among stakeholders, rather than C-suite class solidarity.
So apparently her plan doesn't "nationalize everything". In fact, the Vox article is headlined "Elizabeth Warren has a plan to save capitalism". And once you look at the substance of the plan, as opposed to vague handwaving about it, it seems to me like some pretty good ideas designed to address some pretty enormous problems. And by the way, it also seems to me that conservatives' reflexive attempts to paint this sort of thing as "socialism"--when it is, in fact, an effort to make capitalism more humane--are the primary reason the word has been de-stigmatized among younger generations.
But Williamson does have one parting shot:
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hugo Chávez, Huey Long: The rogues’ gallery of those who sought to fortify their political power by bullying businesses is long, and it is sickening.
When Ocasio-Cortez won her primary the news media reactions were predictable, ranging from "socialists have taken over the party" narratives on the right (and on the left) to a Democratic civil war narrative in the mainstream. A month later this all looked pretty foolish (as it did to a lot of us at the time). But the Dems in Disarray trope is deeply wired into the news media, so look forward to any disagreement within the party as evidence of flailing (among mainstream journalists) or Stalinist groupthink (on the right).
Minnesota Republicans decisively rejected the comeback bid of former governor Tim Pawlenty, a onetime kingmaker in state politics who proved unable to overcome his 2016 description of Donald Trump as “unhinged and unfit” for once boasting of grabbing women....
“Tim Pawlenty stuck his finger in the wind,” Johnson said in his closing ad, which condemned Pawlenty’s criticism of Trump after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016. “I won’t panic when it matters most.” [emphasis added]
Yes, that's right: Pawlenty lost his primary because he made an ineffectual token gesture toward minimal human decency. That's today's GOP.
And Pawlenty's loss is almost a non-story because we've seen it happen so many times already. As Greg Sargent points out, absolute loyalty to Trump at his worst has become a litmus test in GOP primaries. No wonder they keep nominating candidates like Roy Moore and Corey Stewart.
Hi, it's Stupid to say I'm going to be disappointed if Omarosa ends up being what drags Trump down in the end.
I mean, it's true that the writers who thought up this plot twist are trivializing the issues we're watching the show for, the apparent collapse of the Constitution in the face of flagrant illegality in the White House, the pervasive corruption throughout the executive, the treacherous dealing with foreign governments, in favor of what? The backstabbing intriguer motif, the person everybody always votes off the island, who might get brought back on to revive interest as an underwritten storyline starts to sputter and flag, but in this case the storyline wasn't flagging at all, if anything there was far too much going on already without her. Isn't there too much Sopranos-style personal stuff as it is, with the mental illness theme, and the endangered marital and family relationships, and Trump's fraught backstory with his retainers like Cohen and Manafort and Lewandowski and Scavino and the rest, and the bizarre intimacy and crudeness of his connections with his fellow sovereigns Trudeau and Merkel and Macron and Putin and Abe and Kim and Xi and Erdoğan and MBS and Sheikh Tamim, as detached from all the millions of people it affects as if it were taking place in a treehouse?
But then it's much bigger than a reality show, in a sense, anyway, in that what Omarosa threatens is the show itself, not one of the competitors. There's a nonzero possibility she could take this sucker right off the air, in the middle of the second season. This is metareality TV, where the drama itself is the character whose fate is centrally at stake. And not just a character, but a character with a tragic flaw.
Because here's the thing: it's great TV and terrible TV at the same time. It's unbearably compelling, but it's gone somewhere too transgressive, and it needs to die, it needs to be killed, and it needs to be killed by its own internal logic, and Omarosa makes a terrific murderer in that sense, let's face it.
Remember that the storyline of the normal reality show, the thing Trump understands, is really extremely simple—a contest with a more or less arbitrary content, feats of strength and agility, baking cupcakes, negotiating a "deal", and audience members pick somebody they'd like to win, and they do or they don't—but the presidency can't correspond to that (as the election campaign, which Trump really enjoyed, did). Trump would like to turn it into a contest, or a hierarchy of contests, among the cabinet members, among the approval ratings, among the sovereigns, among the trade balances, but none of it will come into proper focus, and nobody ever leaves, or if they leave they have to be replaced. He must wake up in the middle of the night wondering why Australia's still there. Didn't he fire them already?
In the presidency, storylines rise and subside all over the place, true ones and the fictional ones shoddily constructed by liars like Nunes and Sessions and the president himself, and they're in all different sorts of genres, and the Omarosa theme is one of the well-made ones, a Jacobean revenge tragedy. She's a great figure—talented, attractive, and evil, kind of like Iago, but unlike Iago with a clear motivation, her resentment at Trump for his racist exploitation and at herself for her slavish acceptance of it for all these years. I really enjoy her TV presence, her intelligence and confidentiality and the way you know she's bullshitting you but not all the time, which is pretty original. Why shouldn't she destroy him, why shouldn't she prove that she, not he, is the greatest reality villain of all?
The tragic flaw of the President Trump show is its excessive hyperreality, its nauseating tergiversation between the real and the illusory. It's like a Disney Jungle Cruise where tourists keep getting eaten by the crocodiles and the boat is taking on water. It raises all these real issues, like the inadequacy of the Constitution, the responsibilities of government, the meaning of party and nationality, and it's unable to address them. We're all too busy watching the show to consider what it means. What I want is for everybody to stand up and say no, if you won't show us your tax returns, you're not allowed to take the Oath, or you can't own a hotel if you're president, or there has to be some kind of defense against president's selling foreign policy for their personal profit or paying hush money—$15,000 a month is the going rate—to your departed goons, but it's not going to happen.
Which is not to say that the Democrats have no chance of taking control of Congress and mounting a decent impeachment, I still think it's possible, but it won't be any more satisfying than Omarosa revealing Trump audio with the N-word would be. It'll be a clown show, with Devin Nunes and dark and absurd stories of Peter Strzok and Nellie Ohr, even if it comes out right. We won't be able to talk about reality until it's over.
There could be a purpose to all those journalists reporting on breakfast in Trumpland if they'd only report on the economic realities in which the breakfasts take place, as in the case of this big AP story from last week, which explains that
a striking number of Trump counties are losing jobs. The AP found that 35.4 percent of Trump counties have shed jobs in the past year, compared with just 19.2 percent of Clinton counties.
The jobs data shows an economy that is as fractured as the political landscape ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. As more money pools in such corporate hubs as Houston, San Francisco or Seattle, prosperity spills over less and less to smaller towns and cities in America’s interior. That would seem to undercut what Trump sees as a central accomplishment of his administration — job creation for middle class and blue-collar workers in towns far removed from bustling urban centers.
Thus all of the job growth in Texas has been in Democratic-run cities, while in the Republican rural counties things keep getting worse.
And in Beaver County, PA, northwest of Pittsburgh, which has lost 191 jobs in the past 18 months even as the workforce shrank by 1000 from things like outmigration,
Chip Kohser, the county Republican chairman and the bristle-bearded founder of a farm share company, said his party members are rallying around their staunch opposition to gun control.
“Our No. 1 motivating factor,” he said, “is Second Amendment issues.”...
The tax cuts haven’t stopped the outflow of people. Chatting over eggs, bacon and home fries, Kohser estimated that the tax cuts have added perhaps $1,200 to his annual household income and roughly the same to many others in the area — not likely enough on its own to rejuvenate the local economy.
But sure, let's focus on fighting the threat of gun control. I love that "many others". (In addition to owning Fellowship Foods, which grosses $240,000 a year selling "veggies, fruits, beef, pork, lamb, chicken, eggs, butter, bread, coffee, cheese, and more" on a weekly or monthly subscription basis from 75 regional farms, Kohser's been sales director for 20 years of the pet food company founded by his grandfather, so I'm guessing his income is a little above average.)
Gun control and out-of-control immigration!
Sitting outside a cafe before the [Beaver County Chamber of Commerce] meeting, [Republican Representative Keith] Rothfus said there was a clear path for generating job growth: Immigrants.
“You look at areas of the country that are really thriving — there’s a significant immigrant population,” he said. “We need to do a better job of attracting immigrants here. This place was built on immigrants.”
But Rothfus has also been outspoken on the importance of tighter border security. A few weeks after the chamber meeting, he voted for a bill that, had it passed, would have imposed tougher border measures and likely curbed legal immigration.
The county is one of those places where Obama won with around 57% of the vote in 2008 and Trump with 54% in 2016; following the state supreme court's finding that the congressional district it lies in was hopelessly gerrymandered, it's been redrawn into a new 17th District where Rothfus will be up against the new Democratic star Conor Lamb in November, which makes the whole thing kind of iconically interesting, doesn't it?
If the New York Times would cover it with this kind of contextualization I wouldn't be so annoyed with them.
Back in the 1960s, Hayakawa was acting president of an institution called, at the time, San Francisco State College. (It has since evolved into a research university.)
A temper tantrum on
a sound truck
Hayakawa briefly made it into the national headlines, and onto network TV news, when he climbed to the top of a sound truck and ripped out the loudspeaker wires while the truck was amplifying black liberation messages on his campus. To be fair to Hayakawa, he was trying to keep the college open while the people responsible for the sound truck wanted it to shut down. But Hayakawa, of all people, should have understood the symbolic impact of his act.
I imagine that the handful of individuals who knew what Hayakawa had achieved in academia before the San Francisco State incident, and who also respected the ultimate aims of the black liberation movement, felt shocked and mortified. It was as if Dr. Jekyll had suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde. Almost equally bad, when he appeared on television to explain himself, he came off as a kind of well-meaning but wimpy putz. If you have the time to spare you can see it here:
Prior to that incident, Hayakawa was known as an academic who taught a form of thinking that should, if anything, have prevented his tantrum on a sound truck. So it was disappointing, to say the least, that Hayakawa had briefly morphed into an out-of-control bully — resorting to a kind of vandalism to show his displeasure with people who were advocating a point-of-view in a manner that he felt was inappropriate.
But let’s go way back to a little over a decade before that. And yes, yes, this ultimately has to do with with Colin Kaepernick and other athletes taking a knee during the Star Spangled Banner, and with Donald Trump harassing them for it. Just bear with me for a while.
Logic, as you surely know if you took either the kind of college course for humanities majors that is generally nicknamed “Moron Math,” or perhaps a very elementary philosophy course, is kind of a mashup between philosophy and mathematics. It is designed so you can diagram and presumably straighten out screwed up reasoning like this:
Are all redheads plumbers?
“Joe is a redhead. Joe is a plumber. Therefore all redheads are plumbers.” Or, with equally erroneous thinking, some numbskull might conclude that all plumbers are redheads.
Various exercises, done with overlapping, partially overlapping, and completely separated circles helped students diagram both erroneous and logical thought processes. Their use is to help people avoid jumping to nonsensical conclusions from insufficient data.
Early in the 20th Century a Polish-American scholar named Alfred Korzaybski, began expanding our understanding of how false conclusions get made. I don’t pretend to be a student of Korzybski or even to be able to follow him much of the time. However, he spawned an academic discipline called General Semantics. It was S.I. Hayakawa who explained Korzybski's theories in a book dumbed down enough so that even the incipiently cranky 17-years-old college student that I was in 1956 was could get it.
The book was called Language In Thought And Action. It was required reading in my college freshman English course, in part, I suspect, because the head of my college’s English Department, a man named Basil Pillard, was one of Hayakawa’s collaborators.
Whoopee! Here comes
a sex fetish!
One of the principles that the book taught was how to differentiate between things and symbols, which are abstractions, of things. Take one of the ultimate abstractions — the sexual fetish. At the time, one could find, say in New York’s Times Square, book stores that sold pornography and sex fetishes under the counter.
Sex fetishes? They might have included a shiny patent leather woman’s shoe (just one) with a very high heel. You couldn’t have sex with it, at least not as most of us understand sex. It had no erogenous parts. It had no warmth. It had no voice. It had no brain. It had no tenderness. It had no passion. It had no moving parts.
And yet creepy little men would buy it and take it home to kiss, lick, suck and whatever else, all in the course of masturbation. For them, that shiny high heeled shoe wasn’t a shoe. It was sex itself. It may have begun as a symbol of a sexy woman in high heeled shoes, but somehow it had morphed, in the minds of the fetishists, from a symbol into the real thing.
The Bible backs me
up on this, if you care
Fetishising symbols is a practice that goes back at least to biblical times, and that gave rise to one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them…”
So idol worshipping is just another form of masturbating while sucking on the heel of a patent leather shoe. It is a demonstration of people confusing the symbol of God with the real thing, assuming you believe there is a God.
Hold all that for a moment and tell me — or tell yourself — what the American flag is.
Basically, it’s a piece of cloth consisting either of other pieces of red, white and blue cloth, sewn together in a certain manner, or it is a piece of cloth with a certain number of red white and blue stars and stripes printed on it. Most people would recognize either form as “the American flag.” But it’s still just a piece of cloth.
The American flag is also a legitimate symbol of the United States and of American liberty. But that is all it is, a symbol. Some people, Donald Trump among them, have confused the symbol with the thing, same as ancient idol worshippers, and same as creeps masturbating over a woman’s shoe.
You cannot burn up or burn down the United States of America by setting fire to a flag, because the flag is only a symbol, not the real thing. You cannot destroy freedom by failing to salute the flag in a prescribed way, for the same reason.
Similarly, you cannot destroy the United States of America by refusing to stand with your hand on your heart when the Star Spangled Banner is played. Our national anthem is another symbol. Or rather, it is a song celebrating a symbol.
Maybe "taking a knee"
is a form of respect
As for saluting the flag in a manner that Donald Trump favors, consider this. In a more authoritarian state than perhaps even Donald Trump has envisioned, we might all be ordered to get down on one or both knees as a symbol of respect, just as some people do while praying. It certainly seems to be more humble and respectful than standing while feeling for our own heartbeats.
By insisting on taking a knee Colin Kaepernick and other football players are not, as Trump insists, disrespecting the flag They are instead disrespecting the perverted fetishization of the flag by people whose behavior is opposite what the flag stands for — liberty and justice for all. The football players are saying that freedom and justice fail to exist when people are shot dead by a police officer for driving, walking, standing, or merely breathing while black.
It is Trump who disrespects America, and the American ideal, by insisting not only on flag worship, but also flag worship according to the specific ritual he fetishizes.
In doing so, he has committed almost precisely the same perversion as the biblical idol worshipper and the pervert who sits behind locked doors sucking on a stiletto-heeled shoe. Or, for that matter, a pervert who allegedly pays hookers to pee on him. He has gotten his own wires crossed, and confused the symbol of a thing with the thing itself.
If this is a free nation, anyone who so wishes may take a knee, most especially when the knee is taken in protest. The right to protest is precisely what the flag is all about.
