White House Fool Report: Congress, did you want to say something?

I did not see that coming. Nor did the president himself, evidently; according to Mr. Chuck Todd of the analogue media,

only hours after Kerry called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "a thug and a murderer" and accused his regime of using chemical weapons to kill 1,429 people, Obama changed his mind as he walked across the South Lawn with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, the officials said.

Love that Woodwardian detail. Were they chatting about the weather, you think, or maybe maintaining a pregnant silence?

What I didn't get, I think, was the degree to which President Obama appreciates the difference between a Tough Decision (where the situation apparently requires you to make a decision you know to be wrong) and a difficult one (where no one option among those available solves the problem). One of the problems with the option he was about to choose was that it looked like a classically Tough Decision: aiming at demonstrating his own personal toughness rather than stopping the murder in Syria (which it is very unlikely to do). Kicking it to Congress—inviting the whole population into the process—gives us a chance to step back and think about Syria itself.

And it's by no means over. A lot of people assume that the House cannot pass an authorization to use force; I'm very far from sure of that, but what I'm sure of is that Obama is prepared for either outcome. In the meantime he has supported democracy, gobsmacked the Republicans into showing their divisions and the soi-disant left of the emoprogs into showing their rightism, and added weeks to the negotiation framework (including back-channel discussions with Iran which would have been destroyed by the bombing campaign that was scheduled for this weekend). And the number of Syrians killed while we are waiting for the Congress to do whatever it's going to do will be horrible, but no different from the number that would have been killed had our excursion taken place. Only we won't have killed any of them ourselves.

Via.

Stone walls do not a prism make

I wonder if David Brooks is looking a little enviously over at David Frum—the way Islamic Jihad might have looked at Hamas after Hamas got out of Syria—for freeing himself from the Republican yoke before it became really unspeakably embarrassing.

Infinitely long green cuboid seen through a Dove-prism array. From Wikipedia.

In today's column, he starts with a "look first upon this picture, then on this" that certainly makes you suspect something of the kind:

You look at the Romney-Ryan ticket and see that they are much more conservative than you. They don’t believe in tax increases ever. You think tax increases have to be a part of a budget deal. They want to slash social spending to the bone. You think that would be harsh on the vulnerable and bad for social cohesion.

You look at the Obama-Biden ticket. You like them personally. But you’re not sure what they want to achieve over the next four years. The country needs big changes, and they don’t seem to be offering many. Where’s the leadership? 

Tough decision, eh, Sparky? Which is it to be? Wrecking the weak and discombobulating the community, or getting only a couple of those beloved big changes? Six of one and half a dozen of the other, eh?

It's not easy for Brooks to work his way through to a decision either. He manages, but his heart may not be quite in it.

The chosen method is to look at the candidates through what he calls a "prism": that is, in terms of the one item he regards as the most crucial to be dealt with, putting a damper on escalating Medicare costs.

Looking at the candidates through this prism, you see that President Obama deserves some credit for taking on entitlement spending. He had the courage to chop roughly $700 billion out of Medicare reimbursements.... Still, you wouldn’t call Obama a passionate reformer....

When you look at Mitt Romney through this prism, you see surprising passion. By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate. Possibly for the first time, he has done something politically perilous. He has made it clear that restructuring Medicare will be a high priority. This is impressive. If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station.

Yes, by selecting his vice presidential candidate, Romney has demonstrated surprising passion for Medicare reform. (All Obama has done is to restructure the entire health care delivery system.) And not only that, but the Romney program is surprising, too:

Moreover, when you look at the Medicare reform package Romney and Ryan have proposed, you find yourself a little surprised. You think of them of as free-market purists, but this proposal features heavy government activism, flexibility and rampant pragmatism.

It's surprises all round! Especially the rampant pragmatism part. (Do you think Obama's pragmatism is more sejant erect—"Sitting, but with the front paws raised up"?)

So there you have it. Since Obama merely does things to hold down the growth in Medicare costs, without showing an adequate degree of passion, Romney is clearly the better man, since he picked a nominee for vice president. Moreover—and this is just icing on the cake—they have a plan, and not just any plan, but one that is directly opposed to their most passionately held principles. (Obama could presumably come up with something like that, given that he is himself opposed to those principles, but would it be passionate? Would it be surprising?)

But did you never look at anything through a prism before, then, Brooksie? (I know, I know, his mother made him go to one of those girly schools where you never get to touch anything--she was afraid, with his personality, he'd end up getting hydrochloric acid poured on his head.) Let's just say it's not the best way to find out what it looks like, on account of the light-bending.

Wedge prism. From Wikipedia.

Cheap shots and chasers 6/8

Shorter David Brooks: Endorsing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in Tuesday's recall election:

Walker is an obnoxious, hyperpartisan brute who exemplifies everything in movement conservatives I've been complaining about for years now, but you should vote for him because he thinks exactly the way I do.

 That's only part of the column; for the rest, Dean Baker offers an enjoyably acid takedown.

Walker himself won, of course, but not everybody believes it's because Wisconsin agrees with him, as Roy Edroso translated it into our language,

that the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.

 Zandar at Balloon Juice and assorted colleagues argue persuasively from exit polls that Wisconsin just doesn't like recalls. Then again it seems that this recall has given control of the state senate to Democrats, so Walker will not be able to railroad any more of his ghastly program through it.

To Walker, naturally,

Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and make the tough decisions.

Edible dried zombie skin, From Crosstalknet.

That "tough decisions" phrase has to be one of the most abused in the zombie rhetoric repertoire, by the way. It sounds like a brave decision made by a politician without regard to cheap popularity, a "profiles in courage" choice. But it is invariably used to describe a decision that is self-evidently bad—a bogus solution to a problem that may not even exist presented as the only alternative, like trying to jail all the undocumented immigrants in Arizona—to conform with some kind of pharisaically pinched, narrow-minded notion of moral hazard: cutting off somebody else's nose to spite your own face, and ensure the votes of the nastiest people in your constituency.

Another piece of zombie rhetoric was used this week by secretary of defense Leon Panetta:

“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America is going to defend ourselves against those who attack us,” Mr. Panetta said. “This is not just about protecting the United States. It’s also about protecting Pakistan. And we have made it very clear that we are going to continue to defend ourselves.”

 Panetta is here answering, or refusing to answer, the question of  whether drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country's sovereignty. The usage, as a rhetorical trick, comes from Israel: every time the Israeli government is caught committing some abuse against somebody in the neighborhood they cry, "Israel has a right to defend itself."

The implication is always that this is a plea: justifiable crime, because it's self-defense. But they never actually argue it, because it isn't arguable—self-defense doesn't justify everything. If the United States is violating Pakistani sovereignty by dropping bombs there maybe it is truly somebody's idea of self-defense, but it's still violating Pakistani sovereignty nevertheless, and no amount of zombie rhetoric can change it.

Truth terrorists: China

Wu Xiaoqing, the vice minister for environmental protection, demanded that foreign governments stop releasing data on China’s air.

In a criticism clearly aimed at the United States, Mr. Wu said at a news conference that the public release of air-quality data by foreign governments’ consulates “not only doesn’t abide by the spirits of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, but also violates relevant provisions of environmental protection.” (New York Times, June 6, 2012)

What's supposedly wrong with the data is that it's not "representative"—I guess in the sense that instead of building its consulates in a very large random sample of locations, the US puts them only in major cities, the very places most likely to suffer from pollution; you get no idea of the bracing atmosphere in Inner Mongolia or at the North Korean border, or the sultry breeze in semitropical Hainan.

Cycling Hainan. From Mountainbikingasia.com.

What's really wrong is that it's data the Chinese government didn't get a chance to edit—those consulates are nothing but a bunch of truth terrorists. Anyway Wu's statement shouldn't be interpreted as some kind of threat; the vice minister simply wanted to clear the air, heh-heh.

Jennifer Rubin writes;

Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.

No, you do not wreck havoc. Unless the meaning is, "You had some perfectly good havoc in the Democratic Party, and he went and wrecked it." Which would be a pretty odd thing—talk about concern trolling!

One wreaks havoc (past tense and participle wreaked) or occasionally works it (past tense and participle wrought). Not knowing this is illiterate, and illiteracy is a disqualification for writing a column in a national newspaper. See Zandar, again, for demonstration that the content of this column is even worse than the English usage.

 

Bigger than Friedman?

Urp—Must have been something I colonized...

Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich,

Congratulations on the Times Op-Ed! I see they gave you top billing between Collins and Kristof above the fold, over Miriam Zoll and Pamela Tsigdinos, two nice women who want to help people get over their disappointment when fertility treatments fail. Pretty heady stuff, I'd imagine, finding yourself in that kind of company, for somebody from faraway Russia.

And you're starting to attract quite a bit of attention, too! [jump]

The War of the Chickenshit

Image via Canadian Thinker.

Danielle Pletka for the American Enterprise Institute:

Let’s get this straight: Bibi et al, who have what most would agree is a legitimate and existential fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon, are “good” because they’re, er “chickenshit” about launching a strike on Iran; oh, and Bibi is also labeled a “coward” for having been “chickenshit” in that regard. But he’s “bad” because he won’t cave to a Palestinian Authority and Hamas so riven by terrorism, corruption and incompetence that they won’t “accommodate” with each other.

No, I don't think you have it straight yet.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre wants his adjective back: what is Prime Minister Netanyahu doing with an "existential fear"?

White House Fool Report: Power

Little did these guys imagine that one day adult white Republicans would be in an almost identical position, suffering from somebody not getting deported. Via Libraries Linking Idaho.

So young senator Rand Paul thinks there's a parallel between the Obama order to delay deportation on 5 million undocumented immigrants last week and Franklin Roosevelt's order of February 1942 to throw 120,000 documented Japanese residents (barred on racial grounds from becoming citizens but nearly all of them either living in the country for a minimum of 34 years or born here, since no immigration had been allowed since 1908) into internment camps?

Hahahahaha. I guess they had in common that both were entirely legal. (Some people might claim that the victims of internment had a worse time than the victims of, um, say, who are those victims?)

The president probably wouldn't mind having the kind of congressional cooperation FDR got over the internment of Japanese, as BooMan reminds us, with the Senate and House practically competing that March to see which could move their legislation out fastest, and only one mild dissenter, Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who complained that the penalties for disobeying the law (basically, for being Japanese in an unauthorized area meaning more or less everywhere outside of a camp) weren't stiff enough:

Tom, this is not really helping

By Directioner via WeHeartIt.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Contrarianisticus, has a fun take:

Thank God for WikiLeaks.

After all these months of nailbiting over what kind of monstrous evil Hillary might be revealed by the transcripts of her secret meetings with the employees of the Goldman Sachs firms, now that WikiLeaks has published them it turns out she's nothing but a left-deviationist Friedmanite! Exactly what the mustache ordered!

I confess, I was starting to wonder about what the real Hillary Clinton — the one you never get to see behind closed doors — really stood for. 

Right, how come the Clinton we see behind closed doors is never the real one? Wait what?

Radio Yerevan: The Immunity Question

 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it correct that Donald Trump had an Article II where he had the right to do whatever he wanted as president?

Answer: In principle, yes, but

• first of all, he didn't really have it so much as he had access to it, as we all do, in the US Constitution, which is in the public domain, and easily accessible in excellent editions online if you don't want to burden yourself with a print copy;
• second of all, it describes what the president is required to do (to take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed), not what he has the right to do, which may not be the same thing at all, other than issuing pardons and making his own decisions on who he wants to name as ambassadors and cabinet secretaries and the like—and it specifically lists some things that he is absolutely not allowed to do, although he did in fact do them, such as taking money in exchange for hotel rooms and food and beverage service at his businesses from representatives of foreign governments, which isn't supposed to happen because it could be an efficient way of accepting bribe money if it were allowed; and
• third of all, he isn't president any more, at least at the moment, specifically because he also didn't have the right to stay in office after he lost his reelection bid, no matter how much he wanted to. Not that he didn't try.

One of the craziest pieces of news on this newsy day filled in some details on a Trump incident we heard about back when it happened, in summer 2019, when US intelligence caught an extraordinary satellite photo of the accidental explosion of an Iranian missile at its launch site, very classified, and sent it to the White House, and Trump promptly tweeted it.

What's news about this is what ABC News appears to have unearthed from the special counsel's investigation of the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case, involving what Trump thought he was doing:

Literary Corner: Does That Make Sense Now?

Drawing by Mike Luckovitch, via Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

Death, Death—Cases, Cases

by Donald J. Trump

Now it used to be that if you had it, you were immune for life,

right? For life. With me, they say I’m immune for four months.

In other words, once I got it, the immunity went down from life to

four months. I don’t know. They don’t know either. Who the hell

knows? All I know is that for a little while, for at least four months,

I could run in there and kiss everyone, men and women. I’ll kiss

every one of them. I’ll kiss them. No, no. You get over it, then

you’re immune, for whatever period of time. No, it’s true,

though. You heard, for life, you’re immune. Right? That’d be it.

As soon as I got, I said I was immune, they said, “Only for four months.”

They brought it down to four months because that’s the fake news.

They’re fake. The cases are up, but listen to this, they’re all

talking about cases. You don’t see death, death—cases, cases.

You know why we have cases? Because we test so much. And in

many ways, it’s good. And in many ways, it’s foolish. In many ways,

it’s very foolish, because every time you test… Like, for instance,

Barron Trump. Did you ever hear of Barron Trump? He’s a rather

tall young man. He’s tall, and he’s a good kid, and he’s strong,

but he had it. They said, “Sir, Madam, I’m sorry to inform you

your son has tested positive, apparently.” I said, “Oh no.”

Fifteen seconds later, “Sir, your son no longer has it.” No,

it’s true. I said, “How’s Barron doing?” “Oh, he’s fine.

He’s fine.” I said, “What do you mean? You just don’t…”

No, he’s fine. They have a very strong immune system. Ninety-nine

point nine something, right? Ninety-nine point nine. Go back

to the school, North Carolina. Go back to the school. Barron Trump.

A legend. He’s a legend, he got rid of it so fast, but the kids get

rid of it fast. Strong immune systems. The mortality rate is down

eighty-five percent because of the therapeutics and all that they

learned. I mean, they know what to do. In other words, by doing

all of this testing, we’re the best in the world, the most…

I get calls all the time from leaders, “Your testing is the

best in the world.” I said, “Do you test?” “No.” I said,

“You don’t test?” “No.” “That’s why you have no cases.”

Well, very few cases. You know, the cases they have, when

somebody’s sick, they call it a case. I said to one gentleman

that’s very tough, very tough man, runs a tough country,

I said, “Do you test?” “Yes. When somebody comes into the

hospital and throws up all over the floor, we test, but we never

test other than that.” I said, “So you have cases.” “No, we show

very few cases.” So we show more cases because we test. So Barron

Trump, as an example, it’s a case. All the kids are a case. And by the way,

they’re very young now. They’re testing schools and high schools

and this and that and every… And what it does is it gives the

fake news media something to talk about. So they say,

“Cases are up in the United States.” That’s because we test.

India has one point five million people and they do testing. They

test a tiny fraction of the number of people that we test.

So the good is that we know where it is, et cetera, and we

have to protect our seniors, and that’s really the most

important thing. But when you see all this stuff, watch,

they’ll go home, “Cases are up, cases are up.” And I saw it

today, but that’s because of tests. Does that make sense now? If we

cut it in half… And by the way, wasting a lot of money on testing

too We're not allowed to say that. We’re not allowed to say,

“We’re spending millions of dollars on testing.” But if we tested,

half, cases would be half, and they’d have a headline, “Cases

drop magnificently,” but they want us to test, test, test.

(Rally, Lumberton, North Carolina, 24 October)

Not freaking out yet

USS Porter, somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, launches a Tomahawk missile toward Syria. AP photo via Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

It's pretty cute of Trump, I was thinking Thursday night, to have taken what looks like the first steps of a Hillary Clinton approach to dealing with the Assad regime—aim at the air force installations, toward the aim of interdicting the air war, which is their primary method of mass murder, with the chlorine barrel bombs rained down on densely populated urban areas and now the return of sarin gas. Clinton was going to ground the Syrian air force with this kind of raid, killing planes instead of people, at least theoretically, and creating "safe zones" (there was a little bit of Underpants Gnomes logic at work here, I'm not trying to hide that—I'm mindful, too, that Iraqi Kurdistan may have been able to construct a very functional society under a "no-fly zone" in the 1990s, but Syrian Sunni Arabs are living with their own internal civil wars, with Qa'eda and ISIS forces among the warring parties, so it's a little more complicated for them).

Only it doesn't now look as if that's what they have in mind, or as if they have anything in mind at all. Nobody can say what plans they have, or what objectives, military or diplomatic, The Guardian reports. Spicer and Tillerson make statements in which each seems unaware of what the other is saying. The runways at Shayrat Airfield haven't even been damaged enough to stop Syrian planes from taking off there on Friday, apparently to bomb the same town, Khan Sheikhun, that they were attacking with sarin three days ago. They're not interdicted at all, or even slowed down. Just going back to the more "conventional" weapons.

Men of Retroaction

Drawing by Ted Rall.

Everybody's on this one from Fiorina just because it's hilarious, but I don't think all the juice has been squeezed out of it yet; there are a few details that haven't been adequately mocked, and a large point of particular significance to the Rectification audience:

to wage war, we need a commander in chief who has made tough calls in tough times and stood up to be held accountable over and over, not first-term senators who've never made an executive decision in their life.

One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear.

A lot of people out there are reporting that General Petraeus retired from the Army because of his conviction (reduced to misdemeanor from felony charges when he copped a plea) for passing classified information to his girlfriend-biographer, but this is incorrect; he retired in 2011 to take up Obama's offer of a job as Director of Central Intelligence (that's the job he was fired from for the security-violating hanky-panky). So what he told President Obama that President Obama didn't want to hear must have been, "Sure, I'll take the job." Oh, and Obama still does listen to Petraeus, sadly.

Literary Corner: Sir Thing

Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings (2017), via.

I liked this, from the Tucker Carlson interview, not just for its sonnet shapeliness but still more for the way it elevates the sir story into the hypothetical mood. When Trump imagines what it's like to be president, it's exactly the way he expects his TV and rally audiences to imagine it, like the court in a sword-and-sandals movie, where the sovereign stands, or sits enthroned, in the midst of a crowd of heroic-looking guys who "walk up to" him to announce their concerns.

Corollary to that is the insight that he must be aware he isn't, in fact, effectively president, to the extent that these scenes aren't really taking place, much as he clearly wishes they would. That's why . they figure so strongly in the stories he makes up.

Sonnet on the Poet's Theoretical Plan to Remove All the Troops From Afghanistan

by Donald J. Trump

But I would leave very strong intelligence
there. You have to watch because they do --
you know, okay, I'll give you a tough one.
If you were in my position and a great looking
central casting and we have great generals,
a great central casting general walks up
to your office, I say, "We're getting out."
"Yes, sir. We'll get out. Yes, sir." 

I'll say, "What do you think of that?"
"Sir, I'd rather attack them over there, than
attack them in our land." In other words, them
coming here. That's always a very tough
decision, you know, with what happened
with the World Trade Center, et cetera et cetera.

If the general's good-looking enough, George C. Scott type, it's war. There's a chance we haven't gone to war yet in Iran because it's John Bolton pushing the case ("If we don't fight them there..."), with his stupid facial hair.

Nunes Declares War

I really couldn't pass up gentleman farmer Devin Nunes taking time out from his busy schedule fabricating plots by the FBI, the Democratic Party, the retired journalists of the Wall Street Journal and the retired spies of MI6, and I believe the Order of the Templars, to spy on the totally innocent businessman Carter Page in the hope that this would somehow stop Donald Trump from getting elected sometime after he got elected (good cooking takes time!)...

... using his appearance on Fox News to invoke the specter of class war:

.@DevinNunes: "There's been a war on people who actually build things, grow things, work with their hands. They think that if your'e in the D.C. Beltway or NYC... or SF and LA, that this is somehow the people who make this country work. And the fact is: they don't have a clue." pic.twitter.com/pL1fGYGc8F

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2018

Really. I didn't expect to agree with Devin Nunes about anything, but he's got a point, when you think about it. I think about Speaker Paul Ryan and his famous account of who he thinks are the people who make this country work:

Knuckleheads up

Over at Townhall, where there's a central stupidity-conditioning plant maintaining a constant level of stupidity at all times of day and night, someone called Charlie Kirk (Mme Tussaud model pictured above) is talking himself into some serious butthurt over comments by Michelle Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show:

Michelle Obama was asked about the challenge Obamacare faces in not attracting the requisite number of young enrollees. Her response was "A lot of young people think they're invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads”. She went on to add that young people often cut themselves while cooking or injure themselves by dancing on bar stools.

Pre-Crime does not pay

Flower chucker. From Notional Value.

As Emptywheel has been pointing out in her series on "Setting Up a Department of Pre-Crime", discussing the FISA or FISA-like court that might be established to oversee the president's American-murdering activities, such a court is going to be in the very odd position of, [jump]

Brooks discovers Barack

Art from an essay by Steven Hayward from 2010 that opens up, "With the stunning victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts it appears the long night of the soul for conservatives may be over. The last two years have been tough for the Right. In terms of political power, conservatism is at its lowest point in more than 30 years..."

Verbatim David Brooks, "I Miss Barack Obama", New York Times, February 9 2016:

As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama.

Well, that is a pretty strange sensation. Because he didn't go anywhere yet, you know? If you'd like to see him, he's still around. He's the president of the United States. He just sent a new budget up the Hill this morning, for Pete's sake, though the Republicans up there are doing their best to pretend it doesn't exist:

In a harsh partisan snub, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees — Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming and Representative Tom Price of Georgia — have chosen not to invite Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to testify about the administration’s plan, set to be released on Tuesday as part of the traditional budget week festivities.

Even though Obama is wrong about stuff, in Brooks's humble opinion, he has a good character, on five main parameters: basic integrity, basic humanity, soundness in his decision-making process, grace under pressure, and a resilient sense of optimism (I wonder what a sense of optimism is, like you can smell it when it's in the room? and what it is when it's not resilient, but let that pass). It's noteworthy, as Driftglass cheerfully points out, that Brooks has not always had such a high opinion of the president, but maybe he was only dreaming then, or maybe he's only dreaming now, does it make a difference?

Old, mad, despised

Highlighting by Benjamin Wittes, from 25 January, the day the Senate started hearing Trump's defense in the impeachment trial.

The thing that absolutely struck me about the Oval Office coronavirus address was Trump's/Miller's characteristic effort to blame the "foreign virus" crisis in the US on Europe:

At the very start of the outbreak we instituted sweeping travel restrictions on China and put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years. We declared a public health emergency and issued the highest level of travel warning on other countries as the virus spread its horrible infection. And taking early, intense action, we’ve seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe.

The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots. As a result a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe...

So that the travel restrictions on Europeans seemed aimed at punishing them rather than protecting the US, something they can hardly help with. anyway, since the horse was already long out of the barn (the outbreak of Covid-19 in the Kirkland nursing home, reported 28 February with the death of the man Trump referred to as a "wonderful woman", can't be traced to any foreign sources, so it's clear the virus was already established in the Northwest by then).

Share your sandwich with a gladiator pagan fan

Anonymous miniature, 1496-99, from an incunable print in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Turin, via Wikipedia.

David Brooks asks ("The Siege Mentality Problem"):

The siege mentality ends up displacing whatever creed the group started with. Evangelical Christians, for example, had a humane model for leadership — servant leadership — but, feeling besieged, they swapped it for Donald Trump, for gladiator pagan leadership.

Why is this mind-set so prevalent now? 

Noah Rothman was just wondering about that too:

Conservatives, and Republicans to a lesser extent, are wrestling with a siege mentality. It is a common condition that occurs when one party soundly loses a national election. The right feels beset on all sides by enemies, both within and without the walls of the conservative citadel. 

Wait, no, that was in 2013. I meant Wayne Slater in The Dallas News:

West of Eden: The Washington Playbook

Recess at an Aleppo elementary school, 19th century. Halep'de Bir Sıbyan Mektebi, Oyun Saati, Ottoman Archives.

Early on in the big Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic on the "Obama doctrine" (as I said, it's got a lot more than David Brooks thinks it does):

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

Mr. President, thanks!

I also loved learning that the phrase "stupid shit caucus", which I thought I invented in October 2014, was actually common currency in the White House around the same time, after the newly departed ex–Secretary of State Clinton gave Goldberg that interview in the August 2014 Atlantic complaining about Obama's failure to build up a "credible fighting force" out of the students and professionals who had led the peaceful protests against Assad in the beginning of the Arab Spring:

For the Record: Tough on China

 

Illustration by Javier Zarracina/Vox.

Rafael trying to come out plus trompiste que le Trompe:

All things he fought against

Whereas with the one thing he campaigned on https://t.co/dtYcVQLqiZ

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 6, 2020

Seriously...