Lampenfieber

 

Cast party at the Waffle House, via New York Times.

John Ganz:

Still, there’s a lot of time before the election. Maybe Biden will spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate. Maybe one day we will all laugh about how everyone pissed their pants. But then again, maybe not. God does have a sense of humor, but it often seems at our expense.

He sprang back to life the minute it was over, at least if your TV was tuned to MSNBC, which showed him glad-handing the entourage and giving a brief improvised speech. Even his voice was back. He was a happy warrior. He looked positively joyous.

The commentators don't seem to know what was wrong with Biden during the "debate", but it was obvious to me in the first, and as it turned out only, sentences I typed about him in the notes I started taking:

Biden seems pretty nervous, his voice is so hoarse and he's speaking so fast it's not fully intelligible. Better in the follow up when he's not reciting from memory.

(I took more notes after that, but they were all about Trump’s stunning torrent of lies and misdirections.)

Performance anxiety. Stage fright. Le trac. Lampenfieber ("spotlight fever"). He's not really good at this bizarre ritual of American politics, though most of the time he's good enough. It's what sunk him in his first presidential run 36 years ago (he was talking too fast then too, spitting out memorized bits of his stump speech, which included those quotes from the UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and he left out Kinnock's name in the rush, leading the press to accuse him, ridiculously, of plagiarism, as if they hadn't heard him attributing the material a dozen times before), and the memory of that failure only serves to make it worse. And this time the stakes are incredible. It's him or it's Project 2025! It has little or nothing to do with his age!

I've been there. I did a bunch of acting in my youth, which I was not too bad at, and a certain amount of music, in which I was not so good, and I know how it feels. One real disaster: accompanying a British baritone in a song by Ralph Vaughan Williams which was probably not too congenial to me. The piano part was mostly not that hard, but there was a solo bit at the end, after the singer's part was finished, that I could not master; I choked there at the actual performance and couldn't go on—banged out a C major chord (at least it was the right key) and stopped, and I never played the piano publicly again, which is probably a good thing.

In Biden's case it unquestionably has to do with the stutter. He literally choked (now I know where the expression comes from), which is why he was so hard to hear.

The worst is what a stupid ritual it is, as Lawrence O'Donnell was saying. The TV debate is in every way irrelevant to what presidents do, which is with a roomful of advisors expected to remember everything you might not remember, and not in 60- or 120-second bursts. (I'm pretty sure the time limits were a real difficulty for him—it seemed to me the moderators were cutting him off a lot more than they were Trump, and probably with cause, because Trump doesn't need a lot of time to do what he does, tell a lie or violently change the subject, while Biden needs to work his way through a thought, because thinking is one of the main things presidents have to do, and Trump wouldn't even know where to start on that). There is no reason to ask candidates to do it, nothing about it that relates to a qualification for the job. It's no more relevant to the presidency than a hot dog eating contest.

I don't know what should happen now, other than hating the whole thing. It seems to me that the mechanics of finding a new candidate now, with all the primaries over and all the delegates committed, are just insuperable, unless they choose Harris, and the sniveling centrists producing most of the calls for Biden to step down—Claire McCaskill to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof—won't like her either. Krugman, no centrist, is an exception:

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered....Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Biden is the best president of my adult life too, and it kills me to think we might give him up over such idiocy as this. I love the thought of a Harris presidency too, especially as associated as she is now with Biden's agenda, but I have little hope that she can defeat a tag team of American racism and American misogyny, especially in the tumult you can expect within the party if Biden drops out. I don't know what happens next, but I kind of hope it's nothing.

Another Day, Another Annoying Poll

 

Seeing some terror in the ranks over this poll of six battleground states issued by Washington Post (with the assistance of the Schar School of Government at George Mason University), particularly this result:

Even though these same respondents also seem to think Trump is a serious threat to democracy himself; a huge majority predicts that he will refuse to accept the results of the upcoming election, and a very substantial plurality believe Trump will "try to rule as a dictator" (while just a fifth, well within the crazification factor, suspect that Biden will do that).

I'm not going to be able to tell you what's going on here, because I'm stuck on a still more insane feature, which is what it's a poll of—it's a poll of particularly unlikely voters, designated as "The Deciders" for a fairly good but confusing reason, because they're in fact people who find it particularly difficult to make up their minds, don't know for sure whom they are going to support, and are just as likely to decide not to vote at all. Assuming, though, that the electorate is extremely tightly polarized to the point where the likely voters are almost equally divided, which is not an unreasonable interpretation of the normal polling data, it's the unlikely voters who will actually make the decision, for better or for worse or at random, by the way they sort themselves out in November. That's insane as a fact, that the decision is going to be made by the people with the least ability to even think about it, but it is a kind of a fact, and I ought to feel kind of flattered by the Washington Post for working on it, because, as I wrote for the first time in 2017,

Joe Did What? Stand up to Zionists Edition

Joe Biden suggesting Israel pull back rather than permanently occupy the conquered territories in 1973, when he was a 30-year-old freshman senator:

The unnamed official said Biden told Meir that during meetings in Cairo prior to his arrival in Israel, officials there assured him they accept “Israel’s military superiority.”

Golda Meir smokes a cigarette during an interview. (Kan Archive)

Biden warned that Israel’s actions in the territories it had captured during the Six Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were leading to “creeping annexation.”

Since he believed Israel was militarily dominant in the region, he suggested the Jewish state might initiate a first step for peace through unilateral withdrawals from areas with no strategic importance.

The official said Biden criticized the Nixon administration for being “dragged by Israel,” complaining that it was impossible to have a real debate in the Senate about the Middle East as senators were fearful of saying things unpopular with Jewish voters.

Meir rejected Biden’s call for unilateral steps, launching into a speech about the region and its problems (possibly the spiel Biden alluded to in his own comments years later). 

It's an outstanding story published in Times of Israel during the 2020 campaign.

The Big Ten

 

The drunkenness of Noah, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, via Wikipedia.

Donald Trump: I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? 

"Has anyone read the 'Thou shalt not steal'? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It's just incredible," Trump said at the gathering of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. "They don't want it to go up. It's a crazy world.'' (via CBS News)

Well, no, there's nothing wrong with "Thou shalt not steal," and it would be great for Donald Trump to give some thought to the 8th Commandment, as well as the 7th and 9th, and not only stop stealing stuff, but also stop committing adultery and bearing false witness. It would be pretty interesting to see Trump adopting the Ten Commandments as his own personal moral code, but he clearly hasn't done that yet.

But I think people are really missing the important issue here. It's not a bad thing that the Commandments advise them not to steal stuff. Then again, every moral code tells you not to steal stuff. That's not what makes the Commandments what they are. I have this feeling the conservative Christians are not really reading the thing at all, or reading it from a standpoint of such confirmation bias that they're unable to see what it is really about. 

1. I am Yahweh your Elohim the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. If you are not somebody I brought out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery, like an Egyptian or something yourself, you can apply for an exemption from this Commandment, using form 310B from the Exceptionalism Department, for permission to have some other gods before me, including but not limited to Ra, of course; Zeus/Iuppiter; Marduk (and sometimes Anu and Enlil); Brahman and Shiva and Vishnu/Krishna and his other avatars, whoever wins over the long run; and possibly, at some point in the next 6 or 7 centuries, the Holy Trinity of which I am considering being adopted as a board member, sharing (and oversharing!) duties with My only-begotten Son and our sometimes feminine partner the Holy Spirit. I'm already construed as plural ("I am your elohim") in both the Exodus and  Deuteronomy editions of these Commandments, so you should be prepared for this outcome; the number of God, not to mention the gender, may in the end prove to be more important than Their name. Other than that, you shall have no other gods before me.

Juneteenth

Recycled from a couple of old posts at the Substack:

 

Tales of the Resistance

There's this telling moment in the Ross Douthat interview of Senator J.D. Vance ("What J.D. Vance Believes"), where Vance is asked when he decided he "liked" Donald Trump, and he cites his first personal meeting with Trump, in 2021, and Trump telling him the story of how the generals tried to fool him into thinking they were obeying his orders to draw down US troops in northern Syria, in 2018-19, by shuffling them around instead:

The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.” And I was like, OK, this guy’s deeper than I’d given him credit for. And also I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy — the generals not listening to the president of the United States about matters like troop redeployment.

Actually, it was probably not a general but a civilian, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in the first place and then Mark Esper. It was a matter of maybe 200 troops out of a total of 2500 US troops in the region, with an extremely specific function: protecting our Kurdish allies (guarding the detained remnants of the Islamic State so it couldn't reestablish itself in the region) from our Turkish allies, who didn't care about the Islamic State, but were eager to get all the Kurds, who President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan regarded as anti-Turkish terrorists, away from the Turkish border; he'd been calling Trump all year, demanding the removal of the US troops so he could conquer all the Kurd-held territory without crossing any Americans, and Trump obediently tried to make it happen, but then the troops didn't actually go away.

Why was Trump so determined to obey Erdoğan's orders and throw the Kurds under the Turkish bus, against the urgent advice of every single member of the national security and foreign policy staff? Perhaps because he so valued his "very good relationships" with authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS, and Erdoğan too? He'd rather have the secretary of defense get mad at him than the president of Turkey. He could fire the secretary of defense (and eventually did, of course, over Esper's refusal to contemplate putting down American protestors with American troops).

But then there's another aspect to Trump-Turkish relations, the "conflict of interest" he mentioned to Stephen Bannon in a 2015 interview:

Socialist Climber

 

David F. Brooks on "The Sins of the Educated Class":

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

Even the left-wing New Republic! If you couldn't tell the difference between actual Communists (The Masses, Reed, Odets), The New Republic (the magazine had belonged to the same progressive movement as former president Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann when it was founded in 1914, but it was supporting Reagan's "bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes" foreign policy under Marty Peretz when Brooks was in college), and the stalwart New Dealers Perkins and Humphrey, then you weren't reading very attentively.

By his senior year at Chicago he was calling himself a "democratic socialist" like the great Michael Harrington or "social democrat" like the Roy Jenkins/David Owen faction that broke off rightward from the British Labour Party in 1981, unable to tell those apart as well, but also successfully attracting the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., who tossed him a job offer with the National Review after a humor piece he'd written for the Maroon in advance of a Buckley campus visit, and the fanatically neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, who brutally shut down his socialism in a couple of sentences in a televised debate (see image at top, and video from around 2:10 to 6:20) by asking how come all the Nobel prizes went to private universities (neither he nor Brooks seems to have been aware of the 13 Nobels awarded to graduates of the City University of New York at a time when it was tuition free, or the 32 earned by alumni of the University of California at Berkeley, to say nothing of the state universities of Paris, Berlin—29 for the Humboldt-Universität alone—, Bologna, Tübingen, Tokyo—18—, and so on).

Permission to Be Your Worst Self

Over at the Xitter, Dinesh D'Souza is really on drugs now:

No, Dinesh, it's a 1787 document. See the "We the people" up at top?

Eleven years earlier, the authors had been members of a rebellion against a monarchy, and they could conceivably have been arrested for it, if the British army had been able to get close enough (I know for instance that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were expecting to be arrested in 1775 and fled Boston for Concord), but they weren't, and none of them was ever charged with, let alone convicted of, a felony. You can't become a convicted felon without having a trial first. That's how Trump did it, with a grand jury deciding to charge him and a regular jury deciding he was guilty.

That's just one of the differences between Donald Trump and James Madison. If you're looking for a Trump parallel in the story, you'd do better going with George III, another extremely wealthy but profoundly stupid grandchild of German immigrants who believed that God had put him above the law.

Think about it: 

Lawfare

 

Drawing by Lin Rui for Renmin Ribao/The People's Daily, 

When Trump starts ranting about rigged trials and the "weaponized" Justice Department, everybody needs to understand that he knows what he's talking about, and he's lying, rather than just bullshitting.

I mean, he knows because he's worked at doing it, during his time as president. "Lawfare" as they call it (because it's warfare continued by other means, as Clausewitz didn't say) is the one government-related thing he devoted the most of his time and energy to when he was in the White House, at first defensively, to save himself from being held to account for his earlier crimes and protect his illegal business activities from government interference, then aggressively, to punish the law enforcement figures who had menaced him, and eventually try to cripple his main political rival and establish himself as presidentissimo-for-life; and while the defensive use was remarkably successful, when you think about it, the aggressive use really wasn't.

He found that it's really hard, in the US, to pervert the justice system into an army for vanquishing your enemies. He was able to stop Comey and McCabe and Strzok etc. from investigating him, by firing them, but when he tried to sic the IRS on them, along with John O. Brennan, Hillary Clinton, and Jeff Bezos, his chief of staff, John Kelly, refused to cooperate, according to Kelly's sworn statement, and most important, when Comey and McCabe really were subjected to an intrusive IRS audit (I guess when Mick Mulvaney or Mark Meadows was chief of staff), the agency was unable to punish them, because neither man had done anything wrong.

And McCabe even got his stolen pension back when he sued. (Settlements of Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's suits against the Justice Department are expected to be announced by the end of this month.)

Similarly, when Trump finally found "his Roy Cohn" in the person of Attorney General William Barr, Barr was able to protect him from the consequences of the Mueller investigation by issuing his own bogus summary of the report a month before the report itself was published, but when Trump wanted the investigators hunted down and disgraced for conspiring to bring him down, in two investigations, one by the inspector general Michael Horowitz and one by the infamous special counsel John Durham, but they hadn't actually conspired to bring Trump down, and Durham was unable to charge them with anything.

What's Going On. II

From the Livre d'Or des Voyages of Louis Mainard, 1890, via picryl.com.

Déjà vu all over again? Biden (the day after the guilty verdict for convicted felon Donald Trump, some people think that's relevant) announces proposals for a ceasefire in Gaza, to be carried out in three phases: six weeks during which all Israeli forces withdraw from the Strip, hostages in Gaza (especially women and elderly, and remains of the dead) will be exchanged for detainees in Israeli prisons, Gazan civilians will return home, supplied with temporary shelters, and delivery of food, water, medicine, and fuel will get back to full strength, and the parties will work out the details of a probably lengthier second phase; a second phase in which the exchange of hostages and prisoners will be completed and the parties will negotiate a final, permanent ceasefire; and a third, which is supposed to last forever, when Gaza is rebuilt and the last remains are transmitted.  

Isn't this approximately where we arrived three weeks ago, when Haaretz reported that Hamas had accepted a deal proposed by Egypt with a very similar shape, and Israel appeared to have turned it down?

Not exactly. The big difference, to my mind, which isn't getting a lot of press attention, is that this one is billed as an Israeli proposal—Biden is very insistent on that: