Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

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:

For the Record: Parental Rights

 

From New Adventures of Superboy #1 (January 1980). Art by Kurt Schaffenberger, via Wikipedia.

When Republicans talk about "parents' rights", they don't mean parents' rights to support their kids in growing up--they mean parents' rights *against* their kids, rights of an owner over a possession.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2023

Pretty sure I really mean that. People affecting to believe in a big sociocultural wokery conspiracy trying to change "our society" (the society those gents thought they owned) are at bottom angry with their kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, for being smarter and stronger and better looking and eventually getting more sex no doubt (that's the human condition all parents must live with), but more particularly for challenging their authority—not just for being irreligious or sexually different, though those obviously matter when they happen, but especially for being broad-minded, not narrow, liberal for want of a better word, going beyond what the previous generation wanted to allow. I'm not saying all conservative parents are like this, either, or that only conservative parents have conflicts with their kids, but that this particular kind of conflict is directly connected to this particular kind of political conservatism.

No. 1

From President Medvedev's vlog, via The Guardian, 25 October 2011.

Fred Kaplan of Slate, Rectification Central's go-to source of expertise on military matters, had a better-informed version of something I've been wanting to say, about old Willard Mitt Romney complaining in every quarter about how he deserves an apology, because when he said in 2012 that the Russian Federation was "our no. 1 geopolitical foe" and everybody made fun of him he was actually right. As a matter of fact he wasn't right, in the first place because he was ignorant or lying, as was the case with so much of what Romney was saying* during that campaign:

In his 2012 CNN interview [toward the end of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency, a couple of months before Putin returned to the office in May], Romney explained his characterization of Russia as “our No. 1 geopolitical foe” by saying, “They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors”—and referred specifically to Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. In his recent Atlantic interview, he said, “They were opposing us at the U.N. whenever a critical measure came forward.” Both statements were simply untrue.

The fact is, quite apart from partisan bickering or revisionist history about the wisdom of Romney, the U.S. and Russia shared vital interests on a number of issues—and acted together to advance those interests, at least for a while. Medvedev and other Kremlin officials were also genuinely keen to bring Russia into the global economy—to diversify its economy beyond commodities like oil and gas, build up its tech sector, and expand its trade—which motivated them to build better relations with America and Europe.

More specifically, and more importantly in terms of the campaign, he was wrong to suggest that there was some deep defect in the Obama administration's treatment of the US-Russia relationship during the Medvedev presidency, the proof being in what he was able to achieve:

On Senator Cruz Referencing Dr. Seuss During his Filibusterino Performance Against the Affordable Care Act

Re-upping this 2013 post, for no particular reason:

I am Bam.

Bam I am. 

For the Record: Tennis, Anyone?

 

When History paused, sometime between 2009 and 2016. Via Courts of the World.

Four Dorics pic.twitter.com/D2vcNoron6

— Yas Just a Lightweight (@Yastreblyansky) December 8, 2020

Four Dorics beat Two Corinthians.

— Unnamed Democrat (@UnnamedDem) December 8, 2020

A billion tiny October surprises

Image via INKinc.

A week or ten days ago this thing caught my attention: from Fox News's Maria Bartiromo, a story on the counter-counterintelligence investigation being conducted by John Durham at the behest of William Barr to look at the "origins" of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe of the relations between Russian operations in the 2016 election and a select group of Trump associates:

"It is unlikely that we will get a John Durham interim report or any indictments before the election. Now, just 37 days away, a debate has begun within the Department of Justice, as the timing of John Durham's criminal investigation conclusions. I'm being told by sources it is now too close to the election and could be seen as politically motivated," Bartiromo said on "Sunday Morning Futures."

This despite Barr's assurances, going back as far as July, that it would not be politically motivated

“I will be very careful. I know what Justice Department policy is,” Barr said during a long-awaited appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. “Any report will be, in my judgment, not one that is covered by the policy and would disrupt the election.”

My first thought was, well, that's the end of that; Durham can't get what Trump and Barr want him to get (indictments against McCabe, Strzok, and Ohr, and in their steamier fantasies Comey and Mueller, and in Trump's wet dreams Obama and Brennan), and he's throwing in the towel: another October surprise bites the dust:

Douthat and the only-two-countries-in-the-world model of Grand Strategy

Mahjong tiles revealing that China has words for "north", "east", "south", and "west".

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, takes his Grand Strategy chops out for a spin ("The Chinese Decade"):

richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an authoritarian power to tame the internet, to make its citizens hardworking capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA, Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival....

So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s crimes.

Furthermore, Trump’s likely successor is a figure whose record and instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of American illusions about China. 

One of those naïve American centrists, he means, Joe Biden, and of course sneaking in the reference to the familiar smear for the cognoscenti, because that's how Ross rolls—Biden's "family connections" meaning the bogus story from Peter Schweitzer's fabrication factory according to which Hunter Biden took some kind of illicit profit from associations with the Chinese government (I dealt with it briefly here in the form of a Radio Yerevan joke).

Deregulation News

Editorial a couple of days ago in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted:

“We inherited a broken, terrible system …,” Trump told reporters on April 18. “Our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.” That was Trump’s attempt, frequently repeated by the president and recycled in White House presentations, to lay responsibility for the inept pandemic response at Obama’s feet, as if three years in office were insufficient for Trump to repair all the supposed damage his predecessor wrought.

Zorro (Douglas Fairbanks) defends Lolita Pulito (Marguerite de la Motte) from Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim). Photo courtesy of Orange County Archives, via very relevant essay at Zocalo Public Square.

But then again, as they pointed out, in his budget for fiscal 2017, maybe in response to the 2015 Ebola epidemic,

Unmask This

Opening of Grenell's list, via Adam L. Silverman/Balloon Juice.

"The fact that Vice President Biden and all of the president's inner circle, President Obama's inner circle, individually requested to unmask Gen. Flynn is very troubling," he said. "Unmasking involves revealing the identity of an American's private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant to eavesdrop on that conversation." (Senator Rand Paul, quoted on Fox News)

Q: Dad, what's unmasking?

A: I thought you'd never ask. I found out around the beginning of the Republican attempt to discredit the case against Michael Flynn, in April 2017, and first wrote about it then. Actually I sort of found out earlier than that, during the days of High Greenwaldianism following the Snowden leaks of 2013, but didn't pay the same kind of attention.

Vast Open Spaces and Tense Little Monopolies

Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich ca. 1809 via Wikimedia.

Seems Yuval Levin has written a David Brooks column for the Times this week ("How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?")

When we think about our problems, we tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals who are having trouble linking hands. And so we talk about breaking down walls, building bridges, leveling playing fields or casting unifying narratives.

But what we are missing is not simply greater connectedness but a structure of social life: a way to give shape, purpose, concrete meaning and identity to the things we do together. If American life is a big open space, it is not a space filled with individuals. It is a space filled with these structures of social life — with institutions. And if we are too often failing to foster belonging, legitimacy and trust, what we are confronting is a failure of institutions.

Well, don't you tend to imagine our society as a vast open space filled with individuals attempting and failing to hold hands with each other? I mean, when you're thinking about our problems? I guess when I think about our problems I tend to think about our problems, like rising inequality, failure to provide huge numbers with what they need to live satisfying lives, and headlong rush to the destruction of possible human habitats. When I think about what's a creative-sounding analogy for society, I don't regard myself as thinking about our problems at all. I guess that must mean I'm a liberal. Though I have nothing against analogies in principle. Rest assured.

But if American life is a big open space (suddenly it's not American society any more), then it's not a big open space, but a space that is not open at all. This is a point where you might be better advised to move to a different analogy, or give up on reading the thing altogether, which was my choice.

Meanwhile, as if in revenge, Brooks has written a kind of Yuval Levin piece ("The Bernie Sanders Fallacy"), to adduce the economic proofs that there is no such thing as class struggle in the United States, along with possibly attempting to prove on the basis of irrefragable logic that there is no "culture war" either, though he forgets all about that after the initial bothsiderizing in paragraph 4:

Voters, David Brooks doesn't like the way you smell

David F. Brooks in the presence of someone who's not conversant with the liberal international order. Via Medium.

Shorter David Brooks, "Voters, Your Foreign Policy Views Stink!", The New York Times, 13 June 2019:

The problem with foreign policy in America nowadays is the voters, who have never heard of the phrase "maintaining the liberal international order" and are therefore hostile to it, or at any rate hostile to the thing that they actually have heard of that is more or less the same thing, or else it's because they have for some reason that escapes me lost faith in human nature and human possibility and become, especially among the young, distrustful, alienated, and unwilling to get involved in the strange, hostile, outside world.  Therefore we need a leader who can grapple with failures like Iraq, build a younger leadership class, and embody optimism. Probably he should also be a member of a minority, a senator from a state like Illinois, and a talented writer, with experience living in a foreign country not in Europe.

Just making up that last sentence, of course: the Obama nostalgia is completely subliminal here, and real Brooks would be startled to hear himself accused of it. He's never been able to grasp that Obama has any actual original foreign policy views, if only because he can't imagine the possibility that anybody could come up with original foreign policy views after Wolfowitz or maybe Clausewitz or thereabouts or let's say after he got his Chicago BA. But he seems to have a dim awareness that once there was a moment when somebody grappled with the failure of Iraq for a while, and there were a bunch of foreign policy experts under 50, and something more than lip service was given to optimism, while the Republicans grimly kept their eyes averted from the unpleasant spectacle.

The remarkably childish headline is for real. What he's depressed about today is a new survey study:

Father John

Photo by Pete Souza via BuzzFeed, May 2009.

Has anyone looked at the mistakes that John Brennan made while serving as CIA Director? He will go down as easily the WORST in history & since getting out, he has become nothing less than a loudmouth, partisan, political hack who cannot be trusted with the secrets to our country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

Trump's unexpectedly succeeded at something really difficult: making John O. Brennan a truth-telling hero, which is giving something like whiplash to some of our friends, notably Zandar, who remember Brennan from back in 2008 as the person Obama was talked out of naming as CIA director because he had a record from the Bush administration as being not as opposed to torture as a decent person should be, and then wonder why Obama named him chief counterterrorism adviser (a job that doesn't require Senate confirmation) and eventually CIA director anyway.

I, in my usual Obot way, kept thinking there must be some reason Obama likes this guy so much, partly because he looks like a kindly old Irish priest, and ended up concluding just about four years ago that Brennan had been given a really bad rap, that the evidence calling him a torture supporter has been read wrong, and that Obama saw him, rightly, as the right person to fix the troubled CIA:

Here were Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane a little before the inauguration:

Allegory

Allegorical painting: As Republican party vainly attempts to bury the memory of the Obama administration under a crudely forged Jasper Johns on an inadequately primed canvas, paranoid Emperor wanders halls obsessed with spies and bugs. Obama looks on, confident it can't last. pic.twitter.com/9JA9T5RPDp

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 3, 2018

Note subtle detail in use of a pre-1959 48-state flag as Alaska and Hawaii return from Republic to Empire.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 3, 2018

(The image apparently first came up on the Rush Limbaugh show and was posted by one Gunny G. around the time when Kehinde Wiley's wonderful official White House portrait of Obama was unveiled.)

For the Record: Pardon me, boys

Updated with music at end

I know, here we are, Dinesh again, sorry if we have been over-attentive to this slimy creature at a time when so many important things are going on, but as he was thanking The New York Times in its coverage of his pardoning with the indulgence of the Emperor for, I guess, not calling him a Nazi, I noticed that their story had, in fact, a couple of errors:

This @nytimes account is largely fair and the writer should be commended for an honest attempt to give both sides https://t.co/14DKtn30A7

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 1, 2018

They should have caught your gratuitous lie about losing your voting rights. As a felon sentenced to five years probation living under California law, you never did. https://t.co/Ml8oufvZ5M same would be true in New York.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2018

Is Obama the same as Trump?

Via Wikipedia.

While I'm up on the issue, I think I need to devote a few words to President Obama, in response to the thing that's going around like this:

So let’s be clear that “Trump is bad” does not mean “Obama is good” and also that “Obama is bad” is not the same as saying “There’s no difference between Obama and Trump” and also frankly both have indefensible legacies on immigration

— Shuri Dirty Computer Prescod-Weinstein🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧 (@IBJIYONGI) May 27, 2018

because

Okay you all seem to need this in all caps: OBAMA DEPORTED MORE PEOPLE THAN ALL OF THE WHITE PRESIDENTS BEFORE HIM IN THEIR OWN ADMINISTRATIONS. HE IS A SMART MAN. HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING, AND HE DID IT ANYWAY.

— Shuri Dirty Computer Prescod-Weinstein🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧 (@IBJIYONGI) May 27, 2018

To me that first tweet has that libertarian kind of "Hey man I'm just being honest" vibe that makes me crazy. At this particular historical moment "Obama is bad" means exactly "There's no difference between Obama and Trump", as you go on to demonstrate when you assert that the same one-word description, "indefensible", applies equally to both, "frankly", in respect to the immigration issue. Why else would you bring it up, except in the service of a claim that it doesn't make any difference and electing Trump wasn't such a bad thing?

In addition to the fact that the one piece of evidence adduced there is just not true, and that's not a secret.

Smash-Mouth Liberalism

Apparently Smash Mouth was the name of the first band to give Trump permission to use their music at his rallies. Not sure how that relates to the way Douthat's using the expression, but it must be relevant.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does not love the kids; he is deeply distressed by them, in particular their chillingly violent calls for the destruction of Senator Rubio ("Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed"):

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns. Some of these measures have conservative support, but in other cases the Florida Republican has effectively bucked the N.R.A.

When he showed up for the CNN town hall he met boos and heckles; one of the shooting survivors told him that just looking at him was like staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. Notwithstanding his subsequent policy concessions, at the March for Our Lives the students wore price tags around their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

I'm not having any luck finding cases of liberals saying "I am desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to" do anything. It's certainly not something I would say. I suspect Ross is making this up.

Lincoln's birthday

Happy birthday, Abraham Lincoln!

Unknown artist, portrait of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1830-1917), first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, in a campaign poster from her first presidential race, in 1884. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Abraham and Tad Lincoln, 1865, in a photo by Alexander Gardner. Looking for an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln in the NPG collections is what set me off on this,

Annals of Derp: The Gallup Most Admired

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gypsy girl with Basque drum. Via Enigm-Art.

You know who's really the most admired woman in the United States? Somebody you've never heard of. I'm not even kidding: that was the answer 13% of the respondents in Gallup's 2017 survey, "friend/relative". The most frequent answer, given by 27%, was "don't know". Hillary Clinton only came in third, at 9%. Or maybe she was more like 13%, or 5%, because there's a four-point margin of error.

Puttting it another way, this is a really dumb survey, and always has been. It may tell you how many Americans say they admire Hillary the most of all women, around nine in a hundred, or around 94 of their 1,049 respondents (the given number is some manipulation of the raw numbers of those who named her as first and as second choice both). It doesn't tell you who America admires the most—that would take a different kind of poll, maybe taking the top 50 names on these lists and asking a second sample to rank them all.

It doesn't signify nothing. There is some kind of meaning to the suggestion that Barack Obama is more admired than Donald Trump (though only 17% to 14%, well within the margin of error), or that Hillary Clnton is still definitively on the women's list (9% to 7% for Michelle Obama). But it isn't much.

And down below the scale, where Condoleezza Rice and Melania Trump are tied for seventh place at 1% each, about the same as Bernie Sanders (7th place) and Bill Gates (8th place) on the men's list, it's really meaningless. It's comical and a little pathetic when the Free Beacon calls attention to the prime minister of Israel:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is America's most admired foreign democratically elected male leader, according to an annual Gallup survey.

Netanyahu was ninth overall on the list of most admired men by Americans, with about 1 percent of respondents naming him. He is currently the second-longest serving prime minister in Israel's history after David Ben-Gurion.

The Dalai Lama was 11th on the list.

Fewer than one in a hundred think of naming Netanyahu, and fewer still of the Dalai Lama (who's actually tied for 10th place, with Mike Pence and Jeff Bezos). What differentiates him from Justin Trudeau at 13, Theresa May (14 on the women's list), Aung San Suu Kyi (much further down), Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela and Benazir Bhutto, the last two not even alive though the questionnaire specified that they had to be, is pretty much random error.

It's fun to talk about these numbers, but you should avoid thinking you learned anything from them,

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Brooks says it ain't broke...

Margaret W. Tarrant (1888-1959), Fairy Market, via sprookjeswereld.

It's world-famous economics critic David F. Brooks—we haven't heard from that one in a while!—with some cheerful news ("The Economy Isn't Broken"): there are no structural flaws in the economy!