Pardons Я Us

 

Brother Johann Tetzel on the ass, right, dispensing indulgences to the wealthy in a German broadside poster, $32.83 from Amazon (the poster, not the indulgence). 

In the couple of months after the 2000 election, some scandal emerged over the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by outgoing president Bill Clinton, starting with the news that Democratic superdonor and Friend of Bill Ron Burkle had been agitating for a pardon for the junk-bond fraudster Mike Milken, and climaxing with the one given to the tax cheat and sanctions-violating commodities trader Marc Rich, who'd been evading justice living in Switzerland for the previous 17 years, in which the deputy attorney general—a guy you may have heard of called Eric Holder—and the president himself had shown extremely poor judgment at best (Rich's ex-wife Denise was a big-time donor to the Clinton Presidential Library, for one thing, and there's a 200-year-old rule that it's improper to pardon fugitives), allowing themselves to be manipulated by the lobbying of Rich's lawyers including Jack Quinn, who, having been White House counsel from 1995 to 1997, wasn't allowed to lobby for anybody at all until 2002. Also, Clinton issued some 31 pardons and commutations that hadn't gone through the normal processing, because the applications had arrived so late, and First Brothers Hugh Rodham and Roger Clinton had been taking some serious money to lobby the president themselves. Nevertheless Milken didn't get his pardon, and the applications the First Brothers had worked on weren't successful either, and Clinton went on to a very successful post-presidency, Holder eventually became attorney general, and even Quinn (whose Wikipedia bio doesn't even mention Rich) is now a legal analyst at CNN.

All of which seems extremely different from today's news reported by Michael Schmidt and Kenneth Vogel in The Times that there's a regular pardons market in the outgoing Trump administration:

Ah, the 90s—People had more hair then!

C-Span, May 2018.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, explains why the best choice you could make in American history was to get born, like him, in 1979 ("The Best Year of Our Lives"):

The sneerers argued that the Ocasio-Cortezans exaggerate the burdens borne by twentysomethings, which is fair — this is still a rich country whose young people are relatively privileged.

But as a statement about generational experiences, [Charlotte] Alter was basically right. If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles (Vietnam/Iraq), between epidemics (crack and AIDS/opioids and suicide), and between two different periods of economic stagnation (the ’70s and early Aughts). If you were born later, you experienced slow growth followed by financial crisis followed by a recovery that’s only lately returned us to the median-income and unemployment stats of … 1999.

Given that the Cold War and the crack "epidemic" were both basically over by 1991 or 1992; and the US involvement in civil wars in Nicaragua (1978-89) El Salvador (1979-92) Guatemala (1981-93), arms sales to Iran (1981-85) and Iraq (with intelligence backing, 1982-88), invasion of Panama (1979-80), and conquest of Grenada (1983) surely added up to something debacle-like; and the federal response to AIDS started getting serious in 1993; and the bottom 50% emerged from wage stagnation between 1995 and 2002 and then stopped—

Via Washington Post.

—I guess he must mean what our friend Boswood suggested:

https://t.co/JLWzFB60GE Douthat writes a column about how great things were in 1999 without mentioning the name "Clinton." @Yastreblyansky @Mr_Electrico @bluegal

— Boswood (@Bosengood) April 7, 2019

Or maybe it was something else. But when he says

it was the just-enough-internet era. There was just enough internet to boost economic productivity (the Facebook-Amazon era has not had a similar effect), just enough to encourage subcultural ferment, just enough to challenge cultural gatekeepers and give lonely teenagers succor

Something tells me he just misses being a teenager himself. Which is kind of cute when you think about it.

For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

Inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt

Kenneth Starr, via Daily Beast (check out the story!).

What

asks Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street,

if Ken Starr Was Right?

Wait, right about what? On why Congress ought to impeach Clinton?

F. Summary

In this case, the President made and caused to be made false statements to the American people about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. He also made false statements about whether he had lied under oath or otherwise obstructed justice in his civil case. By publicly and emphatically stating in January 1998 that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and these "allegations are false," the President also effectively delayed a possible congressional inquiry, and then he further delayed it by asserting Executive Privilege and refusing to testify for six months during the Independent Counsel investigation. This represents substantial and credible information that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.

No, Ross thinks he should have been impeached for not resigning:

Clinton did it, why can't I?

100PercentFedUp asks the tough questions:

Was the suspicious death of Vince Foster and the firing of Republican FBI Director William S. Sessions firing a coincidence? Did President Clinton need an FBI Director who was willing to look the other way when it came to the alleged criminal activities of the Clintons?

Hm, I wonder.

On the basis of an investigation completed by the GHW Bush Justice Department before Clinton's inauguration. With transparent cause. pic.twitter.com/PDFs7TZyG7

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 11, 2017

OK, make that a "probably a coincidence".

First Feminist

Photo via the Politics and Elections Portal.

Watching the proceedings on MSNBC last night, and after the Big Dog spoke I was interested and puzzled by the way the station's Tough Babes, Rachel and Republican Nicole, dismissed him for that long lingering nostalgic wedding-toast intro taking the audience in some detail from his first cute meet with the candidate to their dumping of Chelsea in the dorm 20-odd years later (he stood at the window concealing his tears while Hillary worked to perfect the environment). "Weak" and "meandering", they thought, though the audience plainly mostly loved it.

It was a remarkably limited view, it seemed to me, as if there's only one thing a speech can do—to overwhelm everybody and be the winner—and a kind of unfeminist view, too, with its assumption that if Bill wasn't the powerful winner of the evening then he was a failure.

a note of sub-Lakoffian semiotics here: Bill's speech had a particular rhetorical purpose that isn't maybe appreciated. (By @maddow...)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2016

All'improvviso

Blogging really is an art form, or able to be an art form, an improvisatory one, and risky in a figurative way--verbally acrobatic: you go up without a net, you may lay a net down while you're in the air. I felt this with what started out to be a shallowly clever post about Clinton the black president and Obama the Jewish president. I wanted a nice link for the Clinton part, found Toni Morrison, and saw something that wasn't shallow, the idea of defining Clinton's metaphorical blackness in terms of his metaphorical persecution, which then applied pari passu to the metaphorically Jewish, persecuted Obama.

None other than Thers, as it happened, was thinking about a related issue, the distinct kinds of hatred projected by right-wingers on the First Ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, and these fit a kind of mirror image of the schema: Michelle is hated with the classical anti-black racism, in exclusive terms of her body, and Hillary in the pattern of anti-Semitism, in terms of her supposedly calculating and conspiratorial mind. Now the idea starts to get pretty serious.

A famous idea from structural anthropology is that of the floating signifier, the sign-object detached from its meaning but still pregnant with a kind of meaningfulness that you can't grasp, like the figures in surrealist painting, or clever advertising. Is this a case of a floating signified, a content wandering from expression to expression, racism from race to race?

Tea and psychopathy

I have been totally fascinated by this on the subject of the Wall Street meltdown that brought us to our present unpleasant situation; an elaborate hypothesis on what made it happen is that the "chaotic nature of the modern corporation", with its "rapid change, constant renewal", and ruthless turnover, stopped the boards and other responsible parties from noticing that the companies were being rapidly taken over by charming, charismatic, psychopaths.

Psychopaths who seemed to them not just normal, but "ideal leaders".

This psychopath, the Persian king Xerxes, has a soft spot--he's in love with his tree. I love how the music is heartrendingly beautiful and hilarious at the same time because of the repeated word vegetabile. The YouTubist has thoughtfully provided the aria's one-sentence text so we can follow it.

Psychopaths whose... [jump]

Tikkun for a ride

Can't seem to get away from this speech of Romney's, where he is castigating Obama for his grandiose promises:

“I’ve been watching some clips of President Obama, then candidate Obama, when he was going across Iowa four years ago,” Romney said. “And the promises were just non-stop of all the great thing [sic*] he was going to do: heal the nation, bring us together, repair the nation and repair the world.”

Which is of course not an accurate report of promises that the president made, but you knew that already. What's important about what Romney says--unless he really does have some fascinating brain ailment, which I don't really believe--is what he is trying to do with language, the effect he is trying to make, and here it's that phrase "repair the world".

If I understand it correctly, what Romney is up to now is pretty bizarre, and probably a good deal more evil than we have imagined, as detailed below the fold...

*This is particularly weird in its own right--as far as Dr. Google and I can figure, every single source in the whole world that quotes this has the same error except for one rush transcript from CNN--and not one either says anything snarky (like about how hypnotized our royal-court stenographers are) or silently corrects it. Does it mean something?

I'm sure that lots of people besides me, like the Kossack commenters to the source linked above, or the great Steve Benen, have recalled that "repairing the world" has a particular meaning and resonance; that it is the normal translation for Hebrew tikkun olam, the obligation of every Jew to make a positive response to what you might call the Melville problem:

Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. 

It's not anything like the first time Obama has been associated with Jewishness; indeed, only a couple of days before the Romney speech, on New Year's Eve, Rabbi Steven Bob published an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post calling him the "tikkun olam president"--

It’s refreshing how genuinely and naturally our president relates to the Jewish community. He mentions by name responsibilities like tikkun olam, the Jewish tradition of working to repair the world, and then talks from the heart about his belief in the same. He discusses the concept of “hineini” – “Here I am” – not only because he thinks giving an unexpected d’var Torah makes for a good speech, but because he subscribes to the values those prophetic words represent.

And last September, John Heilemann in New York Magazine famously suggested that Obama is actually our "first Jewish president". Heilemann, of course, is mainly trying to clarify to the world that Obama is a fervent supporter of Israel and that Binyamin Netanyahu is a schmuck. But the idea of Obama as Jewish president goes back much further than that: to Abner Mikva and the 2008 campaign.

I agree that there is something Jewish about Obama in the way there was something African-American about Bill Clinton (Toni Morrison, 1998). With Clinton it was that smooth, charmed way of letting you know that he knew when there was jive in the air, coming out of someone else's lips or his own, and then the extraordinary way he was mistreated--boy'd and uppity'd, regarded as a rapacious rapist and a hamburger glutton, and, as David Broder remarked to Sally Quinn, no doubt over cocktails in Georgetown or NW, "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place..." Clarence Thomas may have thought he was the victim of a high-tech lynching but Bill Clinton was subjected to an oh-so-civilized one of pursed lips and sidelong glances, and of course nobody really got hurt (except for all the victims of poverty and injustice and no health insurance that suffered when his programs crashed on the rock of the White Southern Republican party under the so-called leadership of... that putz is back running for something???--I can't help it, I'm still really angry about this!).**

With Obama, it's the irony--whether he's in a tux delivering a comedy routine (for which he may have written a couple of his own jokes!) or wearing a baseball cap on the golf course looking around him in bemusement, and the self-questioning--he thinks he's the only one smart enough to do it, of course. And it is also the mode in which he is discriminated against: not, like Clinton, as nothing more than a big id, but rather as some kind of terrifying superego, the chief Illuminatus of who knows what kind of conspiracy of everybody from bankers to Communists, or going back to Romney, at another rally yesterday,

"I think president Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others," Romney told the crowd.

"What I know is if they do that, they'll substitute envy for ambition, and they'll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God," Romney said, leveling rhetoric at the president that he had not used before.

 Obama the hater of America, Obama the secret socialist, Obama the Rootless Cosmopolitan! When Romney hints at a Jewish Obama, you see, a would-be repairer of the world, he's not talking to you and me, but to those who are prepared to believe in this ugly old story... I'm halfway serious here, you know...

**And yes, I know that Clinton did some very bad things, of which the least forgivable to my mind is maybe the smallest, the despicable execution of Ricky Ray Rector, remembered for being such an innocent in the broad sense that he saved the dessert from his last meal "for later". I have mentioned this problem--the intrinsic wickedness of all politicians, even the ones we love--before, and I hope to begin working through it in another post.