Literary Corner: Ah but I was so much wronger then

One of the most precious things about this piece (from Dersh's interview yesterday with Anderson Cooper) is the implication that 20 years ago, when he was a famous expert in constitutional law, he "didn't do research" whereas now that he's become a disreputable shyster who must publicly announce that he kept his underwear on during a massage and complain that he gets no dinner invitations on Martha's Vineyard, he does it all the time. But it gets better:

I Didn't Do Research Back Then

by Alan J. Dershowitz

I didn't do research
back then, I relied
on what professors said ... 

because that issue
was not presented
in the Clinton impeachment

Everybody knew
that he was charged
with a crime, the issue
is whether it was
a hard crime

Now the issue is
whether a crime
or criminal-like behavior
is required. I've done
the research now --

I wasn't wrong,
I am just
far more correct
now than I was then

There's some semiotic interest in the way two legitimate arguments whimper in the corner of this poem, like captured slaves being put to unspeakable uses, the arguments that "high crimes and misdemeanors" need not be statutory crimes on the one hand—there wasn't even any Federal statute law at the time the Constitution was written, so the Founders plainly couldn't have meant that—and statutory crimes aren't necessarily impeachable on the other. Both these things are indeed true, and "a lot of people don't know that" as Trump would say, but they don't do the thing he's trying to say they do.

That is, what Dershowitz said in 1998

"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime," he said on "Larry King Live" at the time.

is certainly true, period, although the use of the term "technical" is pretty annoying—I'm assuming that he means a crime defined by a particular statute, but "well, technically it was a crime" is an expression used to minimize the criminality, as in the case of Trump's blocking of congressionally mandated spending in the Ukraine shakedown (though it's a crime that has never been punished). This is directly relevant to the Clinton impeachment, when Dershowitz was speaking publicly in defense of the president. He put it more intelligently and usefully in an interview with the Washington Post during Clinton's Senate trial in January 1999:

Prof. Dershowitz, this trial has been called both a legal and political proceeding. What do you see it as. And how do you regard yourself, as a legal or political actor?

Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz: None of the above. I think this is a constitutional proceeding that should not be legalistic, nor should it be crassly political. The central point is whether the allegations, if true, constitute treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.

To answer that question, we don't need testimony about who touched who where, but rather about the intent of the framers, the nature of our constitutional system and the criteria for removal of the president. This should not be a trial in the legal or political sense. It should be a great constitutional debate about the meaning of our system of checks and balances.

Since Clinton's misbehavior (giving false testimony to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky) did not have any relationship to his performance of his official duties, and wasn't even related to the case he was testifying in (it was Kenneth Starr's grand jury, which was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater land deal and had ended up investigating his relationship with Paula Jones instead), it could hardly be considered a "high" crime, and arguably wasn't a crime at all, not even "technically":

I am not a strong personal supporter of President Clinton [LOL, he's still using that]. I am a strong opponent of the misuse of the impeachment and removal power against him. I do not think he committed the technical crime of perjury, but nor do I think that he has shown himself to be an honest person.

In that, I guess, perjury is supposed to be when you tell a lie that's material to the matter you're testifying about, and this wasn't.

Were President Clinton to be removed, I believe this would be the first case in Anglo-American history of impeachment and removal of anyone, ever, for trying to cover up and even lying about a consensual sexual encounter. It would legitimate sexual McCarthyism and make sex a weapon in the political wars. The closest precedent we have is the House Judiciary Committee refusing to impeach President Nixon for committing perjury in his filing of a fraudulent tax return. Nixon's actions were closer to being governmental, since they involved the tax deductibility of government papers, but a bipartisan vote ruled that it was too close to the personal side to warrant impeachment.

Well put! And these are exactly the points he is skipping over in his defense of Trump: what Trump unarguably did in regard to the Zelenskyy government—and as we keep being told, there's no dispute on the facts—may or may not be a violation of this or that criminal statute, but it certainly involved the bending of US foreign policy to gratify Trump's personal urgencies, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 65,

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

You can certainly argue that it's made up of statutory crimes (criminal bribery, wire fraud, obstruction of justice) anyway, as Schiff persuasively did last month, to say nothing of all kinds of plainly illegal "misdemeanors" like his retaliation against Maria Yovanovitch, for which any CEO in a US business could be fired, or the defiance of Congress in withholding Ukraine funds, recently declared illegal by the GAO, but nobody can argue that it isn't "criminal-like". It's as criminal-like as it gets.

Oh, Bama! Can this really be the end?

Forget Caligula and Commodus; the best model for the Emperor Trump reign would be Alfred Jarry's fictional Ubu, as suggested here in a poster for a 2013 production of the play by Colorado's Tin Roof Productions (which I think never actually took place, wheels within wheels, poster via Cargo Collective)

Now the senator came down here
Showing ev’ryone his gun
Handing out free tickets
To the wedding of his son
An’ me, I nearly got busted
An’ wouldn’t it be my luck
To get caught without a ticket
And be discovered beneath a truck

I thought months ago I'd be using this headline today, just for fun, without imagining we'd be living in the anxiety-dream dread of "Memphis Blues Again". Now here we are, the day after the president-elect signaled his intention to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and cut the budgets of the Transportation, Justice, and State departments, Commerce and Energy, The Hill reports, in the aim of reducing federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

Wait, really? Given that those five departments spent something $69.7 billion, $35 billion, $27.7 billion, $9.4 billion, and $24.5 billion in 2016 respectively (the NEA at $148 million and NEH $147.9 million are practically invisible in this breakdown, less than 0.02% of the budget as a whole), cutting them out completely wouldn't get close to savings like that—more like $1.6 trillion over the ten years. And they're not getting cut to anywhere near that extent, so any savings there are going to be basically trivial. Of course the plan doesn't touch the big-spending agencies (Defense, Medicare, and Medicaid). Meanwhile the tax plan adds $7 trillion to the 10-year accumulation of debt (according to that leftist organ Forbes Magazine). This is not going to work, folks.

Mazel Tov, Bob!

Harold Keller, 1963, The Four Seasons. I can't believe I found this picture, which I literally remember seeing, this or its twin in a sequence of interrelated paintings beginning with a representational image of women standing in a subway car, when it was new.

My first experience of the music of Bob Dylan was connected with politics, in a fun way, at the end of August 1964, in Saratoga Springs, NY:

Cheap shots 8/3

Rick Santorum is back! At least for a visit. And commenting on the Jerry Sandusky case, about which as you can imagine he knows quite a lot. Or at least as he can imagine, and does. Via Minjae Park at Washington Monthly,

In an interview with Dallas-Ft. Worth’s KSKY 660 AM on Friday, Santorum, a Penn State alum, called the evidence “pretty darn thin” and said, “I’m sort of sitting back and waiting for the facts to out as opposed to, at least as I’m being told, a version of the facts.”

Speculation is that he thought Sandusky was a priest.

Romney, explaining why Jewish Israelis are more prosperous than Palestinian Palestinians, at breakfast in Jerusalem:

"And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognise the power of at least culture and a few other things," the presumptive Republican candidate told his audience. He cited a climate of innovation, the Jewish history of thriving in adversity and the "hand of providence".

Sounds an awful lot to me like, "You people are just so good with money." But it took the Arabs to call him out for racism.

"Not so sure about those krep--those krep--those dumpling thingies, they wouldn't have any chopped Christian baby in that, would they? Get 'em at 7-11?"

Attack of the killer snails: the giant African land snail, achatina fulica, has been invading the Americas—well, South America and Florida, anyway—according to BBC News.

In one Colombian town alone, Buenaventura, more than eight tonnes of snails have been collected since an invasion began two years ago. In Ecuador the problem is so widespread that they have been found in half of the country's 24 provinces, including the Galapagos Islands.

In the fields, they are an agricultural nuisance. In the cities, they clutter up the sidewalks and rip the stucco off houses. Such is the density with which they congregate at the height of an invasion, that they have even been known to cause slicks on highways.

The good news would be that they are not likely to give you eosinophilic meningitis—

The parasite that causes eosinophilic meningitis is called rat lungworm (angiostrongylus cantonensis). It has evolved to use snails as hosts and also spends part of its life cycle in a rat's blood system and brain.

After a rat eats an infected snail, thousands of worms - up to 60mm long - may grow in its brain. In human brains, it seems the worms cannot find their way out again. The worms soon die, but this causes a huge immune reaction and brain swelling.

—unless you hunker down and eat one. The bad news is, we already have rat lungworms anyway, in tiny slugs that can hide out in inadequately washed lettuce.

The BBC says you don't see them this big any more—just an inch or two. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Ruy Almeida.

I don't feel as sorry as I might for Jonah Lehrer, the youthful science writer at the New Yorker who was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotations and lost his job, horrible as that must be, because if you want to fabricate Dylan you should at least make it sound interesting:

“But then,” Mr. Lehrer wrote, “just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. ‘It’s a hard thing to describe,’ Dylan would later remember. ‘It’s just this sense that you got something to say.’ ”

I mean, what the hell kind of Dylan quote is that? That's not Dylan, that's any soulful guitar player in Long Island showing up on NPR to pimp his first album. Dylan doesn't say he finds something "hard to describe," and if he has something to say he doesn't talk about saying it.

"Yaz," said Bobby, looking up innocently, "it would be a hard thing for you to describe, but that's only because you're so fucked up. Do you realize that man in the only animal that looks in the mirror and sees something that isn't there?"

Like, gnomic.