Joe Did What? Annals of Rhetoric

Charleston Mercury, February 16, 1861. Mr. Bret Stephens was not available to complain about how unkind and divisive Lincoln had been, so they had to do it themselves. Reminds me of Biden how they complain that Lincoln doesn't feed the press often enough and that he's an 'indecent old man".

The other day, I was comparing Biden's September 1 speech to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union, and the Four Freedoms peroration. Today, Mr. Bret Stephens, stealing a David Brooks lede ("With Malice Toward Quite a Few"), decides to up the ante:

Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation, to those who deserved it least.

Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces, Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens of millions of Americans as the enemy within.

(First sentence in the second paragraph is screaming for an editor: an expression in Biden's inaugural address is not a feature of last week's speech—at some point in composing the sentence he decided it was about all of Biden's speeches, but was too lazy to reread the first seven words.)

Noteworthy, as Erik Loomis says, that Stephens is now agreeing that the Republican Party is the Confederacy. I mean, why else would he be urging Biden to treat the former the way Lincoln treated the latter? 

What's Happening

Via @Accountabilabud.

Say, what's Mr. Bret Stephens up to these days? Just joining Donald Trump and Glenn Greenwald in a take about how smart President Putin is and how everything is going according to plan ("What If Putin Didn't Miscalculate?"):

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

Putin's just adopting the geopolitics of the Trump Doctrine: Wars are OK if you get to keep the oil. Thus proving that he's "smarter", as Trump would say, than Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. 

Of course Mr. Bret has already been proven fundamentally wrong, since as it turns out Russia is not withdrawing its forces from north and west at all, just lying, as usual.

So I've spent much of the day assembling what I was thinking of as more interesting arguments for why Stephens is wrong in his interpretation of what Putin is doing, and it immediately turns out he's wrong because Putin isn't doing that. The illustration above was meant to show how leaving the assaults in Kiev and Chernohiv in favor of a focus on the southeast wouldn't have gotten the Russians dominance over the energy reserves,  because that's not where the energy reserves are—if Russia is refocusing its efforts away from the northern part of the country between Kyiv and Sumy where they've been steadily losing ground, and to the east of the imaginary line from Kharkiv to Mariupol where they've been steadily gaining it, they're hardly adding anything to the oil and gas field they already control, in Crimea and the the two mini-republics; what remains of that enormous shale-gas field is in the Dniepr basin which Russians have scarcely approached (with a very big portion of it clear over the border in Belarus), and there's another huge oil and gas basin in the the very far west, in the foothills of the Carpathians, which Russians clearly won't go near. But then that's not what Putin is doing anyway, so what's the point?

Which is how things have been going for the blog in recent weeks, in case you're wondering why I haven't been posting much. Nearly everything I start turns boring as I'm writing it. Not only with respect to Ukraine but the various Trump investigations, and the criminality of Clarence Thomas, and so forth. Everything, really. My fascinating take turns into somebody's premature cliché. Anyway, sorry.

Dud

Mr. Bret Stephens is just such a hack ("The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks"):

This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.

Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.

"Bombshell indictment" is a matter of perspective, but readers would be better prepared to judge for themselves if Stephens would reveal exactly what Danchenko is alleged to have lied about and how many lies he told, but Stephens only says he is

Isms don't kill people. Or maybe they do.

 

It's so weird for writers like Bret Stephens to try to warn us that "antiracism divides the world into racial identities" when all its iconography looks like this. From "4 Lessons on Anti-Racism from Brené Brown and Ibram X. Kendi", Illustration by Angelina Bambina/Adobe Stock via Mindful.

The overall funniest thing about Mr. Bret Stephens ("Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup") trying to explain the "antiracism" concept to his readers is his serene confidence that he can do it without reading anything on the subject (spoiler: he can't), but I very much like the way he falls into this interesting rhetorical sandpit on his way:

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided it’s in the name of righting past wrongs.

He's interested in the concept of individual autonomy, but he can't talk about any individuals, only what isms do, believing, scoffing, dividing, being determined, finding things offensive, welcoming things.

Curate's Egg

 

Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr Jones!"; The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!" "True Humility" by George du Maurier, originally published in Punch, 9 November 1895, via Wikipedia.

Jordan in comments yesterday insisting that, even though Bret Stephens must have been wrong about what happened in the 2016 primary campaign, something did after all happen, and it was important:

that the 2016 Republican primaries were a fundamentally transformative moment in American Conservatism, like the Counter-Reformation, with Trump as Martin Luther -- suddenly, the conflict between scripture and practice wasn't tenable any more, and the voters rebelled (for real, unlike the fake, astroturf "rebellion" of the Tea Party period, but borrowing the same frameworks), followed by the politicians, who were dragged hopelessly along until they awakened to the possibilities that the Trump movement had opened and became true-believers (like Goebbels and other Third Reich figures).

I'm not so crazy about the Reformation analogy, with its implication that Trump had an idea (let alone 95 of them). I've used the Hitler analogy, of course, with a different emphasis, thinking about the surprise the German conservatives got when the idiot to whom they'd offered the chancellorship turned out not to be controllable. 

Goodbye Principled What?

Illustration by Alex Cai via Streak Club.

Say, what's in this barrel ("Goodbye Principled Conservatism" by Bret Stephens)? It appears to be full of fish!

How did the conservative movement reach this pass? Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. But the tipping point arrived on a precise date: July 20, 2015. That was the day Rush Limbaugh came to Trump’s political rescue after the developer nearly self-immolated with his remark that John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, refusing early release at the price of gruesome torture, should not be considered a war hero.

I don't know, I'd go for 1957 myself:

In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Why don't conservatives care about manners any more?

Cotton Mouth

"Treason Memorial: The Portrait of Tom Cotton" by Daniel Edwards, 2015, when Cotton and 46 other Republican senators violated the Logan Act by going over President Obama's head to attempt negotiating directly with Ayatollah Khamenei, depicting "the life-size head of Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton looking seditiously ahead, beneath the looming representation of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who appears to have a sly and divisive smile. Etched below is a ‘U.S. seal of treason,’ featuring the bald eagle, scornful and glaring with its back turned away, accompanied by text which describes the offense committed by the 47 senators." Via Send2Press Newswire.

The battle over Senator Tom Cotton's fascist piece calling for the deployment of federal troops across the country in an "overwhelming show of force" against the "orgy of violence" perpetrated by "left-wing radicals like antifa" and their "thrill-seeking rich" allies in "exotic cars" continues even after James Bennett's departure, and The Times is presenting more commentary. Here's Mr. Bret Stephens:

In the week of the Op-Ed’s publication, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Americans favored deploying troops to help quell violent unrest in American cities. That’s not a political fringe unworthy of consideration. And Tom Cotton isn’t some nobody you’ll never hear from again. He has the pulse of his party, the ear of the president and an eye on higher office. Readers deserve an unvarnished look at who this man is and what he stands for.

LOL, "unvarnished". That's the issue right there. Cotton's prose is so varnished you could just about stand it up on a pedestal in the Arkansas capitol and call for it to be removed as a fraudulent glorification of the racist or (as the case may be) treasonous past. An unvarnished look would have to come from a pitiless reporter, not from the man himself, who's as curated as a presidential library.

Innocence of Presumption

Moving goalposts, via.

I know you're all sick of Mike Flynn by now but Mr. Bret Stephens ("Michael Flynn and the Presumption of Guilt") piping up to put his imprimatur on the worst version of the "Flynn is innocent" canard in his most offensively bland "just asking questions" manner really has to be fisked.

“Damn right, exactly right,” the fired, retired three-star general said in answer to audience chants of “lock her up.” “And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what [Hillary Clinton] did, I would be in jail today.” This was said by a man who, as a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and top foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump, had already taken $45,000 from the K.G.B. regime in Moscow and would later take $530,000 from the Islamist regime in Ankara as an unregistered foreign agent. If Flynn had been prosecuted, judged and sentenced according to his own moral arithmetic, he’d be behind bars today.

Fortunately he isn’t, because sleazy behavior isn’t the same as criminal conduct.

Way to sneak in the suggestion that Hillary Clinton probably is guilty of some moral equivalent to bagging over $5 million (i.e., ten times Flynn's acknowledged $530K)  as an unauthorized foreign agent without bothering to say what you think it might be. And the suggestion that what we agree Flynn did is just sleazy behavior, not criminal conduct.

Violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act is a crime. Rick Gates and Paul Manafort, for example, have pleaded guilty to it, among other crimes, and are doing time as we speak. And while Flynn's first legal team negotiated him down to more lying in that case—to an uncharged count of filing a false FARA declaration—it is clearly stipulated in the Statement of Offense:

Cure, maybe, but not proof that capitalism will solve all your problems

Image via Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This week's news of a remarkably successful early trial at the University of Chicago for a possible Covid-19 drug, Gilead's Remdesivir, is really good, let me say that, but I'm not so sure about Mr. Bret Stephens and his panegyric to pharmaceutical profit (The Story of Remdesivir")—

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no big-pharma haters in pandemics. Last year, Elizabeth Warren wrote that “giant drug companies only care about one thing: raking in profits on the backs of patients.” I wonder if the Massachusetts senator would have the nerve to say that to [Gilead clinical research head Diana] Brainard and every other private-sector scientist laboring to find cures under the intense strain of this global emergency.

—and their beneficent employers,

profit-seeking companies operating in fiercely competitive and well-regulated marketplaces. Whatever the fate of remdesivir or any other drug, one lesson from this pandemic is how dependent we are for our survival on an innovative and robust pharmaceutical industry. Maybe we should do more as a country to cultivate it than tear it down.

As a matter of fact, Gilead has had plenty of cultivation from our federal government, in particular with respect to Remdesivir, starting with the CDC in 2014 pulling it out of a "library" of some 1000 possible antiviral compounds the company had been patenting over some decades, as a possible treatment for Ebola, refined with the full collaboration and financial support of the the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) whose scientists did the actual testing of the drug's effectiveness in cell cultures and 100 rhesus monkeys who all survived the disease.

Notes from the commentariat continued

Eli Valley's Passover cartoon (Gut yom tov!) featuring Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss.

Then there was Mr. Bret Stephens, complaining about how Big Government is stopping folks from feeding children ("Covid-19 and the Big Government Problem"):

Katie Wilson, a deputy under secretary at the Department of Agriculture in the Obama administration, is the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, a nonprofit that works with the country’s largest school districts to improve the quality of student nutrition. Her topmost concern is with the millions of poorer children and their families for whom school meals are essential to diets and budgets alike.

In this pandemic, she has a message for government bureaucrats in Washington and every state capital: Stop getting in the way.

Note how he makes the Urban School Food Alliance sound like some nice little private thing, "a nonprofit", as opposed to a nonprofit institution that is a pretty big slice of government in its own right, a confederation of (not "with") the nation's 12 largest school districts with an almost billion-dollar budget used to "leverage our purchasing power to continue to drive food quality up and costs down while incorporating sound environmental practices."

Mr. Bret on the Plague

Drawing by Eli Valley, 2 September 2019.

Shorter Bret Stephens: How can we know if the virus is going to kill us all? Surely it's unwise to do anything rash until we're sure! https://t.co/cHk4lZFl5D

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2020

Stephens ("It's Dangerous to Be Ruled by Fear") needs a little fisking. Starting with the way he stakes out a moderate position by accusing both sides of doing it even inside Donald Trump's brain:

Donald Trump’s first instinct when it came to the coronavirus was to dismiss the threat as overblown, over there, and “totally under control.” His second was to use the pandemic as an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills by treating the virus as a threat on par with World War II.

Both reactions were driven by politics, not evidence. The first was unquestionably wrong. The second needs to be questioned aggressively before we impose solutions possibly more destructive than the virus itself.

The World War II analogy has been raised by a bunch of figures, from Bernard Sanders to Joe Scarborough, who are not in fact strongly committed to giving Trump an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills. Trump himself is interested in something like that when he happily agrees to be referred to as a "wartime president", but his ideas of leadership in  World War II are a little foggy:

Yes, Bernie can win. And he's not the only one.

Annette Nancarrow, portrait of a young Mexican girl and mirror, no date, via Rosemary Carstens.

Who is Mr. Bret Stephens warning, or threatening ("Of Course Bernie Can Win"), as the case may be?

The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.

Is he talking to readers? Is he talking to his colleagues in the panditry? The general problem of confusing your desire with your forecast—you could call it the Bill Kristol problem,  because he's the one who made it the cornerstone of his thinking—is mostly more widespread among readers, I think, while typical pandits are more interested in realizing interesting or contrarian "takes" that they don't necessarily believe at all, like this one, which is interesting because the Very Serious People are united in believing Sanders is unelectable.

Is he talking to the staid conservative readers in The Times's audience, trying to spread panic so early in the season, and for what? What does he expect them to do about it? Register as Democrats and work for Biden or Bloomberg to nip the nightmare in the bud?

He's arguing against those who say that Sanders is doomed because he can't get enough votes:

Poor Bret, Foiled Again

Drawing by Caitlin Mavilia.

My unpopular opinion: Mr. Bret Stephens is actually making a sincere and conscious effort to not be a racist in this column ("The Secrets of Jewish Genius") where he explains why the thinking of Ashkenazi Jews is so much more original than other people: because he specifically says, and none of the critics appears to have noticed, that he's not claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than other people, or that it's their (reportedly) genetically transmitted higher IQs that do the trick, or rather not interested in claiming it, because he has a more interesting reason (in his self-estimation) for claiming it, depending on how you work your way through the maze of the key paragraphs:

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

But the “Jews are smart” explanation obscures more than it illuminates. Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.

Let's start with the linked paper, which Stephens cites as evidence that Jews of Central and Eastern European origin really are in fact smarter than other people, but is about something quite different, a hypothetical explanation of the purported difference (as measured by IQ) claiming Jews literally bred for management, as Kiryn Haslinger explained it in Scientific American at the time:

First they came for the obscenely wealthy Times pundits, and I said...

Drawing by Eli Valley. Please do not explain in the comments what "awoke from uneasy dreams" refers to. Those who don't recognize the phrase can refresh their memory here.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter", New York Times, 30 August 2019:

In commemoration of the German invasion of Poland 80 years ago on Sunday, I would like to note, as I often do, how frighteningly similar to those dark days our situation is now: with our rising dictatorships, failure of international organizations to stop them, and Twitter, which is practically the same thing as the Reichs-Rundfunk over which Hitler's propaganda was broadcast to 60 million Germans. Among the more haunting parallels is the dehumanizing rhetoric of infestation, in which people are associated with disease, or compared to bedbugs, of which all the examples I can enumerate seem to come from right-wingers, but I happen to know that the left is even worse.

Or, more precisely,

Mr. Bret blames the Democrats

Library of the Philological Departments, in the still tuition-free FU Berlin, by Norman Foster, 2005.

Shorter Mr. Bret Stephens, "The Democrats Are Not Up To Their Historic Responsibility", 1 August 2019:

Due to circumstances beyond their control, Republicans are unable to provide a Republican candidate for the 2020 presidential election, so Democrats need to step up and offer one. This is their historic responsibility but I am sorry to say they are shirking it. Perfectly respectable Republicans like that guy Delaney and that other guy seek the Democratic nomination but are ignored. Instead the entire party seems to be focused on nominating a candidate who disagrees with me on important policy issues. This will not end well.

Besides, we wouldn't just be helping out the Republicans in a pinch, we'd be helping ourselves, because nominating a Republican is the only way we can win. This is proven by the fact that in the Democrats' 2018 capture of the House some of the seats were won by candidates who were more conservative than some of the other ones.

Steve was all over this silly column first thing in the morning, so I won't dwell. Suffice it to say that no, Democrats don't feel it's their historic obligation to supply Mr. Bret with somebody to vote for, because we disagree with him and everything he stands for.

But I particularly liked this:

I do not admire anyone embracing the bad idea of free college. The surest way to strip nearly anything of its value is to make it free.

Yes indeed. This is why Oxford and Cambridge, the Sorbonne and the Freie Universität Berlin and the Cooper Union in New York have become such despised places.

What Do the Simple Folk Think?

"What part of 'ordinary people' do you not understand?"

What conclusions, Mr. Bret Stephens would like to know, should "ordinary people" draw from the first round of Democratic debates last week, as to what Democrats stand for?

Here’s what: a party that makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us.

They speak Spanish. We don’t. They are not U.S. citizens or legal residents. We are. They broke the rules to get into this country. We didn’t. They pay few or no taxes. We already pay most of those taxes. They willingly got themselves into debt. We’re asked to write it off. They don’t pay the premiums for private health insurance. We’re supposed to give up ours in exchange for some V.A.-type nightmare. They didn’t start enterprises that create employment and drive innovation. We’re expected to join the candidates in demonizing the job-creators, breaking up their businesses and taxing them to the hilt.

Unfortunately readers didn't all recognize that that was an op-editorial "we", and stumbled into thinking Bret Stephens was himself an ordinary voter, which was just beastly of them!

Notes from the Gawker spawn

Nothing says "perfect candidate to lead the most powerful nation in the world" like "I have no empathy"

— The Mars Travolta (@Anarchopriapism) May 3, 2019

So Mr. Bret Stephens ("Dear Millennials: The Feeling Is Mutual") has taken offense at @anarchopriapism, a 20-year-old from Northern Ireland with 258 followers in her Twitter account (that's up from 64 since Mr. Bret's column came out), and her suggestion that it would be a good thing for the leader of the most powerful nation in the world to able to experience empathy

My own reactionary reaction was different. O.K., I thought, I could definitely vote for Joe — provided he has the mettle to stand his ground.

Though Mr. Bret doesn't actually come out and explain what's wrong with empathy, or empathy for the younger generation, or empathy for

Socialist Surrealism

Drawing most likely from the time of Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel,  1910-12, though the city had two more of them, from  1916 to 1940 and 1948 to 1960. Via Milwaukee Independent.

Six weeks ago there was presidential candidate-flirt Michael Bloomberg:

Speaking with reporters after a second New Hampshire event, Bloomberg was asked about the wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. He said the presidential contender's plan was potentially unconstitutional, and compared it to socialism. "It's called Venezuela," he added.

Only there are no wealth taxes in Venezuela.

Then around the same time there was Mr. Bret Stephens, economic theologian, laying down the catechism of orthodox socialism ("Yes, Venezuela is a Socialist Catastrophe"):

Winston

It's well known that all babies look like Winston Churchill, but the resemblance is even more amazing when they actually are Winston Churchill. Photo via somebody's Pinterest.

Mr. Bret Stephens suggesting a new biography for our Christmas reading, Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Walker, as "an antidote to the reigning conceits, self-deceptions, half-truths and clichés of our day":

For instance: Being born into “privilege” is ipso facto a privilege.

For Churchill — who suffered as a child under the remote glare of contemptuous father and a self-indulgent mother; fought valiantly in four wars by the time he was 25; and earned his own living through prodigious literary efforts that ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize — the main privilege was the opportunity to bear up under the immense weight of inner expectation that came with being born to a historic name.

It's true that Churchill's careers in the military and politics didn't pay him enough to live in the style to which he accustomed himself, as Alan Livsey/Financial Times wrote in his review of David Lough's 2015 No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money:

2018 Democrats: Too Punk?

Stainless Steel Skull Skeleton Head Tongue Ring going for £1.05 from ebay.co.uk.

Fearless anti-Trumper Mr. Bret Stephens complaining that these young Democrats in the ongoing millennium ("Democrats Are Blowing It, Again") are just too goddamned punk:

Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.”

“If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.”

(Kelly wrote that in 1996 in his debut column as the liberal-hating editor of even-the-liberal New Republic; Stephens's link is to a Maureen Dowd eulogy in which she manages to mention that she once bought Kelly a couch, but doesn't say if it was a fainting couch.)

He seems to really mean to move beyond concern trolling, too—he's suggesting he really wants Democrats to win in November: