Trumpfendämmerung

We've often enjoyed seeing politicians' language as a performance of poetry, but today could be the first time I've seen it as opera. But it really is:

[This is the only really good performance I could find of the exact sequence I was looking for from Aida act 1, from the naming of young Radamès as general to go meet the invading Ethiopian army and the cries of "Ritorna vincitor!" (Come back victorious!) to the Ethiopian slave girl Aida gradually realizing that her secret lover Radamès will be working to kill her royal father and brothers and asking the gods to take pity on her in her ambivalence. Video and sound from 1966 not great, sorry, but the musicians including Leyla Gencer as the heroine are doing a fantastic job.]

The curtain rises, the emperor Don Donaldo (tenor) is holding his formal levée in the presence of the whole court including his most senior legislative advisers, La Pelosina (contralto) and Chuck (bass-baritone), and his lieutenant Michele di Pence, the Stone Guest (mime), and he sings, plangently, of the grandeur of his wall, which may or may not exist (that is, in fact it doesn't exist, but he's only sporadically aware of this, as of a pizza that still hasn't arrived a couple of hours after you ordered it), in his majestic aria, "Se vuoi provare del muro il valor":

If you really want to find out
how effective a wall is,
just ask Israel:
99.9 percent effective

our wall will be
every bit as good as that,
if not better.

So we’ve done a lot
of work on the wall,
a lot of wall is built.
A lot of people don’t know that.
A lot of wall is renovated.

We have walls that were
in very bad condition
and they are now
in A-1 tip-top shape.

And frankly, some wall
has been reinforced
by our military.
The military has done
a fantastic job.

Though something is darkening his pleasure, a sense that his legislative agenda may not be working so well:

Concerned Monsignor is Concerned

California red-legged frog, via Amphibian Facts.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is Very Concerned about the increasing radicalization of the Democratic Party, which has lurched violently to the left on issues such as abortion and immigration:

Consider recent developments in the state of Alabama, where the Republican Party has nominated a Senate candidate manifestly unfit for office, a bigot hostile to the rule of law and entranced with authoritarianism.

And who have the Democrats put up against him? An accomplished former prosecutor, the very model of a mainstream Democrat — and a man who told an interviewer after his nomination that he favors legal abortion, without restriction, right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Doug Jones, up against Ten Commandments idolator Roy Moore in the race to fill the Senate seat of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, favors legal abortion without restriction right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb?

Stinkeroo

Nancy: "He can't use chopsticks, can he?" Chuck: "He can't use judgment." Via New York Daily News.

I can't really stand to write about the congressional health care agita unless I can see a glimmer of hope somewhere, and it's obviously been looking very bleak for the last week or two over there and getting bleaker, reaching a kind of climax of awfulness yesterday, when Lamar Alexander of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee announced he was giving up on the bipartisan bill he and Patty Murray had been working on to keep the Obamacare marketplace going through another year, just as it had started to sound like a negotiating breakthrough, and the project of saving the PPACA that had seemed so hopeful a week or two ago was dead.

Then there was something weird about that: according to the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin (yes, in this brave new world I can be reduced from time to time to quoting Jennifer Rubin, and retweeting David Frum too), it wasn't an inability to bridge that partisan divide that had killed the Alexander-Murray bill, it was Majority Leader McConnell:

Prime Minister Pelosi

In the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, received from Emperor Akihito in May 2015.

So Schumer is now Lord Chancellor of the Exchecquer, and Pelosi is Prime Minister, or something like that, presenting his imperial majesty with a fiscal program while Ryan and McConnell bite their lips in frustrated rage. Trump's decided to accept a deal in which the debt ceiling is raised (just enough to last three months) and current spending levels are maintained, and there's $8 billion for the victims of Hurricane Harvey, just a few hours after Ryan announced that that deal couldn't be done (he and McConnell want something much longer-term so that Democrats won't have any leverage with them until after the 2018 elections).

All right on schedule, and foreseeable from the day the Senate Republicans couldn't pass that stupid last-ditch health bill, if not earlier. The Republicans are really broken as a parliamentary party now, and getting anything real done in Congress is going to require not just Democratic votes, as we've started understanding, but Democratic leadership.

BooMan is seeing it this way too, at least in part: we shouldn't be seeing Schumer as some kind of genius negotiator, he emphasizes, and still less Trump, because this deal was inevitable from the moment Ryan and McConnell sold Trump the intrinsically doomed idea of beginning the term with the repeal of Obamacare followed by a big tax reform:

The attention he desperately needs, continued

That last post was about to go somewhere interesting, I think, but kind of missed its bus. It's surely true that we shouldn't be judging politicians harshly for needing attention ("And after all, isn't it something we all need?"), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be judging them on the subject at all ("And aren't they trying to get it by being good?" Not all of them, Sunshine!).

"Tony Bennett, attention whore" from the somewhat eccentric, not to say appropriately named, Diary of a Mad Person

The naked neediness on Chuck Schumer's face as I saw it in 1998 is a part of who he is and how he's as effective as he is, [jump]

The attention he desperately needs

The phrase was used by Mara Liasson on NPR this morning, and to be understood as horse race language--for the attention that will come to a candidate if he gets more votes relative to some other candidate than she was expecting him to, which will apparently contribute to his getting still more votes somewhere else; the desperation would be at the thought of not getting those votes, of being no longer "in the running", and it doesn't sound like the right word, at least as long as you don't think about the money at stake, and I don't think these very high rollers habitually do.

But it made me think of a humbler context,[jump]