Conqueror Worm

Via Fritzi, Mae Busch in Rupert Hughes's Souls For Sale, 1923.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "Cory Booker Finds His Moment", 18 March 2019:

If you're tired of violent, angry demagogues like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, you should be glad that Cory Booker is in the race, because although he's another socialist, so I couldn't actually vote for him myself, he is patriotic, religious, and grateful, which is what I need on my TV in this unpleasant moment. 

Comically, he doesn't provide any evidence that Booker is grateful, only that he should be, because his "family story" is a "success story", unlike Donald Trump or Kamala Harris I guess:

Support for Israel is critical

Because if it's not critical, it's just codependent enabling.

One thing the two Jennifer Rubins have in common: an association with screaming. Bad Jennifer Rubin makes me scream with rage, Good Jennifer Rubin starred in Screamers (1995).

Jennifer, Jennifer...

The Iran deal is as big a threat to Israel as any event since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Well, good, I guess that's not much of a threat. I mean the Yom Kippur War took 19 days, took place almost entirely off Israeli soil and brought no civilian casualties, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, and brought Egypt to the negotiating table for Israel's first peace agreement with an Arab country just three years later. Is that the threat, that peace might break out?

The American people as a whole by a large majority oppose it

Unless you ask the question a different way, in which case they support it—as I can't believe you don't know; that's an out-and-out lie.

Superheroes

I'm so opposed to political personality cults that it's almost as crazy as belonging to one; I really want my politicians to have feet of clay—give me Danton over Robespierre and over your precious Marquis de Lafayette too, any time.

So when I first started hearing about Cory Booker, the perfect candidate, coming out of Oxford and Yale as a documentary-film hero to get rid of Sharpe James, the wicked old scoundrel mayor of Newark, New Jersey, I was skeptical: there's no way, I told myself, that anybody this precisely configured is not a corporate tool.

But what the hell? When there's a blizzard he's there in person to clear away the snow, when there's a hurricane he  tours the flood-soaked streets, and now he rescues girls from blazing buildings! So I give up.

And then there's the tortured Batman to Booker's sunny Superman, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Dark Knight of the noblest aspirations and the most suspect methods; I expect him to be up to no good and he keeps doing things I approve of, absolutely behind my back. Now, unable to persuade the state legislature to set up the health insurance exchange required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he's just gone and taken care of it himself. I'll take it!

Ethnic superheroes. From Light-Skinned-ed Girl.