Alienation of affectations

Of course four-star sheriff Clarke, with his Soviet-style chestful of fake medals and  murderous record as a jail manager, is literally a worse person than Brooks in most ways. Image via Wonkette.

BREAKING: We have a David Brooks Plagiarism Watch situation ("The Alienated Mind"), where former New York Times columnist David Brooks appears, not for the first time, to be committing the same infraction Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke just got busted for.

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Alienation, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is a “state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

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As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age, “Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Yuval Levin, "Conservatism in an Age of Alienation"

“Alienated” need not be a putrid, Marxist designation. The great twentieth-century sociologist Robert Nisbet defined ­alienation as “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” This is precisely how Trump and many of his most vocal supporters frequently spoke about America over the past year.

What Clarke was busted for being, as you'll recall, that he'd lifted 47 passages from other writers without crediting them (in his 2013 master's thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School), even though he did credit the authors for other passages cited elsewhere in the thesis, which he seemed to think made it all OK: "only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but it seems unlikely that the Naval Postgraduate School ethics guidelines were composed with a political agenda). This is precisely what Brooks does when he presents the Nisbet quote early in the column as if he'd picked it up directly out of Nisbet's 1953 The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom and then, a bit later, cites the source he actually got it from, as if turning spontaneously from the Nisbet book to Levin's article. We've seen Brooks doing this before.

Stay classy, Republicans

Image via The Guardian.

If GOP plays this politically smart they can end any chance that the Dems win the WH in 2016. War is politics carried on by other means.

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) November 14, 2015

They can wait if they like until next November for the actual balloting, but Donald Trump was elected president tonight.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 14, 2015

It's certainly true that terrorism has sometimes been great for Republican poll numbers. Who can forget what happened to George W. Bush's ratings in September 2001?

Via Gallup.

In fact maybe you guys ought to tone that down, given this week's report in Politico on how much the CIA knew in spring 2001 about the coming attacks, and how the Bush administration decided to ignore their warnings. Somebody might start wondering if they ignored the threat—

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

—merely because they were stupid, as we've always thought, or because they hoped to profit from it. "Play this politically smart," Sheriff Clarke.

Call 911, honey, and I'll put on the popcorn.

Steve M brings to our attention the case of Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, who

declared the charges brought against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray “George Zimmerman and the Duke Lacrosse case all over again” and said “these cops are political prisoners,” offered up as human sacrifices, thrown like red meat to an angry mob” on Friday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.

The name sounded familiar, and, sure enough, I had run across him before, in January 2013. And because he is such a piece of work, and also a possible mayoral candidate, I thought I'd run this post again.

"Mickey Clarke". Image from Milwaukee County First.

Sometimes you run across a character so compelling that you just don't want to let him go, as in the case of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, via ThinkProgress:

I’m Sheriff David Clarke, and I want to talk to you about something personal…your safety. It’s no longer a spectator sport; I need you in the game, but are you ready?

With officers laid-off and furloughed, simply calling 9-1-1 and waiting is no longer your best option. You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back; but are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. We’re partners now. Can I count on you?

I must say I kind of like the idea of my safety as a spectator sport. Could I get a beer? Who did the national anthem? Were there special days when everybody got a free towel? Alas, no more, according to Sheriff Clarke, an African American Rush Limbaugh Democrat, if you know what I mean, and no, neither do I: