For the Record: Cheap Shots

Married father of four and notorious pickup artist Corey Lewandowski, left, catches 'em all. How does he do it? Sheer Republican animal magnetism. "Mrs. Odom stated that over the course of the dinner, Mr. Lewandowski tried to hold her hand, and she pushed his hand away. He touched her leg, and she moved it away. He grabbed her napkin off her lap and tried to touch her leg again, and she pulled her dress over her leg, to move his hand away and cover her skin," Odom’s attorney wrote in the statement. "He touched her back and she tried to get away," the statement continued. "He described an area where he was sore from a workout, on the side of his butt, but he demonstrated this by touching her there—on the upper side of her rear end. Lewandowski tried to touch her approximately 10 times, and Mrs. Odom always rebuffed him." (Politico; composite photo via New York Post.)

I too was surprised by reports of Corey Lewandowski admitting to stabbing murders in the course of his amorous pursuit of Mrs. Trashelle Odom at a Republican fundraiser, in defiance of efforts to restrain him on the part of Governor Noem, who may be or have been his girlfriend, until I heard the event was held at a Benihana's:

"Hey, I'm pretty good with knives too," said Corey. "I've killed some guys." pic.twitter.com/kRwwUdR9Ex

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 3, 2021

More weekend miscellanea below the fold.

Drumbeat of Derision

 

Shorter David Frum ("What the Never Trumpers Want Now"):

Sadly, the Trumpery has turned us loyally principled Republicans into political exiles, with nowhere to go. I'd love to move in to the Democratic camp, but it isn't really suitable for a loyally principled Republican as it is. Frankly, it's almost as bad as Trump. Can't you fix it up a little? Here is my list of demands.

Well, no, that isn't exactly what he says. In the first place he's not so ill-mannered as to make it all about himself. What he says is more along the concern-troll lines of claiming that Democrats won the 2018 and 2020 elections, to the extent they did win them, because of anti-Trump Republicans coming over to their side, and if Democrats want to keep winning they must rely on those guys rather than on a "base-first strategy", because the Democrats' is "not coherent or big enough".

The former cultural core of the GOP is exiting the party. The Democrats should keep those voters in their corner....

By "former cultural core" he means "the college-educated, the professional, the suburban", which "will, if permitted, realign American politics",  and he offers five ideas for things Democrats could do to hang onto them:

1. Campaign on Republican vote suppression and gerrymandering instead of Democratic programs to improve people's lives: 

Zek Your Privilege

Gulag prisoners, via.They didn't suffer in vain! They suffered so that David Frum could feel good about himself!

John Holbo (2003) on David Frum (1994):

... if it is good for the poor and middle-class to suffer and toil, surely it would do the well-to-do some good as well. We could stiffen upper-classes spines quick by raising the top tax bracket to, say, 95%, while firing all the cops, letting all the criminals out of jail, giving them guns, and busing them to the richest neighborhoods before letting them go. Not a good idea, obviously, but a lot of rich people would learn a lot of important, genuinely meaningful life lessons..

It's from a rant (via Brad DeLong's substack) on Frum's book, Dead Right, in the phase of his life when he was an ordinary Canadian opinionator/thinktank twit, before his bizarre irruption into "public service" as a Bush speechwriter, on the subject of how Frum can't possibly believe the things he believes he believes, as a representative conservative, like the way the Dostoevskian idea of how we can be ennobled by suffering, like the cannibal heroes of the Donner Party or the zeks of the Stalin-era gulag, gets transmuted into the idea that the function of the state is to ennoble people by making welfare payments too small for people to live on.

Frum can't possibly believe that that Stalinism is good, right? Because it's responsible for the ennoblement of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his fellow political prisoners? But when Frum wishes liberal government would be more austere because that would be morally good for the beneficiaries

Deep in the weeds with John Bolton

James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in Henry Koster's Harvey (1950). Via.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath & reread the John Bolton remarks. He did not in fact accuse the Obama administration of hacking.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 12, 2016

Uh, OK, let's see...

BOLTON: It's not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation.

Quite right in the first place, it's not the case that he accused anybody of mounting a false flag operation (stealing the parties' emails to make it look as if Russians had been stealing the emails, apparently, with no theories on why they would want to do that). He merely didn't not accuse them. It isn't clear to him that they didn't do it, but he isn't saying they did, he's just sayin. The Douthat technique of making you think a potentially slanderous thought without taking responsibility for it.

And then,

Are you actually accusing someone here in this administration of trying -- in the intelligence community of trying to throw something?

BOLTON: We just don't know, but I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.

Quite right in the second place. He couldn't be accusing anybody of doing something when he couldn't say whether it had been done or not, but he fingers the guilty party just in case. Can't say if there was any false flag operation but knows who did it.

And thus Frum is absolutely right: Bolton did not say that the administration had carried out a false flag maneuver, but he made sure that's what we heard all the same. He didn't say it with the most exquisite care you could well apply to not saying something, the insinuating scum.

The other really weird thing Bolton did that hasn't caught so much attention was his explanation of why he thinks it might have been a false flag operation, which is worth looking at in some analytic detail.

Tout le monde est Charlie, ça finira par ne plus être chic!

On March 8, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip paid an eloquent tribute to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered on January 7, making a loving use of some of their own best images (Christ I love that Benedict XVI) and showing, incidentally, one way of taunting the murderers without strictly violating the Salafist rules against the visual depiction of the Prophet: