Rant

Sock puppets by Darice.

There's this piece of trolling, cited by Steve

And the liberal-hating left is also skeptical -- see, for instance, Jeremy Scahill and Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:

The current discourse on this issue is plagued by partisan gibberish -- there is a disturbing trend emerging that dictates that if you don’t believe Russia hacked the election or if you simply demand evidence for this tremendously significant allegation, you must be a Trump apologist or a Soviet agent.

And half an hour of idiocy from Professor Stephen Cohen on my radio this morning not only rejecting the Russia hacking hypothesis but also praising Trump for his sophisticated understanding of Russia and clever nomination of Exxon/Rosneft CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state (even as he announces that he is no supporter of Trump and regards supercapitalist Tillerson with horror) and arguing that he too, like Trump, can't possibly know what country the DNC's electronic burglars were working for, and this crap from some Greenwaldian or Grindelwaldian sock puppet pretending to be a supporter of Keith Ellison:

Repairable regression

Said to be a scene in Norway, storm wind blowing pedestrians backwards.

Professor Corey Robin has come back to blogging first time since the election, with a stirring rant against "the politics of fear" as practiced by some on the left:

Once again, we have that sense those of us who insist that the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being.

This corresponds to something I've been complaining about for a couple of years, though I don't think I'd characterize it in quite the same way, not a question of fear as much as of declinism, of the sense that it's all getting inexorably worse (unless the Revolution comes, as it plainly won't), on the part of what I like to call the Eeyore Caucus, as I wrote in January 2015, not coincidentally name-checking Robin:

Democracy

From some rightwing site.

In yesterday's post I tried to talk, maybe not too clearly, about some reasons why I hope the remaining BernieBots who haven't yet done so will follow their leader into supporting the Clinton candidacy—not for their votes, which I don't think she really needs (it looks like a pretty strong victory either way, and if I'm wrong, I don't think their numbers are enough to make a significant difference), but for their ideas, as I said, and the ferocity with which they advocate them.

I think they can be more effective in that debate, helping to move that Overton window to the left if you want to put it that way, if they're on the inside of it, the way the radical Republicans were in 1860 or the Popular Front leftists were in 1932. In both those crucial years, when the more progressive party nominated a relatively "moderate", compromise-loving presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln in the first place and Franklin Roosevelt in the second, radicals managed to make their voices heard among the noise of the business-as-usual politicians, created a much stronger message than the candidate left alone would have thought of, and left their mark in the most consequential administrations in American history. That was in part because some radicals recognized, in Lincoln and Roosevelt, some factor that was more important than how "left" the candidate was.

It's amusing, 160 or so years later, to note how suspicious some abolitionists were of Lincoln:

You can't always get what you expect

The Magic Bus of Negativity. February 28 2016. That's the USS Intrepid in the background.

Shorter Corey Robin, "Unintended Consequences" June 27 2016:

Hillary Clinton's total incapacity to be a change-making president is demonstrated by the fact that some guy who used to work for her at the State Department told Patrick Healy that people who want to vote for Trump should think about the unintended consequences. But what if you use "unintended consequences" to mean the opposite of what it usually means? Then unintended consequences might be just what you wanted, ha ha dummy.

Seriously. I don't understand why he's doing this. He did his best for the Sanders campaign, but it is essentially over now. There is nothing further to be gained by attacks on Clinton's failure to be a revolutionary, especially on such a slender and silly basis; I'm afraid this wonderful scholar is finally turning into a troll. I wrote a longish comment, but it kept getting longer, and more and more irritated, and I finally decided to run it as a blogpost here, where he obviously won't see it, not wanting to be a troll myself.

First the post:

Friday cheap shots: Baseless Rhetoric

Image via the Toms River Patch.

Now we know what the price of Christie's Trump endorsement was: cash (via WNYC).

At a rally of about a thousand people at the armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Thursday, Governor Chris Christie introduced the guest of honor, saying: "Let me bring you the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!"

But this was no ordinary political Trump rally. Tickets cost $200 a person, and the money was used to pay off Christie’s debt left over from his presidential campaign.

WNYC's Matt Katz says that with about 1,000 people attending the rally, that went a long way toward wiping out Christie's $250,000 debt. And that wasn't all. 

"Before the event, Trump did a roundtable fundraiser that cost between $20,000 and $25,000 a person, There were about 18 people there," Katz said. "That money was actually used to pay off Bridgegate lawyers that the state Republican party had hired after they got hit with subpoenas more than two years ago. There’s a half-million dollars owed to those Bridgegate attorneys. And now, thanks to Trump — who six months ago campaigned against Christie by saying he knew about Bridgegate — that debt is mostly paid off."

And what Trump gets out of it is a representative of the "conservative establishment" he can victimize in public, to his (pained) face:

Forlorn hope and change

Cheery Xmas post!

The Devil’s Own” 88th Regiment at the Siege of Badajoz. Watercolour en grisaille by Richard Caton Woodville Jr. (1856-1927). Via Wikimedia Commons.

From Patrick O'Brian's The Fortune of War, via Age of Sail:

Two weevils crept from the crumbs. “You see those weevils, Stephen?” said Jack solemnly.

“I do.”

“Which would you choose?”

“There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.”

“But suppose you had to choose?”

“Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.”

“There I have you,” cried Jack. “You are bit — you are completely dished. Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!”

I love that joke, which Jack tells three or four times, to increasingly annoyed friends and guests, in the course of the 20-novel saga.

What put me in mind of it is BooMan's piece yesterday on what he calls "take-my-ball-and-go-homism" on the part of those who are or claim they are (11 months before an election) too pure in heart to vote for some candidate apparently situated on the right of some point on somebody's one-dimensional scale of leftness-to-rightness and will therefore be forced to not vote at all. This refusal to "choose the lesser of two evils" is as childish as Boo suggests, but it's also rhetorically pernicious, and I want to argue that it's not even properly speaking of the left.

Pyke's Pique

Updated 8/21/2015

Elefanisi Beach, Crete.

Bizarrely misconceived headline at ThinkProgress:

Greece’s Radical Leftist Prime Minister Resigns In Defeat

Government officials told reporters Thursday that Tsipras will turn in his official resignation papers this afternoon and call for a new parliamentary election on September 20th. Tsipras hung on for weeks longer than eccentric Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis, who motorcycled off into the sunset immediately after a July referendum that appeared to put Greece on the verge of exiting the European Union.

In the weeks since that vote, cooler heads prevailed and struck a deal to keep Greece in the currency group... The deal is a catastrophic defeat for Tsipras’ administration, and observers believed it was likely he would lose his job one way or another from the time that he reluctantly called for lawmakers to approve the bailout.

I don't think the writer, Alan Pyke, has a very clear idea of how parliamentary systems work. And it's a howl of Eeyore Caucus despair: on the assumption that Tsipras making a deal must have betrayed the international left by refusing to exercise his Green Lantern powers (he's just as bad as Obama!) because didn't he promise us the Revolution? (No.)

The Eeyore Caucus

[Update: Revised toward the end for clarity 2/1/2015.]

Via StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.

Vivid piece by Jeff Stein at Newsweek about the Israeli-style assassination of the Hezbollah terror architect Imad Mugniyah in Damascus in February 2008, which turns out not to have been Israeli at all but our own CIA.

Mugniyah was apparently a very dangerous and bad man, too, the alleged planner of the 1983 bombings of the US barracks and embassy in Beirut and many other bombings, murders, and kidnapings, including the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994. On the other hand, his involvement in these things has never been proven, and it's not clear that he was up to anything at the time of the killing other than visiting one of his wives, and the assassination looks very much like one of those bad things of which Obama is always being accused, an extrajudicial execution without trial.

But a curious detail of the story, noted by Laura Rozen, is that Bush's DCI, Michael Hayden, was worried himself that the strike might be illegal: