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Steve M has a post on two recent profiles of Vice President Kamala Harris, by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic and Astead Herndon in the New York Times Magazine, that seem to convey a dispiriting message of a kind that's becoming familiar:

Boy, that Kamala Harris seemed so talented, yet she really gives the impression that she's struggling with the job of vice president, and while she's probably ready to be president, you can't blame voters for thinking that she isn't.

The familiar part is the regretful reportorial tone: "I recognize how good this person is, but that's sadly not important; what matters is that ordinary folk don't see it, and I can't imagine what can be done about it." It's something that's being laid on Biden all the time too, particularly over the "age issue", in the Nates' and others' insistence that they're not saying Biden is too old, they're merely saying voters think Biden's too old, and that's what makes it news. Maybe some genius could invent a profession in which reporters could help inform voters about the things the voters are misinformed about. You could call it "journalism".

Steve's point, that this is a problem for Harris, and Biden too—

Harris and Biden both seem to believe that everything they're doing is just fine and the public will come around eventually. They need to acknowledge that that might not happen, even if their opponent is a convicted felon by Election Day. 

—seems pretty much unarguably valid, but one of the things I want to say, as we're maybe sitting around contemplating ways in which they might deal with it, is that it's not exactly their fault. I mean, they have reason to think they're pretty good campaigners, not only because of a long history of winning elections handily in Delaware and California, and Biden's two victories in vice presidential contests in 2008 and 2012, but because of the big national elections they won so convincingly three years ago, against the same presumptive opponent, before he'd even been indicted (not counting the two impeachments, which are indictments in my book, because nobody else seems to take that seriously). 

You want to tell them that style of campaigning won't work any more because why? Because in 2020 they were campaigning against plague, financial breakdown, and the possibility of race war, and now they can't because they already fixed it? Or is it because the bothsiderist media keep telling people they aren't fixed even though they are? The economic problems, as least (on the plague, the media are invested in giving face to the view that it may not be a problem, and the fixes may not work, though they clearly have)? Which they definitely do, in that same regretful tone ("the economy seems to be firing on all cylinders, but there's this perception").

This is a weird conversation in terms of the normal mode of talking about vice presidential nominations. It seems to me they only have a major negative effect on the campaign when they're really disastrous, like Palin. (Quayle in 1992, after the public got to know him, might be another example). Harris's basic function on the ticket is largely the same traditional one as in 2020: to gratify important constituencies the presidential candidate might miss, in her case by being Californian, female, almost-young (she's 58 now), and a member of two key ethnic minorities (three if you count her husband, as I'm happy to do). You'd better not dump her, if you don't want some of those constituencies to feel very betrayed.

Like Pence (evangelical and rural), Biden (very white and union-oriented), Gore (environmentalist), Mondale (northern and liberal). Vice presidential candidates chosen for competence (GHW Bush, Cheney) may have been there to make up for perceived deficits in the top slot, but that was because those perceived deficits (on the part of Reagan and W Bush) were real. And you know how Cheney turned out.

But why does Harris have to go beyond those limitations of the normal to prove that she's some particularly new kind of charismatic figure, the way a presidential candidate does? I think that's the media, doing it for the most shamelessly entertainment-industry reasons. They've been trying for months to work up some primary competition for Biden, that's why they won't stop with the idiotic dementia stories, and now that that's largely failed they're trying to duplicate it at the vice presidential level. (I don't know about Herndon, but Plott made her way to the journalistic top through a National Review Buckley Fellowship, and I've thought she was part of the conspiracy for a while.)

That does't directly help with the question of how Democrats are supposed to cope with this, but maybe in an indirect way: maybe these showbiz aspirations and ratings obsessions were an important part of something we didn't yet understand.

Well, Ari lied, anyhow

Baghdad, 2003. via a valuable article at Strategic Culture.

It's the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and Ari Fleischer, the artist formerly known as the most dishonest presidential press secretary in American history (until Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran away with the title), couldn't restrain himself from weighing in:

The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed "Bush lied. People died." This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) March 20, 2019

Immediately I'm suffused with the same old helpless rage and can't think about anything else. Ari goes on, of course, for a dozen and more tweets, explaining that when "the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD" they all made a mistake, but that's not the same as lying—not mentioning, naturally, that the intelligence services of Egypt and France certainly didn't convince their governments from there that a war was necessary:

Yes They Did

Updated with Bush funeral reference 12:30 PM

"Donald, Donald, I am so disappoint." Photo by Reuters/Marcos Brindicci via MSN.

I told you.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held what the White House described as “informal” conversations at the G20 summit in Argentina. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Saturday that the two spoke at a cultural dinner for leaders and their wives and husbands at the famed Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires Friday night.

Huckabee Sanders did not disclose the content of their conversation, but in a press conference later Saturday Putin revealed that Trump had questioned him about Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian ships in the Black Sea. 

“I answered his questions about the incident in the Black Sea. He has his position. I have my own. We stayed in our own positions,” Putin told reporters, according to the Associated Press. (Newsweek)

Russia's seizure of two Ukrainian naval ships and a tugboat and 24 crew members who are still in dentention a week later was an "outrageous violation of Ukrainian sovereignty," as Ambassador Haley said, on behalf of and with instructions from "the highest level at the American government" (that "at" is pretty weird English). But not so outrageous you can't have a chat with an old friend you have so much in common with, right?

Hip to Hip

Urban Bush Women Hip to Hip, via University of Florida Performing Arts/

David F. Brooks ("The G.O.P. is Rotting") really seems to have got out of the wrong side of the bed. He doesn't even have anything good to say about his own people, the humble folk who occupy the middle, like ideological magpies looking for sparkly ideas to decorate their nests!

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Wait, when were those good old days when the good and the honorable thought there was a middle ground between Trump and suicide? The announcement of Flake's political suicide was on October 24! He's talking about a month ago!

I should also mention that if you're tying yourself to somebody hip to hip is the wrong way to go. That knot's going to slip something terrible (see illustration above).

So we don't have to fight them here

Palace of Justice, Damascus, March 15, photo by an anonymous stringer for AFP/Getty images, via Chicago Tribune.

Nobody should ever have to undergo the kind of horror Britain has been undergoing with the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22 (killing four and injuring 50), the Manchester bombing of the Ariana Grande concert May 22 (killing 22, many children, and injuring 116), and last night's London Bridge incident (killing seven and injuring some dozens, 21 critically).

Nor should it happen in Baghdad, where over the same period 23 were killed and 45 wounded by a car bomb in the suburb of Hayy al'A'amei on March 20, and a suicide truck bomber killed 17 and injured at least 60 at a police checkpoint in the southern part of the city March 29; seven people were killed and 12 injured in three bombings, one in a fish market in Yusufiya, one in a construction site, on April 5, and two more killed and 11 injured by bombings on April 6 and 7,  and a suicide car attack on a traffic police compound in the center of the city killed five and injured six on April 28; one killed and two wounded in separate incidents of May 3, two killed and three wounded in bombings in western Baghdad on May 6, one killed and three wounded by a bomb in southwestern Baghdad on May 9, and another killed on May 10, an employee of the education ministry, four killed and ten injured by a booby-trapped vehicle in Al-Sho'la on May 11, one killed and five wounded by a booby-trapped car near a bridge on Al-Rubaie Street on May 14, one killed and two wounded by an explosion in the north of the city on May 16, two killed and eight wounded in two shopping-district incidents including one at the market in al-Nasr wal Salam region in Abu Ghraib district of May 18, one killed and three injured in a blast near a market on May 19, 35 killed and 45 injured in four suicide attacks around the city on May 19, and three more injured on May 22, also near the market in al-Nasr wal Salam, and then on May 30, four days after the fasting month of Ramadan began, at least 30 killed and 40 wounded by a car that blew up outside the al-Faqma ice cream parlor.

The Wolf Who Whispered Boy

Update: Hi, Mike's readers! Thanks always, Batocchio!

Image by MaryLou11Ans via Blingee.

Liberal Bothsiderist New York Times columnist Frank Bruni on Thursday, working out a way to blame Democrats for the Trump phenomenon, in concert with well-known illiberal observer and totally not concern troll Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

Did Democrats cry wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now?

That’s a question being asked with increasing frequency, though mostly in conservative circles and publications. An essay by Jonah Goldberg in National Review in late July had this headline: “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.”

Bruni is saddened by the way Democrats demonized decent and god-fearing John McCain and Willard Mitt Romney in previous elections, which may have had horrible consequences for our nation, because the voting population, having seen how deeply unfair Democrats were to McCain and Romney, must think the Trump is no more dishonorable than those men were:

GOP: "Government is the problem. Vote Republican so we can prove it."

Photo by AP.

A big serious read at the Progress Pond, Martin's perpetually-in-development replacement site for the BooMan Tribune (update: now at the Tribune too), takes that familiar joke and turns it into very convincing theory, in terms of the way the major US political parties understand their role as political institutions inside the institutions of government:

Taken as a whole, the Republican Party has, ever since its takeover by the conservative movement, done more than any foreign ideologues can ever hope to do to erode faith in the goodness of the American establishment. They’ve done this partly by being very bad at governing, but my focus here is on their messaging. During much of the latter Bush Era, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, and they had a friendly Supreme Court. They ought to have been able to argue that under their leadership the federal government was finally functioning as it should. But, even if this had been plausible based on their record, they could never have done it because their whole machine is geared to deride the tyrannically inefficiency of government. What they did instead was to blame their own failures on the very institutions they controlled, and on the media for never giving them a fair shake.

I'd add that one of the effects of Republican propaganda and its amplification in the media, especially the aggressively "both-sides" media like CNN and the Washington Post, is to alienate or estrange the public from an understanding of what it is government institutions actually do, beyond that Schoolhouse Rock sense of how a bill becomes law—portraying it as monstrous, distant, arbitrary, somewhere writing uncountable volumes of crazed regulations, as opposed to all the cops, nurses, social workers, scientists, inspectors, and so on spending their days identifying common problems and solving them. To the point where they might deny that an agency they have positive contact with is really part of government at all, like that famous constituent who told Bob Inglis (R-SC) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare", or the complaint of George W. Bush suggesting that Social Security didn't need to be administered,

The Doctor is (way) out

No, Doctor, it's really the current bunch of lies we're most concerned about. Image via Business Insider.

Now that Dr. Ben Carson's truthfulness issues are getting to be a thing, would anybody care to revisit the story from the September debate where he spent a lot of time giving George W. Bush foreign policy advice back around 2002, trying to prevent the war in Afghanistan, and that's what Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for? It sounded just a tad odd to me at the time, and I wasn't the only one:

“What I suggested to President Bush is to be Kennedy-esque,” Carson had said. “Declare that within five to 10 years we will become petroleum independent. The moderate Arab states would have been so concerned about that, they would have turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks.”

When Wright asked Carson to share the details of his conversations with President Bush, the renowned surgeon did not hold back.

Ross Douthat taqiyya watch

Detail from the Seven Sacraments altarpiece of Rogier van der Weyden, 1445-50, in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Wikimedia Commons.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, explains what Wisconsin governor Scott Walker ought to have said:

The simplest approach is just a big-tent approach to whom the term “Christian” covers, but if for some reason of deep theological principle you don’t want to use the word itself then you need another way to finesse things. Maybe something like: “President Obama and I would have some big theological differences, but we share a faith in Jesus.” Or something else, artfully constructed, that acknowledges the president’s professed faith rather than acting as though that faith doesn’t matter much and what the nation’s chief executive professes is mostly irrelevant. Because that’s what Walker’s non-response pretty explicitly suggested...

Uh, well, I guess I would like to know what Walker would say if you asked him whether Pope Francis was a Christian, given that they probably have some serious doctrinal disagreements too, not only on such issues as the Immaculate Conception and the Real Presence of the Lord's flesh in the Host and the practice of infant baptism, which the governor's denomination are known to be traditionally pretty iffy about (and the president's presumed theology would be a lot closer to it than the Pope's), but also labor unions, you know, or capital punishment.

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:

Cheap shots and wonk Chucks

Carlson in Snuggie. Image by Politico.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested over the weekend that laws regulating military-style semiautomatic rifles did not make sense .... "We should be clear for our viewers, assault weapon is a made up term," Carlson replied. "And there really is no such thing as an assault weapon." (Crooks & Liars)

The thing is, as a number of people were quick to point out, all terms are made-up terms. The question is whether it finds something coherent to apply itself to. For example, as the ngram below shows, "assault weapon" has been pretty successful since it was introduced in 1917, while "sniveling weasel", first showing up in 1989, has been somewhat iffy:

Glorious Fifth: Postscript

Looks like the promised sky-covering fireworks naming of Snowden names at Pierre Omidyar's Intercept really has taken place after all, not on the fifth of July, but close. It's possibly the most shocking misbehavior by the NSA reported in the Snowden documents so far—involving the targeting of American citizens and even a Republican!—and I'm really glad to see it come out:

Real Leaders

Shorter David Brooks, "The Leadership Emotions", April 22 2014:

Barack lacks all conviction, while Joe Biden
Is full of passionate intensity.

O Captain! My Captain!.

We start off today complaining about how the politicals manage policy nowadays, something with which you and I might wish to concur with a hearty "Damn right, curse that Karl Rove!" or "Ol' Michael Deaver certainly has a lot to answer for!"

But it turns out that Brooks's problem isn't exactly that: it's more that dominance by the politicals has led to a presidency that's not amateurish enough:

White House fool report:

Image from Mi Ex es una Meme.

Hey Mr. P,

You're trolling me, right? At the Palais des Beaux-Arts? As quoted in Slate?

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq war was a subject of vigorous debate, not just around the world but in the United States, as well. I participated in that debate, and I opposed our military intervention there.

Russia's Munich moment

Balaclavas in Balaklava, at least the guy on the right: Ukrainian border guards at the Crimean town. Photo by Sergey Ponomarev for the New York Times.

Unexpectedly, the first hack to come out crying "Munich" over Russia's ongoing adventure in Crimea seemed not to be one of the usual wingnuts (except clearly fascist commenters at The American Interest) but Dr. Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński (McGill, Harvard) on CNN.

But here's Forbes [jump]

Megyn things up

Image via imgur.

Megyn Kelly on the Foxophobia displayed (in her opinion, anyway) by Obama during the Superb Owl interview:

“I do think it’s interesting that the president seems so focused on us,” Kelly told Carville. “I never heard President [George W.] Bush do this about MSNBC. He was taking his licks like a man.”

Actually President Bush was not taking any licks at all, for the simple reason that he wasn't there. Kelly is misrememberizing, or, as I like to put it, making shit up. The MSNBC she is talking about didn't exist until Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow joined the station toward the end of 2008 and of Bush's last term, when he was the lamest of ducks and nobody wanted to interview him anyway.

And the story of Bush's manly lick-taking will come as a big surprise to Maddow herself, who was complaining round about 2010 that she could not get him to appear on her show:

It may not come as a shock that, despite repeated efforts, Rachel Maddow has not been able to secure an interview with former president George W. Bush. Now, Maddow is trying to win an interview with Bush by entering a contest that he is running on Facebook in support of his upcoming memoir, "Decision Points."

She did not win. Bush was taking his licks like a rabbit, and still is. The brave one is Megyn Kelly—or is the word I'm looking for "brazen"?

Let's go slumming

Ill-met in Oakton, proud Titania. Wikipedia.

The mainstream media don’t get New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. They think he is a bully.

Writes Jennifer Rubin. I love how somebody with a full-time gig at the Washington Post gets to speak of the "mainstream media" as a kind of exotic species of which she has a specialized knowledge she can share with her audience:

Triumph of the Won't

From my RWNJ pal Doug Brink, who sees a Leni Riefenstahl at work in the photos of the president with the troops:

This image still bothers me...

The White House poster recently noting Veterans Day weekend... It bugs me...

From the White House Facebook page

Maybe what disturbs me is how it compares with other historical images. [jump]

The war in Iraq: A Spike Lee joint

@Bobblespeak Do the right thing! Radio Raheem is the World Trade Center, NYPD is Al Qa'eda, Georgie Bush is Mookie and Iraq is Sal's Pizza!
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 3, 2013

Pizza itself is priceless treasures of Mesopotamian civilization.

George W driven to Rehab

Uncredited image from Esquire.

Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street Monsignor Ross Douthat joins the choruses of "He couldn't have been that bad":

a lot of liberal criticism of Bush’s record (and especially his domestic record) looks not only misguided but absurd — and I think many liberals know it. Look at Yglesias’s piece, for instance, listing “positive aspects of the Bush presidency that often get overlooked.” It includes signature Bush-era legislation like No Child Left Behind Medicare Part D, plus smaller initiatives like the AIDS-in-Africa push and the “housing first” approach to homelessness, plus the emergency responses to the financial crash, plus some praise for Bush’s failed immigration push and his overridden farm bill veto. That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

First, whatever Yglesias says about No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D (you can tell he's neither a parent nor retired) they were disasters. (And yes, I do know Teddy's sacred name was on the former.) Second,

 That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

I just about rest my case. Third,

True, the list doesn’t include the Bush tax cuts...

Now it's his entire domestic policy. I.e., he had virtually none except to bring the country to fiscal ruin. And to note that Democratic legislators have not been very eager to close the cuts in an attempt to spread the Plame, I mean blame, is pretty disingenuous even by the young Monsignor's standards:

but you may have noticed that the Democratic Party showed no enthusiasm for repealing them for anyone except the wealthy. 

The Bush tax cuts didn't especially benefit anybody except the wealthy.

I don’t really think there are a lot of serious Obama-era liberals ready to argue that, say, Bush’s deficits were actually the grave threat to the republic Bush-era liberals made them out to be...

No, they were much worse—Bush's deficits were what above all made it politically impossible to enact an adequate stimulus after the 2008 crash...