Notes on Christianism

Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Vangelo di Matteo (1964), via a blog called "El Primo de Marty Feldman".

So Cardinal Cordileone ("Lion's Heart") has excommunicated Speaker Pelosi, at least when she's in San Francisco—I don't suppose he can stop priests elsewhere from ministering to her—over her support for laws permitting abortion in a society that is 78% non-Catholic. 

Excommunication seems pretty crazy to me all the way around. It's not like shunning, where the criminal is sent into complete social exile. Excommunicated Catholics remain legally part of the community, they're even expected to attend Mass like everybody else, but they're barred from the sacraments, remaining in their seats while the congregation goes up to receive communion. It occurs to me that that is exactly the opposite of what happens in the Gospel narrative, as Matthew tells it: during the Passover seder service on the evening before his death, Jesus literally hears Judas's confession (though Judas doesn't realize he's confessing)

Lemon, Aid

 

Drawing via Antarctica Journal.

Roy at his Substack and others are understandably feeling heated about the people who aren't feeling heated at all, who call themselves liberals but seem more concerned about the comfort and quiet of Supreme Court justices in their upscale neighborhoods than the 50-odd percent of the population with wombs whose rights are being snatched away by those same justices

It’s pretty wild to see how easily leaders from both sides of the aisle accepted this fraudulent crisis at face value when the engineers of the assault on our rights were the alleged targets.  At the same time, when you talk about the very real danger the draft Dobbs decision poses to not only the right to abortion but also other unenumerated rights such as gay marriage and contraception — as can be clearly read in Alito’s opinion — not to mention the dead certainty that Republicans will use the decision to try and ban abortion outright nationwide, the toffs don’t seem nearly as exercised.

Part of the reason, I think, is because conservatives are loudly declaring that they won’t do any such thing, and the Very Serious Democrats cannot bring themselves to suggest they’re lying.

I'm wondering if the Very Serious Democrats—TV civility Democrats like Paul Begala and Chris Coons, are worth the attention. For one thing,

For the Record: Big Buttons and Illegal Orders

Trump and His Big Buttons, via the Australian site Green Left.

With reference to what is presumably the finale of Bob Woodward's Trump Trilogy, Fear (2018), Rage (2020), and now Peril (to be released next Tuesday), now featuring a collaborator in the person of a WaPo colleague, Republican whisperer Robert Costa—

The advance promotion of the book from CNN offers a pretty interesting story of the very last days of the term, following the episode, just after the election, where Trump signs an order to withdraw all the US troops from Afghanistan before Biden's inauguration, by 15 January, as we've sort of known since May. Among other things, it's done in secrecy from the government, under the urging of Stephen Bannon, who's back in the scene urging Trump toward the real coup, and in tandem with the firing of defense secretary Mark Esper and all sorts of attendant intrigue in which Trump seems to be trying to seize some kind of power over DoD. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and some others are able to stop the precipitous move in Afghanistan (if you think Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan three months after the agreed date was dangerously rushed and poorly planned, you'll agree that this proposal was at least a couple of orders of magnitude worse), but Milley is spooked by this evidence of Trump's ability to sneak around the normal channels, while CIA director Gina Haspel is suspecting Trump could order an attack on Iran, and going on to ask, "He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum... This is a highly dangerous situation. We are going to lash out for his ego?"

For the Record: FUD

Pessimism has a pretty good pedigree too...

Me trying to explain the facts of life to one of those self-denominated "progressives" ended up someplace that could be moderately interesting:

The slogan is popular. Since Medicare is not a single-payer program it's likely few people know whether "Medicare for All" is one, and it's certainly not known what they actually favor.

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 24, 2021

A lot of people don't know that. Here's a pretty good explainer https://t.co/x7WictdRrh

— Wiggles of Weimar (@Yastreblyansky) August 24, 2021

Mod Squad

 

Mods with modified scooters, Peckham, South London, May 1964, Daily Mirror via All That's Interesting.

This is making me crazy, on the subject of the push in the House, back early from August recess to deal with the double infrastructure package, the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure proper, and the $3.5-trillion "human infrastructure" including the universal pre-K, universal two-year college, permanent child tax credit, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and all the global warming initiatives that got cut out of the first one, to be passed by Democrats alone if necessary in the form of "instructions" to be carried out in the Senate.

As you've probably heard, the second part is threatened by a rump group of nine representatives who used to call themselves "Problem Solvers", led by New Jersey's Josh Gottheimer—now they're billed as "the Mod Squad"—insisting that they'd like to just vote on the first part for starters, in opposition to the 95 Rockers of the House Progressive Caucus, who have demanded starting with the second part, to forestall any cheating on the part of the Mods. Speaker Pelosi (who is solidly on the "progressive" side of the issue, contrary to some reports portraying her as in the middle) is said to have been working out a plan to do both of them more or less simultaneously.

So last night the nine issued a curious statement in the Washington Post—

If Chris Ran the Circus

 

The Spotted Atrocious.

The Most Chris Cillizza Thing Ever:

If you ever held any hope that the House select committee on the January 6 US Capitol riot might produce a report that would help us understand what happened in the lead-up to that day and, in so doing, provide us avenues to keeping it from happening again, you should give up on those hopes now.

The reason? Speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision Wednesday to reject two of the five nominees -- Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana -- put forward by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to serve on the panel.

Absolutely! How could be possibly come to understand what happened in the lead-up to January 6 without Gym Jordan flapping his arms, barking like a dog, and running back and forth on the tabletops? We completely depend on Gym Jordan and Jim Banks for our ability to understand virtually anything!

Wait, who is Jim Banks? He's somebody who's gone from backing the Mueller investigation during his first term

What a Relief

 

Photo by AFP via a website my computer says I shouldn't trust.

My unpopular opinion on the "stimulus" bill is in the first place that it isn't a stimulus, which is a good thing, because that's not what we need, at the moment, economically; the purpose of a stimulus program is to pump up weak demand, and weak demand isn't our problem. Plenty of us have plenty of money, which we could spend to encourage economic activity and create jobs and make everything boom for everybody, and the reason we aren't spending it isn't that we don't want to, it's that we're scared to go out. There's a pandemic on, people!

The problem we have is a pandemic problem, and the way to fix it is to end the pandemic. That's the only stimulus we need, and we're doing what we can, though we could no doubt be doing it better (and will be, after 20 January), and it's going to take about a year, during which things are just not going to be too lively on the economic front no matter how much we try to goose it. What we need in the meantime is a relief bill, to tide us over and keep us alive while we're waiting, and this is in fact what Congress has just produced—an installment, at any rate—lightly disguised as a stimulus. My unpopular opinion is that Speaker Pelosi has just rolled Majority Leader McConnell, once again, the way President Obama did in 2011, and sneaked a pretty good bill past him.

For the Record: I Haven't Forgotten You Brooks

Lon Chaney in Herbert Brenon's Laugh Clown Laugh, 1928.

If you're talking about the House of Representatives you might try to remember that for two of those years it was under the GOP speakership of famous wonk genius Paul Ryan and impeachment inquiries couldn't begin and it was Infrastructure Week all the time but nothing happened.

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2020

House passed a terrific early childhood appropriations bill https://t.co/RQTKfZ69dg which was preserved in the deal passed and signed in December https://t.co/0Y1wnNNTRv

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2020

But maybe when you're home next you could call your congresswoman and ask her what you could do to help out with passing her universal pre-K bill https://t.co/l7XvQuJwQW

— Good With Rockets (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2020

Prime Minister Pelosi

Advising Democrats not to cheer too hard over the impeachment votes, via USA Today.

Apparently Trump held Congress and our national security hostage in the National Defense Authorization bill over his right to extort stuff from Ukraine—

Senior Trump administration officials in recent days threatened a presidential veto that could have led to a government shutdown if House Democrats refused to drop language requiring prompt release of  [a $250-million appropriation of] future military aid for Ukraine, according to five administration and congressional officials.

The language was ultimately left out of mammoth year-end spending legislation that passed the House and Senate this week ahead of a Saturday shutdown deadline.

That's just totally normal, right?

Other than that, I really think this is the week Nancy Pelosi became prime minister (as I began expecting a couple years ago), conducting an impeachment of a president, presenting him with three huge bills to sign—the $1.4 trillion appropriations bills and the revised NAFTA treaty—and commemorating the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium (the President, though he had no public events over the weekend other than the Army-Navy football game, sent Defense Secretary Mike Esper to represent him).

'Twas the eve of impeachment

and all through the House
staffers stared at their screens
and continued to grouse,
when what to their skeptical
eyes should appear
but a screed of six pages,
all dripping with fear!

Trump to Speaker Pelosi:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives.

That's pure Trump. Like Putin's, or Kim Jong-un's, or Mohammed bin Salman's denials, we're supposed to accept that it's valid because it's "strong" and "powerful". And it's strong and powerful because he says so.

This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

I'd mention that impeachment is not unconstitutional or unprecedented, but you probably knew that already. I'm not sure it's part of legislative history. If it was anything like what Trump suggests it was, it was amply precedented by the young nation's first impeachment, that of the Federalist Judge Samuel Chase in an overwhelmingly Republican Congress, as described in Jill Lepore's splendid New Yorker piece in October, in 1805, managed by Rep. John Randolph, whose articles

Linguistic note: Impeached Forever

An enjoyable little grammar point on the opening of the impeachment articles which, we're told, is directly taken from the impeachments of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton:

Resolved, That Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors1 and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate...

Why is it "is impeached", rather than "be impeached", parallel to "be exhibited"?

In the first place, let's note what that "be" is; because it's not "be" in the most frequent sense of the infinitive complement with no subject or tense marking, most typically prefixed with "to" (as in "I want to be loved") but not always ("you can be anything you want"). This one, "that they be exhibited", is an English subjunctive, relic of a whole ancient verbal system that has mostly disappeared from English but is still used with "be" for referring to things that may or may not have happened, typically in an explicit or implied if-clause in the present

if this be madness, there is method in't

be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread

or that would have happened under different conditions in the imperfect

Literary Corner: Recep, Don't Be a Tough Guy

President Trump being castigated by the Speaker of the House, enlarged from the picture in his Twitter feed.

Letter to his Excellency the President of Turkey

by Donald J. Trump

I

Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out
a good deal!

II 

You don't want to be responsible
for slaughtering thousands of people,
and I don't want to be responsible
for destroying the Turkish economy —
and I will.

Unless...

Tin sign from Desperate Enterprises, $10.56 down from $14.99.

I'm really shaken by this, via NPR:

Americans are split, 49%-46%, on whether they approve of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and independents at this point are not on board, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds.

But the pollsters warn that the new developments could change public opinion quickly, especially with 7 in 10 saying they are paying attention to the news.

You bet it could. The number favoring has never been anywhere near this close to 50% before, let alone higher than the number opposing. It looks like a really new world, and your congresscritters, who either are or aren't seeing similar developments in their own constituencies, know if it is or isn't. This was taken Wednesday night, after Pelosi announced the formalization of the impeachment inquiry, before the whistleblower complaint was released. It could move very fast indeed.

Or it could be just more statistical noise—one poll never tells you the truth about anything, don't get too excited—but if it's a real phenomenon and sustains itself, I'm seriously starting to imagine we could end up removing Trump from office, in the way I was suggesting last March, a month or so before the Mueller Report arrived, when I discovered this chart:

Hi It's Stupid: Impeachment

(No Bruckner, a composer I really can't stand, but this Wagner, conducted by Levine to last a full minute longer than Wilhelm Furtwängler's version, illustrates the kind of agonizing drawing-out alluded to in the reference below.)

Hi, it's Stupid to say I've been completely wrong about the dangers of moving into full impeachment mode over the past few days, because I could probably change my mind again in about 20 minutes, but my main objections to the way it was going forward seem to have been answered: we are not moving to impeach the president over a single phone call where he probably acted like a gangster, and we're not going to rush to get it over with before the New Hampshire primary.

The phone call, or rather the whole effort from the Ukrainian election in April to now to put the squeeze on President Zelensky to do something to harm Joe Biden or risk the US funding of the Ukrainian effort to hold off Russian conquest, which I still think is more Giuliani's baby than Trump's, is important for a couple of genuine reasons, as veteran Carl Hulse puts it at The Times, not just because of the exceptional clarity of the case itself but also because of the exceptional illegality of the White House response to public questions about it:

Got Paranoia?

Via.

Just thinking out loud here:

What if he used a fake charitable foundation for self-dealing, committed tax fraud and bank fraud in equal measure for decades, sold foreign policy for cash to Saudi Arabia and UAE?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 24, 2019

Why do you and some others seem so intent on limiting the case to this tiny tip of an iceberg of criminality?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 24, 2019

I'm with Steve. In 1974, the HJC and John Doar worked to narrow the offenses behind the articles.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 24, 2019

Well, they didn't narrow them that far. Three articles were approved, on obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress (the one Trump and Barr are so busy committing at the moment with their refusal to obey Nadler's and others' subpoenas), and two rejected, on the administration's falsification of records of the secret Cambodia bombing (we could have jailed Kissinger!) and Nixon's own failure to pay taxes on government-paid improvements to his places in San Clemente and Key Biscayne, which was characterized in the Article as taking unconstitutional emoluments (Nixon must be laughing hysterically in his grave over what Trump gets away with on this score).

For the Record: The Impeachment Agnostic

Update below:

Image by Simone Noronha/New York Times.

With respect: she doesn't think she's "refusing to hold him accountable". She thinks she's hesitating to use a method of doing it that she regards as likely to fail. She could be wrong, but let's be careful about describing it. https://t.co/Nu7QGd3qfO

— Intellectually Disheveled (@Yastreblyansky) July 26, 2019

Liberalism

The hand-colored Voyage dans la Lune of Georges Méliès (1902), via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "What Pelosi Versus the Squad Really Means", New York Times, 16 July 2019:

Pay no attention to the contest between Democrats and Republicans. The real struggle is the civil war between the troops of Nancy Pelosi, representing liberalism,  and the legions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representing illiberalism, who are probably going to win because (1) Americans have moved into lifestyle enclaves, (2) universities, media, and the Senate have degenerated, as people who put the rules of fair play above short-term partisan passion scarcely exist, and (3) Donald Trump is on their side. I am not a crank.

After President Trump came to the "defense" of Pelosi ("But Cortez should treat Nancy Pelosi with respect.... She should not be doing what she’s doing. And I’ll tell you something about Nancy Pelosi that you know better than I do. She is not a racist, okay. She is not a racist. For them to call her a racist is a disgrace." [NARRATOR VOICE: Nobody called her a racist]) and announced that the members of the "Squad" (Reps. Ocasio-Córtez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar) ought to go back where they came from (Bronx, Boston, Detroit, and Somalia-via-Minneapolis respectively) and "fix" those places, and Pelosi responded appropriately with a tweet

For the Record: Impeachment is another Great Pumpkin

Lengthy exchange with some no doubt good-hearted young person that I should probably forget about but it rankles:

Wow seems like there should be an impeachment inquiry to increase interest in younger opponents to Trump. Do they compare historical? Those numbers aren’t usually this high until oct ‘20

— James Moody (@GodlessLib_CB) June 4, 2019

He won’t be successful doing that in context of an impeachment inquiry. He will be very successful without that purview. Legal experts all agree on this. Maybe it’s unnecessary and the courts will not only short circuit but force Trump’s hand. I’m skeptical of that w/o an inquiry

— James Moody (@GodlessLib_CB) June 4, 2019

What legal experts all agree? What transformation does the word "impeachment" work? I looked up an authoritative source for what are all these fabulous powers House Judiciary will get by changing the name of its hearing, and I have to say I wasn't too impressed:

Infrastructure Week

"We'll always have Infrastructure Week!"

Politico suggested the principals were still hung over from the last Infrastructure Week at the end of April and the current one already was dead, hours before it officially got started (in the Cabinet Room, at 11:15):

WELL, THIS [the three-weeks-ago one] WENT ABOUT AS WELL as any other infrastructure week. The White House is not going to present any plan to pay for rebuilding the nation’s roads and highways.

INSTEAD, the administration will ask DEMOCRATS to make the case for a $2 trillion package. The White House has identified roughly $1 trillion in spending cuts to pay for legislation -- about as realistic a plan as saying this newsletter will fly you to the moon if you say abracadabra.

TO REALLY DRIVE THE NAIL IN THE COFFIN, Trump sent a letter to PELOSI and Senate Minority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER on Tuesday saying they should pass the USMCA before turning to infrastructure. The letter

Heh. Apparently in the end it was more explosive than that, per Peter Baker and Katie Rogers:

Good Impeachment Takes Time

Via.

There's some really interesting news out of the Reuters-Ipsos poll (h/t Scott Stedman), which has found, in polling conducted Thursday through this morning, that Trump's approval rating has dropped 3 percentage points since the Mueller report was released, to its lowest level of the year to date in that poll, 37%. Although—and this is important—support for impeachment remains pretty weak.

The really startling thing is the share Republicans are taking in the result, with the total number approving Trump at 75%, down from 83% in late March. That's a lot!

And it's pretty reminiscent, once again, of what started happening to Richard Nixon in February 1973, when the Senate Select Committee began its hearings, and continued on to October, and the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon's approval rating somewhat stabilized at very low levels; note particularly how the Republican vote, the red line in the chart below, sinks from 90% at the beginning of the plunge to hover around 50% for the duration.