Wretched Excess

 

All right, you guys, just stop it right now.

Jill Biden should have consulted a First Lady with taste and actual experience decorating the White House like Melania Trump.

Her Christmas decorations are hideous!

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) November 29, 2022

Reposted himself at 3:00 AM. pic.twitter.com/QdIN6bk1Jh

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) November 30, 2022

Donald Trump was the greatest soccer player of his generation, better than Pelé.

— Nick Adams (Alpha Male) (@NickAdamsinUSA) November 29, 2022

My Dad Went to Hanoi and All I Got Was This Lousy Evidence That I'm in a Smurfing Conspiracy

Image via Medium.

Smurfing, or structuring, being the crime of making a financial transaction in a one-bit-at-a-time way sequenced and parceled so as to evade reporting requirements, like the $35,000 checks cut by the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen all through 2017 paying him back for his payoff of one of Trump's one-night stands (illegal under campaign finance law whether Trump repays it or not), of which we saw two on TV yesterday, one with Junior's signature on it.

He wasn't lying when he showed us your signature on that Stormy Daniels check, Junior. And that's another one of your little crimes, too, structuring payments, isn't it? You might want to keep your head down for a while.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2019

Poor Junior!

Meanwhile, North Korea. Nicholas Kristof deals out some conventional wisdom ("After the Trump-Kim Failure"):

For the Record: Pompeo Seeks Peace

Montage by Alice Wielinga/Time.

Speaking of North Korea, I think I may have just noticed something significant, stimulated by a Twitter friend:

I imagine Trump's demanding that people stop calling him a loser from the Singapore summit. Fox ran a story on DPRK missile plant expansion July 2 https://t.co/vYFuaEYTuC, state department announced Pompeo trip July 2 https://t.co/ePU0QsFhww

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2018

Namely, as you see, that Fox's first story on how North Korea was not doing anything to "denuclearize" and was in fact going back to building up forces appeared on the same day as the State Department announcement that Pompeo was going back for a visit to Pyongyang. And the next day that Trump tweeted for the last time (so far) on the subject:

Managing the Emperor

Drawing by Marian Kamensky/Cartoon Movement, Octover 2017.

We have a question from The New York Times:

Trump Starts a Trade War, but Does He Have a Plan to Win It?

Spoiler alert: He doesn't have a plan. He never has a plan, from the chaos of MuslimBan 1.0 a week after inauguration to the ongoing chaos of the Central American parent-child separation program, and the people who work for him don't have a plan either, whether because they simply don't have the ability or because there's some problem with what Trump wants them to do, like Mexico really isn't going to pay for the wall. In a sense he's the true Underpants Gnome president:

• Phase one: Collect wall-building funds from Mexico
• Phase two: ?????????
• Phase three: Profit!!

What he has is a sense of how great he's going to look when he's successful, which is what he means by saying he "keeps his promises". He's going to look the way he told them he'd look, at the campaign rallies, and if the staff doesn't make him look that way they need to go.

Thus poor Pompeo, trying to work him through his fantasy of "solving" North Korea:

Is the United States Necessary?

With all respect, don't see why they expect me to think this picture represents something real.

I don't know why I let it happen, but I keep getting enraged by the emerging consensus that Emperor Trump did something positive to bring about whatever is going on on the Korean peninsula, from the wingnuts calling for him to be given the Nobel Peace Prize right away (don't wait for the Norwegians to do it, just steal Obama's and give him that one) to Mr. Magisterial David Sanger offering his balanced appraisal to readers of The New York Times:

President Trump insists that his own actions are responsible, that his threats of “fire and fury” and, more important, his intensified sanctions, forced Mr. Kim to this moment. He is partly right: Mr. Trump has shown an energy in confronting North Korea that President Barack Obama never did.

But disarmament experts who watched the Korean leaders meet in the DMZ agreed that Mr. Kim had been driving the events.

"Shown" being the operative word there: Obama certainly didn't tweet threats of nuclear war or offensive nicknames to the wider public. He did what he did quietly, without checking with David Sanger first, and Sanger still can't forgive him for that. He prefers a White House like that of George W. Bush or the current occupant flooding the press with 50 or 60 lies a day to one that puts him on a low-calorie diet of truth, in modest quantities.

But it isn't even the implied insult to Obama that bothers me: it is, once again, the continuing inability to recognize that South Korea has anything to do with it, or even exists.

Guess who just found out the Korean War isn't over yet?

In the Demilitarized Zone,via CNN; can't find a name for the bird.

Yesterday's story in The Times:

But analysts said South Korea was aiming for a comprehensive deal, in which the North agreed to give up its weapons in return for a security guarantee, including a peace treaty. Mr. Trump’s comments suggested he backed that effort.

“They do have my blessing to discuss the end of the war,” he said. “People don’t realize that the Korean War has not ended. It’s going on right now. And they are discussing an end to war. Subject to a deal, they have my blessing.”

You know what he means when he says, "People don't realize". That's what he always says when he's gobsmacked by some revelation, like Lincoln having been a Republican

I'm not going to lie, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself for prognostications since at least January as to what was going on from the "my button is bigger than your button" tweet through the Winter Olympics, which is that the South Korean government has realized that Trump's ignorance and mercuriality mean it can take over the 64-year-old peace process from the AWOL United States. Which may not be the way it looks to you, with these crazy events in which somebody with no more official status than Dennis Rodman, in between jobs as Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State (if he can get confirmed by the Senate, which has been looking very iffy), travels to negotiate with the Cute Leader or whatever they're calling him to arrange a meeting for him with Emperor Bigbutton. You may think that the US is not merely actively engaged but hyperactively engaged.

But that's my point, really: hyperactivity isn't coherently directed at anything. Trump doesn't know whether he wants a war or wants peace, or care, as long as he's acclaimed the winner of whatever it turns out to be. He's not in charge, and President Moon Jae-in is.

The news today that DPRK and ROK truly are talking about a peace treaty is just astonishing, though, and I'm not even sure what to think. The upshot may not turn out exactly the way Pompeo expects, but it sounds like progress from here for the moment.

The Fire-and-Fury Next Time

Carl von Clausewitz, via ZenPundit.

As I've been arguing, the best thing that could have happened in the North Korea issue was that South Korea should take command of the diplomatic process, and this has happened in more spectacular form than I could have imagined, with intrepid South Korean negotiators wangling Kim Jong-un into inviting Donald Trump to hang out some time in the spring and Trump into accepting.

Congratulations President Moon Jae-in and people of the Republic of Korea, delivered, at least for what's probably quite a long moment, from the threat of devastating war! And shame on the US press for continuing not to notice them, and the real responsibility for this achievement, from Moon's New Year démarche inviting a DPRK delegation to the Pyeongchang Olympics and persuading the US to postpone the annual ROK-US military exercises, to South Korea's national security adviser Chung Eui-yong getting the invitation from Kim on Monday, passing it to our dotard emperor yesterday, and managing, as they say, to be the last person to talk to him and get the word out to the press before some courtier had a chance to change his mind, although that seems to have been Trump's own idea, as if he was afraid any delay at all might break this moment of lucidity:

One Billion Dollars

From March 2017, via The Wrap.

Trump over the weekend, as reported by The Hill, seemed to be letting an awfully big cat out of his bag:

President Trump said late Saturday that North Korea must “denuke” before any talks with the U.S.

“Now we are talking and they ... called up a couple of days ago. They said that ‘we would like to talk.’ And I said, ‘So would we, but you have to denuke, you have to denuke,’ ” Trump said at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, D.C., Reuters reported.

“We will be meeting and we’ll see if anything positive happens,” he said.

“I won’t rule out direct talks with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. I just won’t.”

He took a phone call from North Koreans? They discussed entering formal talks and he made a proposal? Actually no, it seems this did not happen. As explained by an unnamed National Security Council official and confirmed by the White House and noted in Newsweek, the president misspoke:

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:

Preventing the President of the United States

By Giphy.

Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 1, 2018

And the heart (big, fat, and beautiful) is in the delivery!

There's an answer to Steve's question! We were looking for the heart in the wrong place, in the formation and implementation of policy. Trump's heart isn't in that; the man is a born trouper. It's in the greasepaint and the greenrooms and that connection with the crowd, and the ratings of course, although that seems a little backward—the fact that you turned it on, if you did, doesn't prove that it was good, because you didn't know whether it was good or not ahead of time. Ratings are a measurement for advertisers, as you know, advertisers are interested in whether you get the eyeballs, not their critical esteem, and you can get the eyeballs with a slow-motion train wreck. Also Fox didn't make any money on it, since you don't interrupt the SOTU with commercials, although they did presumably benefit from the before and after color commentary.

Nevertheless Trump achieved his personal goal, of whacking his way through reading the text without a fail and achieving more applause breaks—turns out all you have to do is ask for them, leading the applause yourself from the dais!—than any of his predecessors, stretching a thin speech out to an astounding 90 minutes and making the Republicans do all the work. I didn't hear him say, "Believe me," or fluff any difficult words, at all, though I wasn't listening attentively all the time. Paul Ryan blew more lines than he did, I thought, even though he only had one, which he began, "I have the high honor and distinct privilege of preventing..." before pulling back.

And the ratings were tremendous! Well,

Not too scared

Moon goddess from the Ohoe tomb no. 4, 6th-7th century, Goguryeo (or ancient Goryeo). via Wikipedia.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I'm going to say it again: as you know, there's no button, and the procedure you need to follow to order that strike is a fairly complex one, which I think Donald Trump in his current psychological state might have a hard or even impossible time following:

From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. (Michael Wolff)

And whatever they tell you, our military are trained carefully that they must not follow an illegal order, and I don't think there's any doubt about this one, as Marjorie Cohn was explaining a couple of months ago at the HuffPost:

Taking Names

Partying hearty in Pyongyang after the ballistic missile test of August 2016. Photo by Reuters via The Independent.

Mean Girl Nikki Haley: "This vote will be remembered." True to threat, only the cool kids get to go to friendship party. BFFs like Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Togo invited, but sad face for 128 loser countries like UK, Germany, Japan! They were warned! pic.twitter.com/uk8XrDHQhq

— Roland B. Hedley Jr. (@RealRBHJr) December 22, 2017

Yes, 128 United Nations delegations insisted on sticking with their decades-long foreign policy and voting their disapproval of Emperor Trump's whimsical decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish state without any acknowledgment of the interests of a Palestinian state that is supposed to have its capital in the same city, in contravention of decades of US policy as well and against the fervent pleas of his own national security advisers, even though Ambassador Haley had told them:

Haley writes: “As you consider your vote, I encourage you to know the president and the US take this vote personally.

“The president will be watching this vote carefully and has requested I report back on those who voted against us,” she continued.

He's taking it personally. This isn't just a political decision, it's an attack on the august person. I can't get over this. So Haley swung remorselessly into action, like my dear sister Nancy when she was around four or five and would say, when anybody disrespected her, "You're not coming to my party!" That's speaking softly and carrying a big stick, huh?

Coincidentally, when the Security Council unanimously adopted a tightened sanctions regime against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea last week, the Kim Jong Un regime was swift to make its move:

“We define this 'sanctions resolution' rigged by the U.S. and its followers as a grave infringement upon the sovereignty of our Republic and as an act of war violating peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region,” North Korea's foreign ministry said in a statement on state media Sunday.

Kim will be having a party too, undoubtedly, but he won't be inviting any countries. Not even Guatemala and Honduras. That's how a real emperor does it. Eat your hearts out, running dog capitalist roaders!

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Jack Kennedy was a (distant) friend of mine, and you, sir...

From Joseph Simms, 1873, Nature's Revelations of Character, Or, The Mental, Moral and Volitive Dispositions of Mankind, as Manifested in the Human Form and Countenance.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("The Missiles of August"):

No reason to worry, Trump is basically John Fitzgerald Kennedy: disgusting, but not really dangerous.

Yes,

a reckless, lecherous U.S. president obsessed with his own vigor and out of his depth on foreign policy faced off against a thirtysomething dictator armed with nukes. If we survived the Cuban missile crisis without a thermonuclear war, there’s probably a way to get through this one, too.

I don't think it's quite right to describe Trump as "lecherous", though he'd probably like that himself. My sense, especially from the famous Billy Bush tape, is that he's less interested in having lots of intercourse with many different women than in assault, peeping, and especially getting his presumed exploits talked about. It's hard to imagine JFK calling the New York Post under an assumed identity to get them to write about how much sex he was having.

Bret Stephens Solves North Korea

Image via Sizzle.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "On North Korea, Trump's on the Right Track", July 7 2017:

All the boring and conventional thinkers are trying to get Trump to take a path in the middle between the usual two extreme options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons program—more sanctions or military strikes. Because how can more sanctions accomplish what fewer sanctions have failed to accomplish? And military strikes are off the table because of something I think Michael O'Hanlon probably says at some point in this very long piece, though I haven't found it yet. What they really want him to do is split the difference and put more diplomacy into it. But all these people are seeing the problem wrong. We don't need to get rid of the nukes, we need to get rid of the regime. This always works. How do we change the North Korean regime? All we have to do is persuade the Chinese government to cut off fuel supplies to the country and put Kim Jong-un under permanent house arrest in Beijing when he comes over to complain. Then everybody in Pyongyang will breathe a sigh of relief and be normal and keep their nukes to themselves instead of using them to upset everybody and probably selling them to Iran and so on. How do we get the Chinese to do this? Sanctions on Chinese banks, of course, and frightening them by selling more arms to Taiwan. Which is exactly what Trump is doing, I think. Now all they need is a grand strategic reason for doing it, and looks like I just took care of that myself!

Swear to God:

Copernicus—Think of that!

Something very funky about that Krasinski Square setting, chosen, some thought, because it's a lot smaller than the Zamkowy Square where Obama addressed enraptured crowds in 2014, and easier to fill up with President Duda's bussed-in supporters. But looks a lot like a postmodern staging of a Wagner opera. Reuters photo via New York Daily News.

The Emperor discusses his plans for North Korea in response to its test of what seems to have been an ICBM that could carry a nuclear weapon to Alaska or Hawaii if they could make one small enough to fit it, which they apparently will one of these days if things go on the way they do:

“I have some pretty severe things we’re thinking about," Trump said at a news conference in Warsaw. "Doesn’t mean we’re going to do them. I don’t draw red lines."

"It’s a shame they’re behaving this way and they’re behaving in a very dangerous manner, and something will have to be done about it," Trump said.

He has no idea what he's doing because Mattis hasn't told him yet; perhaps the Secretary thought it would be more prudent to wait until after the Putin meeting, since, as we know, Trump can't be trusted to keep information to himself.

Also he thinks he doesn't draw red lines but he drew one just last week, the very same as the old Obama red line that he has mocked so much:

Don't panic, Tom!

Breakfast in Korea. To the surprise of one Vice reporter, it's what's for dinner!

Seems like a long time since he's hit one out of the Friedmanian lunacy park like this:

Solving the Korea Crisis by Teaching a Horse to Sing

And the exotic (not that exotic) dateline:

SEOUL, South Korea — Some stories have to be experienced to fully grasp — the Korea crisis is one of them. I arrived in Seoul on the evening of May 28. As I was dressing for breakfast the next morning, I was jarred by a news alert ringing on my phone: North Korea had just fired a short-range ballistic missile that had landed in the sea off its east coast.

Grammar salad in the first clause ("stories" is the subject of passive "be experienced" but not the active "grasp" that follows it, and when you're trying to parse it you start wondering if stories have to be experienced like Jimi Hendrix—"Has this story ever been experienced, well I have"—and you're in a state of collapse before you get to the first dash), and the implication, because we do know what he means, that he doesn't expect us to understand the story he's about to tell.

I guess it does have missiles in it, and it's sure slow...

Sergey Nikitich Khrushschev and his father around 1962, not sleeping. Via BBC. No special meaning.

Stupid Analogies department, from David Sanger:

What is playing out, said Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who tracks this potentially deadly interplay, is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” But the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up, as President Trump and his aides have made it clear that the United States will no longer tolerate the incremental advances that have moved Mr. Kim so close to his goals.

Our Soviet antagonist in 1962, in response to US deployment of more than 100 nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey and the possibility of a renewed US effort to overthrow the Cuban government, secretly deployed a like number of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, creating a terrifying standoff when U-2 spyplanes discovered their existence.

Loud Speaker

Don't know why they gave Israel a bishop, or a pawn down there among the Marsh Arabs. Via Gordon Campbell Plans to Bomb Iran's Nuclear Facilities. No, he didn't really, and it was 2009.

So BooMan gave his readers a challenge: to read what Mr. Speaker Boehner said this morning about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1—

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday said he hopes the Obama administration fails to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Boehner said he did not believe Iran would ever live up to its side of a bargain that would lift U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

“I’ve never been optimistic that we’d get to an agreement, a real agreement that would stop the nuclear threat from Iran and I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of giving up their desire for a nuclear weapon,” Boehner told Fox Business Channel’s “Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo.”

Asked whether he’s expecting an agreement, Boehner said: “I would hope not.”

“I don’t think we can get to agreement with people who have no intention of keeping the agreement,” he added.

—and then answer a question:

The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]

A brief sidetrack into speculative Kim Jong-il

Little Jurka (Jurij Irsenovič Kim) with his lovely Soviet parents, Il-sung and Jong-suk. His Shirley Temple smile presaged a movie career. The picture is not dated; I can't believe how beautiful they are, it doesn't seem right. In the shot below they look more North Korean and not so pretty; note Jong-il's remarkable ears:

Photos pillaged from yesterday's Daily Mail.