For the Record: Xits 'n' Giggles

Tom reupped this beautiful old piece in honor of the appearance of Indicted Trump as a kind of Fonzie figure making women faint and reducing men to helpless envy at his badassery. 

 

For God's sake read the indictments, Marco. They detail an astonishing range of crimes, worse than Nixon's, committed by an organized mob infiltrating the highest levels of government. The justice system had to address it. It is the justice system, not politicians, who "decided". pic.twitter.com/w9MHxZ2uXk

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2023

Literally 30 years, starting with the stupid "Travelgate" investigation https://t.co/VmJqsTQUoV That's how old this "destructive new era" is. If you want to issue warnings, issue them to your own caucus.

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2023

We Have Met the Élites and They Are Ted

 

Ted Cruz's vast kitchen "breakfast area", with a view of the also vast patio, via New York Post.

The shamelessness is overpowering. @SenTedCruz https://t.co/UAiwYHEXCD

— Woke Mob Values (@Yastreblyansky) May 30, 2022

He doesn't actually spend $23K/month for security. Looks like Republican donors do that, with the blessing of the FEC, and not to protect his house but his campaign travel, as he roams the country pretending to be a serious person looking for votes for the—ah, 2024 election, and for all I know he needs the protection, as Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock, both running for 2022 and for different reasons subject to really frightening threats, certainly do, which Kelly's opponent apparently thinks is funny:

When a GOP candidate seeking to run against Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly recently released an ad featuring him in a Wild West shootout with Kelly and other prominent Democrats, members of both parties criticized the spot. 

Kelly’s wife, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, formed a gun control advocacy group after surviving a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson in which a gunman killed six people. Senate candidate Jim Lamon posed as an old-time sheriff having a shootout with “the DC gang” in the ad, which aired during halftime of the Super Bowl on Tucson’s NBC affiliate. His campaign subsequently said it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

The "DC gang", lol. That's another code for those "élites" we keep hearing about who are totally not country music–loving assault rifle–toting homeboys like Senator Cruz. 

But, just to be clear, his whole neighborhood may not be strictly gated, that's for the neighborhood's lower class, the condo owners, not three-story 4000-square-foot five-bedroom mansions like his own, but the 24/7 private security is definitely there.

River Oaks is a subdivision within the Houston Super Neighborhood #23 and is located in between Uptown and Downtown Houston. River Oaks is said to be one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Texas and the U.S. as a whole. It is two square miles of mansions and exclusive estates, each valued in the millions of dollars. Security for the area is maintained by a private agency called the River Oaks Patrol, which boasts one of the lowest crime rates in the city of Houston.

We don't know how much he pays for it, but we do know it's the kind of personal service–oriented. company that will take care of your dog if a cold snap and massive citywide power failure force your family to flee to Cancún, as we learned when that happened to the Cruz family last year.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this evidence that Ted Cruz knows exactly what "élite" means, which has little to do with tastes in popular music or guns: it means him (along with, no doubt, some people who are less committed to tax cutting for the rich and deregulating capitalist excess, but mostly him). 

For the Record: Pipeline Talk

 

Getting Russian natural gas to Europe, via Radio Free Europe. It'l be a lot less complicated once Europe stops using natural gas—may it be soon!—but in the meantime, the Ukraine (the purple line) is not getting replaced...

And now for something completely different:

I have two things I say about this issue: (1) Trump administration had four years to impose sanctions on Russia over the pipeline, and frequently said they were going to do it https://t.co/YqXnHrV9df but never did for some reason...

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 12, 2022

For the Record: God Rest You Merry

 

Ecumenical Holiday Ugly Sweater via Zazzle, $31.05

Aren't you special! Happy Kwanzaa-if-you-celebrate to you too. If you don't, what business is it of yours?

— Condemn That Shit ASAP (@Yastreblyansky) December 27, 2021

The "village" in Nigeria she comes from is Owerri, a city of 1.4 million people. It's predominantly Christian, but lots of "villages" in Nigeria aren't. Plenty of Christians in US celebrate Kwanzaa. It's allowed.

— Condemn That Shit ASAP (@Yastreblyansky) December 27, 2021

Kwanzaa is not an alternative to Christmas. The two are celebrated on different days and represent similar social values. I mean I guess you're not too big on Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men and Women, but you're unusual. pic.twitter.com/ouiQV7S2Bv

— Condemn That Shit ASAP (@Yastreblyansky) December 27, 2021

Just in case it's not totally clear what Ted is attempting to do here, it's to vilify Kwanzaa without sounding like My Little Margie here:

If the Creek Do Rise, What Else Will? Protect Yourself!

 

Lindsay Graham, in his hypothetical, is fully armed, watching all his neighbors get killed by a gang. https://t.co/vlbEWUn0Gt

— A.R. (Ancient Router) Moxon (@JuliusGoat) March 28, 2021

Central, South Carolina (pop. ca. 5,385), home of Senator Lindsey Woolsey Graham, isn't in central South Carolina, but up in Pickens County in the state's far northwest, and not exactly in a hurricane zone, or prone to earthquakes or volcanoes

Pickens County, SC, via Wikipedia.

but that doesn't mean it's without its perils, as people learned last year in nearby Easley, and and all along the Calhoun Memorial Highway (Route 93) pretty much every year, when the spring rains come and the creeks rise.

Literary Corner: Party of Country Clubs

Country club crowd lining up for a Biden speech in Detroit, 9 March 2020. Photo by Jeff Kowalski, AFP/Getty, via Wall Street Journal.

I Hear America Kvetching

by Senator Rafael Edward Cruz, Esquire, BA (Princeton), JD (Harvard)

They look at Donald Trump and the millions of people who went to battle
fighting alongside him and they’re terrified.
They want him to go away. Let me tell you this right now:
Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere,
The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs,
it’s the party of steel workers and construction workers and taxi drivers and
cops and firefighters and waitresses. That is our party!
these deplorables are here to stay!
Every one of you has a platform.
Every one of you has a voice.
The corporate media wants to silence these voices.

For the Record: The Preemptive Whatabout

Via The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

Much respect and warm feelings toward attorney general nominee Merrick Garland, but I also enjoyed what looked to me like subtweeting skill in the written version of his opening statement for today's confirmation hearing:

From Merrick Garland statement https://t.co/ohDLfE38m1:

"strictly regulate communications with the White House"

That's aimed at criminal AGs Sessions and Barr and it's very welcome pic.twitter.com/cRPqoXI3ck

— Screechy Ill-Speak (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2021

Ted Cruz may have thought so too, because in his "questioning" at the hearing he brought in what you might call an argument by Preemptive Whatabout, where you don't wait for your opponent to give you a name before you respond with your whatabout, but rather trot it out in advance—in this case forestalling the Barr with a dig at Obama's first attorney general, Eric Holder.

We don't all love Holder a hundred percent, I realize. I personally think it's a divided legacy, with very good work in the civil rights area (including, I'll say this to the end, in his handling of the 2014-15 unaccompanied minor migrant crisis, "cages" and all, as comes clear when you compare it with Sessions and his crimes against humanity in 2017) and his very inadequate response to the crimes committed by bankers and insurers in the 2007-08 financial crisis. And I'm fond of the idea of Holder as Obama's anti-racism translator, if you know what I mean, expressing thoughts Obama didn't feel he could afford to express for himself.

But Cruz's remarks pushed me into one of those rants:

Radio Yerevan on Blue-Collar Ted

 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that today's Democratic party represents rich, angry Hollywood celebrities like Seth Rogen better than it does blue-collar union workers in the energy and manufacturing sectors like Senator Ted Cruz?

Answer: Yes, but...

First of all, Rogen is a union member (Screen Actors Guild) in an industry that is arguably a kind of manufacturing in structure, and certainly supports 2.6 million jobs including 927,000 in direct production and distribution and consists of 93,000 businesses in all 50 states, 87% of which employ fewer than ten workers, and generates $17.2 billion in exports with a trade surplus of $10.3 billion, four percent of the total U.S. trade surplus in services; and three other unions, according to him, which I have no reason to doubt. Which Cruz is not, having spent his entire working life, after a couple of years at a private law firm (1997-98) and a stint with George W. Bush's successful first presidential campaign (1999-2000), in government jobs. 

Cruz Channels Lenin

 

Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Height, 1960. Tell them the Republicans are the "party of the working class". Via Wikipedia.

I've long found it fun to say that American conservatives are the most doctrinaire Marxist ideological faction, in the sense of believing in the reality of class struggle, except that they want the proletariat to lose the war and give way to the permanent dictatorship of the revolutionary bourgeoisie instead of the more conventional other way around.

But I always meant it as a joke line, insightful but not meant to be taken literally, until I saw this from Rafael Theodore Cruz channeling Vladimir Il'ich Lenin here:

Today’s Dems are the party of the rich.

GOP is and should be the party of the working class. https://t.co/WMTDtKTzwU

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 29, 2020

Really? 

For the Record: Tough on China

 

Illustration by Javier Zarracina/Vox.

Rafael trying to come out plus trompiste que le Trompe:

All things he fought against

Whereas with the one thing he campaigned on https://t.co/dtYcVQLqiZ

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 6, 2020

Seriously...

NYT Book Review: Sentence them to the galleys!

Right, "Intel" gave him a call 10:30 Sunday night after leaving him hanging for 48 hours. "Hi, Mr. President, Intel here, we got a line on that report that we've been collecting evidence going back to January that GRU has been paying Afghan militants to kill NATO troops since 2018, and it turns out when we had that emergency National Security Council meeting on the subject last March, as reported in The Times, WaPo, and Wall Street Journal, among other places, we apparently decided the evidence wasn't credible, so we didn't want to bother you. We suspect the New York Times Book Review of fabricating the whole thing."

With their field critics in Helmand, who planted the story with the militants ("Just tell the interrogators Russians were paying you, and in turn we'll get you lunch with an agent to pitch your manuscript"). No, the @nytimesbooks bit must be a bizarre Autocorrect. But in general he's once again gotten out ahead of where the cleanup crew can follow him, simultaneously acknowledging that the reports exist, "based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals", and claiming that The Times made them up.

And in other cheap shots:

For the Record: Miscellany

Twitter is like an intellectual equivalent of the southeastern Australian coast right now, deadly brush fires everywhere you turn demanding your attention so you don't know where to focus.

Why are these Democrats complaining about lawyer lawsuits? We have lawyer lawsuits all the time! You can't FILE a lawsuit without a lawyer!

Oh, FOIA lawsuits?

Never mind https://t.co/oDQGAN880e

— Dopes 'n' Babies (@Yastreblyansky) January 23, 2020

Trump doubling down on his belief that there were no US casualties in the Iranian raids on bases in Iraq, after the army announced that there were a number of cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Mess the Press: A Matter of Faith

Jordan writes in comments at NMMB:

The Jay Rosen piece keeps getting into his rejection of any possibility of Todd's "naïveté" -- contrasting that idea with Rosen's famous "Church of Savvy" (the brilliant Rosen idea that what's valued amongst Washington journalists isn't insight, or wisdom, or accuracy, or righteousness, but "savvy" -- the ability to speak from a bored, cynical, apolitical, anti-idealistic position that indicates one's membership in the inner sanctum of the Beltway, a vantage point from which one can relate what's "really" going on) -- but I wonder about this; I think it's just semantics.

Because, whether you want to call it naïveté or not, I think it's fairly obvious that Chuck Todd believes in what he's doing; he thinks he's accomplishing something by bringing Republicans and Democrats onto a television show to ask them "fair," "penetrating" questions; he accepts the same symmetrically-balanced paradigm that his audience presumably believes in -- and the built-in favoritism towards conservative ideas and elected officials, vs. the automatic, disdainful suspicion of Democrats and progressives, is just a manifestation of a basic systemic bias that Todd is utterly unaware of -- he can enact it so guilelessly because he can't see it.

I won't disagree with much of that. I was put off by the way Rosen insisted that "it's not naïveté" several times, which seemed awfully facile (and by the strangely self-serving way he suggests Todd ought to be reading Press Think, when he says "Todd did not care to listen" and then quotes himself, as if the blogpost had been addressed to Todd).

One of the things Rosen sees but doesn't understand is wonderfully encapsulated in the term "Church of the Savvy": that it really is a church, with articles of faith, and the members believe in it, but that doesn't exclude guile. A priesthood doesn't doubt the truth of the doctrine but its members jockey for status in cynical ways and blindside those who aren't initiated all the same. When you watch video of Trump's "spiritual adviser" Paula White prancing the stage frenetically during the service, you know she's worked into a genuine trance state and having an absolutely real spiritual experience, which doesn't stop her from being manipulative and corrupt.

Brooks Endorses Cruz

Love before it went sour. Congressional Quarterly via Esquire.

Nailed it: In comments yesterday over at Alicublog, I predicted:

There's the narrative of Cruz as heroic resister, coming not just from the NRO right (e.g. Jonah) but young Master David Frum, who was kvelling non-ideologically over Cruz's bravery on the radio this morning. I expect it to be the subject of David Brooks's column tomorrow.

Sure enough, he's back in the saddle this morning (after his week in Cleveland helping with the color commentary on PBS, leaving the Tuesday column to be cranked out by a possibly snarky research assistant, I wasn't sure he'd actually show up), with a piece under the GÖPperdämmerung title "The Death of the Republican Party" singling out the repellent Texas senator:

I’m not a Cruz fan, but his naked ambition does fuel amazing courage. As the Republican Party is slouching off on a suicide march, at least Cruz is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” When the Trump train implodes, the docile followers who are now booing and denouncing Ted Cruz will claim they were on his side all along.

(I think that's his 144th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his time as a Times columnist. He's been slowing down; nos. 141 and 142 were back in February, and I seem to have missed no. 143. In contrast, it's just the fourth time he's used "athwart" in an echo or direct quotation of old Mr. Buckley's famous definition of "conservatism".)

It's the beginning of the next narrative, of how conservatism can never fail but only be failed, as we'll hear it over the next four years. The "courage" it took Cruz to risk, ah, what exactly? To risk looking obnoxious to the person who called him a liar several times a day for months and who is on his way to what Brooks himself predicts will

end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.

Cruz is positioning himself, as he always does, for the next act, that's all.

The real neo-monarchist

Still dead. Image lifted from an openly fascist website (in Spanish).

Stung, no doubt, by the shrieks of derisive laughter that greeted his essay on why our political thinkers should pay more attention to the thinking of neo-reactionaries (not the racism, of course, just the good parts), Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has now issued his "Well, liberals are the real neo-reactionaries anyway" piece. Or liberals are the real neo-monarchists at least. Or "the center-left and center-right rather than the ideological extremes" in "a kind of moderate-middle enthusiasm for crown government, as a means of escape from congressional dysfunction and endless right-left war". Or those identical-twin princes Barack Obama and George W. Bush:

Executive-branch Caesarism has been raised to new heights by the last two presidents, and important parts of the country have responded by upping the ante, and — like ancient Israelites in the Book of Samuel — basically clamoring for a king.

Cheap shots and hot pursuits

Update 4/22: Welcome Mike's Round-Up Readers! Thanks, Batocchio!

Via Wikimedia Commons, attributed to M.Z.D. Schmid.

The worst thing about Donald Trump, per David French at National Review: He encourages feminism.

The masculinity of Trump is exactly the caricatured, counterfeit masculinity of the feminist fever dream. It takes the full energy of manhood and devotes it to sex, money, and power. It’s posturing masquerading as toughness and anger drained of bravery.... he breathes new life into a feminism that is so extreme, so hysterical, that even a majority of women reject it.

That must be pretty darn extreme and hysterical, if even the wimminz are against it.

West of Eden: Brussels doubts

Syrian family in Istanbul. Photo by Jonny Hogg/Reuters (?) on Flickr.

Trump doubled down on his torture advocacy yesterday, naturally:

The billionaire businessman said authorities "should be able to do whatever they have to do" to gain information in an effort to thwart future attacks.

"Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said on NBC's "Today" program, adding he believed torture could produce useful leads. "You have to get the information from these people."

That would almost be funny, if it wasn't so horrible, coming at the time it does. On Monday, as Belgian police were talking about the fantastic cooperation they were getting from Salah Abdeslam, without the benefit of torture ("worth his weight in gold," said his lawyer), they happened to mention one of the leads they'd acquired, the false name Soufiane Kayal being used by Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in November's Paris attacks; on Tuesday, the Brussels bombings took place, and today we are learning that that same Laachraoui is a member of the team that did yesterday's slaughter, probably the bomb-maker. The Belgian authorities might well have been able to capture Laachraoui and prevent the attack, thanks to their humane and effective interrogation practice,  if they had been a little luckier.

Cheap shots: The Detroit debate

No offense to gorillas meant. I really, really love gorillas. I just don't think their behavior is appropriate for humans to emulate. Image via Gorillas344.

Hard as it may be to believe, it wasn't all Trump's penis, big as that is, or may conceivably be. Some of my favorite big lies of the evening follow.

Trump math

TRUMP: Let me explain something. Because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies — because of the fact that the pharmaceutical companies are not mandated to bid properly, they have hundreds of billions of dollars in waste.

We don’t bid properly. We don’t have proper bidding procedures. The reason we don’t is because they take care of all of the senators, all of the congressman, and they don’t bid. They don’t go out to bid. WALLACE: Mr. Trump...

TRUMP: Take a look — excuse me. You are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars...

WALLACE: No, you are not.

TRUMP: ... if we went out to the proper bid. Of course you are.

WALLACE: No, you’re not, sir. Let’s put up full screen number 2.

You say that Medicare could save $300 billion a year negotiating lower drug prices. But Medicare total only spends $78 billion a year on drugs. Sir, that’s the facts. You are talking about saving more money on Medicare prescription drugs...

Cheap shot: Truss Ted

Because if the Rapture turns out to be a Rupture, you're going to need Support!

Cheap shots, heels, and mountains of dreck

Yesterday I said something to the effect that Donald Trump was fearless, but I was wrong: as the Scarecrow had his terror of a lighted match, as Achilles dreaded an injury to his heel, so there's one thing the Donald fears: Questions from Fox News's ice princess.

Megyn Kelly. Photo by Alexei Hay/GQ, December 2010, via TeaParty.org. So that's what fuck-me heels are?

Amazing Conservative Logic of the Year:

I know it's still only January, but this from David Beckworth (Mercatus Institute) and Ramesh Ponnuru (American Enterprise Institute) in the New York Times is an instant classic: