His Wonders to Perform

Photo via petguide.com.

 

I don't have a Hardcore email account like Edroso's, but I do get some crazy off Twitter, from nuts there who have followed me at one time or another (I always follow back), for reasons I can't generally reconstruct. One of whom goes by "Question Ray Epps". It's also come to me that outside the depths of the Slough of Paranoia most people don't have a very clear idea of why Ray Epps is a thing, whereas, because of my Twitter connection, I've spent some time trying to figure it out, so I probably have a slightly clearer concept than most of you of who Ray Epps is, and the enjoyable Ray Epps news that has surfaced this week, and I thought I should share that.

Epps was an ex-Marine, the owner with his wife of a wedding-venue business in Arizona, and a pretty high-ranking  Oath Keeper, president of the Arizona chapter, who didn't get charged in the January 6 investigations, although he was captured on video during the rally the night before, telling an interviewer and later a crowd that "We've got to go into the Capitol! That's where our problems are!"—"Peacefully! Peacefully!" he added the second time,  leading the crowd to begin chanting, "Fed! Fed! Fed!" And the next afternoon just at the moment of the breach on the Capitol itself, where he's briefly seen whispering to an unidentified person outside the barriers, who then joins the others knocking the barriers down and punching the cops on the other side, while Epps disappears. There's a pretty good mashup of these glimpses in this story at The Independent.

Then, as Ted Cruz was telling the FBI's representative in a Senate hearing on January 11 2022, a mysterious development:

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.”

I can tell you something about that one: the FBI wasn't looking for him any more, because when the first poster went up and Epps realized they were looking for him, he immediately called them and gave them whatever evidence he had to give (The New York Times checked his phone records and found he'd spoken to them for an hour), so it's really not all that magical.

Tucker? I hardly know 'er!

 

Everybody has to put in their take on Tucker, I guess, including his pal Glenn Greenwald:

Can't decide whether Grindelwald here is so focused on advancing the Russian program that he can't see anything else or so anxious to change the subject from white nationalism that he can't do anything else https://t.co/KACHRT8PEz

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) April 25, 2023

Or I guess it must be opposite sides of the same coin, Glenn's leftist Putinism (the story that the bloodthirsty US started the war in Ukraine by forcing pacifist Putin to launch another involuntary invasion like those in 2014 or in Georgia in 2008) serving as a beard for the fascist Putinism (Tucker's) he can't quit associating with.

That's basically Glenn's theory of why Carlson was axed at Fox—specifically, over Carlson's "passionate defense" of the four members of the African People's Socialist Front in Florida charged a couple of weeks ago with taking money from Russia's FSB foreign intelligence agency to "covertly sow discord in U.S. society, spread Russian propaganda, and interfere illegally in U.S. elections", or as Glenn puts it, being "dissidents" against US support for Ukraine. 

Narratology: If You Have a Hungarian For a Friend...

Tucker and Viktor on Monday, photo by the Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister, via The New York Times.

Not how the old saying goes, but if you have a Hungarian for a friend, you might want to know who his other friends are.

I don't know to what extent readers are following the adventures of the wingnut brethren in Hungary, where Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been serving as a visiting fellow of the Danube Institute since spring (his substack says he went 17 April, and was about to return to the US when he last posted on 4 August, but he's also traveled around a bit in France, Spain, Romania, and Poland, I think), exuding enthusiasm for the illiberalism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, one of the politicians who emerged from the velvet revolutions of 1989, a more or less conventional, pro-Western though very conservative, leader in his first premiership from 1998 to 2002 and an increasingly authoritarian one in his second, beginning 2010, during which he has battled immigrants (especially Muslim ones), LBGTQ+ Hungarians (that's important to Rod, of course), press freedom, and George Soros and his Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation gave him a scholarship to Oxford in 1989, but he returned to Hungary to run for Parliament less than a year after starting).

On the press freedom, Rod rodsplains, in a post datelined Ljubljana (note how, for evidence, he cites himself, talking to an anonymous Slovene, reporting the authority of some anonymous Magyars without explaining what makes them authorities):

I mentioned to a conservative writer here that a couple of Hungarians told me that if Orban had not engineered the takeover of a number of Hungarian press titles by his friends and allies, there would be no conservative media presence at all in Hungary — this, even though conservative voters are a majority. Whenever you hear people on the Left demanding government intervention to guarantee “equity” — meaning equal outcomes [if I ever hear it, but I haven't so far, though I've heard talk about reviving the FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949-87 requiring individual broadcasters to represent a range of views] — remind them that that is pretty much what Viktor Orban did with the Hungarian media landscape. I should say that I have serious misgivings [sure, Rod, that's why you're defending it] about the media operation Orban pulled off, but the de facto monopoly the Left has on the media, especially in a small country like Hungary, tempers my criticism. Orban is far more realistic about the world people on the Right actually live in, I think.

Vaccine Skeptics

Pyrrho of Elis, founder of the Skeptical School, holds rigorously to principle. Existential Comics.

 

Predictably, it turns out that liberals are to blame for vaccine hesitancy—Murc's Law again—because we're "condescending" and that hurts the feelings of people who might otherwise go for it. We're treating them as mulish when they're in fact skeptical, Michael Brendan Dougherty opines at National Review:

Proponents of the vaccine are unwilling or unable to understand the thinking of vaccine skeptics — or even admit that skeptics may be thinking at all. Their attempts to answer skepticism or understand it end up poisoned by condescension, and end up reinforcing it.

Skeptics! So we should be persuading them with sweet reason, not treating them as idiots, as, according to Michael Brendan Doughterty, we are all doing, as when Senator Cornyn says the doubts are "based on conspiracy theories" or Senator Romney calls it "moronic":

Those rats won't fck themselves

 

Via.

Me, on 28 October 2016:

There is no chance, as far as I'm concerned, and based on what actual journalists are reporting, that the FBI has any new information that is of any relevance to the question whether or not Hillary Clinton ought to be president, regardless of your feelings about that question, since the emails that "may have been related to" Clinton's private server, which Huma Abedin seems to have chosen to print from a home laptop that was also used by Anthony Weiner to transmit pictures of his penis, or not, as the case may be, are neither from Clinton nor to Clinton, and are absolutely not documents that have been withheld from the investigation; the FBI is already perfectly familiar with their content, at least so far (there are thousands, naturally, and it will take many weeks, until long after the election is over, to finish looking at them). They could conceivably be relevant to the question whether Huma Abedin mishandled classified data, but nobody's saying that there's any likelihood of that either; they're just checking them out from an "abundance of caution".

Comey's conduct in making this non-information public 11 days before the presidential election is said to be from an "abundance of caution" too, or, as we say in English, covering his ass against accusations that he ended the Clinton investigation too early, just in case the Bureau does somehow learn something of interest to somebody. Yes, it's really improbable, but Comey's going to be ready. Not only does he wear a belt and suspenders but he also has his trousers surgically attached to his waist and ankles:

“In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season,” he noted, “there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”

(Via Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, which you need to read.) Comey seems to think the worst thing that could ever happen to our republic would be if somebody criticized him. With the result, naturally, that he comes in for a lot of criticism, much of it very richly deserved. 

OK so I was wrong about how long it would take for FBI to go through the material (it took exactly just long enough to poison the electorate and ended just in time for Comey to pretend it hadn't done that), and I was obviously wrong about whether this nonsense could affect the vote outcome (Steve was more doubtful). But I was right about the utter nullity of the scandal.

Me, almost exactly four years later:

For the Record: Stupid or Wicked?

Kin Ming Estates, Tseung Kwon O, Hong Kong, housing 22,000 people. Image by Baycrest via Wikipedia.

Roy (subscription) asks, on the subject of the contrast between helpless Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher and malevolent Tucker Carlson, where we draw the line for conservatives between stupid and evil. It generated a huge amount of very interesting commentary, from which my main contribution:

Yastreblyansky30 min

I'm enough of an old-school love-me-I'm-a-liberal, by upbringing and temperament, that the question makes me kind of uncomfortable. Am I implicitly wondering whether we in the progressive community are really, really smart, or just really, really good?

There's a classic liberal answer according to which stupid and evil are two sides of one coin. People are evil because they don't know any better, and they're stupid because they're too selfish to bother learning. Chicken and egg. Conservatives are evil because they're so unconscious of the exigencies of life outside their own tiny and comfy community that they can't conceive how anybody could get into trouble unless they were bad people, and therefore feel no pity. There's a parallel failure of perspective among liberals like Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby, whose emotions were wholly devoted to starting a mission in Africa while she lost track of her neglected children and suicidal husband, but at least Mrs. Jellyby has some moral imagination.

If conservatives are forced to find out, they might learn. I think David French truly learned something about what it's like to be a black kid when he adopted one and his ugly-white community turned on them. Everybody knows about Mrs. Reagan realizing that stem-cell research isn't immoral when she was caring 24/7 for an Alzheimer's patient and heard that the research could help. That's why we love stories like The Prince and the Pauper or Trading Places.

The thing that distinguishes Tucker from Jonah is the energy he's willing to put into staying ignorant or, if necessary, turning to ignorance on a 1984 dime, as he did with the subject of mask-wearing the other day, adopting the Trump view after weeks of telling his audience the (scientifically correct) opposite. Jonah doesn't have any energy and trusts his friends to make the decisions (David Brooks has a wider circle of friends and adopts three or four contradictory viewpoints without noticing the contradictions). Tucker actively looks for the view that will advance his power goals whether it's true or not, and I agree that's evil. But he doesn't think it's important because he's too stupid to imagine the real-world consequences; he's just a high school kid taking the side the debate coach assigned him, doing his best to win it for the team.

The conversation quickly fell into worrying about "DLC Democrats" or "establishment Democrats", and I had something to say about that as well:

There once was a pisher

Photo via The Independent.

I seem to have been the only participant in this contest:

That's not a challenge. Make it so they can't use the word "fucker" and you have yourself a chore.

— Dale Burden (@CthulhuHulu) April 9, 2020

But what the heck, I feel good about it.

A snide young imperialist, Tucker,
Had manners that hardly were pukka;
His own polo pony
Despised him as phony
And threw him in less than a chukka.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 10, 2020

And the third one feels like a real poem, which doesn't mean I don't hope it's funny, but that it really does say something about Tucker that couldn't be said so easily in normal commentary, and obeys the laws of the form while subverting their function. and all the words, even the Yiddish ones, seem to have more than one reason for being there.

There once was a pisher called Tucker
Whose lips formed a permanent pucker.
Was he really farklemt
By compulsive contempt?
Or just an inveterate sucker?

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 10, 2020

Literary Corner: Tucker In

Jephtah Killing his Daughter Judges 1, from the Maciejowski Bible (France, c. 1250), via Pneuma Review.

Thoughts on His Receiving Support From White Nationalist Institutions Like David Duke and the Daily Stormer Website For His Denunciation of Imaginary South African White Genocide

by Tucker Carlson

Joseph Stalin loved his daughter.
I love my daughters. Does that
make me a Stalinist? That's such a
stupid question I don't know what to say.

(AP via Lincoln Journal-Star)

Moral: Don't ask yourself stupid questions. Let somebody else do it.

How does that analogy work, though, exactly? "Nazis love me. I love myself. Does that make me a Nazi?" Well, no, that's not a valid syllogism, but. If a father's love—Iosif Vissarionovich's or Tucker's— for his daughter is a good analogy for a Nazi's love for Tucker, what's good about it? How does it work? Are we saying the Nazi's love for Tucker is warm, sweet, chaste, and somehow inevitable? Are we saying nothing could be more natural, unless it's Tucker loving Tucker? And why would that be?

Litter-ary Corner

Song of Illegal Immigration

by Tucker Carlson

I actually hate
litter which is one of
the reasons I'm so against
illegal immigration.

It produces a huge amount
of litter. Huge amount
of litter and I mean that
with total sincerity.

Text from Andrew Lawrence via Steve.

Literary Corner: Tucker Face

Getty Photo via NBC.

A pungent lyric by former bowtie model Tucker Carlson, now enjoying a second career as a professional brow-knitter, the Man Who Looks Perplexed at Fox:

Song of Triumph 

by Tucker Carlson

When's the last time
you heard a liberal laugh?
And not sardonically or bitterly
or in rage but actual mirth.

Like, 'I'm amused hahaha
look at me I'm carefree.'
Have you seen that in the
last year and a half?

At a superficial level, it may seem unseemly for him to be taking so much pleasure in the idea that he and his political faction have destroyed the peace of mind of an entire class of people since the 2016 election, but I think there's something deeper going on in the alliteration—the leap of L's and rumble of H's surrounding the central "hahaha" as if to suggest a subtextual "lalala (I can't hear you [laughing])", a Tucker face of deep suspicion that those liberals may be laughing (in their non-actual, sardonic or bitter way) at him.

And a kind of endearing Martian-anthropologist sense of wonderment when he speculates on the mysteries of the human laughter mechanism, that it must be aimed at getting ("look at me") attention that isn't going to him.

The right is starting to get better at comedy and it's making lefties nervous. pic.twitter.com/8iRWwgtd7a

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 24, 2018

Fake interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by a "comedian" called Allie Beth Stuckie, posted without my realizing that, as I learn from Roy, there could be people online who don't realize it's fake. I'm leaving it here as the most pure and ghastly bitterness- and rage-fueled example I've ever seen of the rightwing fantasy of what "comedy" is probably like.

For the Record: It's the RPM, Stupid.

Three rounds per minute and sometimes you still needed a sword. Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, via WhiteRoseWritings.

Over 30 shots, 17 lethal, in under 5 minutes.

AR-15 firing rate cited as between 45 and 700 rounds per minute.

Thompson submachine gun, 600-1500 rpm, banned successfully 1934.

2nd Amendment written before invention of Baker rifle, 2-3 rpm.

Has something to do with guns.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

The Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock to achieve 9 rps (540 rpm).

The Orlando shooter reached 2.66 rps/160 rpm.

Ban on Tommy gun didn't stop gang killings, but made them far less lethal. Banning semi-automatics would save lives.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Not a majority of lives lost to guns, which are mostly suicide and spouse/partner murder. Just a few. But these include concertgoers in Las Vegas, clubbers in Orlando, children slaughtered in Columbine, Newtown, Va Tech, now Broward County. How do you have a problem with this?

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2018

Cheap shots: It's gone, boom!

Image via Arizona Star.

The former neurosurgeon ate at the Silver Saddle Steakhouse on the south side's East Benson Highway, a day after speaking to thousands of people at the Phoenix Convention Center.

He drew national attention as well, after commenting later in the day that he supports the use of military drone strikes to help secure the border....

In January, comedian/actor/director/screenwriter Adam Sandler stopped in to the Silver Saddle to have dinner with his sister.

That Silver Saddle wouldn't by any chance be an advertiser or anything, would it, Star?

Anyhow, what does Dr. Ben Carson mean by "drones" in his stump speech, as at his Phoenix rally last Tuesday?

“What I have said consistently is that we need [to] seal our borders,” he said. “We can use a whole series of things to do that, not just fences and walls, but electronic surveillance and drones.”

I mean, given that US Customs and Border Patrol has been using surveillance drones since 2005, to virtually no effect, although they have managed to crash 23 unmanned planes, one 100 yards from somebody's house in Nogales? What use other than surveillance did he have in mind? He wasn't planning to kill anybody, was he? He wasn't planning to use armed military drones, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus law (funny trick for a small-government Constitutional conservative, I must say), was he?

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:

Cheap shot: Li'l Tucker

Via Crooks & Liars, 2010.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday said that liberals were making a “racist attack” by pointing out that “white privilege” exists in America.

During an interview on Fox News, Carlson noted that conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter had been criticized for a recent column claiming what people thought was white privilege was “just me being better than you.”

“I mean, it’s silly on its face,” the Fox News host opined. “Some white people are privileged, some aren’t. Some black people are, some aren’t. It’s strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it’s making a generalization — a negative one — based on skin color.” (Raw Story)

I know right.

Tucker has a dream... of being judged not by the color of his privilege but by the contents of his portfolio. http://t.co/ZKuH93NYOm
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 18, 2014

Cheap shots and chasers 6/15

Updated 6/16 (with new taco picture)

Ah, fascists! Ilias Kasidiaris of Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party, who tried to beat up two left-wing members of parliament, both women, last Friday, on live national television, was locked up in the TV studio after people called the cops and escaped by busting in the door—now he's announced he's going to sue the women, for "unprovoked defamation", and the TV station for illegal detention.

Steampunk five-lens glasses. From www.holytaco.com.

David Brooks comes out all apocalypytic all of a sudden:

many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval Levin expressed the sentiment perfectly in a definitive essay for The Weekly Standard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:

“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. ... We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism."

Jeez, collapsing due to its internal contradictions! Ever hear that before?*  And after Götterdämmerung, where are we bound? What's the new social order going to be like?

It's going to be like 1927! or maybe 1890, before that damned Grover Cleveland pushed the income tax in with the tariff bill! Because

the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and education. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses thrive because they have political connections and small businesses struggle.

You didn't think we were going to get Denmark, did you? It's the retroactionary program—when Romney's elected, they're going to Restore the Future, right? get rid of all that sleek blond wood and stainless steel of the future as we know it in favor of what? Steampunk, of course!

*You have to check this out from ExurbanDoug, a quiet Brooks disciple, born to blush unseen and waste his sweetness on the summer air. Presumably he gets these great big ideas atop his great big lawnmower tractor.

¡Todos se asemejan! The website RNCLatinos.com, wooing the Spanish-speaking vote for the Republicans,  wanted a nice picture of jolly brown children to demonstrate their friendly feelings. They probably meant Spanish-speaking children, but what they got was a mixture of kids from different parts of Asia, as you can see from the original at Shutterstock. Apparently the gaffe is being repaired, but here's a screenshot—lest we forget.

From Talking Points Memo.

Bulgogi tacos, with cheese, Korilla BBQ Truck, Los Angeles. From Hungry Taiwanese Girl.

And poetic justice via Raw Story:

Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-18), the lawmaker who crafted the state’s controversial anti-immigration law, SB 1070, also known as the “Papers, please” law, was thrice denied a venue for a fundraiser scheduled for Thursday afternoon, June 14. According to the Arizona Capital Times, the former legislator asked two Mexican restaurants and a public school library to host the event, only to be told to please campaign somewhere else.

The fundraising event was originally planned to be held at Macayo’s restaurant in Phoenix, but the plan was scuttled by activist Dee Dee Garcia Blase of Arizona’s Tequila Party, a conservative Latino group formed in reaction to the deportation-happy Tea Party. Garcia Blase organized a protest to be held outside the restaurant during the event and contacted Macayo’s corporate offices, which led the restaurant to cancel the event on Thursday morning.

Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa). From Mesa Arizona Now!

How do you like the outfit? And how do you like this outfit, from Tucker ("I am so not gay") Carlson's Daily Caller, celebrating "with hot American women" for Flag Day on Thursday?

And this one?

Abbie Hoffman. Via Tristero at Digby's Hullaballoo.

Now guess which of these three got busted and jailed for desecrating the American flag? Hint: It wasn't a Republican, even though the rules don't say anything about what party you belong to:

(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.

 And now guess where that text came from.

(Apologies to Monsieur Bouffant for appropriating all his research here; I didn't mean to, but the image of Senator Pearce is my discovery and once I had that I couldn't stop.)

What are bad writers for? (addendum)

While I was preparing my effusions on the literary efforts of James Poulos, I was not alone. Hordes of bloggists leapt at Poulos's text like hounds on the umbles (actually, no; the hounds get random bits of flesh, which might be a better metaphor anyway, while the umbles are reserved for the servants, baked into umble pie; but I digress); in addition to the links given in the earlier post I should mention TBogg, SEK, Betty Cracker, and Rich Yeselson. But the most startling approach is undoubtedly that of Doctor Habilitatissimus Michael Bérubé, who laid down a claim that Poulos's writing is not merely not bad but actually in some sense—well, extraordinary; "modern," he says, "perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern," citing as evidence the following text:

to the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua [jump]