For the Record: Miller Bringing Back the "China Virus"

 

Trump sold foreign policy to the PRC for less than $20K. https://t.co/hBnMdg0KZR pic.twitter.com/jtvEr4MclF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Because he didn't think it was going to be that serious, except sometimes. pic.twitter.com/d4DLPsc0qX

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Literary Corner: Elegy For the War Dead

William Blake watercolor illustration for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", 1777-78, via Wikipedia.

From an interview on ABC News with David Muir (in which the poet once again complained about the "broken tests" bequeathed him by the Obama administration, to no pushback from Muir; I'd say it's not surprising if they didn't work very well in diagnosing Covid-19, but very remarkable that they should have existed at all, since Obama left office more than three years before the virus was discovered, or is it possible that Trump is not telling the truth here? Just asking questions).

Muir observed that the pandemic has now taken upwards of 70,000 lives, more than the Vietnam War, and asked the president if he had a message for the bereaved families; rather than telling him that he was a bad reporter and calling the question "nasty", as he has done in the past, Trump offered an answer in the form of a lengthy elegy, in which his capacity for empathy was on unusually full display:

I wanna say I love you 

by Donald J. Trump

I wanna say that we're doing everything
we can I also wanna say that we're
trying to protect people over 60
years old we're trying so hard

I wanna just say to the people
that have lost family
and have lost loved ones
and the people that have just

suffered so badly and just
made it and just made it
that we love you we're with
you we're working with you

Literary Corner: An Incredible Phenomenon

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, on President Donald Trump:

"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” -- this is shocking, hackish stuff from Dr. Birx. pic.twitter.com/c2phsRYaJs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

President Trump, on how he found out from President Xi Jinping (rather than, say, members of the White House coronavirus task force) that the rumors are true—younger patients don't generally get as sick from Covid-19 as older ones do (text via RealClearPolitics):

For the Record: June 4

Image by vienman.com via Taiwan News and an excellent discussion of George H.W. Bush's failure to respond to the Tiananmen killings.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I got embroiled in an idiotic Twitter war discussing the Chinese president with a transatlantic mob of conservatives who have recently found that they object to the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province being forcibly "re-educated" into Xi Jinping Thought and the decisions of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, after being completely indifferent to it for years, and my tweet went a little viral:

Xi's a horrible person but he knows how to behave himself in public. Never tells the host country who to pick as prime minister, for instance, or talks about whether the local princesses are nasty or not.

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

Trump's a garrulous old fool who can't control his tongue and keeps insulting people left and right. You should hear what Khan's predecessor as mayor said about inviting him to London--guy called Boris https://t.co/JdDwGRTdg1

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

An awful lot of people decided I was trying to say that Xi Jinping was a nicer person than Trump, and haughtily informed me that Xi is in fact a bad man.

Literary Corner: Mob Rule

Painting by Lennon Michalski.

Songs for Kentucky

by Donald J. Trump

I. The Democrats

The Democrats have become
totally consumed by their
chilling lust for power.

You can either vote for
Democrat mob rule or you can vote
for a Republican party that stands
proudly for law and order, fairness,
freedom and justice. Simple as that.

They want to get rid of ICE.
They think ICE
isn't nice.

II. Xi Jinping

The absolute head.
This is an absolute
head of China.

III. The Space Force

You know it's all about space.
It's all about space. Defense,
offense, everything is going to
soon be all about space.

Rally, Richmond, Kentucky, 13 October 2018. Text via Daniel Dale.

It takes a thief

Green-headed tree agama, via San Diego Zoo.

David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug! At least from the foreign policy perspective ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"):

I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.

"Hopped-up" (1920s slang for "maniacal in a drug-induced kind of way") makes it art.

The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.

It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."

I think there may be a couple of flaws in this argument, one being that none of these eggs are actually chickens at present, as in the North Korea case: