Brooks on Soul

What is a soul?

asks David F. Brooks ("Joe Biden and the Struggle For America's Soul"), with reference to President Biden's assertion, when he was announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential race, that we are still "in a battle for the soul of America," as we were in 2020, when that was Biden's campaign slogan.

Actually it's just a rhetorical question, because he knows the answer. In fact he knows more than one answer, and he also knows which answer Biden has in mind:

Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

And what the hell is that, when it's at home? A "moral essence"? (Makes me think of the Essence of Chicken that Tiger moms in Southeast Asia give their children to endow them with strength to study harder, or the French word essence meaning "gasoline".) 

Narratology: White Whale

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side. We've known something about these documents for a long time—Trump started claiming he had already declassified a stash of documents on the subject as early as a Tweet of October 2020—

“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!”

 —which, like so many Trump statements, was more aspiration than fact; it wasn't, in fact, until January 19 2021, the day before the Biden inauguration, that, with some documents in hand, in a "binder" he'd received from the Justice Department on December 30, he finally issued a memorandum to the attorney general, DNI, and DCI directing them to declassify it, with the redactions demanded by the FBI. I don't think it's been reported whether they obeyed this order, but it also seems certain that at least one copy of those materials, probably without redactions and with intact classification markings, was among the stuff stolen and sent to Trump's Palm Beach club that day, along with at least one copy of the classified stuff stolen from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by Chairman Nunes and Chief of Staff Meadows that the staff had made so many photocopies of on the same day. 

What I'm saying is that Jack Smith seems to have come to the same conclusion as I did on a motive for at least some of the Mar-a-Lago document theft—his long quest to avenge himself on the FBI and everyone who exposed his collusion with Russian intelligence in the 2016 election, and (taking it, as I always do, just a notch farther than the reported story) that will be the basis on which Trump is indicted in this case. As, I think, I've been telling you.

Not only that, but also this week is the wonderful reporting in The New York Times by Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner that shows former attorney general Billy Barr pushing special counsel John Durham on the same quest to incriminate the FBI and others over the Crossfire Hurricane and Robert Mueller investigations in the face of the fact that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing to begin with, and of course practically none squeezed out after millions of dollars and years of effort (one minor deception in the filing of the third renewal request on the surveillance order against Carter Page, discovered not by the special counsel but the FBI inspector general. Corroborating what I've been telling you since October 2019  at least, including anticipations of this week's stories in

• that snipe hunt for evidence in Italy where Barr and Durham came up dry, in October 2019, and the switch to a criminal investigation, of which I wrote at the time

"It's about Trump, and the idée fixe of Trump's increasing paranoia: that he must get to his enemies by using their weapons, of saying "bad things" and getting "dirt". Investigate them all! Lock them up! And its failure so far, which has been accelerating in recent weeks, as Barr's meta-investigation falls apart. "

• the pressure on inspector general Horowitz to come up with the stuff in April 2020, with a nod to John Solomon's participation in the effort going back to August 2019

"My [i.e., Solomon's] reporting, including interviews with four dozen U.S. officials over the last several months, actually identifies a much larger collection of documents — about a dozen all together — that, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats"

• the use of Russian intelligence disinformation to hint at a bogus case against Hillary Clinton "to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service" in October 2020 (with a guest appearance by the big binder mentioned above, delivered by DNI John Ratcliffe to Barr's DOJ)

It's always seemed me that this was one big story, starring mad Trump as Captain Ahab after the white whale of the FBI, and all Trump's henchmen from Solomon and Patel back to Bully Barr as the Pequod's doomed crew (Cassie Hutchinson is Ishmael, alone escaped to tell thee?), only it's not a ship but a criminal outfit. And now the news narrative is finally coalescing to my point, under Jack Smith's guidance. I think there could be a lot of indictments, though sadly not of Barr and Durham, who are in some ways the most reprehensible of all (committing some of the exact same crimes of which they falsely allowed Hillary Clinton, together with Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and others, to be accused), and it's looking as if I've had pretty good instincts on this up to now.

Pompeo

Esther and Asahuerus at her banquet, with Haman lowering at the side, just realizing he's doomed, by Rembrandt, 1660, via Wikipedia.

Speaking of conservative Christians who recognize Trump for what he is but think that's what God wants him for, see Susan Glasser's terrific New Yorker profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:


March 2016:

On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument to Pompeo, who told the crowd at the Century II arena, “I’m going to speak to you from the heart about what I believe is the best path forward for America.” An Army veteran who finished first in his class at West Point, Pompeo cited Trump’s boast that if he ordered a soldier to commit a war crime the soldier would “go do it.” As the audience booed, Pompeo warned that Trump—like Barack Obama—would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.”

August 2019:

Does Ross Douthat read this page?

Used in publicity for a performance ("An Evening of S.I. Witkiewicz") by the Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf, New York City, November 2004.

Just wondering, after noticing an odd metaphor creeping into today's column ("The Empty Majority"):

It has the tics of an opposition party, the raw wounds of a beaten coalition, the dated ideas of a bankrupt force. Its attempts to pass a health care bill aren’t just painful to watch; they have the same unheimlich quality as a calf born with two heads, the feeling of watching something that the laws of politics or nature should not permit to exist.

Not quite English yet, Monsignor: "they" (the attempts to pass a health care bill) do not have the feeling of watching anything. Attempts don't have any feelings at all. You're the one with the feelings. But anyway, I wrote, two days ago,

McCain's vote should be regarded as a kind of mercy killing of a freakish creature that just was not viable, a two-headed calf with a blocked intestine.

What are the odds he got that calf from me?

Of course I take the pro-choice position that it's kinder to put the monster out of its misery than force it to live, helpless and in pain, for another few weeks, and Ross takes the anti-choice position that nothing is to be done. He sees the whole episode, with some justice, as a synecdoche for the current state of the Republican party as misbegotten and impotent, elected but unable to govern, but not his problem. He seems to wish the Democrats would come and kill the GOP for him (the way Thailand has Muslim butchers who absorb the karma of killing lambs and cows and chickens so that Buddhists can eat meat without feeling very sinful):

Potemkin Campaign

"And God sometimes uses potěmkinium." (Necyklopedie, the Czech version of the Uncyclopedia, has an entry on potěmkinium, an element in the "Mareseyevian", as opposed to Mendeleyevian, periodic table. After the World War II fighter ace Aleksey Petrovich Mareseyev, whose life was portrayed in Boris Polevoy's novel, and sadly Sergey Prokofiev's opera, The Story of a Real Man.)

It's getting so bad the journos don't have the heart to counter it with a #DemocratsInDisarray number. Corey Lewandowski, the granite-headed little woman-whacker who has been sort of running the Trump campaign, was kicked out this morning, during a war council in Trump Tower with various captains and lieutenants including the 27-year-old spokesperson Hope Hicks, with whom Lewandowski has not gotten along very well—when he first became campaign manager, a year ago, and she rejected his ultimatum that she abandon Trump corporate for Trump political,

“He made her cry a bunch of times,” Nunberg said. In Nunberg’s telling, Lewandowski said to Hicks, “You made a big fucking mistake; you’re fucking dead to me.” Lewandowski declined to either confirm or correct Nunberg’s recollection. “I don’t recall the specifics of that,” he told me. (Olivia Nuzzi, GQ, via The Guardian)

Hicks gets along with Ivanka, who is the Trump she started off with, and it seems that Ivanka is the one who said Lewandowski had to go. She's the unofficial campaign manager now. Why not? She's already launched a successful line of handbags, fragrances, outerwear, eyewear, and shoes.

My favorite Lewandowski stories are the ones where he was busted with a handgun and ammunition in the Longworth Building when he was working as a congressional aide there, in 1999, when he was 26; and the 2002 losing campaign for New Hampshire Senator Robert Smith when he was primaried by John Sununu, and Lewandowski painted Sununu as a possible terrorist sympathizer because of his Lebanese ancestry (Wikipedia for both of these).

In which we go Godwin

You know who else used to talk nonstop about freedom? Via TodoPorMéxico.

Via Mother Jones:

At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Carson noted that many people believe a situation like what took place in Germany in the 1930's and 1940's could never happen in America. "I beg to differ," Carson said. "If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech."

At a press conference after the speech, reporters asked Carson who he thinks is like Adolf Hitler in the U.S. "I'm not going to go into that that. I think that example is pretty clear," he responded, without elaborating.

Running away, as you see, from his poison remarks. Carson loves to complain about "political correctness" preventing him from talking about slavery and Nazism, though as has been noted, he talks about them unhesitatingly all the time, but what's really wrong with what he does is the cowardly way he does it, throwing those scary words out into the discourse and then just leaving them there, refusing responsibility.

#RiseUpOctober: Bad apples

National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Thursday 10/22, via Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Some beloved commenters here and at NMMNB have made me feel misunderstood over yesterday's post on FBI director James Comey. Commenter Ten Bears wrote,

I have issues with this notion the cops are "protecting" me. They do not, nor have they ever. Me, or my family. More like an armed gang roaming the countryside terrorising the population.

Ten Bears, that's exactly what "protection" means, in certain circles.

The post wan't well enough written, though, and I'd like to try to make my point more explicit.

I don't actually know whether a majority, vast or otherwise, of US police officers are hardworking professionals and deeply humane and caring individuals or not, and strictly speaking there's no way I can know, because the institutions of police accountability seem to be designed to make sure we can't find out, which might make you a little suspicious.

I do know that a lot of us feel that there's a real problem with it, and I don't think we're hallucinating. Maybe it's a few-bad-apples in a vast-majority-of-brave-and etc., and maybe it's a set of institutional problems that put so many cops on the scale from indifferent (as when our Brooklyn apartment was robbed three times in two years and I couldn't even get them to produce a report to explain to the cable company why my cable box was missing) through venal (from traffic cops issuing tickets to narcotics agents seizing serious property, as if their central task was to shake citizens down), to downright violent, inflicting special torments mainly on African Americans, ranging from constant harassment to murder.

Surrealism

He was farther out than you thought, with a vengeance. From Christianist News Service (just kidding, Cybercast News Service) News:

Speaking from Capitol Hill on Friday morning after the lack of support for the plan, Boehner was asked, “What went wrong?”

He said, “Listen, there was a perception created that that vote last night was going to increase taxes. Now, I disagree with that characterization of the bill.  But that impression was out there.”

“Now we had a number of our members who just really didn’t want to be perceived as having raised taxes,” he said.  “That was the real issue.”

Boehner continued: “One of my colleagues the other night had an analogy of 100 people drowning in a pool and that he was the lifeguard.  And because he couldn’t save any of them, does that mean he shouldn’t have done anything?  And his point to them was, if I can go in there and save 99 people that are drowning, that’s what I should do as a lifeguard.”

“But the perception was out there, and a lot of our members did not want to have to deal with it,” he said.

Hold that analogy a second, I think it's trying to get away!

Image from Swimming Pool Safety News.

I figure Boehner meant to say "because he couldn't save all of them", because if he couldn't save any of them then he couldn't have saved 99. Obviously for a working lifeguard saving 99 lives in a single pool is a pretty big deal, and worthwhile even if one refractory swimmer goes and drowns anyhow.

But what's the analogy to, actually? Who's in danger of figurative drowning? Because I hadn't heard of the proposals of Plan B being meant exactly to save anybody, unless, well, the Republican members of the House, whose failure to participate in finding a way around or over that fiscal declivity might bring about their figurative extinction.

Or are all the members really lifeguards? Are the potential drowning victims the figurative 99 taxes that are getting lowered against one that is also getting lowered but is getting the perception created that it is getting increased? Or is it really getting increased, and hence a drowning victim, and creating the perception that all of them are getting increased by synecdoche, creating the lifeguards' weary negativity?

Or am I just vainly trying to separate the sheep analogies from the goat analogies? Baaa.