Concerned Monsignor is Concerned

California red-legged frog, via Amphibian Facts.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is Very Concerned about the increasing radicalization of the Democratic Party, which has lurched violently to the left on issues such as abortion and immigration:

Consider recent developments in the state of Alabama, where the Republican Party has nominated a Senate candidate manifestly unfit for office, a bigot hostile to the rule of law and entranced with authoritarianism.

And who have the Democrats put up against him? An accomplished former prosecutor, the very model of a mainstream Democrat — and a man who told an interviewer after his nomination that he favors legal abortion, without restriction, right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Doug Jones, up against Ten Commandments idolator Roy Moore in the race to fill the Senate seat of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, favors legal abortion without restriction right up until the baby emerges blue and flailing from the womb?

Unnerved? If anything, more nerved than ever.

Trump after the third debate, as portrayed by actress Glenn Close.

Corey Robin, at the end of a useful set of reflections on IDidTryToFuckHerSheWasMarriedgate, wanders off into trolling Democrats:

I would be remiss if I didn't note here the panic among Clinton supporters that all this talk of Trump's possible stepping down has provoked.

On Facebook, quite a few people seem genuinely unnerved by the possibility that Trump would step down, leaving Pence or some other improbable figure (John Kasich?) to rally the Republicans to victory. With just five weeks to go until the election.

Here's a message for my Clinton-supporting friends: You can't scream for months that Donald Trump is a unique threat to humanity, different from all other Republican threats we've seen, going back Goldwater, and then, when it seems like we might finally and happily be spared this unique fascist threat, panic. Just because you fear that it would mean your candidate won't win. That kind of response undermines everything you've been saying these last few months.

I don't spend a lot of time, or indeed almost any, on Facebook, so maybe that's why I'm missing out on this phenomenon, but I really haven't seen it on the old Twitter. In any case I'd like to say that I, as one Clinton supporter, am not even somewhat unnerved by the prospect of Trump stepping down. In fact I really wish he would, for an assortment of reasons:

The Quest for Pluperfection

Olive Thomas in Alan Crosland's The Flapper (1920). From somebody's Tumblr.

Last week as we were talking about that Brooks post where he was longing for the good old days when conservatives were real conservatives and not just reactionaries the way they are now, longing for the good old days when lolwut—I guess Brooks is not merely living in the past but the anterior past or pluperfect, the time before the past that the conservatives of the past were dwelling in, like a Confucian scholar in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) looking back to the Han (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), when folks lived by the morality of the mythical sage-emperors Yao and Shun (before 2070 B.C.E.).

Anyway, Jordan in comments drew attention to this very peculiar piece by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, arguing somewhat more coherently that today's conservatives aren't, essentially, reactionary enough, or at least Trump and his supporters aren't, in the way they glorify the selfishness of Trump's own personal story, his gleeful use of the tax code and bankruptcy law to stiff the government and cheat his creditors, which is so counter to the message of conservatives back in the day, which was always for a revival of that dear traditional morality that reigned in that anterior past (they believed in the pluperfectibility of man):

I'm only worried about you, Donald

Image via IN slideshare.

Now that the question of the candidates' health is making so many headlines, can we revert back to the question of mental health?

I realize we were all wrong piling on a few months ago diagnosing Trump's narcissism or sociopathy or psychopathy at a distance and without professional expertise, which is a terrible and unethical thing to do if you are a trained psychiatrist according to the so-called "Goldwater rule", and possibly unhelpful if you're an amateur since there are so many things about Trump that are worth complaining about without bringing this up, but as the man says I don't know, it's just something a lot of people are saying.

I mean, I'm just asking questions. Can we get a medical report on that?

Also there's some interesting news suggesting that Donald Trump is at serious risk of being a psychopath, about 21 times greater than the average person. I'm not even kidding; this is literally true, because of his lifestyle choice of being a corporate CEO.

When you come to a fork in the road, take the middle

Pola Negri in Mal St. Clair's A Woman of the World (1925). Image via Fritzi, who has her own review.

David Brooks, still incredibly unfired ("Hillary, This Is Why Democrats Are Still Struggling", July 26 2016), may think the candidate is "squirrelly" and "willing to blatantly lie to preserve her career", but that doesn't mean he wouldn't offer her some heartfelt advice:

PHILADELPHIA — Dear Hillary,

Donald Trump has presented you with an amazing opportunity to become a world historical figure! If you crush him in this election, you could create a new Democratic majority and reduce the G.O.P. to an ever-declining rump of ethnic nationalism. On the other hand, if you fail to beat Trump, you will go down as America’s most hapless political loser and be vilified forever for enabling an era of American Putinism.

No pressure! Have fun in Philadelphia!

(There's the 145th career use of "amazing/amazingly".)

No, I don't see any concern trolls. Do you see a concern troll? Really? You mean you think Brooks doesn't sincerely want Clinton to create a new Democratic majority and reduce the GOP to an ever-declining rump of etc.? You cynic you.

Monuments in Bothsiderism

Just a little more NPR, and a note on poor Cokie Roberts, who's been demoted for her courage in coming out to denounce the Trump, because God forbid NPR should ever suggest that one side in an electoral contest is better than other in objective reality, as opposed to public opinion standings; and must now be identified by the network as a non-journalist; they stopped calling her a "news analyst" some years ago, but now she has to share her Monday morning spot with some explicitly partisan hack, who on this Monday was a Trump supporter from the (gasp!) open rightwing propaganda vehicle Washington Times, Charlie Hurt. Bob Edwards wept.

This woman, the child of not one but two New Deal Democrat congresspersons and an uncloseted feminist (if of a pretty weak-tea variety, writing pop history focusing on women but always choosing her heroines from those who were married to Great Men, as if to mark her "moderation" with this territorial modesty), has been running from accusations of partisanship for a lifetime, but the dreadful taint has finally caught up with her.

Yond Hillary has a workaholic look

Let Brooks have men about him that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.

Buster Keaton in Roscoe Arbuckle's His Wedding Night (1917). Via Oh, So?

Shorter David Brooks, "Why Is Clinton Disliked?", New York Times, May 24 2016:

I think I've got the answer to this vexing question—it's got to be because we don't know what her hobby is. Why, she may not have a hobby at all! You can't expect Americans to put up with that!

Because it can't possibly have anything to do with a 25-year campaign of calumny, libel, and prurient fantasies accusing her of everything from insider futures trading to murder, with allegations of sexual oddity, support for terrorists, simple bribery, and selling the influence of the secretary of state to fund her gigantic appetite for um funding Haitian earthquake relief and bolstering her hated husband's reputation as a humanitarian, with the eager complicity of the media widely reporting every story ("some say, said some") though it can never show a foundation in fact for any of them. Somewhat abated after 2000 when she wasn't running for president and then when Barack Obama was, but revived since a couple of years ago at triple the original force.

No, it's because we don't know whether she collects cat figurines, or works on cryptic crosswords in her spare time:

Keep hope alive!

Via Tracy Viselli/Feminists Will Kick Your Ass.

Mr. Pierce is out there concern-trolling Hillary Clinton, or that's really the wrong way of putting it, because his concern is plainly sincere (he's glad to say that she's "the only sane and plausible choice available" and that the added benefit of electing a woman president is a "genuinely big honking historic deal"), and sort of meaningless in that he doesn't seem to doubt she'll win in any case, but the effect is trollish all the same:

as a seeker of votes, as an applicant for the world's most powerful temp position, for the second time in a row, she's proving to be something of a mediocrity. I realize that the results last night in West Virginia will not mean very much down the road. They are products of skewed demographics and the playfulness of a number of voters who would not vote Democratic in the fall if you paid them in gold to do so. I realize that a large part of the difference between her winning margin in 2008 and her losing margin Tuesday night can precisely be measured as the difference between running against the "black guy" and having worked for the "black guy." I also realize that she only lost the delegate count to Bernie Sanders 16-11, which does little to slow her grim and inexorable march to the podium in Philadelphia this summer. But, dear god, she really leaves West Virginia with a very clean clock.

How clean? Well, Jesus, Charlie, 234,027 voters showed up (in an open primary) to vote for a Democrat, giving Bernie Sanders 51% of the vote to 36% for Clinton (the bulk of the balance going to local attorney Paul T. Farrell, Jr., representing the zombie coal industry, insisting if you keep pretending it's not dead it might turn out to be alive). Whereas in 2008, there were 359,910 voters in the Democratic primary splitting 67% for the same Hillary Clinton and 26% for young Barack Obama. That latter is what I would call a dear-god clock-cleaning. Whatever happened to young Obama, by the way? Did he find some more friendly career opportunity where he wouldn't have to depend on that vote-getting?

A supremely bad idea

Justice Joseph Rucker Lamar (1857-1916), via New Georgia Encyclopedia.

In the bizarre storm breaking out last night over whether it's proper for a president in the last year of his term to nominate a Supreme Court justice, with Chuckles Grassley claiming such a thing hadn't happened in the last 80 years even though he himself had voted for one of them (Anthony Kennedy, in 1988; the others in the last 80 years are Brennan, 1956, and Powell and Rehnquist, from the Nixon year 1972), a point of some significance got lost.

In the normal case a new justice is named when an old justice retires, and is available to serve, however crankily, until the new justice is confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The really problematic situation, where there are only eight justices and the strong possibility of failing to reach a majority in an excessive number of cases, only happens in the much rarer event of a justice's death or resignation with immediate effect.

So Dr. Google and I would like to report: Scalia is the first justice to have died during an election year since 1916, when Joseph Rucker Lamar of Georgia died in the middle of term on January 2, and on January 29 Woodrow Wilson "surprised the nation" by nominating Louis Brandeis to succeed him. Brandeis took rather a long time to confirm, until June 1, for some reason or other—

That's what Republicans do

Image by Dorsey Shaw/Buzzfeed.

So elements of the rightwing noise machine are working on the interesting project of attacking Hillary Clinton as a tool of rapacious capital, as in Karl Rove's hilariously inept-looking ad (h/t Marie3)—



—like Rove and his masters think getting bought by Wall Street would be a bad thing ("$20 million, same as in town").

And here's Jonah, right on cue, to castigate her for pretending she's on Obama's side:

The thinking is pretty obvious. Obama is personally popular among core Democratic constituencies, particularly African-American voters in South Carolina and other states that come after New Hampshire and Iowa. That’s why she’s casting Sanders’ “Medicare for All” program as an attack on Barack Obama’s “legacy.”

Pandering to those Negroes and their childishly personalized politics, wouldn't you know it. Speaking of childishly personalized politics, the reason Jonah knows Hillary really hates Barack is classic middle school:

The devil is a concern troll

Juan de Flandes, The Temptation of Christ (ca.1500-1504). Image via David Lawson/Pinterest.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Tempting of Bernie Sanders", New York Times, January 14 2016:

I'm just so concerned about Bernie, you know. He's so high-minded. He doesn't sling enough mud, and if he doesn't get more vicious fast he may not win the nomination, I mean sometimes you wonder if he even really wants to win as much as he wants to achieve some noble goal like making the Democrats a better party. When he criticizes Hillary Clinton it's over these wonky issues like her failure to support single-payer universal health care or to object to regime change policies, do Democrats really care about that shit? He should be talking about the intersection between character and policy, like the sordidness of the Clinton Foundation, with its slimy and rapacious funding of things like relief and economic development for Haitians, local projects around the world for combating climate change, and focusing on the health and well-being of American kids under five ("Too Small to Fail"), and connecting the dots between that and her immoral email account, which not only exposed national security secrets by the ton to our enemies and caused the deaths of Americans at Benghazi but brought on the entire Iraq War. And he needs to express himself pithily when he talks about foreign policy,  I just happen to have this 400-word diatribe right here he could use. You know me, I just have his best interests at heart.

So raise the scarlet standard high

Welcome Crooks & Liars Readers!

Updated version correcting an idiotic error called out by commenter Brett at NMMNB:

Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Arte.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is teddibly concerned for the unfortunate British Labour Party, which has just elected "hard-left" Jeremy Corbyn to the party leadership:

I can’t help noticing that, for most of my childhood and early adult life, a succession of Labour Party leaders reformed the constitution of the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock did, John Smith did, Tony Blair did, to make sure that it was more rooted in what the British people wanted. And it does seem, as an external observer, that a generation’s work has been unravelled in the space of 12 months.

If he thought they were so great I wonder why he didn't vote for them. I mean, isn't he British people himself?

Over in America at the National Review, ex-British Thought Leader Charles C.W. (Cruel World) Cooke is even more upset:

David Brooks, the Prime Offender

Elliott Dexter and Pauline Garon in Cecil B. DeMille's Adam's Rib (1923). 

David Brooks, "Hillary Clinton, the Great Defender", September 1 2015:

Hillary Clinton has obviously had a bad summer. She’s losing in New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders, even among women. She’s barely leading him in Iowa. In a Quinnipiac poll of potential general election matchups, she’s beating Donald Trump by only four points, 45 to 41, and she’s beating Marco Rubio by only one point.

David Brooks has obviously had a bad summer. In moral philosophy, he consistently loses to columnists who actually have a point of view, however repellent, like Ross Douthat; in a shocking turnaround, he's even losing to Douthat in wry cynicism—the smile-pout that has long been his signature moue (Ross is a Hansel come to challenge Brooks's Zoolander). In a head-to-head test of how he is viewed by economists, he gets considerably less respect than Thomas L. Friedman, and is barely more positively regarded than Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post.

The conventional view on the pandit cocktail circuit is that he horribly mishandled the fabricated-data scandal that accompanied the launch of his campaign book, The Road to Character. That's part of it, especially since (unlike, say, just for example, Hillary Clinton) he had clearly done something unethical, but popular opinion shows a more pervasive personal set of weaknesses, portraying him variously as a tool of the Likud Party; a hypocritical moralizer asking people to live their family, work, and religious lives in a way he has been completely unable to do himself; and an ignorant twit. He—

If Iran the zoo

Wicked Persian fanatics plotting the breakout time for their nuclear device, scheduled for sometime during the Malia Obama presidency. Photo by Atta Kenare via Negar Mortazari.

David Sanger shakes his head, warning against excessive complacency:

Mr. Obama will be long out of office before any reasonable assessment can be made as to whether that roll of the dice paid off. The best guess today, even among the most passionate supporters of the president’s Iran project, is that the judgment will be mixed. Nothing in the deal announced on Tuesday eliminates Iran’s ability to eventually become a nuclear threshold power — it just delays the day. 

That is, we won't know for at least 16 years what happens after 15 years are up. And whoever's president in 2030 might be a Muslim, or an opponent of all international negotiations, or suddenly struck with paralysis and hence unable to do anything about it. That Obama is such a weakling! Why can't he control what happens when he's not around?

Similarly, old George H.W. Bush should never have signed that START treaty in 1991, because it had an expiration date, forcing the US and Russia to negotiate a new treaty in 2010, which they might not have done, given the difficult relationship between the two countries, although in fact they did. What a mistake that could have been if it had been a mistake, which it wasn't!

And Start II still might fail—we won't be sure till 2021, or 2026 if the parties go for the extension option. That old George totally made the world a more dangerous place with his heedless peacemaking!

It's like a Dick Cheney theory of diplomacy: you should never come to an agreement if there's a 1% chance it won't work out the way you expect. Much better to have a war, because that always gets you what you want.

As far as he's concerned

Concerned Greta Garbo. From Mauritz Stiller's Gösta Berlings Saga, 1924, via Lamb & Serpent.

Verbatim David Brooks, "The Mobilization Error", June 9 2015:

Democratic and Republican presidential candidates face a choice: They can appeal to the broadest possible audience or pander to their most devoted partisans. Most will choose option No. 2, because it's the easiest and clearest route to the presidency.

But it's not the right path.

Hahaha, fooled you, it's Ron Fournier! But I'm not sure you could corroborate that in a blind tasting. There are some formal differences keyed to the fact that one is a blog post, the other a dead-tree column: Fournier uses a lot more blockquotes (with bonus blockquote from CHUCK TODD!) and links, Brooks trots out more "arguments" (first, second, third, finally, and furthermore), but they agree, Hillary Clinton is not doing enough to unify the nation and it's time for concerned well-wishers to get really frowny.

Words in the Monsignor's Mouth

Image via DancesWithFat.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Running against Hillary", June 7 2015:

Hillary Clinton's poll numbers are similar to the percentage of the vote obtained by Nursultan Nazarbeyev in the last Kazakhstan elections, suggesting that people are afraid if they don't tell Gallup they support her they'll be getting that knock on the door from her secret police force goons I NEVER SAID THAT funded by her billions in bribe payments from oil companies. So the brave souls risking the Gulag to run against her YOU'RE PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH have their work cut out for them. They can't run to her left on domestic policies unless they happen to be Bernie Sanders (as in one case they actually are) because she is herself turning out to be a virtual Communist, and they can't criticize her foreign policy hawkishness because she has decided not to be any more hawkish than President Obama, so my view as a completely disinterested observer is that they ought to hammer her for being evil and corrupt, which will not help them win but will at least provide material that Republicans can use in the general WHAT I mean so that after she's president for life and the best Americans can say for themselves is "At least we're not Kyrgyzstan" we won't be able to say we weren't warned THAT'S NOT WHAT I SAID.

No, Monsignor, it isn't, but it's what all your fans heard. How does that work?

What's to stop me from marrying my television?—Ross, I think you did.

Update: Welcome visitors from the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2015!

Joseph Guisol of Toowomba, Queensland, and his bride, Honey, a golden labrador, 2010. "It's not sexual," Guisol told the guests. Via Animal Planet.

Sometimes Monsignor Douthat is really kind of brilliant, and today is one of those times, when he takes up the challenge of turning the mouth-breather Rick-Santorum man-on-dog argument about the slippery slope of marriage equality into a sophisticated, even wearily amused piece of high-class concern trolling.

Not saying, in fact, that allowing people to marry their same-sex partners will inexorably lead to dudes getting hitched to their pooches, but that it will most likely end up with legal polygyny, and then won't you liberals be sorry?

Because he recognizes that liberals won't like the idea of legal polygyny:

Hunkered and Steely

Uncredited image via Tinypic

Shorter David Brooks, "Hillary Clinton's Big Test", New York Times, March 13 2015:

It's a given that she'll be faced with brutal confrontations like Whitewater, Travelgate, health care reform, cattle futures, Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi, the emails and so on, because that's just how things are nowadays, apparently because of those stupid sunshine laws, I can't imagine any other reasons for such a peculiar atmosphere, so the question is basically whether she'll go strong or go large. Large means like Ronald Reagan, rising above hostility, to instead reveal scary and vulnerable parts of herself so that voters feel as though they can trust and relate to her; strong is like Frances Perkins, a personal hero of mine, who unfortunately ruined a promising career by being too reticent, too closed in her attitude toward information.

I know you all probably think I'm exaggerating and you're too lazy or too Times-phobic to click the link, but he really said that about Perkins:

Gleanings from a not unincidental economist

Pinned angel, from CraftyB (not a Hobby Lobby rival, I think, but an independent artist).

I may need to offer an "I changed my mind" over the question of whether covering contraception in the health insurance policy lowers the insurance costs, by saving the costs to the company of unintended pregnancies, or not, which I chewed over most recently here, because Austin Frakt, the Coincidental Economist, has warned readers of the New York Times Upshot that this may not be the case: because among the sources cited by my source (the HHS Issue Brief of February 2012) is a study from Hawaii whose conclusions are "not unambiguous":

And Andrew Cuomo is Miklós Horthy

As Ross sees her.

As everybody else sees her. Could we at long last be moving beyond the Reese Witherspoon thing to facing up to some serious mommy issues?

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, increasingly identifies himself with a party-within-a-party, the Reform Conservative movement, which you might define as the faction of Republicans who remember some of the stuff they learned in [jump]