"Quiet, quiet, piggy!"

 

So Trump responded to Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as "bin Salman", that's a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin "Mr. Vladimirovich"—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, "Āl Saud", House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son's father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News's Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post's Jamal Kashoggi:

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It's not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven't heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event,  as something that wouldn't be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that'll be the day.

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Pretty Nice Girl

One thing I really wish people would try to do in the discussion of the late Mrs. von Battenberg, as somebody was calling her, is leave the Empire out of it, as in the current explosion of love for it, from Mr. Stephen Miller

the British Empire has been such a benevolent force for good in the world, and its unraveling was a historic tragedy with empires like China, for example, filling that void. If you look all around the world today, what is the legacy of this empire? The rule of law, self-government, natural rights, property rights, an independent justice system? Basically, everything Joe Biden is trying to destroy right now is something that was wonderful the British Empire had. 

(it actually gave all its colonies in Asia and Africa versions of the Internal Security Act that enabled countless dictators from Singapore to Pakistan and Burma and Ghana to Grenada and Sri Lanka to erect dictatorships under cover of law, and its failure over a century to provide Hong Kong with self-government is the chief reason Hong Kong doesn't have it now, and it didn't have any interest in "natural rights", including whatever awful thing you may mean when you use the term, and it's clear you're only using the moment to make absurd false accusations against President Biden, even as horrible new evidence emerges about how Trump and Barr worked to bend US Attorneys to their desire to persecute their percieved enemies)

to his eminence Mr. Cleese

Toxic Therapy Party

 

Image via Dr. Tracy Hutchinson, Fort Myers, Florida.

Brad DeLong (subscribers only) gets a letter from Senator Rubio:

Fellow Patriot, 

I really am disappointed, Fellow Patriot. I am disappointed to say we missed our goal for May. I heard that Mark shared our internal financial memo with you and you still didn’t step up? I am SO disappointed. Like I told you, we had plans to open a field office, but we are going to have to push that opening back. With a RADICAL DEMOCRAT challenger just about to announce her campaign against me, we really cannot afford any missteps. 

I have been working my absolute hardest to ensure the people of Florida and America are best served by Congress. My efforts have not gone unnoticed, I was fortunate enough to receive an endorsement from President Trump for working on behalf of our veterans, enhancing Border Security, and standing up to “woke” corporations. While it was an honor to receive President Trump’s support, it riled up the Left. The good news here is I won’t EVER bend a knee to the radical Left. I am COMMITTED to fight for your conservative values regardless of whatever the out-of-control Left will try to throw at me. I will never give up on you, Fellow Patriot. However, despite all of these good things, missing this deadline is a MASSIVE misstep. I won’t lie, I am nervous. But I’ve spent the day strategizing with my team, and I have convinced them to extend our deadline for another 24 HOURS....