Pettiness on Display

 

Image via preen.ph.

And it's back to no, according to yesterday's interview with West Virginia MetroNews Radio. Jennifer Psaki was just too mean.

Manchin said he would not say "the real reason" talks failed.

But when asked what that was, he said: "The bottom line is ... it's staff. It's staff purely. ... It's not the president. It's staff. And they drove some things and put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable."

That's more important than the United Mine Workers, probably among the most important factors in electing him as a Democrat in one of the most Republican states in the union. It was the UMW that convinced me he'd end up voting for the bill back in April, when union president Cecil Roberts showed up with him to endorse the BBB climate change provisions. Nah, he threw those guys under the bus:  

The labor union noted that the bill includes an extension of a fund that provides benefits to coal miners suffering from black lung disease, which expires at the end of the year. The UMWA also touted tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to build facilities in coalfields that would employ thousands of miners who lost their jobs. 

“For those and other reasons, we are disappointed that the bill will not pass,” Cecil Roberts, the union’s president, said in a statement. “We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working, and have a meaningful impact on our members, their families, and their communities.”

He didn't think much of the mothers of West Virginia either:

The Playing Fields of Eton

 

Johnson at Eton, front and center as usual, in one of a number of pictures where he seems to be trying on a Mussolini face. Photo via The London Economic.

This fine Guardian piece by the novelist Richard Beard, talking about how upper-class boarding school nourishes and shapes the psychopathy of the Tory ruling class in UK, as typified by Old Etonians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, is harrowing (see what I did there?):

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

For the Record: Mid-Autumn

 

Mooncakes, pastry stuffed with a sweet filling (these are lotus paste) and an optional salted duck egg yolk representing the full moon of the 8th Month in the east Asian lunar calendar (this year last Thursday), said to be the biggest and brightest of the year; the holiday is ideally spent in a garden, where you eat pastries, drink tea (or something stronger), and contemplate the moon while the youngsters dash around with decorated lanterns, making it the most literati-Chinese thing there is. In the Year of the Virus, cloud cover completely hid the moon and you couldn't find mooncakes downtown at all until two days later, how 2020 is that? Photo via.

It's the Trump-supporting Brooklyn Chasidim who have been holding indoor unmasked weddings and funerals and High Holiday services like they were Trump rallies the whole time. Can't blame it on de Blasio. I mean you can, of course, because you're ignorant af.

— Let's Read the Book School (@Yastreblyansky) October 4, 2020

For the Record: With Cheap Shots

To be clear the ICE rule has existed for a while, and it had a legit purpose, to stop exploitation of foreign students by fraudulent online diploma mills like University of Phoenix (though why administered by ICE and deporting students instead of DOE to regulate schools?) https://t.co/JOcKWq9ihO

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2020

But it clearly should have been suspended for this year's emergency when schools are being punished for doing whatever they can to ensure student safety. Goes along with Trump trying to discourage masking, and it's evil.

— 🔻Cookin With Yas🔻 (@Yastreblyansky) July 8, 2020

Not to mention the administration's ongoing effort (not likely to succeed, because he doesn't have the power under our "federal" system which seems like a good thing for a change) to force public schools to open ahead of time, which just seems ridiculously dangerous, for teachers and other staff, for kids (and the horrible danger of the Kawasaki-like syndrome that has afflicted some when "normal" Covid-19 left them apparently unscathed) and the parents and grandparents to whom they could bring the disease home. I have my own theory of what his "plan" is—

The Emperor Has No Nose (But He Thinks He's Got the Best)

Via Medium, and a nice post by William Sonn with an alternative answer to "Which Roman emperor does Trump resemble most?"—Caracalla, he argues persuasively.

Hi, I just want to turn the mic over to good old Watergate hero Carl Bernstein, reporting for CNN:

(CNN)In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

This is the first report of a four-month CNN investigation that seems to be following up on the Zelenskyy affair and the glimpse it offered of what Trump's leader conversations are like, bullying, cajoling, and focusing on his personal interests, his complete inability to sustain a normal give-and-take interaction with another person. Though when you think about it we've been seeing it from the beginning, with the reports of Trump's calls with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull

More on Kushner

Thanks for the shoutout, Tengrain!

NewYork, uncredited stock photo via Financial Times.

A rather rich person, owner of a couple of Lower Manhattan boutique hotels, once told my wife the secret of getting rich: You have to be able to entirely ignore the content of whatever it is you're doing, the product if your business is producing something, in favor of the bottom line. I naturally thought, what a sad approach to one's livelihood, how like starving oneself.

Then, the things that former Observer publisher Jared Kushner is not interested in, by former Observer editor Kyle Pope:

MOST WEEKS, KUSHNER NOT ONLY DIDN’T READ the Observer, he didn’t appear to read anything else, either. I never knew him to discuss a book, a play, or anything else that was in the Observer’s cultural wheelhouse. His circle of friends was fairly limited, largely tech executives and other successful business people, a smattering of celebrities, and a coterie of much older successful men, people like Rupert Murdoch, financier Ron Perelman, and the public relations impresario Howard Rubenstein.

Even politics seemed to lie outside his area of interest. Every week, Kushner and I held a conference call with the Observer’s editorial writer, who would pitch ideas for the paper’s two main editorial slots. These ideas usually touched on state, local, or national politics. Kushner almost never showed any interest in what tended, at the time, to be the hottest and most pressing issues of the day.

What he wanted The Observer for was to serve as a "bullhorn for his own financial interests", Pope thought, a vehicle for rewarding allies by putting their names in annual lists of the "top people" in New York real estate, and commissioning "hit pieces" against refractory bankers who balked at giving him loans, but mostly just to establish his general valuableness as a person who gets talked about in a positive way, which is always good for business. Central to that was that the paper should be seen as a financial success, compromised by the way he chose to make it one, by saving money on writers, whom he regarded as incomprehensible annoyances:

It's how emperors roll

Kaiser Wilhelm II, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Well, well, who could have imagined something like this?

WASHINGTON — When President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, convenes meetings with top National Security Council officials at the White House, he sometimes opens by distributing printouts of Mr. Trump’s latest tweets on the subject at hand.

The gesture amounts to an implicit challenge for those present. Their job is to find ways of justifying, enacting or explaining Mr. Trump’s policy, not to advise the president on what it should be. (Michael Crowley and David Sanger)

Oh, me, for instance, in April 2018:

Trump doesn't have any idea how to mobilize power except by screaming at people. He issues a tweet and thinks it's an imperial rescript, but it doesn't make anything happen. He doesn't understand the forms for that, and he's losing everybody who has a clue, or they're learning how to ignore him.

The national security apparatus has to do without him, essentially, not in the first place because they want to, but because he's basically AWOL. He won't pay attention and he won't speak coherently. They have to figure out what to do themselves and convince him it's what he asked for. Of course they also don't literally want to blow up the world or the US economy except for the random stupid hires like Miller or Bolton or that ass Navarro...

And when he really fucks up publicly and demands something they can't pretend to be doing at all, this [the 2018 kerfuffle about pulling US troops out of Syria] happens. Or they try to do half of it. It's getting to be a bigger problem, with the Kim invitation and the Putin invitation and the trade war.

Glad to see they're getting down to reporting it.

This is how emperors roll too:

Growing evidence of what the French would describe as a “l’etat c’est moi” approach to governing here in the United States as traditionally independent institutions are being stripped of their independence https://t.co/03elJnqP1I

— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) February 22, 2020

And in current psychopathy...

Yesterday, here in Trumplandia, the Emperor got his feelings wounded in a telephone conversation with a person in space, one of the two astronauts who just performed the first all-female spacewalk operation in history, which he referred to in his initial remarks as "the first time for a woman outside of the Space Station... the first-ever female spacewalk". When they finally got a chance to speak one of them, one of them, Dr. Jessica Meir, noted that it wasn't actually the first spacewalk a woman has ever performed, in justice to the great women who have done it in the past, and a shadow crossed his face, and he gave that brave astronaut the finger, disguised as an innocent scratch, in a cowardly fifth-grader's attempt to slip it past the teacher's attention or maintain plausible deniability

(my screenshot). Because nobody's allowed to tell the Emperor he's wrong in public, ever.

Meanwhile in Westminster, the House of Commons dealt Prime Minister Johnson a blow today by passing the Letwin Amendment, requiring him to send Brussels a letter requesting a three-month extension on the Brexit deadline before they'd vote on the deal he brought home from Brussels this week, and he swore he'd never do it, as he's been swearing for weeks he'll never ask for an extension and the nation will leave Europe as scheduled on Halloween no matter what, though in fact he had to do it before midnight tonight.

So

Boris Johnson has sent a request to the EU for a delay to Brexit – but without his signature.

The request was accompanied by a second letter, signed by Mr Johnson, which says he believes that a delay would be a mistake.

The PM was required by law to ask the EU for an extension to the 31 October deadline after losing a Commons vote.

(BBC via Lemieux) he sent it anonymously. With a cover letter denouncing it. Presumably so his fans will believe he kept his promise.

I just was struck by the immensity of the petulance of these two psychopaths, one of then in the pettiest possible position of doing a photo op at an occasion that means nothing to him, the other in a matter of extraordinary moment, both so drowning in their own amour-propre that they can't even see what's going on around them.

Trump Failing Another Turing Test

Exchange in the comments on yesterday's post:

Me: He doesn't think he can get out of it with a Sharpie, he thinks he can get out of it by denying it "very powerfully", like Putin or MBS. The Sharpie is pro forma, because it's the custom to offer evidence and because the problem is, for a change, so simple that he can do it himself. It's true he was surprised and annoyed that it wasn't good enough for people—that's because he doesn't understand the relationship between evidence and conclusion whereas your approach seems bent on insisting that he does.

Jordan: But at a certain point, he picked up the Sharpie and drew that curve onto the map. In that moment, what was he thinking? Are you saying he wasn't dealing with evidence and conclusion?

(I'm not picking a fight -- I'm genuinely interested and confused.)

I'm not very happy with the post, not just because I haven't succeeded in communicating my idea to the community but even more because I haven't succeeded in communicating it to myself. If we write to find out what our idea is, and that's a huge part of it for me, then I failed. I liked a part of the post nobody's interested in, the first paragraph, and Jordan's stuck on a point I think is obvious.

So I'm not picking a fight either, but I want to try coming at that point from a different direction, if I may, that I've written up a bit before on the Twitter, which is the subject of Trump "joking"—the pattern where he says some abominable thing

Psychopaths on Parade

Feral Britain. Forest of Dean, 2008, photo by David Slater/Alamy via Times Literary Supplement.

Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry in the New York Times:

“When it came down to it, she was just too sensible,” said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of Mrs. May. “She’s got to be thinking of her legacy now, and if people are dying for lack of medicine, if there are food shortages, if Britain goes feral, that’s not how she wants to be remembered.”

It's not such a big deal that Britain might go feral, but that might lead to people saying unkind things about Theresa May.

Comment

Dinesh D'Souza's response to the terror attacks on Muslim Friday prayers in Christchurch: Even though it's true and his story is imaginary, it's of the family of "fake news" because he feels it has the wrong emotional resonance. In this way he's the real victim, because now everybody's missing the point he would like to have made.

I sent him a question and he replied, in fact, after googling an example of a church that got attacked as proof that the media don't care:

The psychopath's ability

Peter Hall's adaptation of Animal Farm in a production by the English touring company Paper Zoo, 2008.

If you want to know how this LEFTIST move toward socialism ends JUST read ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell. The PIGS (socialist left) overthrow the farmer. Before long, the PIGS are at the top of the SOCIAL ladder and the rest of the livestock who helped them get sh*t on by the LEFT. pic.twitter.com/H64b50mzc5

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) August 7, 2018

If you want to know how George Orwell's leftism stood against totalitarianism left and right and for democratic socialism you need to look at a real book instead of a PowerPoint knockoff. https://t.co/D01HDsQPb4 pic.twitter.com/sKKEyWsPQJ

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018

For the Record: Psychopathy

Via obviously psychopathic expert guy.

I felt we got somewhere interesting in the following:

It's the psychopathy. He's not cognitively incapacitated but can only think about something to the extent it immediately pains or gratifies him. What he learns about "issues" is what it takes to get the rubes to applaud or get a rise out of us.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

That's easier. The expert's doing all the work, he just has to make a serious face and the expert feels understood.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

Well, sure, but I don't think he's doing it to please the person, he's doing it to display to the next person that he has an interesting opinion. "A lot of people don't know this, but..."

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

You bet. One thing I still don't get is, people (and T himself) say he wants people to "like" him. And yet he is easily the most despised person on the planet. Maybe that desire to be liked is rooted in psychopathy, with appropriate results.

— Ellis Weiner (@EllisWeiner) April 28, 2018

As it happens, I ran across something relevant in an old thing, from The New York Times's David Sanger, from November 2016, on Trump's campaign interview with Haberman and Sanger the previous March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

(My bold.) That's so Trumpy. He's got the crowd-pleasing condemnation of the JCPOA, which he's going to stick to, but no knowledge of what the JCPOA is or what it's supposed to accomplish to explain what it is he objects to, and he gets Sanger and Haberman to feed him a reasonable-sounding answer, giving Sanger a quote he's still working six or seven months later.  Not cunning enough that Sanger doesn't notice it, but enough that Sanger will just hint at it, with Church-of-the-Savvy obliqueness, not risking his access.

Literary Corner: I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist

Mainstream media are concerned, inevitably, by the eccentricities of President Trump's call-in to the Fox & Friends show yesterday morning, in which he seemed to be growing more and more out of control as the half-hour wore on, and Doocy, Earhardt, and Kilmeade looked increasingly alarmed, until he finally began complaining, "I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist."

Upon which they decided they'd better get him off the line, eventually shoving him away a little brutally when he didn't get the message ("We could talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do") and Trump was able to hang up, turn his own TV back on, and crawl under the covers.

Worried about health of Pres Trump. C/S John Kelley needs to get him off-line and get a week rest. Phone call to FOX News very troubling. Has three years left in Office. POTUS has immense legal authority. An unstable Pres is not good for the American people.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) April 27, 2018

But here at Rectification Central we have another way of looking at it, of course, taking its point of departure with the form of what Trump says, as in the bit two thirds of the way in or so after he's moved on from North Korea and "Sleepy Eyes" Chuck Todd to the discussion of CNN and its "council of seven people and of the seven people every one of them is against me," and this startling exchange:

Trumps Fall Apart

Drawing by John Darkow, 1./28/16, via George H.'s Pinterest.

At the end of an anxious post Friday, Digby wrote:

Trump is getting stronger every day. Don't let the chaos fool you. 

Which is somewhat the opposite of what I've been thinking, that he's starting at last to really fall apart, which is pretty daunting. I'm diametrically disagreeing about something with Digby! A friend was shocked enough to ask about it, by email, but it's going to take me a while to get around to the point, so bear with me.

A lot of people, Digby included, think we can't know much about the official grounds for the firing of Andrew McCabe until an official report is issued—

It is certainly true that we don't know all the facts underlying the firing of Andrew McCabe. Maybe he was leaking damaging information to the press about Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump and then blatantly lied about it. From what we understand his crimes so far, they are much more vague than that but we'll have to wait and see. 

—but that's not quite correct. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman for The New York Times seem to have found out a good deal, though they also don't seem to think it's a very important part of the story, and don't get there until paragraphs 22-23, and it turns out to be about an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation:

Memo Random

You'll be reading sounder versions of this all weekend, no doubt, but I wanted to organize and shovel out some initial reactions.

Stan Laurel in Pick and Shovel (1923), from gfycat.

Carter Page first attracted the attention of the FBI in 2013 as the subject of a conversation between two Russian agents recorded by US intelligence:

Mr. Podobnyy tells his Russian colleague that Mr. Page frequently flies to Moscow and is interested in earning large sums of money. Mr. Page was apparently interested in striking a deal with Gazprom, the Russian state-run oil firm, according to the transcript. Mr. Podobnyy called Mr. Page an “idiot” but said he was enthusiastic.... “I will feed him empty promises,” he was overheard saying.

The recruitment effort doesn't seem to have gone anywhere; nevertheless, by the summer of 2014, Page was being monitored under a US surveillance warrant (according to an August 3 2017 report from CNN). We don't know what that was about or how it further developed, but it seems he was still under surveillance when he suddenly surfaced in public in March 2016 as first on the list of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers, "Carter Page, PhD", just behind citizen George Papadopoulus, now a convicted though not sentenced criminal in the Mueller investigation.

At the end of June or beginning of July Christopher Steele, who had been studying relations between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russians at the behest of the Fusion GPS research firm, which had been studying Trump's business affairs for a rightwing newspaper, the Free Beacon, from fall 2015, and subsequently for a Democrat-connected law firm, Perkins Coie, increasingly alarmed at the stuff he was hearing from his informants, sent the first memo from the subsequent dossier to contacts in the FBI.

That July, Page traveled to Moscow to deliver a peculiar commencement address to that year's graduates of the New Economic School:

American Visigothic

A conservative mark = wrecked a lot of things and hurt a lot of people. @nytimes https://t.co/WwxZMzCenD

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) December 26, 2017

After a chaotic start, the Roman Senate—sometimes working with Emperor Honorius holed up in Ravenna, sometimes against him—racked up a solid record of conservative accomplishment in 409, firmly letting their British colony know that it would have to defend itself from here on (Italia First!); improving troubled relations with Alaric the Visigoth by making him commander-in-chief of the Western Empire (magister utriusque militiae), paying him a substantial bribe, and naming an alternative local emperor, Priscus Attalus, more to Alaric's liking; not to mention passing an edict forbidding anybody to wear trousers within the city walls.

Actually the edict on the trousers dated back to 399, but you see what I mean.

Evariste-Vital Luminais (1821-96), Alaric's forces in the sack of Rome, 410.

Is that rude?

Image via Buddy "L" Trucks.

So some of us thought it was hilarious when Trump, in Japan, asked Japanese car makers to start manufacturing cars in the United States, when in fact they build 4 million vehicles a year in the US, in comparison to the 1.5 million they export here (in 1986 it was 3.5 million)—"Is that possible to ask? That's not rude. Is that rude?"—and some didn't think it was hilarious at all, like this Aaron Blake bloke writing for the Washington Post:

But this is completely unfair to Trump. A look at this fuller remarks makes clear he did know that Japanese cars are built in the United States. He even talked about it at-length and praised the manufacturers for the amount of jobs they've created here.

Leviathan

Michael Sgan-Cohen, "Leviathan" (1983), Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem, from Wikimedia Commons.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks is shocked-shocked to learn that the intellectuals in the White House have a Hobbesian view of the world ("Donald Trump Poisons the World"):

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath....

[This] explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.

Indeed. There's something deeply repugnant about people who think this way. People like, ah, New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Human Nature Redux", February 2007):

You can't make this stuff up

Or if you can, there could be serious money in it.

François Truffaut, via Cinémathèque Française.

Narratology isn't admissible evidence in a criminal court, but there's something in the report of the Comey memo that really makes me believe, the psychological realism of what the Emperor is said to have said, and its tone:

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It's the sound of a very wealthy father talking to the boarding-school principal after the entitled, psychopathic son has burned down his bedroom knocking over the bong, or assaulted the chambermaid. Or a mafia boss addressing a policeman on behalf of a dumb henchman picked up for cutting somebody with a broken margarita glass in a bar fight. "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go—he's a good kid." No, he's not, but that's not even the point.

And only a crude-minded screenwriter would have the father holding out an actual check; there's no need for that, the idea of bribery or extortion is already there. This is a world where Trump is perfectly comfortable and competent. He's done this before, "dealing". (His difficulty is just that he isn't in that world any more and he has no idea who's a crook and who isn't.) You don't say, "I could fire you," he knows that. And we know that, because when he didn't get his way with Comey he did fire him. This really happened.

Cross-posted in No More Mister Nice Blog.