Brooks Looks at Li'l Don

Doesn't always take a conspiracy theory to connect the dots. Via openclipart.

Heredity or environment? Where does sociopathy come from? David Brooks ("Moral Vacuum in the House of Trump") lays out the case from Friedrich Drumpf the Rheinland draft-dodger and British Columbia brothelkeeper to Donald Trump, Jr., enthusing over an illegal in-kind campaign contribution from foreign nationals connected to an iffy government the way you might about a trip to the mountains—"I love it especially later in the summer"—and pictures it as a kind of evolutionary development in the moral tone:

I repeat this history because I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.

It took a few generations of the House of Trump, in other words, to produce Donald Jr.

That's ridiculous, really. You'll never convince me that Li'l Donnie is in some sense more evil than old Fred, Woody Guthrie's "Old Man Trump" sucking up government money and profiteering off the blood and sacrifice of World War II veterans to create exploitative housing, whites only, in Queens:

Social Lives of the Rich and Famous

Somebody photoshop Scalia's face in there for me, please.

This is really dumb to begin with, but everybody needs entertainment, and I've been learning too much about the subject not to share it, concerning the possibility that Ivanka Trump has temporarily abandoned the hubby and kids (one four months old) and the presidential campaign for a vacation with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's girlfriend, if it's true that Putin's girlfriend is none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch, said to have been dating Vladimir Vladimirovich on the rebound from the (also rumored) affair with Tony Blair that may, if it took place, have brought on the breakup of her marriage with the then 82-year-old ex-Australian news magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is now 85 and married to Mick Jagger's old squeeze and baby mama Jerry Hall.

As far as I know Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson don't come into the story but don't bet on it. I don't, for the record, think much of the Putin angle. If you believe the kinds of publications that have reported it (there's a fresh rundown at Snopes), then you need to believe Angelina Jolie has gotten pregnant 14 or 15 times in the last couple of years (by my back-of-the-envelope calculation based on my view of tabloid front pages in subway stations) and divorced nearly as often, which is not even possible, given that you really can't have more divorces in one individual life than you have marriages.