Literary Corner: Oh Freedom

 

Music historian Linda Russell, via RecordOnLine, on campaign songs.

Two Songs

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

I. Take a Look at Bacon

You take a look at bacon
and some of these products –
and some people don’t eat bacon any more.
We are going to get the energy prices down.

When we get energy down, you know …
this was caused by their horrible energy – wind.
They want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn’t blow,
we have a little problem.

II. The Transgender Thing

But the transgender thing is incredible.
Think of it. Your kid goes to school
and comes home a few days later
with an operation. The school decides
what’s going to happen with your child

and you know many of these childs
fifteen years later say, what the hell happened?
Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me?
It’s incredible.

The price of bacon in 2023 was down 9% from its all-time high in 2022, year over year, and it's lower now than it was then. Brad DeLong, who I really, really trust, claims the price of bacon is at a historic low, matched only by the price in one weird interval 30 years ago:

The price of bacon relative to personal income per capita has only been noticeably lower than it is today for about a year in 1994-1995.

For the Record: Rights Gotten Spectacularly Wrong

For freedom before she was against it, or both at the same time? Or is the decision to terminate a pregnancy not a private family decision? It certainly would be in my family, don't know about Marsha's.

 

The Constitution has a dream that its four little children will be judged by the content of their character.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2022

She's got my vote if she wants it

And finally Stacey Abrams isn't president of Earth. I know it's hard for you guys at National Review to understand the difference, but that's a TV show.

Apparently National Review is all bent out of shape about a cameo appearance by Stacey Abrams as "United Earth President" on the Paramount series Star Trek: Discovery. 

Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth

thunders Jack Butler:

Jim [Geraghty] has covered the Star Trek criticism, so I’ll focus on Stacey Abrams. Abrams is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it, behavior that Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has convincingly argued is morally indistinguishable from — and helped set the stage for — former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election.

And earlier this week, Matt Mashburn, a member of Georgia’s state elections board, argued that the House January 6 Committee’s decision to pursue the legal argument that those who argued the 2020 election* did so knowing this was false and then raised money off of it anyway are guilty of fraud should make Abrams, who has profited handsomely in her own way from her election denial, nervous. As Spock once said, sauce for the goose.

*Some words like "that the 2020 election was rigged" seem to have wandered away from the sentence at this point, arguably frightened off by all the argle-bargle that precedes it in the pancake of relative clauses. We'll come to that presently.

I don't know about The Corner, but in my house Abrams is more famous as the architect of Democratic victories in Georgia in November 2020 and January 2021 that gave the party the White House and the Senate majority.

Moar Senatorial Stupid

 

Valhalla burning in the distance, after the original production, Bayreuth 1876, via BR-Klassik. Rick Scott wants to do this to the world every five years.

Rick Scott: "My plan is not to raise anybody's income tax. It is to raise some people's income tax." #NPR

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Rick Scott: "Who said I planned to sunset Medicare? I only said I planned to sunset Medicare!" #NPR

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Rick Scott: "I never said I wanted to do ANYTHING. I just wanted to start a conversation about the stuff I wanted to do, which I actually didn't want to do."

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2022

Although, looking at the actual text of Scott's interview now that it's up at the NPR website, I"m finding some evidence that Scott is not actually out of his mind, just really remarkably stupid.

The income tax proposal in Scott's "11-Point Policy Book" is like this:

For the Record: Gaetz's Rebellion

 

Scuffle outside the Springfield, Massachusetts courthouse, 1786; 19th-century wood engraving, Granger Academic.

From here https://t.co/dccKX08vue

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021

https://t.co/qc2kxI5gC2 pic.twitter.com/s7qO4tfQRr

— Freewheeling Passion (@Yastreblyansky) May 28, 2021

Postcard From Parliament Square

Pouring beer on the flag of the European Union is a thing somebody did. Photo credit to PA/Independent.

Not a postcard from me, but from Tom Peck for The Independent, observing how "on Friday 31 January, between the hours of 9pm and 11pm, Westminster’s Parliament Square played host to a static, knuckle dragging carnival of the irredeemably stupid."

I’ve listened back now to the sound on my dictaphone that records Britain’s moment of liberation and it goes exactly like this: “Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! FREEDOM!!!! YEAAAASSSS!!!! F****** FREEDOM!!!! WE F****** DID IT!!! F****** FREEDOM!!! F****** DO ONE!! F****** DO ONE!!!!”

It seems as worthy a catch phrase of the moment as anything else. F****** do one! Who exactly? Absolutely everyone. It doesn’t matter. Just f****** do one. Put that, as they say, on the side of the bus....

We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up.

Today, The Independent is informing its readers that

Donald Trump is facing fresh ridicule after tweeting his congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs after they won Super Bowl LIV by saying they represented “the Great State of Kansas... so very well” when the team is, in fact, based in Missouri.

One of the most disturbing things for me about this Revolt of the Stupid is the way it calls into question everybody's commitment to democracy. The rebels, of course, have no interest in democracy; they're interested in owning the libs, permanently, and would rather not be asked to think about anything else. They gladly surrender their political power to an authority, preferably one as stupid as they are, who's willing to tell them all the lies they can listen to. But we, too, in our disgust that such people as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are enabled to exercise that sort of democratically obtained power, are we really interested in democracy? Are we really not tempted to wish we could, at least, exclude the stupid from power? Are we really not secretly inclined to long for the rule of Plato's philosopher kings? Not, strictly speaking, undemocratic philosopher kings—I'd like underlings like me to be listened to—but more like a kind of weighting in the distribution of political power in which you get more if you know there are two Kansas Cities and only one has an NFL franchise, or grasp that the European Union isn't responsible for the presence in England of immigrants from the Caribbean and and South Asia.

I hope I'm not thinking that way. I hope I'm thinking the opposite way, that stupid people are in the minority and more effective democracy (bringing in the people who are smart enough to be too cynical to vote) would keep them out of power.

For the Record: Southern Strategy

Drawing by Tony Auth, June 2008.

Another one of those Twitter lectures, presented not to display how I defeated the choad I was responding to (I didn't, really, he's impenetrable) but as a reference guide to how the evidence goes in a format I thought was pretty concise and well-pointed:

Moar stupid Trump tricks

Via tenor.

Speaking of bestial topics, I guess it's part of the emperor's privilege to set the conversation, and we seem to be giving in more and more to his wishes, but this one about proposals to ship asylum seekers from the border to "sanctuary cities" is so ridiculous even Jonah Goldberg recognizes it as "trolling in place of public policy", in his morning chat with NPR, and yet we go on talking about it.

It's pretty clear that, riffing off what Steve says, Trumpy Republicans believe that all white people hate immigrants as much as they do and only pretend not to out of "political correctness" or just to be bloody-minded or to pick up on all those imaginary illegal-immigrant votes that keep Republicans from making it a one-party state, and the way this arose must have been some time last November, no doubt from one of his Fox friends, I'd guess Lou Dobbs (who was pretty much attributing the Republicans' loss of the House to those votes), and Trump was screaming around the West Wing why wasn't his worthless piece of shit DHS secretary just sending those shithole illegals to San Francisco since Nancy Pelosi loves them so much, and deputy policy coordinator May Davis sent out a query to DHS, in the hope of shutting him up, as The Times broke the story on 11 April:

For the Record: Wall that Fall

Serbian-Hungarian border (I think), 2015. Photo by Getty via Politico Magazine.

Trumpy's source from USA Today article is Elisabeth Vallet, a geography professor at the University of Quebec-Montreal https://t.co/k0IFkGLLLD and she's 100% right: pic.twitter.com/I8GyHhkBai

— Hamberder Heaven (@Yastreblyansky) January 16, 2019

Life Goes On

Cambrian ocean scene, featuring an Anomalocaris canadensis ("anomalous Canadian shrimp") chasing trilobites. Image by diorama artist Ken Doud.

In fact it's likely she meant the Cambrian, and I think it's very likely that a system of global warming, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion, worked in at least as disruptive fashion as it does now, if I'm getting this great post from Science News for Students and a Britannica article right. In a sense, I'll show, conservatives are right in their claim that the climate change phenomena we're experiencing now aren't that different from the climate change phenomena that have been around forever, and they certainly weren't caused by humans then. But don't get too comfortable, conservatives.

For the Record: McArdle on Climate Change

There goes the Virgin Mary down a flooded street in Venice, Italy...seems about right. pic.twitter.com/cdoGq59CBC

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) November 3, 2018

This video is so funny and at the same time so deeply frightening, like a Buñuel film. [Update: It's not Venice, obviously, as Arundel notes in comments: turns out to be Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and the video is doctored. I stand by my Buñuel remark.]  It probably wouldn't bother Megan McArdle:

She'd calmly point out that Venetians [or Canarios as the case may be] in the pre-Cambrian era managed to make it through. Oh wait, there was no life, plant or animal, on land at the time, so perhaps nobody minded in those days. The hard-shelled creatures that had just started evolving at the end of the period, 540 million years ago, might have enjoyed watching the coasts wash away.

West of Eden: Deal Away

Chahar Bagh School, or School of Sultan Hossein's Mother, Isfahan, 19th-century drawing by Pascal Coste, via Wikipedia.

Money quote, for my money, from the press questions after Trump's announcement:

REPORTER: Mr. President, how does this make America safer? How does this make America safer?

TRUMP: Thank you very much. This will make America much safer. Thank you very much.

Oh, that's how. In a much kind of way. Not somewhat or a bit. It's the muchness, stupid.

I didn't listen to the speech, but the way folks were describing his delivery (somebody on Twitter said he was "reading it phonetically") made it sound clear that he'd spent even less time reading it ahead of time than he normally does, which means around zero, and had no idea what it said. Though you can see a dim understanding floating by in a couple of Trumpy interpolations, like

In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime — and it’s a regime of great terror — many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash — a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.

the reference to $1.7 billion as "many billions" and "actual cash" as if there were something particular sinister about that (cash was important to them as it would take some time for international banks to lift the sanctions), or his cute attempt to put himself in Ayatollah Khamenei's place—

Because We're So Stupid: Mystery Maybe Solved

"Whaddaya mean they make cars in Canada? Where, for Christ's sake?" Image via Greenpeace.

I think I may have a fix on what happened (as discussed in yesterday's post, and thanks to a comment from Professor Fate) when Trump was enjoying himself telling the Missouri Republicans how he makes shit up the other day, if you bear with me for a minute here, starting with the fact that he's told the story about his brilliant defeat of Prime Minister Trudeau before, notably at the Pensacola rally in support of Roy Moore, December 8, via Toronto Globe and Mail:

"I like the prime minister very much. Prime Minister Trudeau. Nice guy. Good guy. No, I like him. But we had a meeting... He said, 'No, no, you have a trade surplus.' I said, 'No we don't.' He said, 'No, no you have a trade surplus,"' Trump told the Florida crowd.

"(Trudeau) said, 'I'm telling you that Canada has a deficit with the United States.' I told my people – in front of a lot of people – I said, 'Go out and check'."

He said his staff found Trudeau left out some key details, pertaining to trade in goods: "(Trudeau) was right. Except he forgot two categories: Lumber timber; and energy. Other than that, he was right. When you add them all together, we actually have a $17-billion deficit with Canada."

Literary Corner: Because We're So Stupid

Update here.

After blanking on the name “Canada”, U.S. President Donald Trump was overheard referring to Justin Trudeau as the “leader of the igloo people”, as the two met for crunch talks. The incident occurred during the President’s sit down meeting with the Prime Minister in the Oval Office. While Trump was commenting on how “great” the PM was, he paused mid sentence at: “And you’re honestly a terrific leader of…” Unaware that his microphone was on, or that everyone else in the room could easily hear him, Mr. Trump leaned over to his advisor Kellyanne Conway and whispered: “Ah, what do they call themselves again, those people,” Trump said while discreetly pointing upwards. “You know, up there where it’s cold,” he added, snapping his fingers. Before an alarmed looking Conway could respond, Trump bluttered, “the igloo people, is that it? He’s the leader of the igloo people, right?” (Satire, I should say, from the Burrard Street Journal. Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters.)

In the briefing I said I would provide the trade deficit number we have with Canada. In 2017 we had a $17.58 B trade deficit. In January 2018 we had a$3.63 B trade deficit. Both reflect trade in goods. Which is exactly what @POTUS referenced. https://t.co/PHm7hXdszD

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) March 15, 2018

I hate to tell you all, but she's almost right. Lying, but only over one nonsensical detail. Trump is not exactly making that up in his fundraiser speech for senatorial candidate Josh Hawley in St. Louis on Wednesday . Or he is, but he isn't lying: he's creating; he's not trying to tell his audience what happened as much as giving them the drama of how it felt. He's messing it up in a very odd way, too, but that's another matter. There's just one real lie in his account, which Sarah is lying about in turn in a more calculated and yet brazen way. But Trump is like Herodotus, giving you the sting and the rush of it:

Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:

Modest Proposal

Pope Francis "appearing to make amends" with President Trump. with two unidentified Spanish princesses visiting from 1957.

Washington Post's "The Fix" may be even dumber without Chris Cillizza than with him, as Armando points out:

Trump’s foreign trip didn’t solve his media problem, but it helped https://t.co/ekcHoT1aUE

— Callum Borchers (@callumborchers) May 29, 2017

Helped what? https://t.co/ijjdifvqS5

— Armando (@armandodkos) May 29, 2017

Indeed.

Borchers explains, for one thing,

Brooks's 1.6 cents on tax policy

In 2005 dollars.

A 2% raise for you and me, a 13% raise for the Emperor and his pals, and under Senate rules they must find either someplace to steal the money from or some Democrats' votes. Via Center for Tax Policy.

Shorter former New York Times columnist David Brooks, "Can Elephants Learn from Failure?" March 28 2017:

One of the reasons that the Republican proposals to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act failed was the problem that it was a terrible bill that nobody liked, taking benefits from tens of millions of vulnerable people and giving tax breaks to the wealthy few. If Republicans are able to learn from their mistakes, they will not do this again with the upcoming tax bill, but instead take money from tens of millions of financially strapped people in the form of a consumption tax and give tax breaks to the corporations that provide the income of the wealthy few, which will totally increase economic dynamism and growth, according to research by economists that has apparently been published, though I don't have time to tell you where.

He doesn't get around to the point about how all the voters are going to love this one, either.

Outmatch them at every pass

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

It's just amazing, really, how willing people are to try to make an interpretation of the daily Trumpism, as if it were an oracle from the lips of the Pythoness high on laurel fumes or the Cumaean Sibyl, how they keep guessing how you could translate his gnomic utterance into their own technical language, looking for a clue as to what he might have in mind to do as president:

Little trick

19h-century carved glove puppet theater at Lin Liu Hsin Puppet Theatre Museum in Kaohsiung, via The Star (Malaysia).

I thought the official Chinese response to the President-Elect's little Taiwan phone escapade was pretty sophisticated, combining the expected formal protest from the foreign ministry ("solemn representations") with a display of fairly competent snark from the foreign minister, Wang Yi:

This is only a little trick put up by Taiwan, and it’s impossible to change the ‘One China’ pattern that has formed in the international community. I don’t think the US government will change the ‘One China’ policy it has insisted for years, which is the cornerstone of the healthy development of the Sino-US relations. (Quartz)

Or a "petty trick" in the translation offered by the South China Morning Post. Managing to disrespect President Tsai Ing-wen as a kind of spitballer, making trouble to no serious purpose, and Trump as a helpless simpleton for being gulled by her so easily.

And if you didn't get that last, China's English-language papers were happy to fill it in for you:

“Taiwan made a petty gesture before Trump is sworn in, and Trump responded to it,” state tabloid Global Times wrote, adding he is “not familiar with foreign relations.”

And the ministry got into the act as well, with the same tone of regretful surprise at finding itself involved socially with people who are really not of the better sort: