The Third Dimension

White mochi with macha filling, via Uncut Recipes.

So Jordan was wondering over in the comments how David Brooks might have reacted to the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago, and I found something kind of—unsurprising might be the right word, from David Nyhan writing for the Boston Globe in January 1999, who watched a Brooks appearance on PBS looking back at the failure of the Senate trial, and, spoiler, no, he didn't talk about how Gingrich's House ought to have been working on infrastructure bills instead:

"This is a Great Lost Cause," he enthused of the Republican drive to snuff out the Clinton presidency. "We fought for truth, for justice," he said. That notion was novel to me. This whole thing has looked like a down-and-dirty political ambush from the word go, to me and to most Americans. I could never buy the William Bennett Moral Crusade; I always suspected that was a book-tour con.

But Brooks found what he gamely phrased "a kernel of romance" for Republicans in this yearlong dive into the cesspool of semen-stained dresses, cigars in the wrong places, sneaky tapes of a ditzy young intern by a repulsive Republican operative (can anyone defend the taxpayers still paying $90,000 a year to Linda Tripp for her no-show Pentagon job?), and the greasy pawing-over of tapes, transcripts, appointment logs, Secret Service records, and other detritus of the 60,000-page House impeachment probe.

Brooks looked ahead to the Republican National Convention of 2000 and through the mist of the future, saw Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, being summoned to the podium to accept the plaudits of a grateful party, with the crowd roaring for Hyde and his fellow impeachers: "They stood for principles against the polls."

It strikes me that there's more to this than simple hypocrisy, a simple double standard for Republicans vs. Democrats; or maybe I should say it's a motivated double standard.

And Then the Critics

Image via The Clyde Fitch Report.

The way I received it, listening to the Judiciary hearing on the radio (unlike Chuck Todd, I don't get to criticize the "optics", and I didn't listen to the Intelligence hearing at all, though I've got the transcript in an open tab and I'm working on it), Mueller had a pedagogical task I thought he was living up to pretty well, with the intense cooperation of the Democrats on the committee. Namely, he wasn't going to read us the Report ("Hey kids, it's story time!"). He was going to make us read it, or the committee members on our behalf, because that's what you need to do in this class: if the professor spoonfeeds you the material, you're not going to get it, you have to master it for yourself.

And Mueller really wants us to read the Report. "The Report speaks for itself," he keeps saying, like Dorothy insisting she just wants to go back to Kansas. He's aware, I think, that nobody has read it, but he's put so much into it that he doesn't have much left for himself.

So he wouldn't give them a lecture, he gave them a "recitation", or what's called a tutorial in UK, in which the congresscritters read it to him, and he signaled to what extent he thought they were getting it right:

When Osama bin Laden was murdered

Glenn Greenwald righteously denounced a certain ugly-American response to the news--

one of those events which, especially in the immediate aftermath, is not susceptible to reasoned discussion. It’s already a Litmus Test event: all Decent People — by definition — express unadulterated ecstacy [sic] at his death, and all Good Americans chant “USA! USA!” in a celebration of this proof of our national greatness and Goodness (and that of our President)

 --although he may have been mistaken as to how far such vulgar behavior extended among the population (lots of us found reason to stay sober, and for that matter I don't recall Mitch McConnell dancing out by the White House, say,  or any self-described Republicans, though their reasons were certainly different from mine), or how long it was going to last.

Human sacrifice as represented in a label from the reign of Djer, second king of the First Dynasty (ca. 3100 B.C.E.), after which the Egyptians are said to have abandoned the practice

He also added, primly, [jump]