Oklahoma senator
James Lankford's speech
at the Family Research Council's Pray Vote Stand Summit in Atlanta offered
what sounded like rhetorical gruel, warm but a little watery, almost David
Brooks:
“Our Constitution, put together by our founders – I believe God led in that
-- put together a structure and a system that has made us the most
prosperous, most moral nation in the history of the world – when we follow
it,” said the senator.
On top of reminding the audience about how many lawmakers do not follow the
Constitution, he also stated, “One thing that we have lost. What is the
first word in the Constitution? ‘We’ – hang on – actually, I work for ‘we’
[the people]. Because this selfish attitude has become more and more
prevalent that the whole world is about me. And the power of our
Constitution began with this very simple principle of ‘we.’”
Promotion of the speech on Twitter got me a little exercised, and some
analysis made it look, in fact, kind of sinister:
William Blake watercolor illustration for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", 1777-78, via Wikipedia.
From an interview on ABC News with David Muir (in which the poet once again complained about the "broken tests" bequeathed him by the Obama administration, to no pushback from Muir; I'd say it's not surprising if they didn't work very well in diagnosing Covid-19, but very remarkable that they should have existed at all, since Obama left office more than three years before the virus was discovered, or is it possible that Trump is not telling the truth here? Just asking questions).
Muir observed that the pandemic has now taken upwards of 70,000 lives, more than the Vietnam War, and asked the president if he had a message for the bereaved families; rather than telling him that he was a bad reporter and calling the question "nasty", as he has done in the past, Trump offered an answer in the form of a lengthy elegy, in which his capacity for empathy was on unusually full display:
I wanna say I love you
by Donald J. Trump
I wanna say that we're doing everything we can I also wanna say that we're trying to protect people over 60 years old we're trying so hard
I wanna just say to the people that have lost family and have lost loved ones and the people that have just
suffered so badly and just made it and just made it that we love you we're with you we're working with you
Via BBC, August 2013, reporting findings by Richard Toye that "many people thought the Prime Minister was drunk during his famous 'finest hour' broadcast. Prof Toye, from the University of Exeter's Department of History, said Churchill's speeches did stimulate and excite people but also caused disappointment and considerable criticism. 'There is little evidence that they made a decisive difference to the British people's will to fight on,' he added."
Newty thinks a "bully pulpit" is when you use the presidency to beat up on the weak and defenseless. Naturally he's in favor. https://t.co/IlnTLzKdF0
Meanwhile Hugh Hewitt thinks Winston Churchill is the more apt comparison, because of his rigorous insistence on happy talk:
Churchill insisted that everyone in his cabinet, in the country really, choose to put on confidence and resolve like an overcoat. Even when gloomy, and he often was, or waspish, snappish and impossible to please (it seems like a daily occurrence in Larson’s account), Churchill knew his audiences were many: In Britain, across its empire, in America’s ambivalent White House and Congress, and of course in Berlin.
Of course. Our allies, who can't decide whether to fight or not, will be inspired by Trump's eloquent courage, while the virus, holed up in its bunkers, is going to be baffled by Trunp's resolute cheerfulness and probably make tactical mistakes.
What an idiot, but what an appetite for trying to rationalize public deception. I hate praising Churchill, but he never told Britain that "we will win this war sooner than people think".
A constant theme on the Republican side of the impeachment debate was the idea that "Democrats have been wanting to impeach this president since the day he took office," as if to say the particular matter of the Ukraine case was just an excuse—the spaghetti strand that clung to the wall.
Of course it's projection, as my old friend Mikey says, because it's exactly what they'd been planning themselves (see Steve M for lots of detail):
What I know is, weeks BEFORE the election, when it seemed a lock for HRC, I’d heard of R’s saying they’d be drafting Articles on her literally before she was even sworn in.
For what??
Doesn’t matter. Because HER.
So, any Rs b¡tching now, can Shut right TFU & sit TF down. 😡
Nevertheless there's some truth to the suggestion that we'd have taken anything that worked, some of us: the Zelenskyy bribery case being the one that somehow grabbed the attention of those 30 "moderate" congressional Democrats and the big newspapers—though not to the corollary implication that Trump's not guilty in the others, from the corrupt use of the inauguration fund and the campaign finance violations for which Michael Cohen is in jail through all the bank fraud and tax fraud that may apply and the many sexual assault charges and the foreign and domestic emoluments to the big cases of the president bending foreign and national security policy for the personal benefits he may have received or be receiving from the leaderships of countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and above all Russia.
I was worried about this problem in the "marketing" of the narrow impeachment case from the start, that it would give Republicans a chance to insinuate that the Ukraine shakedown must be the only bad thing Trump had ever done as president, since it was the only bad thing Democrats had been able to find, and cast doubt on whether it was really so bad, because they'd be portraying it in isolation, rather than the context of Trump's all-round thug style of foreign policy. Indeed that's how the Republicans have been arguing, and yesterday they did it all day long, until I was moved to emit the following thread:
Mr. Bret Stephens writes a letter to his pal Kevin D. Williamson, newly appointed columnist for The Atlantic, commiserating with him over the sad fate of being criticized ("The Outrage Over Kevin Williamson"):
The case against you, as best as I can tell, rests on three charges. You think abortion is murder and tweeted — appallingly in my view — that doctors and women should perhaps be hanged for it. You believe “sex is a biological reality” and that gender should not be a choice. And you once boorishly described an African-American boy in East St. Louis, Ill., “raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”
My view is that there are more important charges than these: he is a bad writer and dishonest. For example, he falsely accused Jonathan Chait of using a strawman argument in a piece in which he himself used an idiotic strawman argument, an awful ad hominem argument, and two serious falsehoods, followed by a second post in which he falsely accused Chait of dishonesty, and falsely claimed that the great socialist writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., agreed with him (Williamson) that human inequality is genetically determined (of course the basic criticism there applies to Stephens too). I wrote it up in 2015:
William Franklin, governor of New Jersey 1763-76. Spent infinitely more on street repairs in Trenton than he did on protecting his state from invading British troops. That's because he was on their side. The Revolution wasn't a war between Englishmen and Americans, it was a war between Tories and Whigs. Portrait attributed to Mather Brown, 1790, via Wikipedia.
It’s kind of funny in a sick way that the Republicans have literally spent infinitely more money trying to win #PA18 than on protecting our elections from Putin’s interference.
This language is really starting to give me an abreaction; I mean, not from Martin in particular, everybody uses it, I'm sure I've used it myself, but the rhetoric of nation-to-nation war, of Russia and America, and they attacked our country, misses to me the essential point that this is a partisan contest, not a national one, a series of attacks by the forces of reaction on the forces of liberality, not Russia against America (and Britain and France and Germany and Denmark and Ukraine and Georgia and Albania, please read this new story, and even a bit Italy) but Putin's international party of local chauvinism, fear, and hierarchy of the strong over the weak against our international party, in the broadest sense, of cosmopolitanism, hope, and liberty-equality-fraternity, going beyond local party, as in the UK where the Brexit issue transcended those groupings, but not necessarily: in the US it was an attack on Democrats, and it wasn't an attack on Republicans. Once the Republicans had chosen their candidate, it was an attack on their behalf.
Republicans and Putinists are allies now. They share the vision of a society in which the traditionally strong—the white and wealthy, the male, the publicly pious—monopolize the power, keeping the masses hypnotized with the theater of nations, flags, parades, and xenophobia. Republicans benefited from the Russian state's interference in our elections. All this is true even if the collusion story isn't true. Why should they spend money protecting the elections from that?
I mean obviously Republicans can prove me wrong on this. They can impeach Trump, for instance; refusal to implement sanctions overwhelmingly passed by the Congress in flagrant violation of Article II section 3 or, even more, to give the NSA and Cyber Command authority to act against Russian hacking operations are perfectly good grounds. Asked by Swedish reporters last week what he was going to do about it, Trump said,
Certainly there was meddling. Probably there was meddling from other countries.... I think you have to be really watching very closely. We won't allow that to happen. We're doing a very, very deep study and we're coming out with, I think, some very strong suggestions on the '18 election.
The impersonal verb ("there was"), the gratuitous everybody-does-it reference to other countries, and the "very, very deep" all mean nothing is going to be done. It's 2018 already. We've seen our first primaries. Impeach him, Republicans!
Image from an article of last June in Pulpit&Pen, "NAR Prophet, Steve Cioccolanti: Donald Trump is the 'Last Trump' Before The Rapture".
Something in that Salena Zito article, from back in late September, kept sticking in my craw:
The best way [to prevent inner-city "explosions", says Trump], is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”
That's pretty insightful there; if it doesn't get better, it's likely to get worse, whatever it is.
It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.
My bold.
It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
But you just took him seriously and literally, identifying the statistic you think he was using as if it could be completely appropriate, although it's apparently not, since it's unreasonable to expect full-time students to take jobs if they can avoid it.
When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, “Now that’s interesting.”
I'll bet he did. It takes a bullshit artist to recognize superior bullshit.
Former Longaberger headquarters in Newark, Ohio. Via Columbus Dispatch.
Clinton was pretty much right, let's just go ahead and assert it. Shemade her rhetorical mistake, I think, in starting with the wrong basket; she should have begun with the Trump voters she feels for, about whom she was almost a little too nice, sounding like David Brooks:
people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
From a daguerreotype of 1847, National Portrait Gallery, from Wikimedia Commons.
It's David Brooks, the world-famous photography critic —"How Artists Change the World", apparently not by going to Philadelphia this summer.
As usual, there were a ton of artists and musicians at the political conventions this year.
What, they only had two thousand pounds of artists and musicians? Somewhere between ten and twenty individuals, depending on the gender mix? At both of them put together? That seems low. (I realize Brooks, being a literary man, is using some fancy rhetorical technique here, probably the figure of litotes, or understatement, and what he actually means is "rather a lot".)
And that raises some questions. How much should artists get involved in politics? How can artists best promote social change?
Donald J. Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power to cyberspy on a secretary of state’s correspondence.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras during a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Which sounds remarkably like what we usually refer to as treason. I want to argue that what he's really doing isn't so much treason as a classic McCarthy trick, sneaking a very nasty lie into the discussion by packing it into his presuppositions, where it can poison our minds without being noticed, in seeding the conversation with the story of those "30,000 emails that are missing".
Because they AREN'T MISSING, and haven't been missing, certainly not since FBI INVESTIGATORS RECOVERED THEM ALL LAST SEPTEMBER after Clinton turned the equipment over to the agency in August. And there aren't 30,000 of them, but actually two or three thousand, together with some mails from Huma Abedin. Now the investigation is finished, and they're being sent in batches to the State Department, which is processing them for release to the public, starting last Thursday.
Of course there are surrogates out to say he's merely joking:
— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) June 22, 2016
Rectification Central welcomes Marco "Cuban Heels" Rubio, statesman and poet (see below), back into the world of public affairs and the 2020 presidential campaign!
Yes, he's decided to offer himself to the people of Florida for a few months in 2017-18 as their continuing Senator, in spite of the inconvenience and suffering it will cause him and his lovely young family, so he can have a good-paying job he doesn't have to show up for when the campaign starts rolling and #RepublicansInDisarray after the Trump debacle might be desperate enough to turn to him. What a hero!
Not that it wasn't a struggle, between the quiet, self-effacing Rubio who longs for nothing so much as to live in private dignity, caring for his loved ones and in-laws, and enjoying the simple life of an attorney in a rainmaker sinecure and a few corporate board positions, and the deeply committed Rubio who says, no, I just can't let the people live without the benefit of me telling them what's what—they're depending on me!
This deep division—these two souls warring in a single breast—was the subject of a short but poignant lyric he wrote in the thick of the 2016 campaign. I wanted to run it then, but he dropped out so quickly I never got around to it, and I'm happy to have the chance to do that now, beneath the fold.
Speaking of Ross Douthat and the rhetorical strategy of "I'm not saying—just saying", here's cand. doc. Fredrik De Boer, literally a student of rhetoric, with an elegant variation: "I don't say it, I've never in my life said it, but some of my friends say it, and evidence shows that they are right":
I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.
Old Orrin Hatch on NPR explaining how there is NO PRECEDENT for a TERM-LIMITED PRESIDENT in his FINAL YEAR OF OFFICE to NAME A SUPREME COURT JUDGE, therefore it's outrageous to even think about it.
That's how narrowly he has to define it in order to cobble together some kind of truth out of the lies being told by Senators Grassley, McConnell, Lee, and so on. But I think you need to understand that according to my research there are exactly zero times in American history when these conditions have been met.
There could not be a term-limited president until after the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, and since then there have been four years when there was one in his final year (1960, 1988, 2000, and 2008—Nixon, of course, was in his final year in 1974 but the president in the general election year was Ford), and no Supreme Court justice died or resigned in any of those four years, which is really not surprising, because, like most people, Supreme Court justices really don't die or resign any more often than they can avoid it (the exception being, of course, Charles Evans Hughes, who resigned twice, in the election year 1916 and in 1941), and there aren't very many of them.
Scalia, always a spitballer, shattered his last Supreme Court precedent in the last act of his life, by leaving it at a moment when no justice has ever left before. There's no precedent for the whole situation, Senator Hatch, so there's no precedent for the president not to name a new justice either. And that's not all.
Buster Keaton in The General (1926)? [corrections welcome], from the Tumblr of yet another idiot who can't understand the concept of crediting an image, so screw them.
If Bernie Sanders becomes president, government spending will go through the roof! There will be centralized economic planning and the Washington establishment will control American life! Taxes will be so high you won't be able to choose your own lifestyle! Entrepreneurs will have no incentive to entreprenate! American colleges and universities will become tawdry nests of hippies like Cambridge and Uppsala instead of forward-looking profit centers like the University of Phoenix! You'll have to wait in line for your rationed health care! Not that there's anything wrong with that, I've lived in northern Europe myself, but it's not Tocqueville's America, and I find it amazing—amazing—that our young people should think of it as a good idea.
(Is he trolling me today, doubling down on "amazing"? 141st and 142nd career uses of the adjective and its corresponding adverb in the Times column.)
She wouldn’t just be a disaster. Hillary Clinton is disqualified from being Commander-in-Chief of the United States. Someone who cannot handle intelligence information appropriately cannot be Commander-in-Chief and someone who lies to the families of those four victims in Benghazi cannot be President of the United States.
Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman at a Children's Defense Fund event, 2013. Photo by Alex Brandon/AP.
That Amy Chozick story about young Hillary Rodham as an undercover agent of change in Alabama in the summer of 1972, infiltrating the system of "segregation academies" set up in the South to evade civil rights law, contains an amusing example of rhetorical electric slide:
D. Taylor Flowers, the chairman of the board of Houston Academy, whose father was a founding board member, was in the ninth grade at the school (which locals call “H.A.,” jokingly saying it stands for “holy Anglo”) when Mrs. Clinton visited. “I've heard the story, and I don’t think Hillary Clinton made it up,” he said over lunch in Dothan.
The school was founded to prepare students for college, not as a segregation academy, Mr. Flowers said. But, he added, “I would be disingenuous if I said integration didn’t have anything to do with” parents’ enrolling their children in Houston Academy. “Integration was a huge social change for us.”
Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review, on Thursday, writes about "Inequality Warriors Vs. the Family and the Individual", chides persons of progressive views over
the inequality that you purport to be committed to eradicating.
and invites us to
abandon the inequality crusade
(for comments see Scott Lemieux at LGM) but, on Friday, objects with some agitation to having his rhetoric criticized:
Walker is an obnoxious, hyperpartisan brute who exemplifies everything in movement conservatives I've been complaining about for years now, but you should vote for him because he thinks exactly the way I do.
That's only part of the column; for the rest, Dean Baker offers an enjoyably acid takedown.
Walker himself won, of course, but not everybody believes it's because Wisconsin agrees with him, as Roy Edroso translated it into our language,
that the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.
Zandar at Balloon Juice and assorted colleagues argue persuasively from exit polls that Wisconsin just doesn't like recalls. Then again it seems that this recall has given control of the state senate to Democrats, so Walker will not be able to railroad any more of his ghastly program through it.
Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all
across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and
make the tough decisions.
That "tough decisions" phrase has to be one of the most abused in the zombie rhetoric repertoire, by the way. It sounds like a brave decision made by a politician without regard to cheap popularity, a "profiles in courage" choice. But it is invariably used to describe a decision that is self-evidently bad—a bogus solution to a problem that may not even exist presented as the only alternative, like trying to jail all the undocumented immigrants in Arizona—to conform with some kind of pharisaically pinched, narrow-minded notion of moral hazard: cutting off somebody else's nose to spite your own face, and ensure the votes of the nastiest people in your constituency.
Another piece of zombie rhetoric was used this week by secretary of defense Leon Panetta:
“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America
is going to defend ourselves against those who attack us,” Mr. Panetta
said. “This is not just about protecting the United States. It’s also
about protecting Pakistan. And we have made it very clear that we are
going to continue to defend ourselves.”
Panetta is here answering, or refusing to answer, the question of whether drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country's sovereignty. The usage, as a rhetorical trick, comes from Israel: every time the Israeli government is caught committing some abuse against somebody in the neighborhood they cry, "Israel has a right to defend itself."
The implication is always that this is a plea: justifiable crime, because it's self-defense. But they never actually argue it, because it isn't arguable—self-defense doesn't justify everything. If the United States is violating Pakistani sovereignty by dropping bombs there maybe it is truly somebody's idea of self-defense, but it's still violating Pakistani sovereignty nevertheless, and no amount of zombie rhetoric can change it.
Truth terrorists: China
Wu Xiaoqing, the vice minister for environmental protection, demanded that foreign governments stop releasing data on China’s air.
In a criticism clearly aimed at the United States, Mr. Wu said at a news
conference that the public release of air-quality data by foreign
governments’ consulates “not only doesn’t abide by the spirits of the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Vienna Convention on
Consular Relations, but also violates relevant provisions of
environmental protection.” (New York Times, June 6, 2012)
What's supposedly wrong with the data is that it's not "representative"—I guess in the sense that instead of building its consulates in a very large random sample of locations, the US puts them only in major cities, the very places most likely to suffer from pollution; you get no idea of the bracing atmosphere in Inner Mongolia or at the North Korean border, or the sultry breeze in semitropical Hainan.
What's really wrong is that it's data the Chinese government didn't get a chance to edit—those consulates are nothing but a bunch of truth terrorists. Anyway Wu's statement shouldn't be interpreted as some kind of threat; the vice minister simply wanted to clear the air, heh-heh.
Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.
No, you do not wreck havoc. Unless the meaning is, "You had some perfectly good havoc in the Democratic Party, and he went and wrecked it." Which would be a pretty odd thing—talk about concern trolling!
One wreaks havoc (past tense and participle wreaked) or occasionally works it (past tense and participle wrought). Not knowing this is illiterate, and illiteracy is a disqualification for writing a column in a national newspaper. See Zandar, again, for demonstration that the content of this column is even worse than the English usage.
