Cheap shots

Meat Mark Halperin! At the Hickory Park in Ames, Iowa, I believe, 2007. Via.

That's so Halperin.

Donkeys fly - @davidplouffe endorses @HillaryClinton https://t.co/PSGie8rAQu

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) October 24, 2015

Expressing amazement that Plouffe should endorse Hillary—no clue that his judgment, or anybody's, could be about policy and politics rather than raw teen emotions. ("But he was against her eight years ago!" Yeah, Obama was running.)

Many are called, but few are Douthat

St. Ross, Pandit and Martyr. MockPaperScissors, August 2010.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is shocked! shocked! to find that the Roman Catholic Church is not a democracy like the Muslim ummah in which it's OK to toss out takfiri accusations, as he's been doing in the direction of the Pope recently, sometimes subtly as in that column, sometimes pretty out there on Twitter:

@DouthatNYT Please be careful throwing around a word like "heresy." That is an extremely serious accusation and in this case unfounded.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 23, 2015

Pretty comical, considering that his complaint seems to be that the church may be heading down a path that's not authoritarian enough in its approach to sinners such as the divorced. Now a brief letter from 55 distinguished Catholic theologians at US academic institutions has appeared complaining to the New York Times about the conduct of their ill-bred and untrained employee, and today's column is a lengthy reply to that:

I have great respect for your vocation. Let me try to explain mine.

He has a vocation! Isn't that special! He didn't just fall into opinionating, he was called to it.

I believe the Blessed Virgin appeared to him in a dream: "There are many ways of serving me, Ross; yours is to kvetch about the decadence and depravity of the times in The Times, on a weekly or biweekly basis."

White House Fool Report: Friday news dump

Updated 11/7/2015

"A Marine monitors the flight line out of the rear of a MV-22B Osprey after completing fast-rope and rappelling training with Marine Special Operations Command, near Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina, June 23, 2015." U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Orlando Perez. Via Task & Purpose.

Among the various mixed signals the administration is sending about its plan to put "several dozens" but "fewer than 50" Special Operations troops on the ground in Syria, not "advisors" but nevertheless in an "advisory capacity", is one that goes along with the way I've been trying my hardest to understand Obama's policy:

The move was meant to bolster diplomatic efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who on Friday reached an agreement in Vienna with countries with opposing stakes to explore “a nationwide cease-fire” and ask the United Nations to oversee the revision of the Syrian Constitution and then new elections. 

That is, the purpose of the thing is part of the peace strategy, not the war strategy, to upgrade and maintain the administration's influence on the situation as these important and even slightly hopeful talks, now including Iran, proceed, in the same way the Russian moves in Syria are meant.

Not that they won't participate on the war side, from their post inside an opposition group headquarters in northern Syria, though they won't be going anywhere else or even on patrols; their job is

David Brooks: Trick or Treat!

Image via Stevenson Financial Marketing.

David Brooks writes, "The Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio Moment", October 30 2015:

Well, it has been a pretty long summer, hasn't it! And I'm just about ready to party. I'm going as Zombie Bill Safire, and I've even got a couple of kids to shlep around door-to-door for the tricks and treats, little Paul and little Marco, dressed as that fabulous WWE tag team The Wonks, and let me tell you these kids look great!

No, but seriously, folks, these boys are the freshest thing in town, and if you think I'm kidding take a look at young Paul assuming the gavel in the House of Representatives, youngest speaker since James G. Blaine (the continental liar from the state of Maine), who was only 39 on his ascent in 1869. As for Marco, I think it's wise to start predicting right now that he's getting the presidential nomination, because that's been my plan since, oh, last February, and it looks like it could be starting to happen, as voters begin to tire of looking in the windows on Madison and go home to Jersey to start thinking about what they're actually going to buy.

Because for one thing, voters don't need to have a very clear idea what their candidate's agenda is, but they have to think she might have an agenda of some kind, and celebrity candidates Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson do not project that deep and abiding seriousness the way, say, that guy who was president before Obama once did in the awed eyes of your humble correspondent.

Fabricating Rhythm

Illustration from Austin and Belinda French, Some White and her Calf: Lessons from the Farm (2010).

Does David French make stuff up?

David French, I mean, famed Iraq combat attorney (if you needed a brief in the trenches he was always there for you, band of brothers, for the whole ten months, November 2007 to September 2008) and National Review correspondent, who sometimes leavens his work with an interesting bit of reminiscence from his own past, as in the case, which became kind of famous over at Edroso's place a few weeks ago, when he reminisced about his own early ascent into fightin' manhood, in the course of a discussion of how "victim culture is killing American manhood"—

In one grade-school incident, I got into a playground fight with another boy and knocked him to the ground. As the teacher rushed up to separate us, she demanded to know what happened. “He said I hit like a girl,” I told her. “Is this true?” She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. “Well then, you deserved it,” she said. And that was that. I thought of that minor playground scrap — and many others like it....

No victim culture for little David! Teachers understood something about the requirements of manhood back in the day.

So anyway, I just happened to notice that he's had a couple of occasions to remember the policemen of his childhood in recent months, and he remembers them in oddly different ways, which seem to correlate directly with the ideological point he wants to make.

So, this week, in explaining why we shouldn't be "disturbed" by the video of deputy sheriff Ben Fields of Spring Valley, South Carolina, throwing a 16-year-old girl in her high school classroom to the ground and pulling her across the floor, he recalls the cops in school as heroic defenders of the weak, against extraordinary violence, who really can't be questioned, because that's just the way it is:

Oh the Sensible Trump!

Shorter David Brooks, "A Sensible Version of Donald Trump", October 27 2015:

Voters these days are fed up with experienced politicians (I mean except for some Democrats, who seem to be interested in Hillary Clinton, deep in politics since 1974, or Bernie Sanders, who ran his first campaign in 1972 and kept pushing until he won his first mayoral contest nine years later), and looking at complete outsiders like Dr. Ben Carson and Donald Trump, and I get that, but what they really need is a Donald Trump who is totally unlike Donald Trump in every significant way. You know, sensible. I mean, he'd still be really rich and all those goons who want to vote for him would still want to vote for him, but other than that. He could start with this very intellectual-sounding speech I wrote for him.

Bernard Gilliam (1884), the unveiling of James G. Blaine. Via Wikipedia. 

I'm going to leave it to others (happy birthday, Driftglass!) to do the analysis on this one, because I got a visit from the Muse:

Annals of derp: Good news for John McCain

Ratifying the 15th Amendment, 1870. Via United States Embassy to Nigeria.

A fairly comical example of some willful derp from the National Review, with that conservative penchant for looking through every bend in the chicken entrails for the signs that are in some sense or another "good for the right", in this case a way of arguing that there's something about a YouGov poll that you can see in a dream as an indication that there is a universe where black people might vote Republican:

The White Vote

By Ramesh Ponnuru — October 23, 2015

Great Scott Alexander post:

[T]he [polls with racial breakdowns that] we have suggest that Donald Trump’s supporters are about as diverse as any other Republican’s and maybe more so. . . . 

On the other hand, there is a candidate whom the media narrative fits like a glove. A candidate who may win [a] primary among whites, but loses in a landslide among minorities. A candidate whose black support is almost an entire order of magnitude lower than his white support. . . .

The what vote? Great Scott! It's a blog post arguing that Donald Trump isn't a magnet for angry racist white voters but if he is then Bernie Sanders is too only just kidding:

#RiseUpOctober: Bad apples

National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Thursday 10/22, via Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Some beloved commenters here and at NMMNB have made me feel misunderstood over yesterday's post on FBI director James Comey. Commenter Ten Bears wrote,

I have issues with this notion the cops are "protecting" me. They do not, nor have they ever. Me, or my family. More like an armed gang roaming the countryside terrorising the population.

Ten Bears, that's exactly what "protection" means, in certain circles.

The post wan't well enough written, though, and I'd like to try to make my point more explicit.

I don't actually know whether a majority, vast or otherwise, of US police officers are hardworking professionals and deeply humane and caring individuals or not, and strictly speaking there's no way I can know, because the institutions of police accountability seem to be designed to make sure we can't find out, which might make you a little suspicious.

I do know that a lot of us feel that there's a real problem with it, and I don't think we're hallucinating. Maybe it's a few-bad-apples in a vast-majority-of-brave-and etc., and maybe it's a set of institutional problems that put so many cops on the scale from indifferent (as when our Brooklyn apartment was robbed three times in two years and I couldn't even get them to produce a report to explain to the cable company why my cable box was missing) through venal (from traffic cops issuing tickets to narcotics agents seizing serious property, as if their central task was to shake citizens down), to downright violent, inflicting special torments mainly on African Americans, ranging from constant harassment to murder.

Annals of Derp: Depravity, Germanity, and Wikipedia

Freestyle Bowling often borrows elements from other sports. Via Stupidedia.

Andrew C. McCarthy of the National Review wrote in reference to the tragic or comic demise of the Special Select Committee on Benghazi:

‘We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.

Nice en-dash, Andrew! (No snark, a mere hyphen in "then–secretary of state" wouldn't have been right, as Wikipedia clarifies.) But, uh, depraved?

So I went and commented.

Why does James Comey hate cops?

"A hunky Baltimore police officer has been inundated with marriage proposals after a photo of him cuddling a stray kitten he rescued and then adopted went viral....  The image [of Jon Boyer with friend] received more than 4,000 likes and several hundred comments praising his selfless work -- and handsome looks." (Daily Mail) How many politicians got on his case for this unseemly publicity?

We're accustomed to various privately funded agents of fascism—the heads of police benevolent associations, the radio-talk Ciceros—issuing blackmail threats on behalf of the police, to the effect that if the behavior of cops is subjected to some kind of public scrutiny cops will just refuse to protect us.

And I generally discount it, because I believe the responsible figures who tell me that the vast majority of police officers are serious and dutiful and good people who would never dream of conducting their work like a protection racket, and have no reason to fear seeing it exposed. At least I'd like to believe them, but it's somehow not very easy to find out how true that is.

But I get taken a little aback when the director of the FBI does it, as reported today:

Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.

If I dared to eat a peach, would you respect me?

Image via fiercegifs.

Editors' Note: Due to a transmission error, today's column by David Brooks, "Life and the Passion of Lady Gaga", was inadvertently run backwards. A corrected edition, or quite a lot of one anyway, appears below:

A friend of mine perpetually asks, "Who would you be and what would you do if you weren't afraid?"

I wonder why. But some people live an amplified life and throw their contradictions out there. Their life is a work of art. This will sound weird, but I'm thinking about Lady Gaga.

Speaker Squeaker

Preparation for working with Ted Yoho. From Ryan's Twitter feed via Huffington Post, July 2013.

I've been so consistently wrong in everything I've suggested about the Speakership—in spite of a remarkable, even bewildering range and variety of ideas—that I haven't even been able to catch up with it. Even as the news began to arrive that young Paul Ryan was negotiating his acceptance of a draft, and my wrong began to coalesce with everyone else's, and the word was that the Freedomists had caved to all of his most tyrannical demands ("And you all have to say I took it on so I could spend more time with my family!"), I had an analysis half written in my head explaining how the Freedomists had definitively lost their game and their only interest henceforth was to hold on to a little face.

A Tale of Two Headlines

How he felt in June 2013, not how he feels now.

Politico, October 5 2015:

Brzezinski: Obama should retaliate if Russia doesn't stop attacking U.S. assets


NPR, two weeks later:

Former National Security Adviser: U.S. And Russia Must Work Together In Syria

Both referring to the same Brezinski opinion piece in Financial Times, October 4.

It was the NPR story that got my attention. I don't subscribe to the exotic strain of Brzezinski paranoia according to which old Zbig actually rules the world with the aid of his trusty and superpowerful henchwoman Victoria Nuland, who staged an entire revolution in Kiev to cover up her secret maneuver to seize dictatorial power in the Ukraine. etc, etc., but I do think of him lazily as a kind of poor man's (or Democrats') Kissinger, a throwback to the power diplomacy of the 19th century animated by hatred for Russia and for his excessively peaceable old boss Jimmy Carter,

Bye Bye Biden

Image via The Daily Bash.

I found myself really conflicted about Biden, for reasons I could hardly even explain to myself, because they were pretty compound, if not really complex.

There was the on-the-one-hand human angle of why should a 73-year-old-man who's just lost his son have to put up with this kind of life, of campaigning and begging for money and telling lies up and down the country, and the on-the-other-hand human angle of remembering the awful story told by George Packer of Biden and his staffer Jeff Connaughton, in which it turns out that that Sweet Joey personality is something that can be turned off pretty easily, in favor of an alternative personality that's honestly not necessarily very nice.

Then there's the foreign affairs question where it seems to me clear that Biden knows more and understands better than anybody in the way of being a candidate, which seems bizarre on its face, given that the leading candidate actually served as Secretary of State for four years not long ago. But there's a reason why Biden got the Iraq portfolio. Is Hillary a hawk and Biden a person of peace? I don't think one can trust them by their utterances, but I have been very disturbed in this last week or two by a couple of things. First by the thing Clinton said in the debate:

Cooper said to the debaters, "You've all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?"

Hillary Clinton: Well, in addition to the NRA, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians. Probably the Republicans.

She hasn't noticed that President Obama has been working to put together some kind of different relationship with Iran, possibly the most important foreign-policy accomplishment of the presidency, for which being proud to be an enemy might not be the best way of expressing how we feel? or that there's more than one Iranian point of view, in Iran?

And then this no-fly zone idiocy, making Clinton look as stupid as her friend Senator McCain? Because there isn't enough murderous stupidity in Syria yet? Do they feel there's some kind of quota that isn't being met? Or a Guinness Book record to set? Times notes:

Luke Coffey, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said: “It makes for a nice tweet, it sounds good, it sounds like a policy idea. But when you get down into the details, you see why it’s not really going to work.”

Karl P. Mueller, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, said that the Russian air campaign “changes things significantly,” and that “initiating armed combat with the Russian Air Force is a very big thing.”

“In the past, when there’s been talk about no-fly zones, usually what people have meant is we’re going to force the Syrian Air Force to stay on the ground,” [which might have been a good idea had it had any hope of working, which it didn't,] he said. “With the Russians in the country, that gets significantly more complicated, because now you’re talking about grounding or shooting down Russian aircraft, or intimidating them into not flying, or not attacking certain targets in certain areas.”

My only thought is that Clinton knows it's idiotic and is suggesting it only with the understanding that she has no power to make it so. That, like suspicions over her sudden adoption of a hostility to the Trans-Pacific Partnership in which I can't believe she really believes, makes her seem less stupid, but at the same more dishonest than I wanted to think of her as being. I'm really a little disheartened. I've been fighting the dishonest-Hillary meme for months, and she's not helping. I'm sure I'll be back on board by nomination time, but it may not be easy.

Meanwhile, it's just a terrible idea for the US to be messing around in the Syria situation in any way more aggressive than what the Obama administration is already doing (doing more to improve the lot of the refugees is another matter), but none of the presidential candidates is saying this in an effective way: Paul for the Republicans is featherheaded, O'Malley and Chafee are weak-voiced, and the most important opponent of over-militarizing, Sanders, sounds as if he's responding more or less automatically: it's not clear how he understands the situation, or even how much he knows about it. The most valuable thing Biden could have done as a candidate would have been to come out and explain it, in a way the public could understand.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Yo Canada

I don't think Canada was meant to have a Thatcherite revolution; it took them an awfully long time to try one out, getting around to it only in 2006, and it was only scandal that got the "natural governing party of Canada", the Liberals, out in the first place—though a scandal that seems by US standards ludicrously mild-mannered, like Dr. Evil's extortion demand; the government was found to have improperly awarded $3.75 million in contracts to some Montréal ad agencies, almost half of which involved no actual work, or what Pentagon insiders commonly refer to as "a typical Tuesday". And in the end none of the party's leaders were implicated.

But in the meantime, Canadian voters just don't like criminality even of such a modest sort, and while the country as a whole is normally of the left, the left is always divided, among liberal Liberals, progressive New Democrats, and the ethnicist Bloc Québécois, and so the vile Stephen Harper slipped into office with 36% of the vote, and 124 of the parliament's 308 seats, which is allowed in Canada's parliamentary system as long as enough people in the opposition put up with it (because, say, they don't want another election).

The Gravity Deficit

Georges Méliès, La Voyage dans la Lune (1902). Image via wifflegifs.

David Brooks writes ("Enter the Age of the Outsiders", New York Times, October 19 2015):

As any fool knows, gravity plays a tremendously valuable role in our solar system in encouraging planets, comets, asteroids and so on to stay in their appointed paths. If the sun were to start slacking off on the gravity, other heavenly bodies might just take up eccentric orbits or wander off altogether, shirking their responsibilities and setting a terrible example for their own moons.

I mention this because it's such an original and compelling analogy for what's been happening in our own political and social systems lately, and a good way of walking back my unfortunate lapse last week where I lost my temper with the House Freedom Caucus and inadvertently suggested that both sides might not do it.

Faith works miracles: Time travel edition

Hi C&L fans! Thanks, Batocchio!

Or is he just another secret Muslim? (Via)

I was startled to hear on the radio this morning the story, from the Republican candidates' forum at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas this weekend, of how JEB! found the Lord, which was new to me, and somewhat surprising, given the well-known history of how he got married to a Catholic woman in 1974 and went to Mass with her for the next 21 years before finally being received into the Roman communion in 1995 (as he wrote in a piece for CNN on the eve of the Pope's visit to the US in September), because it sounds as if he was having a secret and, um, rather Baptist life the whole time:

Like the other candidates, Bush focused on his anti-abortion rights record and painted himself as a defender of religious liberty.  He opened up about a born-again moment he experienced in the '80s, when he decided to read the Bible from end to end.

I got about halfway through Romans when I realized that Jesus was my savior," he said. (CNN via)

(love how the defense of religious liberty is directly associated with the liberty to interfere with other people's possibly irreligious liberty), or,

Bleaker Speaker

Fujiwara Michinaga (966-1027). Michinaga was so powerful that he never even needed to assume the highest positions in the government hierarchy. As the head of the Fujiwara clan, it was simply understood that he was the most powerful person in the government. Michinaga first came to power in 995, thanks to the efforts of his sister, the retired empress Akiko, who was perhaps the most powerful women in the Heian era, able to force the emperor to appoint her brother to a position of power. (Via Pennsylvania State University)

So the Congresscritters are trooping back into Washington, no doubt refreshed by their Indigenous Peoples Day holiday and the delightful crispness of the autumn weather and Senator Ted Cruz appearing on the Mr. Chuck Todd Show to inform the public that he declines to say whether Representative Ryan is a True Scotsman Conservative or not:

CHUCK TODD:

Alright. I wanna do two more things about this Washington. Is Paul Ryan a true conservative?

SEN. TED CRUZ:

Oh, listen. I-- I-- I like Paul Ryan. He's a friend of mine. This is obviously a question that is wrapped up in the Speaker of the House-- deliberations. I have said consistently I'm gonna stay outta that....

So at a rally in Iowa last week (flanked by Charles Grassley and Steve King) Senator Cruz consistently demonstrated his intention of staying out of that by naming his own preferred candidate:

Annals of derp: Canon balls

Giovanni Venanzi of Pesaro, 1688: King Solomon being led into idolatry by his wives. Via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, demonstrates once again that he's just not that good at theology and canon law, in his allegations of a "conspiracy" on the part of old Francesco to "rewrite" Catholic doctrine with regard to the policy of allowing divorced-and-remarried Catholics to take communion:

Francis’s purpose is simple: He favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null.

...if his purpose is clear, his path is decidedly murky. Procedurally, the pope’s powers are near-absolute: If Francis decided tomorrow to endorse communion for the remarried, there is no Catholic Supreme Court that could strike his ruling down.

I know a dead parrot when I see one

One Jennifer Rubin has a nightmare (Bad Dreams, 1988), the other one has a daydream.

Jennifer Rubin wants you not to count out JEB! yet, at least in New Hampshire:

His main challengers in New Hampshire — Ohio Gov. John Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — have $2.6 million and $1.4 million cash on hand respectively, and as of now in the national RealClearPolitics average are below the 2.5 percent threshold for the next debate.

That's his main challengers for fifth place? I believe he has that just about sewn up.