Still more good news for John McCain!

Hobart Bosworth in Rowland V. Lee's The Sea Lion (1921). Via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "Donald Trump Isn't Real", New York Times, February 2 2016:

1. Donald Trump draws his political style from the theatrics of World Wrestling Entertainment, in which what matters isn't whether you win or lose or whether you are good or evil but how aggressive you show yourself to be, so if he wins it won't be real, right, Dad? But it's real if he loses?

2. Marco Rubio's surge in Iowa is amazing.

(That's Brooks's 140th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his Times column since September 2003, for the record, maintaining a steady rate of just over once a month.)

My Revolution

Image via Sodahead.

I was sort of clean for Gene in early 1968, you know. I'm that old!

I cut my hair and put on a tie (paisley, no doubt, and four or five inches wide), and did a little door-to-door in our little town, not proselytizing, that was not part of my instructions from the McCarthy campaign, just collecting information on preferences, but I was glad to be a footsoldier. It was a revolution! The youth of America were going to take over, at long last, and wash our country clean of corruption! I felt infinitely superior to friends lounging around listening to Iron Butterfly (as far as Iron Butterfly goes, I guess I still do), or Simon and Garfunkel: I can't hear the new Bernie ad without a garbled lyric coming involuntarily into my mind, expressive of a weirdly wrong sentiment for a primary campaign:

The future's not what it used to be

"Blind monks examining an elephant", an ukiyo-e print by Hanabusa Itchō (1652–1724). Via Wikipedia.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "Trump, Sanders and the Revolt Against Decadence", New York Times, January 31 2016:

What makes the Trump and Sanders campaigns alike is that both are protests against decadence, at least if you redefine "decadence" to mean something completely different from what it usually means.

Merriam-Webster:

1. 1:  the process of becoming decadent  [= "marked by decay or decline"; Simple English definition "having low morals and a great love of pleasure, money, fame, etc."]
   :  the quality or state of being decadent
2. 2:  a period of decline

Ross Douthat, verbatim:

You say you want a revolution, but what if you've got one?

William Howard Taft on carabao-back in the Philippines.

I'm not one of those who worries a lot about whether Bernie Sanders is electable or not, at least against anybody on the roster of Republican candidates including the imaginary ones like Romney or Ryan, and with the Democratic ground operation as it's developed over the past eight or ten years. He's a disciplined and attractive candidate, and he keeps saying things everybody knows to be true and nobody else does say. BooMan was quoting Dana Milbank the other day—

Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

—and I was thinking, are you crazy, Milbank? Since the whole Republican shtik is to pretend to this Catonian personal rectitude and an indignation at the corruptions of the times that Sanders actually exemplifies, simply standing next to Sanders at a couple of podiums might cause Trump or Cruz or Rubio to simply annihilate, in a blinding flash of cognitive dissonance.

That said, I don't have any real doubts about Clinton's electability either, I just don't think that's the question. I think the question needs to be how we see the two of them as president, and, like Krugman, I have a really hard time imagining what Bernie does in that situation. How does he pass those initiatives to reregulate the banking system, and overthrow the health insurance industry in favor of Medicare for all, with a Senate where a two-fifths vote counts as a majority that can defeat any bill? Elizabeth Warren was out in the Times the other day implicitly complaining about the Obama administration's failure to enforce the laws we already have on corporate misfeasance:

A Simple Matter of Fairness

Marguerite de La Motte and Claire McDowell in The Mark of Zorro (1920). Via Fritzi, of course.

David Brooks misses the good old days ("What Republicans Should Say", January29 2016) :

For a few decades, American and British conservatism marched in tandem. Thatcher was philosophically akin to Reagan. John Major was akin to George Bush.

That's precisely 1.2 decades when the tandem act was in effect, from Reagan's inauguration in 1981 to Clinton's in 1993 (Thatcher was prime minister 1979-90, Major 1990-97), but you were saying?

But now the two conservatisms have split. The key divide is over what to do about the slow-motion devastation being felt by the less educated, the working class and the poor.

Grace and Pity

Anne Baxter as Eve in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), via FilmFanatics.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, must be overdoing the fasting and prayer, because he's having hallucinations:

Bush, the well-funded front-runner whose poll numbers had been sliding since the summer, came prepared to swing at Rubio over his missed votes in the Senate. Rubio, the upstart running against his former mentor, responded with a mix of grace and pity, dismissing Jeb’s attack as a desperate flail, taken because “someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

Or should that be a "frothy mix of grace and pity"? It was nothing of the sort: it was a mix of standard politician deflecting a legitimate question with an irrelevant counterattack and typical Rubio spat-out syringeful of canned snake venom—it was the Trump technique of answering criticism with "You're a loser!" but without Trump's affable understanding that it's all just a game.

Listenings

Walking by the Beacon Theater and realized Joan Baez was playing a gig there tonight! Not as if I could go, but I wanted to put something up, and this piece of bizarrerie turned up (the Dead seem not to know the song at first, but they definitely make something).

It's also Mozart's birthday (the kid's just 260 and fresh as ever)!

R.I.P. Tarpman

So that fool LaVoy Finnicum managed, in the end, to make himself look tragic, or at least pathetic in the proper Greek sense, a subject of suffering, after all, and I feel bad, partly because this is starting to seem like another side of that distressed middle-aged undereducated white guy suicidal thing. I'm a serious comedy person, and what was great about this whole adventure was its comedy (#DaddySworeAnOath, and the request for throw rugs, and the dildos, and #Tarpman not least), and to me a gratuitous death of someone who may be stupid but still has a soul is a cheap way to ramp up the dramatic stakes, even when it's the Coen brothers.

Cheap shots, heels, and mountains of dreck

Yesterday I said something to the effect that Donald Trump was fearless, but I was wrong: as the Scarecrow had his terror of a lighted match, as Achilles dreaded an injury to his heel, so there's one thing the Donald fears: Questions from Fox News's ice princess.

Megyn Kelly. Photo by Alexei Hay/GQ, December 2010, via TeaParty.org. So that's what fuck-me heels are?

Amazing Conservative Logic of the Year:

I know it's still only January, but this from David Beckworth (Mercatus Institute) and Ramesh Ponnuru (American Enterprise Institute) in the New York Times is an instant classic:

Brooks in denial, 'cause he's a crocodile

Clara Bow in William Wellman's Wings (1927) Via.

David Brooks really dislikes anger. I guess that's why he's decided to stick with stage 1 of his grief ("Stay Sane America, Please!", January 26 2016):

I am going to spend every single day between now and then believing that neither Donald Trump nor Ted Cruz nor Bernie Sanders will be standing on that podium. One of them could win the election, take the oath, give the speech and be riding down Pennsylvania Avenue. I will still refuse to believe it.... please allow me a few more months of denial.

Pretty standard horserace panditry today, the sort of thing I believe he does on television, and at first glance not wrong enough to be very interesting. It's cute how he has to set up a tag-team match to make a bothsiderist case with Sanders, Cruz for the equidistant-from-the-center argument (Cruz is as far right as Sanders is far left and therefore neither of them can win) and Trump for the outside-the-pale (Sanders isn't even a Democrat, therefore Trump really isn't a Republican, in spite of the latter's claims) and conclude that because Sanders will most likely not get the Democratic nomination therefore neither Cruz nor Trump will get the Republican one. That does not follow.

Let justice roll down like waters

Investigation of Planned Parenthood ends up busting the video fraudsters instead! Manny Fernandez, New York Times:

HOUSTON — A grand jury here that was investigating allegations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two anti-abortion activists who made videos of the organization.

In a statement, the Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said Monday that the director of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, had been indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record and a misdemeanor count related to purchasing human organs.

Another center employee, Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record.

The Center for Medical Progress had covertly shot videos of Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetuses for research. Mr. Daleiden, 26, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his attempts to procure tissue for research.

Ms. Anderson said in the statement that grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing. She did not specify in the statement what record or records were allegedly tampered with.

Cheap shot: Joe Walsh

And I gotta tell ya, if I were black, I'd worry a lot more about the 76% of black babies born to single moms than I would about the Oscars.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) January 24, 2016

.Gotta say, if I were @WalshFreedom, I'd worry about the 100% of my own kids with single mom and no child support. https://t.co/QZWsvJyQyl

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 24, 2016

.Gotta tell ya, if I was a Christian like @WalshFreedom I'd try clean my own house rather than judge those I don't know (Matthew 7:1-5)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 24, 2016

Exchange: Trolled

Image via Scuzzfeed.

There was a troll in the comments to the Sarah Palin poem piece trying to bait commenter Avattoir. I don't block trolls, at least I haven't done so yet, but I do enjoy holding them up to public ridicule, especially when they are the kind of Breitbart commenter who thinks announcing he's gay entitles him to deny the validity of the trans woman's experience, and I'm much too vain to let my response languish at the bottom of the thread, so here it is:

stackedaktor  Avattoir • 3 days ago

Metaphorical overload.

Honestly, Palin did it better.

 

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  Avattoir  stackedaktor • 3 days ago

  In fairness, it's hard to out-dung an actual dung beetle.

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    stackedaktor  Avattoir • 2 days ago

    The rule that made my writing punchier:

    Omit needless words.

    -Thanks to Strunk and White.

Realms of Gold

Key West, 1946, Via Steve Newman.

"Are you familiar with the American author Ernest Hemingway?" Keats asked, lounging in front of the fire.

"Certainly," said Chapman. "Indeed I knew him personally toward the end of his life."

"Did you then? How was that?" Keats wondered.

"Well, it was in Key West, of course. I was tutoring the children of some friends of his, in music and rhetoric, and he often popped in of an afternoon on a visit, after he'd finished his day's writing, and would stop by in the schoolroom to cast a critical eye on the lessons, though in fact he was hardly critical. And he admired my taste in vintage clothing."

"He did?"

"Naturally. I was well acquainted with all the town's thrift shops, of which there are many, and I was pretty well dressed in those days, on practically no income. I possessed some extraordinary hats, for instance."

"Hemingway was interested in vintage clothing?" Keats raised his eyebrows a notch higher.

"Not especially. But he was concerned about luggage, you see. He was planning a trip to Idaho, for some mackinaw fishing, or lake trout, and was in despair about his suitcases, which were in a state of disrepair. But while remarkably generous in many respects, and a wealthy man, you understand, he was deeply frugal on certain subjects, and luggage was among these. He hated the thought of shelling out hundreds of dollars on a suitcase. So he asked me to take him around the shops to see if he could find something suitable on a second-hand basis."

Keats put another log on and stood up to stretch. "And did he?"

"Did he what?"

"Did he find something suitable?"

"Ah! Unfortunately not. I did my best, but in the end Papa got a brand-new bag."

You gotta be a football hero?

trust me, Rubio (w/ 2.1 GPA) didn't get "scholarship" to play JV football in college. https://t.co/EQ16CZMxok

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) January 23, 2016

But that's what the biography says:

Despite his “class clown” reputation and low grades, Rubio played football throughout grade school and received a football scholarship to Tarkio College in Missouri. He attended for one year before transferring to Santa Fe Community College and then graduating in 1993 with a bachelor of science from the University of Florida. (Daily [Dog-]Signal)

Why doesn't Boehlert think Rubio got a football scholarship to Tarkio? Because that's not exactly the way Tarkio was working in Rubio's freshman year 1989-90, the year before the college closed down for good, for reasons Anthony dePalma explained in the New York Times at the time:

Don't Walk

The Blizzard of '16.

Cheap shot: Who's vulgar now?

Image via News Corpse.

Dr. William Kristol:

In a letter to National Review, Leo Strauss wrote that “a conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.” Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity?

Would that by any chance be the same Dr. Kristol as the one who used to write a column for the New York Times, and who gently chided Ms. Noonan, in 2008, for complaining about the vice presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin as "symptom and expression of a new vulgarization of American politics"? Politics in a democracy has always been vulgar, my dear, he wrote at the time, "since democracy is rule by the 'vulgus,' the common people, the crowd":

Winter music

Image by WhoCares7 at Deviant Art. If you embiggen you can see that the fences in the middleground are musical staff notation.

By pure and fairly extraordinary coincidence, I'm not the only one who has brought together Sarah Palin and late Beethoven: The pianist Jeremy Denk interviewed her in October 2008 on the subject of the piano sonata op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"). I'M NOT KIDDING (it's just possible that somebody else was kidding, though ;-)). Everybody needs to read it.

Not sure I want to commit myself to listening to the whole Hammerklavier in the middle of a blizzard; I found a video of Denk playing the last sonata, op. 111, instead, which should be just about perfect:

Cheap shot: Relative pronouns

I am the consistent and strong conservative that will beat Hillary Clinton and undo the damage Obama has done. https://t.co/hLWV16iHq5

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 22, 2016

I think "who", not "that". Unless you're inanimate. Oh, wait.

We're off to slay the Wizard!

David Brooks has a peculiar memory:

The fact is, for all the problems we may have with Wall Street or Washington, our biggest problems are systemic — the disruptions caused by technological progress and globalization, mass migration, family breakdown and so on. There’s no all-controlling Wizard of Oz to slay.

Watch your tropes, David! The job isn't to kill the Wizard, it's to get him to send you back to Kansas, where Toto buried your happiness out behind the storm cellar. And the problem is he—the Wizard, not Toto—can't do it for you, it's really up to you:

Image via.

Power, and potency, are on Brooksy's mind today. He's riffing off a fun essay by Anand Giridharadas on the theme of the 2016 election campaign being—this is a case where most sides do it—that whoever you are, you think somebody else has all the power: