Brooks tackles Frederick Douglass, Supermodel

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?

Boot on Ground

Image by Creekside, vintage 2006.

Bloodshed enthusiast Max Boot, late of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, perhaps best remembered for his 2005 remarks about how the torture practiced in Abu Ghraib was really no different from what our soldiers experience in basic training (maybe that's why they call it Max Boot Camp), is out with yet another of those Where-Did-We-Go-Wrong pieces expressing his shock and horror at what's happened to the formerly Grand Old Party, "How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump", in today's Times, blaming it on the anti-intellectual posing of figures like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr.:

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” 

....In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

BooMan responds by reminding us, correctly, as he himself along with many others (me too!) has been saying since September, that the Republicans deliberately created a Racist Party, and the Stupidity was simply an inevitable consequence of that:

It wasn’t dabbling in stupidity that weakened the party to the point that it could be stolen from conservatives. It was dabbling in racism that did that.

A political movement that relied on polarizing the nation by race in order to survive without compromising or evolving their ideology wound up getting a racially polarized nation and losing their party and their power.

So, now, conservatives are actually offended the racism goes too far and is sincere, and the pretense to stupidity has become the reality.

But I think there's a lot more to it than that, which emerges from Boot's nostalgic tour of the Republican intellectuals of the good old days:

West of Eden: Is Clinton pulling back?

Entrance to the Cheik et Bakr quarter, Aleppo. Postcard, ca. 1910, via Levantine Heritage.

A somewhat weird story in Britain's Independent aims to bring us up to date on Clinton's Syria policy, with the suggestion that it's almost entirely up in the air:

Hillary Clinton plans to order a full review of the United States’ strategy in Syria as one of her first priorities if elected President.

One of her foreign policy advisers, Jeremy Bash, said she would seek to end Bashar al-Assad’s “murderous” regime despite waning political will to oust the autocratic Syrian President.

He said dealing with Syria would be Ms Clinton’s “first key task” if elected and she would work to get President Assad “out of there”.

While she holds to the theoretical aim of getting rid of Assad, that is, or rather "working" to get rid of him, she seems to have dropped the specifics, such as they were (efforts to pursue the Obama policy a little more energetically, plus that "limited no-fly zone" for the protection of civilians), or put them off pending some large-scale rethink to start after the election. And at the same time the international situation becomes less and less favorable to the project as the "political will" diminishes among the possible coalition partners like Britain and Germany.

And then there is the ongoing Aleppo campaign, in which the US and Russia are finally collaborating to hit the Qa'eda-linked Nusra Front troops holding the eastern part of the city under brutal Salafi rule, and possibly to help the hundreds of thousands of civilians stuck in the sieges there and in Manbij to escape. This plays toward Obama's preferred scenario, in which Syrian constituencies other than the ISIS and Qa'eda groups come together to negotiate a new government under the patronage of the US and Russia, and Assad's fate is a secondary issue.

Syria seems to be kind of disappearing from the campaign; Clinton didn't mention it during her acceptance speech in Philadelphia, and the Democratic platform (whether under the influence of Sanders or the president) leaves her old position out:

Break

The brilliant, lovely, and dutiful 23-year-old brought home fresh copy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which she read in company with a friend reading her own copy this afternoon, and is now turning over to me. I have a post in the works but it will just have to wait.

Noma Dumezweni (Hermione Granger), Jamie Parker (Harry Potter) and Paul Thornley (Ron Weasley). Photo by MANUEL HARLAN via Telegraph.

No Comment

Photo by Dorian Santiago via NBC News.

Tomorrow's the 50th anniversary of the day Charles Whitman of Austin, Texas, 25-year-old white man, Eagle Scout and Marine, son of a violent authoritarian father, speed freak and college student, killed his wife and his mother in their homes and then went to the University of Texas campus where he gunned down 49 people, killing 16 of them, mostly from the observation deck of the Main Building Tower.

It is also, apparently by coincidence, the day the new Texas "campus-carry" law goes into effect, as I learned from NPR, allowing anybody with a Texas handgun license to carry a concealed handgun on any Texas college campus including, obviously, UT Austin.

The NPR story went to bed too early to incorporate another Austin story, where the 6th Street nightlife district was terrorized early this morning after the bars closed by reports of an "active shooter situation" in the neighborhood. But not to worry, that was just a rumor! The fact was that there were two shooters in completely unrelated incidents, and they were just working out their own private relationship issues, I guess, and only one woman got killed and four seriously injured, so it's just Texas. The one shooter who succeeded in murdering somebody is still at large, but he isn't "active". The Second Amendment escaped unharmed.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Convention bounce

Misty Copeland, via Shape.

John Cole puts it very nicely:

We Democrats get ALL THE GOOD SHIT NOW. We get the most progressive platform and agenda in my lifetime, we get to cheer for our troops and say NO MORE STUPID WARS. We get to stand up and say Black Lives Matter and thank the cops who risk their lives because we’re fucking smart enough to hold two god damned ideas in our heads. We get to stand up for a woman’s right to choose and gay people to marry and still get to rock the house as Rev. Barber brings down the fucking roof in the name of the almighty.

Our heroic frontline troops have rushed Patriotism Hill while the enemy was sleeping off their mean-drunk hangover, and they've seized it, and from that high ground they can control more or less everybody's movements.

Oh, and you know how they keep telling us Hillary's not a great orator like Bill and Barack? Well, she probably doesn't dance like Misty Copeland either, and I bet she can't work up a salmon filet with beurre rouge like I can, but there are a number of people around in comparison to whom she is a terrific speaker, and some of their names are Willard Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush. Newt Gingrich? Senator Tom Cotton? Mike Fucking Pence? How come nobody ever compares her to those guys?

And don't even talk about the Trump, who's an adequate trash talker by WWE standards but not even close to old Mick Foley.  Or Jennifer Granholm either, speaking of first-class trash talk. Also he's severely mentally ill, and decompensating, and lurching into a pronounced turn for the worse. Meanwhile I'm crying from looking at pictures of Bill Clinton playing with balloons.

I'm having my own personal convention bounce, is what it is. That was such a splendid convention, from start to finish, from the unspeakable nobility of Mr. Khizr Khan (which Fox News apparently felt it had to censor) to the silly dad tricks of Senator Kaine. If you were watching with a little ideological checklist, you probably noticed a bunch of boxes that didn't get checked, but if you let yourself enjoy the big picture, you saw that this really is the "most progressive platform the Democratic party has ever run on" and everybody from Warren to Bloomberg ready to work within it.

No doubt reality will be kicking in shortly, but I feel pumped.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Open terrain

Otto von Bismarck escorting the arrested Emperor Napoléon III after the Battle of Sedan, French corpses littering the side of the road. Painting by Wilhelm Camphausen, 1877, via Wikimedia Commons.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Democrats Win the Summer", July 28 2016:

Now the Democrats looks like nice middle-class folks who care about their families and their country and feel empathy for others. Thanks a lot, Donald!

Naive people like me commonly think of politics as if it ought to be a confrontation of ideas on what the polity needs to do, but of course it's really a confrontation of people, organized into teams, a kind of war or a game of field control, and ideas are the field, the territory the teams contest, the largely static semiotic map across which we crawl out of our ideological trenches, trying to plant our flags in enemy ground.

Which means that what the fight is mainly over is the territory of ideas on which we all basically agree, the motherhood and apple pie; our job is to own those ideas, and deny them to the enemy. If I can convince the voter that I'm really strong on motherhood, with an unquestionable commitment, that will suggest that the other guy really isn't—that he's suspect, unreliable on motherhood, dangerous and dishonest.

Maybe he wasn't committing treason: Postcript

Image by Brian Watt via Ricochet.

BooMan notes a weird confusion in Trump's plea to Russian intelligence to hack US institutions, between the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee which were leaked to Wikileaks by Russian government hackers and the "30,000 missing emails" of the private server used by the former secretary of state :

Trump seems to have gotten a smear campaign mixed up with something real, and he wasn’t just asking Russia to release everything they have from the DNC. He was asking them to go find (if they haven’t already) emails that Clinton wrote as Secretary of State.

I'm pretty sure that confusion didn't originate with Trump; I think you can see it being staged, in a weird little flurry of rightwing reports from last spring, with some interesting Russian fingerprints on it, summarized in a story Media Matters ran at the time:

Maybe he wasn't committing treason on TV, but that doesn't mean he's not being vile

Updated below: There's a lot wrong with this post, too much to fix by editing.

Harry Langdon in Mack Sennett's Picking Peaches (1924). Via.

So Donald Trump is publicly inviting Russian intelligence to hack the computer files of the former secretary of state:

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:

First Feminist

Photo via the Politics and Elections Portal.

Watching the proceedings on MSNBC last night, and after the Big Dog spoke I was interested and puzzled by the way the station's Tough Babes, Rachel and Republican Nicole, dismissed him for that long lingering nostalgic wedding-toast intro taking the audience in some detail from his first cute meet with the candidate to their dumping of Chelsea in the dorm 20-odd years later (he stood at the window concealing his tears while Hillary worked to perfect the environment). "Weak" and "meandering", they thought, though the audience plainly mostly loved it.

It was a remarkably limited view, it seemed to me, as if there's only one thing a speech can do—to overwhelm everybody and be the winner—and a kind of unfeminist view, too, with its assumption that if Bill wasn't the powerful winner of the evening then he was a failure.

a note of sub-Lakoffian semiotics here: Bill's speech had a particular rhetorical purpose that isn't maybe appreciated. (By @maddow...)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2016

When you come to a fork in the road, take the middle

Pola Negri in Mal St. Clair's A Woman of the World (1925). Image via Fritzi, who has her own review.

David Brooks, still incredibly unfired ("Hillary, This Is Why Democrats Are Still Struggling", July 26 2016), may think the candidate is "squirrelly" and "willing to blatantly lie to preserve her career", but that doesn't mean he wouldn't offer her some heartfelt advice:

PHILADELPHIA — Dear Hillary,

Donald Trump has presented you with an amazing opportunity to become a world historical figure! If you crush him in this election, you could create a new Democratic majority and reduce the G.O.P. to an ever-declining rump of ethnic nationalism. On the other hand, if you fail to beat Trump, you will go down as America’s most hapless political loser and be vilified forever for enabling an era of American Putinism.

No pressure! Have fun in Philadelphia!

(There's the 145th career use of "amazing/amazingly".)

No, I don't see any concern trolls. Do you see a concern troll? Really? You mean you think Brooks doesn't sincerely want Clinton to create a new Democratic majority and reduce the GOP to an ever-declining rump of etc.? You cynic you.

I mean, you can't have a newspaper going around making people feel they're *wrong* about stuff

Drawing by Jen Sorensen, 2013, via The Political Carnival.

A reader calls my attention to the replacement of the great Margaret Sullivan as Public Editor of the Times, Liz Spayd (I'm sorry, that really looks like a fictional name), who is worried that news and opinion writing at the Times may not be really good for the paper's marketing. Did I even type that?

I HAVE been here less than a month, but already I’ve discovered something that surely must be bad for business if your business is running The New York Times. It comes via the inbox to the public editor, from people like Gary Taustine of Manhattan, who writes: “The NY Times is alienating its independent and open-minded readers, and in doing so, limiting the reach of their message and its possible influence.” [Or] James, an Arizona reader: “You’ve lost a subscriber because of your relentless bias against Trump — and I’m not even a Republican.”

If your coverage of Donald Trump impresses James, who is not even a Republican, as relentlessly biased against the candidate, that can't be good for business.

Feel the Burn. But don't get too excited.

Hi MBRU Cowpokes! Thanks, Tengrain (for all the style quirks I stole from you for this piece)!

Really, Russian intelligence? Karla would be rolling over in his grave, were he not a fictional character.

Poor Debbie!

Turns out that while certain self-denominated progressives have been demonizing Wasserman Schultz as the personification of a rigged Democratic Party run by powerful hidden capitalist overlords, that whole party has been longing to get rid of her, at least if you trust

Several senior Democratic officials with ties to Hillary and Bill Clinton

two people with direct knowledge of the conversation

one former West Wing adviser

a senior Democrat

a DNC staffer

a source familiar with the discussion

and

one state party chair

Ah, Politico! "Some said, said some..." Nevertheless, I think there are solid reasons for trusting them on this one: many people who would like the news out that Wasserman Schultz's departure is a welcome development, but few who want their names out there as saying so. It really seems to have been everybody, from the president and his political staff (Jim Messina, as far back as the wake of the 2012 election), Hillary Clinton and her people, starring John Podesta and Robby Mook (since fall 2015), and her own staff: as she began to not show up for scheduled events,

Come se dice "vast carelessness"?

Italianofili!

The best, classiest, hugest review ever of The Great Gatsby now available in the tongue of Dante and Ariosto, at Sotto il Vulcano, blog of the Italian publisher Edizioni SUR (which specializes in writing from and on the Americas).

The 2013 Daisy Buchanan, pretty winsome, Carey Mulligan.

Why, Grandmother, what big margins you have!

The better to short you with, my dear!

New York Times Sunday Review, July 24 2016.

What that un-Timesly moat of white represents, of course—vast spaces for meditating—is the column inches meant to be occupied in the spread by the 800-some words of the David Brooks column entitled "The Dark Knight", until some bright spark noticed, sometime Friday morning, that that piece was about 50% plagiarized from the David Brooks column entitled "The Death of the Republican Party", which had appeared that morning in the usual spot.

Or perhaps "The Death of the Republican Party" was plagiarized from "The Dark Knight", it's not easy to say. I'm guessing the assistant who wrote "Trump is Even Trumpier", which appeared in Brooks's spot on Tuesday, also wrote "The Death of the Republican Party", and Brooks himself produced "The Dark Knight", and they didn't so much plagiarize one from the other as they worked from duplicate sets of Brooskian Duplo blocks, each turning the embryonic paragraphs to a somewhat different use. You can check out the evidence at my previous post on this fascinating question, if you have not already done so.

The editors decided to split the difference, deleting "The Death of the Republican Party" from the online edition and "The Dark Knight" from the paper one, and that, with its traces in those margins on the Op-Ed spread, is the whole story, I suppose.

But for one thing I don't think the assistant is supposed to be writing the column, no matter how busy Brooks is with his TV appearances. And all that white space has to be embarrassing. If I were Andrew Rosenthal, I think I'd have to conclude this was a firing offense. But hey, I've said that before.

As a notorious billionaire once said, just what in the hell is going on?

Image by Elizabeth Griffin for Esquire, December 2015.

Everybody's got a reason why Donald Trump won't release his tax returns. Some say it's because he's one of those rich free riders taking advantage of loopholes to bring his income tax bill down toward zero, a bloodsucker who gets an infinite amount more out of government than most of us do but doesn't give anything back. For others, it would reveal that he's far less wealthy than he claims, putting a hole in his Prosperity Gospel argument that you should vote for him because he's made himself so damn rich he's bound to make you rich too, although that argument surely has enough holes in it already. Then there's the possibility that he's getting a lot of income from some unpleasant place he doesn't want us to know about.

Here's another hypothesis with some elements of all-of-the-above: that the tax returns would show he's seriously dependent on money from sources in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, people in the orbit of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, sponsoring his ventures and covering for his colossal mistakes.

Really?

Yes We Kaine

Also, he plays harmonica. How can you not love that?

So I took it a little personal at first...

.@HillaryClinton do you hate us hippies or do you just not know we exist? Tim Kaine will not get you any votes you didn't have.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) July 23, 2016

Still, in the cold light of day, or what would be the cold light if it wasn't 99 degrees Fahrenheit in New York today, reading about Kaine has been kind of reassuring. He's been to a great extent a victim of the kind of dumbass stereotyping we once did with Joe Biden—very specifically, people used to worry about whether Biden would be a reliable voice for abortion rights, given his Catholicism, but he's always been very clear that his personal views have no impact on his views of what should be legal, and the same applies to Kaine, who has been maybe even more emphatic:

In Which David Brooks Should Sue David Brooks for Egregious Plagiarism

A little while after midnight this morning some Times editor signed off on a feuilleton-style piece by David Brooks for the paper's "Campaign Stops" rubric, to which Brooks has never contributed, just as he more or less refuses to post a blog or to Tweet as the others do and has withdrawn from the back-and-forth jollity with Gail Collins and generally demands privileges of non-work that are accorded to no other Times opinionist.

The piece had apparently been written in the wake of Senator Ted Cruz's passionate non-endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate, which Brooks had personally witnessed on Wednesday night; he's been in Cleveland all week with the PBS-NPR team broadcasting the color commentary, as I mentioned in my own response to his Tuesday column. Although he seemed at his most clownish and disengaged on the TV, gesticulating wildly, woggling his head, and smiling with embarrassment, having apparently nothing to say—I can't remember a single thing he said and I think I was having some trouble understanding him—the piece was extremely dark and disturbed, under the headline "The Death of the Republican Party", describing the convention as a fatal catastrophe and Senator Cruz as its suicidally brave Cassandra.

I'm not linking it, for a reason that will become clear below, if you don't know about it already.

Brooks Endorses Cruz

Love before it went sour. Congressional Quarterly via Esquire.

Nailed it: In comments yesterday over at Alicublog, I predicted:

There's the narrative of Cruz as heroic resister, coming not just from the NRO right (e.g. Jonah) but young Master David Frum, who was kvelling non-ideologically over Cruz's bravery on the radio this morning. I expect it to be the subject of David Brooks's column tomorrow.

Sure enough, he's back in the saddle this morning (after his week in Cleveland helping with the color commentary on PBS, leaving the Tuesday column to be cranked out by a possibly snarky research assistant, I wasn't sure he'd actually show up), with a piece under the GÖPperdämmerung title "The Death of the Republican Party" singling out the repellent Texas senator:

I’m not a Cruz fan, but his naked ambition does fuel amazing courage. As the Republican Party is slouching off on a suicide march, at least Cruz is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” When the Trump train implodes, the docile followers who are now booing and denouncing Ted Cruz will claim they were on his side all along.

(I think that's his 144th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his time as a Times columnist. He's been slowing down; nos. 141 and 142 were back in February, and I seem to have missed no. 143. In contrast, it's just the fourth time he's used "athwart" in an echo or direct quotation of old Mr. Buckley's famous definition of "conservatism".)

It's the beginning of the next narrative, of how conservatism can never fail but only be failed, as we'll hear it over the next four years. The "courage" it took Cruz to risk, ah, what exactly? To risk looking obnoxious to the person who called him a liar several times a day for months and who is on his way to what Brooks himself predicts will

end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.

Cruz is positioning himself, as he always does, for the next act, that's all.

Prosecution for the Witness

Donald Trump's lawyer, by Runt-of-the-Web.

Famed prosecutor Christopher "Wormtail" Christie has never actually argued a case or cross-examined a witness in his distinguished career, that's one of my favorite facts about him, but decided to make his debut at the Republican convention on Tuesday, roaring out his list of charges against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and asking the audience to agree: "Guilty or not guilty?" Massive audience response, with chants of "Lock her up!" Leading inevitably to more calls to execute her for her crimes, though even Christie didn't manage to allege any of those. It was one of the most fascist moments of this increasingly fascist campaign.

I got into a very lengthy debate with a Trumpet Strumpet on the Twitter machine when I should have been writing a blog post, and here most of it is. At least it has a couple of jokes, and a few references if you want to argue about Libya with anybody (including me), below the fold: