Ground Chuck

I'm not sure either candidate can feel like they made progress tonight. Clinton was on the defensive and Trump lacked a lot of substance

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) September 8, 2016

Is this peak Chuck?

Clinton was certainly "on the defensive" as she submitted gamely to sustained machine-gun fire from all sides (left, right, and unlabeled) and the constant interruptions of the host, who had far too many questions, from the audience and his own, mostly about those pesky emails. She wasn't defensive in the sense of self-justifying and special pleading, at all, but the defense was the side she was placed on, and she played it as well as she could.

(There was only one question, I think, that she didn't answer—sadly, it was the hippie one, asking her how we could be sure she wouldn't be too belligerent, and I don't think she understood it at all. Her answer was not too reassuring, though she piously said force is always the last resort; on the Iran question, though, she finally convinced me that she has some appreciation of the value of the agreement.)

Trump, in contrast, simply didn't attract many questions—I think when we see a transcript that will be borne out—and didn't see any reason to attempt answering any of them, preferring to change the subject and talk about how great he is in a general sense, and how terrible the president and the Democratic candidate are. Lauer interrupted him only once, at the very beginning, to clarify that he would like it if Trump would lay off the personal insults, but Trump didn't listen to that either.

That's a funny expression, that Trump "lacked a lot of substance", as if you could weigh and measure how much substance he didn't have and it was a really big pile of the stuff. "There was so much substance in the event, and he lacked almost all of it!"

VDH is in flux, and all the old referents are at the bar

Russell Lee, 1938, Drinking at the Bar in Pilottown, Louisiana. 

The funny thing about this rhapsody from Victor Davis Hanson at National Review isn't that this doughty #NeverTrump is backing Trump—

No one knows how long Trump can stay on message. (He turns out to be an effective teleprompted speaker who, unlike Obama, can go off the script for brief moments without stuttering and seeming confused.) No one knows how long he can continue to take on taboo topics in different and often innovative ways....

some of the missing 15 percent of the Republican establishment will decide to swallow their pride and board the Trump train before it leaves the station. as they ponder the rare possibility in 2017 of a more conservative presidency, Supreme Court, and Congress. It may not be the sort of conservatism that they want, but it’s certainly better than what they were likely to get otherwise....

Trump has taken a vicious pounding from the press, in unprecedented fashion, and somehow not lost his cool in a way that everyone thought he would....

the entire Republican party is in flux, and all the old referents are beginning to matter far less.

—but that fact that he himself doesn't know it yet. It may take his mind another couple of weeks to catch up with his mouth.

More on the progressive Trumpening of the old-line conservatives from Steve.

Cicada

Cicada

by Yu Shinan (558-638)

Probes down with whiskers for the clear sap,
Sings out from the bare-branched parasol tree.
High and wide as the voice may ring,
It will not vanquish the autumn wind.

Yu Fei'an (1889-1959), Cicada on Tong Tree, 1936.

蝉
虞世南（唐）

垂緌饮清露，流响出疏桐。
居高声自远，非是藉秋风。

Chán

Chuí ruí yǐn qīnglù,
liú xiǎng chū shūtóng.
Jū gāo shēng zì yuǎn,
fēi shì jiè qiūfēng.

Brooks on Obamacare, continued

Harold Lloyd at Coney Island in Speedy (1928), via gastrocinema.

David Brooks ("The Incredible Shrinking Obamacare"), I was saying, has an extremely weak understanding of what's in the Affordable Care Act, and it strikes me that it might not be a bad idea to kind of go over that briefly, because (a) it's got a very complex surface, but it's pretty simple on the inside, (b) the administration still hasn't explained it all that clearly, as is unfortunately the case with so much of what it does, and (c) the daemonic right wing has kept us all off balance with its perpetual Gish Gallop of facts, pseudo-facts, and lies, forcing us to spend all our time saying what it isn't as opposed to what it is.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is in the first place a broad program to bring the nation to universal access to good quality health care on the basis of actuarial principles.

The good quality, for everybody who has health insurance, was to be created by a general reform of the insurance business emphasizing preventative care (through no-copay checkups and such), holistic treatment (cutting into the fee-for-service model), reduction of stupid rent-seeker costs (which didn't go over too well with the pharmaceuticals industry), and a revolution in the way premiums are assessed, making it strictly on the basis of age and not taking the customer's health state into account (including the preexisting-condition rule). The universality would be attained through the very large-scale expansion of two things that already existed in 2009 and the introduction of a third thing that didn't:

Annals of derp: Brooks on Obamacare

Richard Barthelmess and Florence Short in John S. Robertson's The Enchanted Cottage (1924), via Fritzi.

I'll get back to Brooks's post on "The Incredible Shrinking Obamacare" when I have more time, because his ignorance of what's in the program, seven years after it was passed and four years since it started getting implemented, is pretty startling, but there's one bit I want to note before somebody scoops me:

Philosophically, Obamacare tried to split the difference between European-style government coercion (the individual mandates) with a traditionally American respect for competition and freedom of choice (the exchanges).

But lawmakers couldn’t stomach a law involving forceful coercion (punishing penalties to make the young take part) and they couldn’t stomach a more purely market-based system. They wound up with a nonfunctioning compromise.

Note how he refuses to name who couldn't stomach penalties (he presumably means Republicans, though in fact this was a big part of that famous old Heritage Foundation proposal), and who couldn't stomach a purely market-based system (like they had in England around 1775?). It's a rhetorical strategy to dump on the Affordable Care Act without noting how the Baucus committee did its damnedest to come up with the kind of bipartisan compromise Brooks is always demanding, and whatever is wrong with it is really that there's altogether too much compromise.

But it's also the case that there is coercion to make the young, and everybody else of working age who doesn't have employer-supplied insurance or Medicaid, take part, in that form of the tax penalties that the IRS will be taking in April, which has now grown up enough, after its humble beginnings, to take a pretty big bite (up to in the neighborhood of $2,500 for an individual, $10,000 for a family of four). Brooks literally seems not to have heard of this.

He's like somebody trying to explain that cookbooks are a failure because recipes never tell you whether you need salt or not.That's really not the problem!

Cheap Shots: Stormy Monday

Clinton bows to Rectification advice!

Me, August 29:

I think she should hold out on the press conferences but start letting them on the plane, which Donald J. Trump will never do

ABC News, September 1:

Beginning on Monday -- with just 64 days left until the election -- the Democratic presidential nominee will replace her small, private jet with a significantly larger aircraft that she will not only share with her campaign staff, but with Secret Service staffers and reporters too.

And yesterday:

The Latest: Clinton debuts new Boeing 737 campaign plane https://t.co/uTJi1VKpAs pic.twitter.com/pAeUO9UE3j

— Killeen Buzz (@killeenbuzz) September 5, 2016

On the way to Quad Cities, Clinton made the tour to the back of the plane and took questions for about 20 minutes. Photo by Andrew Hamik/AP via Chicago Tribune.

The Wolf Who Whispered Boy

Update: Hi, Mike's readers! Thanks always, Batocchio!

Image by MaryLou11Ans via Blingee.

Liberal Bothsiderist New York Times columnist Frank Bruni on Thursday, working out a way to blame Democrats for the Trump phenomenon, in concert with well-known illiberal observer and totally not concern troll Jonah Goldberg of the National Review:

Did Democrats cry wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now?

That’s a question being asked with increasing frequency, though mostly in conservative circles and publications. An essay by Jonah Goldberg in National Review in late July had this headline: “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.”

Bruni is saddened by the way Democrats demonized decent and god-fearing John McCain and Willard Mitt Romney in previous elections, which may have had horrible consequences for our nation, because the voting population, having seen how deeply unfair Democrats were to McCain and Romney, must think the Trump is no more dishonorable than those men were:

Labor Day Trump Trolling

Image via gifsec.

Not that there's any danger of his reading any of it (fortunately, it would be tragic if he blocked me)...

.@realDonaldTrump Flake gets more votes in AZ than you ever did. You couldn't even score 50% of the Republicans. Pathetic!

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) September 5, 2016

.@realDonaldTrump Arizona may go Democrat for only the 2nd time since 1948 because you're such a hopelessly bad candidate.

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) September 5, 2016

That's pretty much from Flake himself, who thinks Trump's inability to stick to one position on the immigration issue is going to kill him in Arizona.

Lede, Exhumed

J.E.B. Bush with East Hampton Village mayor Paul F. Rickenbach, Jr., on a fundraising visit in July 2015. Photo by Richard Lewin for the East Hampton Star.

Some cutting-edge reporting by Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin in the New York Times has unearthed the little-known fact that presidential candidates usually spend the month before Labor Day (when voters are believed to be preoccupied with the Olympics and nostalgic memories of the days when we used to be able to afford vacations) hobnobbing with the wealthy and raising campaign money:

Cash-seeking candidates from both parties often rely on August to reach vacationing donors who open their wallets, and their palatial homes. In 2012, the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, brought in close to $4 million over a single weekend from events in the Hamptons. And Mr. Trump, while netting $64 million through online and direct-mail fund-raising in July, also made the trek this summer to the eastern end of Long Island to raise cash. (paragraph 26)

Or, as some cunning subeditor put it in the headline,

Annals of Derp: How to recognize a non-racist

In other big news. North Carolina talk radio host Bill Mitchell offers some empirical proof that Donald J. Trump is not a racist:

You notice how close Trump stands to this black man as he listens to him? No racist would ever do that. pic.twitter.com/OjHlSfPvW1

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) September 4, 2016

Little-known fact: One of the definitional symptoms of racism is what is called proximity exclusion, in which the sufferer is physically unable to be in the proximity of a person of some other race. If Trump were a racist, he could not make his way to within two feet of a black person, even if he wanted to do it for the sake of a photo op.

This is how we know the Michael Fassbender character in 12 Years a Slave wasn't a racist too!

Just a simple businessman taking care of his assets and winning winning winning.

I got nothin'

Busy day, sorry.

This picture of the Trump kids looks like the VHS cover of a late 90s teen horror movie. pic.twitter.com/Q6DYoOC1PR

— pat tobin (@tastefactory) September 3, 2016

And instead of "This is not a Republican vs. Democrat election. This is about an insider versus an outsider," the caption should read, "This is about an insider versus an alien."


This, from 1956, greatness almost beyond belief. Frankie Lymon, the composer of the song, was 13 years old. He died very young, too.

The Times has used the word "shit" 47 times since 1/1/2000. This has been one of them.

Bothsides vs. No Sides

Empress Catherine II of Russia, via GlobalHistoryCullen—can't find a date or painter's name.

Back in the good old days, says David Brooks ("Identity Politics Run Amok"), Americans talked about politics from a purely intellectual standpoint, impersonally, without any reference to the nasty realities of our different ethnic and class identities, divided only by their attachments to different philosophical perspectives:

Once, I seem to recall, we had philosophical and ideological differences. Once, politics was a debate between liberals and conservatives, between different views of government, different views on values and America’s role in the world.

"Seems to recall" indeed. He's been telling himself this story so long that he's created a spurious memory of having lived in it.

What he actually recalls, from his casual reading of popular history books, mostly Great Man biographies, is an America in which ethnic and class identity had no role in political discourse because the discourse was carried out almost entirely by people with the same identities: upper-class white Protestant men. Brooks may think it was because they were all so philosophical in those days, but the real reason identity didn't come up was that nobody with a different identity had a voice.

Bothsides takes a stand

Pontius Pilate washes his hands, by the Master of Cappenberg, Liesborn Altarpiece, between 1500 and 1525, UK National Gallery.

So yesterday I was in a car (not driving) following an extraordinary and enjoyable rant from someone called Matthew Chapman, starting somewhere around here:

They've done NOTHING to educate us on the candidates policy (especially Clinton's). They are only barely covering the candidates' records.

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) August 31, 2016

And AFTER inundating viewers with all this Clinton hate, they bombard Clinton with worthless questions like "Why do people not like you?"

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) August 31, 2016

Then they have the nerve to ask why Clinton is cagey about interviews, pressers, and so on, when they're the ones creating the narrative!

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) August 31, 2016

etc., when I caught wind of the presence of a somewhat famous person, ABC News analyst Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ('04) campaign and now one of the high and mighty champions of Cokie's Village of the Totally Objective Media, taking personal offense at something Chapman was saying.

It's Not Whether You Win or Lose

or How You Play the Game, but Whether You Compromised with the Person Who Did Lose or Win, Mutatis Mutandis, So That It was a Nonwin-Nonwin Situation for Everybody, Because That's Sportsmanship

Thomas P. Friedman AUG. 31, 2016

CreditImage by Norskarv.com.

Americans realizing that the Vikings made it first.

Anyone who says it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton wins this election is even crazier than my cousin Thomas L. Friedman, who is convinced that it does matter, because Trump is not merely more ignorant than a chicken reared in isolation from her peers, but literally proud to be that way, and unable to control the impulses that arise from his total lack of information. Whereas Hillary is merely arguably criminal, not that you should expect me to do the arguing, my specialty being the broad magisterial sweep. In the same way Lester Young was arguably a dick, but had the chops to be the Prez, so does Hillary strike me as presidential material in spite of her well-known and devastatingly arguable ethical issues.

But I'm not even here to talk about the candidates at the moment, though I could conceivably blunder into doing this a couple-three paragraphs down, but about the voters, who are us, and who are possibly even worse than the candidates.

A disturbing pattern of meetings with nobodies

Stone City, VA, May 9 2016, photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via NBC.

Remember when the big pearl-clutching issue was Secretary of State Clinton meeting with too many nobodies, poor people, and above all persons of that other possibly Not Quite Serious gender? As Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote back in May 2013, as part of a general assessment of her work as secretary:

On her trips abroad, she met with women farmers, small business owners, and grassroots activists. On a 2009 visit to South Africa, she spent more time visiting a women’s housing project outside Cape Town than she did meeting with Jacob Zuma, the country’s president.

Some quietly criticized her priorities, complaining that Clinton was devaluing the office of secretary of state by meeting with so many, well, women. But Clinton defended her agenda and continued to bring her star-power to bear on raising the status of women and girls around the world.

That would be quite a few more nobodies than the 85 Clinton Foundation donors she's said to have met during her 1,464 days as Secretary, though I guess we'll never get AP to calculate how many (they could only find information on 154 people other than government officials she met with the entire time she served, or fewer than one person per week, so it must be a pretty difficult research task).

People who are enchanted are the real tough cookies

 Enchanted (Walt Disney, 2007), via Decider.

David Brooks is interested in "Making Modern Toughness". I guess he figures the world needs toughness, but the toughness they used to have back in the day lacks the lightness and sophistication of the kind of toughness we would want for the current era. It was thickened with cream and egg yolks and people didn't value the natural character of the ingredients. We're looking for a toughness that makes more use of infused oils and techniques like steaming and sous-vide cooking and a sense of terroir.

When I ask veteran college teachers and administrators to describe how college students have changed over the years, I often get an answer like this: “Today’s students are more accomplished than past generations, but they are also more emotionally fragile.”

That rings true to me.

Pause to note how David Brooks apparently has a standard operating procedure for dealing with veteran college teachers and administrators. "Can you describe for me, please, how college students have changed over the years?" How many has he interrogated, one wonders, and do they constitute a random sample? What percentage of the responses is "often", and how does this frequent answer differ from others?

Rant

It's been 263 days since Hillary Clinton last held a press conference. That's a dangerous precedent. https://t.co/6iBmBoFJvd

— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) August 24, 2016

And it's been 11,482 days since the American people learned anything worth knowing from one of these masked kabuki events in which some of the nation's least informed journalists demonstrate their "toughness" and "savvy" by asking a president or presidential candidate essentially the same questions they'd be asking Carmelo Anthony at the half (either "How do you feel about the last 45 minutes?" or "What secret thing do you plan to do during the next 45 minutes that you would never tell me but I'm asking it anyway?"). No, I just made that number up.

Sani ol-Molk, Anoushirvan Khan and the courtiers, 19th century. Via Iran Chamber.

State-of-the-art psychiatry

Image via Never Yet Melted.

TRUMP: A lot of people don't realize this, but I am actually the Emperor Napoleon. I didn't know it myself until quite recently when I got a message about it from the transmitter in my upper left wisdom tooth. I said "Are you crazy? That would mean I was like well over 200 years old!" But on reflection I saw it was true! How else can you explain what's been happening to me?

BAD MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL: This kind of talk suggests the candidate may be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

GOOD MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL: It's irresponsible to say you can diagnose someone's mental health without examining them in person. Many candidates say grandiose-sounding things. Mr. Trump could have all sorts of reasons for claiming to be Napoleon.

BAD MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL: For example?

GOOD MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL: I'm going to have you decertified. I know some very powerful people.

More at On the Media. And from Mr. Chuck Todd via Tom Boggioni. And one last howl of rage from me:

.@scottlincicome @owillis Chuck Todd: Are you qualified to say belief in unicorns is a delusion? Do you have a medical degree?

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) August 28, 2016

Goodness gracious, great balls of Brooks

Hillary's probably more like President Fictional Beyoncé. Come to think of it, that sounds pretty good to me.

Brooks's title, "The Art of Gracious Leadership", makes me imagine a President Jacqueline Kennedy, because I don't think anybody in history has been more frequently described as "gracious", or to make it completely clear, President Fictional Jacqueline Kennedy, because I feel sure the real Jacqueline Kennedy must have had a good deal of toughness behind the wispy voice and the mask of her cheekbones, and an impatience with bad taste that I bet she wasn't always able to graciously conceal.

Maybe President Fictional Dolly Parton:

CHUCK TODD: President Parton, your approval numbers have frankly been in the basement for weeks, don't you think it's time to show more leadership and cut Social Security or something?

PRESIDENT FICTIONAL PARTON: Honey, do you need a drink? Estelle, get Mr. Todd another drink, please, honey! This is such a nice visit, Chuck, I'm just thrilled you found the time to stop by.

TODD: What makes you think you can work with Congress to do what the American people want, whatever that is. Aren't they suspicious about the possibility that you may have had cosmetic surgery?

FICTIONAL PARTON: I'd be so glad if you could offer me some sage advice on that stuff, Chuck. I'm such an airhead myself, sometimes, honestly. We should totally have a longer visit sometime where you can share some of that super-attractive masculine wisdom and I can just sit at your feet drinking it in. How's Mrs. Todd? Honey, I love that girl to death! You should have brought her along!

Indeed, Brooks's beef today is that Hillary Clinton, or Fictional Hillary Clinton, as the case may be, isn't gracious enough to be one of those people in public life that we really admire, so that, sadly, he's unable to really admire her, much as he would enjoy it if he could.

But luckily he has plenty of sage advice as to how she could improve her graciousness numbers, and possibly one day even win some esteem from Brooks himself.

It all starts with experience:

All Trite

Pretty maids all in a row. Traditional costume, Corbi, via Pure-Romania.

I can't believe Hillary used the word "dog whistle" in that speech (she had nearly as hard a time saying "alt-right" as Trump does saying, "LGT...................BQ" or "African................American", but that's OK). That's almost as great as it would be if Obama advised everybody to pay more attention to the thinking outside the Village. I'm also enthusiastic about the new way she's using the mic, trusting it to carry her voice and speaking actually somewhat softly, intimately, which can make you work a little to listen to her.

Not that I'm one of those who criticize her for bellowing in those primary rallies on the ground that women sound "shrill". I really don't like that style from men, either, even if it's Teddy Kennedy or Howard Dean. Especially if it's Teddy, come to think of it, because as everybody knows Dean couldn't do it right, but Teddy sounded like an authentic authoritarian, even when he was preaching love between my brothers and my sisters a-a-all over this land.

Rather, I'd say one of the unexpected little benefits of finally having a woman reach this stage of the campaign is that she can experiment with these stupid conventions. When she lowers her voice to tell you, in effect, "I realize what clowns these people are and at the same time I'm telling you they're seriously dangerous," and you understand it's for real.