One more 2016 rant

Buster Keaton in The Scarecrow (1920). Via somebody's Pinterest.

The Guardian website keeps front-paged article links in the "More on this Story" spot for months, and I just ran into this infuriating election post-mortem by Thomas Frank ("Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there", Guardian, November 9, 2016) and got angry all over again:

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

In other words, Donald Trump won the presidency because Hillary Clinton is evil. Why being evil didn't hurt Trump is not explained.

The reference to Joe Biden (god love him!) is the tell that this furious post-election rant in the guise of a fancy political analysis is really just the Big White Man Will Save Us story sure as if it had been told by Joseph Manchin or Jim Webb.

Meat the Press

Via Daily Racing Rag, January 2016, a site you might enjoy.

Just to add my own trumppence' worth to what everybody, and by that I mean Shakezula at LGM, has had to say about the meeting of the press with Meet the Press, in the persons of Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker and New York Times editor Dean Baquet, who consented to be interviewed by Chuck Todd this morning, just like common political actors, as if to acknowledge that in spite of all their earnest efforts to avoid it, their work might occasionally have some influence on the course of human events.

Perish the thought! Asked by Todd if he "would've covered Donald Trump differently, knowing what he knows now", Baquet replied that he wouldn't change that at all, but might have done something else quite differently:

Sure, I would've done stuff differently. I'm not sure I would've covered him differently as a candidate. I think I would've tried to go a little bit deeper in understanding the anger in the country. It was the same anger in the country that led to the rise of Bernie Sanders and led to the rise of Donald Trump.

I think if news organizations made a mistake, and I can only speak for my own, I think that we wrote stories about anger in the country. We even did a series called Anxiety in America. But, of course, we should've done more. And I think people would've been less surprised, had we done more. That's what I would've done differently.

The worst thing, you see, "knowing what he knows now". isn't that the United States elected a manifestly incompetent clown to serve as the country's president; it's that people were "surprised" by it. If the New York Times had written more about anxiety, or anger, or whatever, is there even any important difference in whatever peculiar little emotions those hillbillies might be feeling out there, maybe they would have known in advance that Trump would win.

So it seems Baquet's audience is gamblers, who lost a lot of money when the orange-faced long shot came in first by a nose against ridiculous odds, not the American people who are stuck with the outcome, and especially those hillbillies, who are just data points for the reportage. It's not the press's responsibility to inform the public of what the consequences of their vote might be; their responsibility is to keep the punters up to date on the state of the turf, the weather, and the candidates' knees.

I think there's a huge amount we don't know about Donald Trump and his finances. And even, I would say, what he believes in. I think that Donald Trump himself has said many things about different issues. He's said different things when he met with The New York Times. He has said different things in large rallies. I think that there are a lot of question marks about Donald Trump.

But what the hell? What really matters is that we didn't know he was going to win!

We learned a lot about his business. We learned a lot about him as a person. I think what we could've done better was to understand why the country found Donald Trump appealing and why the country found him more appealing than some of the more traditional candidates like Jeb Bush.

And answers such as, "because we allowed him to lie freely about his background and his plans while circulating equally absurd lies making the opposing candidate sound like a warmonger, bribe taker, and even occasionally pedophile sex trafficker, without contradiction," will not be accepted.

Team Optimist

Image via verywell.com.

I'm once again on the holiday relief squad for Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog, and seeing as how Steve is a world-class pessimist, one of the things I try to bring there is a touch of sunny idiocy, as contrast, especially appropriate for the season of fresh starts and resolutions. And pretty challenging this time around, if we're talking politics, as we lurch into what seems certain to be the worst US presidential administration at least since Buchanan's, probably ever, led by a walking personality disorder in an impasto of pumpkin-colored pancake makeup.

And that's just for starters.

Is it possible that anything good can happen in 2017, or anything bad be forestalled? Not, surely, by the conscious intention of our president-elect or his Cabinet of Deplorables or the dreadful Republican leadership of the Congress. Maybe in states like California, where Governor Jerry Brown has already announced his determination to fight any Trumpian assault on environmental research and regulation:

Don't seduce my clicks, bro!

Charlie Chaplin in City Lights (1931). Via designingsound.org.

Oh, Brooksy stopped into the office to deposit part I of his New Year's survey of magazine articles so good he almost decided to read them, and part 2 is out today:

Every December I read hundreds of long-form essays to select the Sidney Awards, and every year I regret that I spend so much of the other 11 months reading online trivia. Then, every January, I revert to Twitter.

David, David! Twitter is on the Internet, you know. We can easily find out what you do with Twitter in January, which is essentially nothing.

Your personal account, opened in June 2011, is still an egg (yes, I'm sure it's you because of the followees we have in common—Ana Marie Cox and Jake Tapper—not to mention a number of other familiar names including that of Anne Snyder) and you've only sent seven Tweets in the five and a half years. On only eleven occasions have you been interested enough in somebody else's tweet to "like" it, four of them in the past year, most recently on November 28 (a link to Benjamin Wittes's possibly premature judgment that there was nothing partisan about James Comey's letter to the Gang of Eight intelligence congresscritters which Chaffetz leaked as soon as he got it for unquestionably partisan purposes). You have committed one single retweet.

Your personal Facebook page is a little livelier than that—seven updates in 2016 out of a total of 13 since May 2012, of which the top two, November 22, are about incorporating Ms. Snyder into the profile picture, and a total of 58 likes since signing up—but I just want to stipulate that it's hard to imagine spending 11 months per year reading online trivia at such an exceedingly low level of interactivity. If you are that passive even as the amount of time you are spending on social media is enough to prevent you from reading long-form essays, you are seriously doing it wrong. There's a reason for calling them "social". Or else, of course, this picture is pure fiction.

It's certainly fiction when he claims he reads "hundreds of essays" in December. I'd be surprised if it was 20, counting the shoutouts to people he knows, like the poet Christian Wiman in Tuesday's column, whose essay "The Bright Abyss" has inspired three Brooks columns in the past two years, or Andrew Sullivan today, for an essay he already wrote about back in October, so I guess that's one essay he managed to look at before December. "Looks at" because to say he legit reads them is also fiction,

Dog paddling in the Rubicon

Image via tenor.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cabalisticus, is so adorable sometimes. He really is the reasonable, kind-hearted liberal Zionist he'd like everybody else to be, as when he generously characterizes the Israeli prime minister:

Netanyahu is a leader who is forever dog paddling in the middle of the Rubicon, never ready to cross it. He is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution if that decision in any way risks his leadership of Israel’s right-wing coalition or forces him to confront the Jewish settlers, who relentlessly push Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank.

Oh, please, Tom. Netanyahu is forever sending you selfies where he's posing on a diving board on the opposite bank and you're thinking, "Well, he must have jumped in by now." He hasn't. He never will. He has no interest in your two-state solution, and he never has had. He used to make these vague gestures toward it, to gratify his American patrons, but now he hardly bothers, because he knows the money will never stop flowing no matter what he does. He is stonewalling for the moment when the two-state solution will no longer be possible, some think that moment came quite a while ago, and the Americans will leave him alone, except for the cash.

Seriously, literally, and bullshit

Welcome MBRU, thanks Tengrain!

Image from an article of last June in Pulpit&Pen, "NAR Prophet, Steve Cioccolanti: Donald Trump is the 'Last Trump' Before The Rapture".

Something in that Salena Zito article, from back in late September, kept sticking in my craw:

The best way [to prevent inner-city "explosions", says Trump], is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”

That's pretty insightful there; if it doesn't get better, it's likely to get worse, whatever it is.

It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.

My bold.

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

But you just took him seriously and literally, identifying the statistic you think he was using as if it could be completely appropriate, although it's apparently not, since it's unreasonable to expect full-time students to take jobs if they can avoid it.

When I presented that thought to him, he paused again, “Now that’s interesting.”

I'll bet he did. It takes a bullshit artist to recognize superior bullshit.

Jon Swift Memorial

Tom Ellar as Harlequin with his wooden batocchio or slapstick, early 19th century. Via Museum of London.

The 2016 edition of the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, the Salon des Indépendents of online political writing, an annual tribute to the late and great blogger Jon Swift/Al Weisel in which some dozens of mostly small bloggers select a favorite post of the past year for the delectation of a wider public, is up at Batocchio's Vagabond Scholar site. You'll see some familiar names and a lot of less familiar ones you might want to know better. It's one of the sweetest institutions of the year, and I hope you'll check it out.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

I saw Mommy kissing the continuing resolution

Drawing by Thomas Nast, 1881, via Wikipedia.

Blogfriend Steve M, on holiday, surfaced on the Twitter to react to a piece of sublime idiocy from the tax crusader Grover Norquist:

Norquist: Liberals see government the way kids see Santa https://t.co/gwls1JUs56 pic.twitter.com/86fskyXM7k

— The Hill (@thehill) December 25, 2016

So your point is what, Grover? There is no government? Government is really your parents? https://t.co/eVc99er8AW

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) December 25, 2016

It struck me that there's actually something to that; not, I mean, that government is a bishop from Anatolia who's been dead for 16 centuries so we're foolish to believe it exists. Or that we should leave a plate of cookies and a glass of milk for the OSHA inspector because he's our dad. What Grover said, as opposed to what The Hill reported, is a little more sophisticated.

Blogiversary

The Divine Mothers, via Wikipedia.

On the blog's first Christmas Eve, in 2011, I offered the following paragraph—

Yuletide is the period around the winter solstice when the Germanic peoples practiced their winter festival with animal sacrifices--blood for the gods and goddesses, sprinkled with twigs used as aspergilla around the idols and on the temple walls, and boiled meats for the humans--and copious amounts of ale, with its most sacred moment over the night from 24 to 25 December, on what the Catholic Encyclopedia refers to as "the extraordinary and obscene Modranicht", the feast of the Divine Mothers, a triple-goddess cult of Gaul and Germania.

—followed by a lengthy and eclectic program of YouTube music for a winter night, most of which no longer exisis at the URLs where I found it.

This month is pretty much the fifth anniversary of Rectfication, and coincidentally last night some time it had its millionth page view (as Blogger counts these things, which I think includes anybody who ever saw a thumbnail of a picture I used in an array of 30 on a Google Images search; a more realistic number, from Google Analytics, makes it somewhat less than half of that, but what the heck). Anyway congrats to me and good Yule to all!
Some music below the fold.

Outmatch them at every pass: Postscript

By the way, I'd like to make just one protest against the meme going around according to which President Obama himself is actively working to beef up the US nuclear deterrent force even as he keeps talking about bringing it down:

Contrary to Mr. Obama’s own conciliatory nuclear posture, and concrete steps in that direction, his administration has also embarked on a sweeping modernization of the American nuclear arsenal that may cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. It features new factories, refurbished nuclear arms and a new generation of weapon carriers, including bombers, missiles and submarines. The bombers are to carry a new super-stealthy cruise missile meant to slip through enemy air defenses.

It's not a great idea, but it doesn't really affect the MAD balance of power (the way George W. Bush's dreadful decision to abrogate the ABM treaty in 2001 did, maybe the single most damaging US action in US-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War).

More importantly, this story skips a really important step. It wasn't the administration that did the embarking, in 2010, but Congress, and specifically 13 Republican Senators, who forced the modernization on Obama as their bribe for providing the necessary two thirds majority for ratifying the New START Treaty, the most significant step in US nuclear weapons policy in 30 years:

Outmatch them at every pass

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

It's just amazing, really, how willing people are to try to make an interpretation of the daily Trumpism, as if it were an oracle from the lips of the Pythoness high on laurel fumes or the Cumaean Sibyl, how they keep guessing how you could translate his gnomic utterance into their own technical language, looking for a clue as to what he might have in mind to do as president:

Miscellany: Me and my Google

The Donald's money-saving design, via bodybuilding.com.

On the Air Firce One pseudo-scandal:

Another win by @realDonaldTrump... @Boeing will deliver new version of Air Force One well under budget.https://t.co/HTAZy7KrNV

— Harlan Hill (@Harlan) December 21, 2016

Easy for Muilenberg to make the promise since it was never going to cost near $4 billion in the first place. https://t.co/OLO3a7kZCc

— Yul Streblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 21, 2016

.Phony master negotiator @realDonaldTrump couldn't get any commitment on $379 billion F-35 though. That's the real outrageous spending. https://t.co/OLO3a7kZCc

— Yul Streblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 21, 2016

With friends like these, who needs anti-Semites? Er, that is...

Bibi in the Dark Tower, via The Forward (and another take on how somebody could be an anti-Semite and a Zionist at the same time).

Great piece in Tuesday's Times by Omri Boehm ("Liberal Zionism in the age of Trump"), in the philosophical opinions rubric, dealing with the current strangeness in the American Jewish community, with regard to US and Israeli politics, where most vote Democrat here and feel increasingly alienated with the far-right government there and illegal settlers in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, while much of the traditional leadership continues to treat the Israeli right as sacrosanct and beyond criticism and finds itself increasingly accommodating to the incoming Trump administration, even to its anti-Semitic associations in the person of Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, who has consorted with Nazi-inspired denizens of the so-called "alt-right" in his professional life as chairman of Breitbart News and has been reported (including in a sworn deposition) to have made vicious remarks about Jews in his private life. And who was invited to the Zionist Association of America annual gala in late November, to meet Israeli education minister Naftali Bennett and ambassador to US Danny Danon.

Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. “It is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their politics,” he pointed out.

In the end Bannon skipped the party, showing that he may indeed be uncomfortable socializing with Jews in quantity, just as he told his ex-wife (apologists claim he was afraid of the protesters out in front of the Grand Hyatt, but Phil Weiss is pretty sure he was just blowing the Jews off).

It's funny how Dershowitz seems to have misspoken there; surely he meant "unless you disagree with their politics". Or Israeli politics in particular, since that is what he habitually does, throwing the term freely at those who oppose Likud policy, and refusing to use it on anti-Semites like Bannon who agree with Likud.

Emperor Trump: Generals may get a little tired of this

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, 1867. Wikimedia Commons.

Foreign Policy reports on new insights into the views of the Trump transition, as seen at the department of Defense:

A Pentagon memo outlining the incoming Trump administration’s top “defense priorities” identifies defeating the Islamic State, eliminating budget caps, developing a new cybersecurity strategy, and finding greater efficiencies as the president-elect’s primary concerns. But the memo, obtained by Foreign Policy, does not include any mention of Russia, which has been identified by senior military officials as the No. 1 threat to the United States.

It doesn't mention Iran either, for whatever that's worth; the only named countries in the memo are North Korea and China (plus ISIS or ISIL—both stylings are used, irritatingly).

This isn't equivalent to Obama's view in 2012, in opposition to candidate Willard Mitt Romney, that Russia was not the most serious military threat to US interests, if only because the DoD agreed with Obama, and it was a moment (near the end of the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev) of really warming Russian-US relations, important cooperation on the Syria and Iran issues, and no signs of Russian designs on foreign territory since the Georgian war of 2008, for which the Georgian government seemed (to the USG) to be to blame.

Drinking ironically

Stylish drinks menu in the New Era where they'll sell you a Colt '45 in its traditional front-stoop presentation, lightly chilled dans son brown bag, just fifteen bucks. You too can participate in this authentic native cultural phenomenon in a safe and relaxed environment, rich, detached, and woke af.

Image via the brilliant and beautiful daughter.

Let's not have this fight

Kitty Dewall and Harry Liedtke in Ernst Lubitsch's Das Fidele Gefängnis (The Merry Jail, 1917).

David Atkins at the Political Animal informs us that

a war of words and ideas still rages on the left between the Sanders-leaning economic populists and the more establishment defenders of the Clinton campaign. Broadly speaking, the contours of the argument center around whether Clinton could have done more from a populist messaging standpoint to appeal to white working class Rust Belt voters and to disaffected voters who stayed home, or whether Clinton’s overall approach was good, but that she was overwhelmed by the prejudices of white voters and stabbed in the back by Comey, Russia, and various parts of the progressive left.

You know, no.

For one thing, if by "various parts of the progressive left" he means the tiny knot of irredentists who refused to follow Bernie into the Democratic embrace and the construction of the most "economic populist" campaign platform in American history, I can't believe anyone really thinks they played a significant role with their retweets of Breitbart and otherwise Russian/Republican talking points. They were extremely annoying, especially with their insistence on kidnaping the term "progressive" for their own stupid purposes,  but they were not in any way an important part of what happened on November 8. Those who actually are progressive in orientation (like Atkins himself) voted for Clinton and urged their friends and admirers to do the same. Unfortunately there aren't that many of them either, as we learned during the Democratic primary, when Bernie's political revolution turned out not to exist.

The Pathology of Trump Voting

Animated GIF by Bill Domonkos (2014).

"What's the matter with Kansas?"  wondered Thomas Frank in his celebrated 2004 book, meaning the political problem of what makes middle-class Kansans such self-defeating voters, continually giving themselves government by a Republican party that seems determined to make their lives worse in more or less every respect, impoverishing them materially (with an unbending insistence on freedom for the employer class, from taxes and regulation) and spiritually and intellectually (with an intolerance for heterodox views in education and religion).

But I'm wondering whether we should start thinking of it as a medical problem, following Shannon Monnat's research finding powerful correlations between the Trump vote and death rates from drugs, alcohol, and suicide in Rust Belt counties, what she refers to as "deaths of despair", or Kathleen Frydl's work focusing on opioid overdoses in Ohio and Pennsylvania in particular, or the study done by The Economist, which got comparable results without considering any drugs other than alcohol:

Rant: Party like it's not 1984

Agent Oliver, aka Tirade, from Team Demonicus.

So "moderate" Republican journalist Josh Barro, now ex-Republican, driven by the awfulness of Trump into the arms of that adult-run party, is already participating in the traditional Democratic pastime of complaining how hopelessly wrongheaded the party is about whatever one's own pet issue may be—welcome aboard, Josh!—in a piece for his regular gig at Business Insider on how we need to stop griping about, and delegitimizing, the election:

This reaction is bad, for two reasons. One is that baseless challenges to the election result (including by obliquely lobbying the Electoral College to nullify the result) undermine the very electoral institutions that Democrats were correctly saying we need to honor before they knew they would lose the election.

The other problem is that the obsessive focus on what was so unfair about this year's election — the Electoral College, the FBI, Russia's interference, sexism, and more have all been mentioned — allows Democrats to avoid focusing on how their own errors to contributed to the loss.

Instead we need to concentrate on four years from now, nominating a nice old white dude and throwing poor people under the bus. I'm not going to fisk the post, which you might as well just read and argue with at your leisure, though I would like to point out the bothsiderist idiocy of his suggestion that all these activities are basically equivalent to Trump screaming without any empirical basis that "This election is rigged, people!" (We really need to not talk about reforming the Electoral College or preventing hostile governments from screwing around with our politics?)

There's just one broad point I made in a Twitter tirade I want to reproduce below:

Maybe he wasn't committing treason: Reprise

Image by Brian Watt via Ricochet.

Flagging memory jerked up by a tweet from the billiant Joan Walsh

Do...people actually think the DNC email system was hosted on Clinton's server https://t.co/lM5Kio4Gl7

— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) December 16, 2016

Republicans have counted on voters conflating these issues all along, and made sure they did. https://t.co/rQWl05OKAK

— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) December 16, 2016

That confusion between the emails on Clinton's private server and the Democrats' burgled emails, exemplfied today in some insane remarks by RNC communications director Sean Spicer, made me recall something I'd totally forgotten, which is that I myself noticed it back in July, with evidence that

1.  Donald Trump himself confused the Hillary emails with the DNC emails;
2. The confusion was being directly promoted by Russia's English-language propaganda press and its rightwing acolytes (ZeroHedge, Ingraham, Joe Hoft brother of Jim, and the like); and thus
3. The whole brouhaha was a kind of evidence of the Russian government trying to influence the US elections against Hillary Clinton and in Grump's presumptive favor.

I'm just going to rerun the whole thing below the fold so you-all can judge for yourselves. because in the light of Trump's "election" it turns out to be a lot more relevant than I ever imagined it could be.

Cheap Shots and House Salad: Emperor pops off

"The Ivanka’s Salad, a chopped approximation of a Greek salad, smothered in melting goat cheese and dressing and missing the promised olives, that seemed unlikely to appetize a SoulCycle-obsessed, smoothie-guzzling heiress. (Instead, it looked like a salad made by someone who believes that rich women only eat vegetables.)" But photographed on a day they remembered the olives, evidently by the house food stylists, who seem as poorly prepared judging from this image (via foodspotting) as the chefs sound judging from the review.

If you wanted to know what prompted this:

Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016

you might be satisfied, like Mr. Pierce, in recalling that Graydon Carter was the elegant phrase-maker who years ago coined the near-Homeric epithet "short-fingered vulgarian" to refer to our president-elect. But Mr. Trump rarely rakes over old grievances when there are so many new ones he needs to respond to, on a daily basis, and this case is no exception, and there is more to the story than that.