Trouble in Mind

Revised and Updated

Senator Hatch "has a rough time" with renewing the Children's Health Insurance Program.

.@SenOrrinHatch on CHIP: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves – won’t lift a finger – and expect the federal government to do everything.”

Unbelievable. https://t.co/4VHROvIL8X

— Jenny Wilson for UT (@JennyWilsonUT) December 2, 2017

About $14 billion a year, and it's true small kids are shamefully slow on paying their medical bills like "I think Daddy takes care of it right?"

Everybody—starting with Joe Scarborough!—took this a little bit out of context, I'm sorry to say. What Hatch said, as reported in The Guardian, is this:

By the horns of his own chastity

Young virgin auto-sodomized by the horns of her own chastity, Salvador Dalí, via Wikipedia.

Young Ben Shapiro wants to know, over the news of Michael Flynn's guilty plea:

Is The Mueller Special Investigation Going To Result In A Massive Political Explosion...Over Nearly Nothing?

Because Flynn has only pleaded guilty to the one crime, and not much of a crime at that! Lying to the FBI about something he did that wasn't even illegal! Well, probably not. I mean, is that all they got?

Supposedly, Flynn spoke with Kislyak about backing off of retaliation against Obama administration sanctions, and also about delaying a late-Obama administration United Nations resolution designed to condemn Israeli settlements. It’s completely unclear why Flynn would lie about such conversations; they weren’t illegal. In fact, most Americans would want the transition team to talk to foreign governments about the policy to be implemented in mere weeks.

Jesus Christ on a graham cracker crust, Ben! I realize you became Internet-famous for proclaiming your preserved virginity at 21, but I can't believe anybody who's been brought up near a television set is that naive.

Haven't you ever heard of plea bargains given to a relative underling to elicit testimony against the relevant overling? Like John Dean?

Fix it behind closed doors

Per Jason Easley at Politicus USA: McConnell clarified this afternoon that nobody's allowed to read the bill until after they pass it.

Nobody gets the real reason for Flynn's guilty plea , which is that it's to distract us from the Senate Republicans passing this obscene tax bill (I don't know that it's really obscene, of course, and perhaps they're airbrushing out all the pubic hair as we speak).

The following report from CNN and some other material is offered without comment:

For the record: Self-plagiarism

This is so priceless, if I do say so myself.

I know how! You could recycle huge chunks of texts from one book into another book and sell them all over again, one book for the price of two, as Christine Kelly puts it in her review of a couple of books by, ah, Dinesh D'Souza.

Says one of the most notorious self-plagiarists in the world https://t.co/oBO5jSE5Hb pic.twitter.com/0JmUSX1xQy

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 30, 2017

Vote-O-Rama day

"I have a feeling we're not in regular order any more." Teri Garr in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein, via Film Misery.

I've been wanting to write something about the tax bill—

"Anything you've heard you can take off the table because it's evolving." -Bob Corker on the state of trigger talks.

— Richard Rubin (@RichardRubinDC) November 29, 2017

This is incredible. The vote is tomorrow!!! No legislative text, no score, no vetting by experts, not even an outline! cc: @SenJohnMcCain https://t.co/ztZD5Ybj2C

— Topher Spiro (@TopherSpiro) November 29, 2017

But it's like the wrong end of an acid trip, where you're getting disenchanted and ready for a nap and grousing, "God damn it, everything's still melting." (A very long time ago for me, I should stress, but I still remember that.)

Code Talkers Vs. Dog Whistlers

Via navajopeople.org.

One of the things that hasn't been noticed in Emperor Trump's smarmy, patronizing, shoulder-patting performance with three nonagenarian World War II Navajo Code Talkers at a Native American Heritage Month event at the White House yesterday, after the group's president, Peter MacDonald, had presented his own opening remarks summarizing their achievements. Not the characteristic narcissism—

And I want to tell you -- you said you're 90 years old? That's great, because you have good genes. That means the press has got me to kick around for a long time. (Laughter.)

(Trump is going to live for a long time because his guest has good genes?) Or the unceremonious decision not to read the remarks that had been prepared for him and just dump the text into MacDonald's hands—

I loved that and I loved your delivery. And the Code Talkers are amazing. And seriously, it is what I said. So what I'm going to do is give you my speech, and I want you to hold that. And I know you like me, so you'll save it. But that was so well delivered, from the heart. So I want to give you this speech because I don't want to bore them with saying the same thing you just said. And you said it better, believe me, because you said it from here. And I mean it from there too.

It's that he has no idea what they're being honored for, what the Code Talkers did, beyond being "special" and "brave" and displaying "love for the country"—didn't have any idea what it was before yesterday, hadn't read the remarks in advance, and had been daydreaming while MacDonald spoke, hearing nothing but a reference to Iwo Jima, until the very last bit (an appeal for help in putting together a Navajo Code Talkers Museum), which he did pick up on later on:

Socialism of the right?

Postmodern mariachis att Turnberry, June 2015 in The National.

Wrong. The Nazis were far RIGHT, always have been, always will be. By the way, the Democrats and Republicans essentially switched platforms during the mid 60s after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so the entire basis of that book you mentioned really IS "The Big Lie".

— Jim Salomon (@JimSalomon) November 26, 2017

Cite for that Goebbels quote please?

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2017

I'm sure Dinesh has a better one, but this took me 2 seconds on Google.
Goebbels: "The NSDAP [Nazi Party] is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism." (Der Angriff, Dec 6th, 1931)

— Janey Mack (@JaneyMackWriter) November 26, 2017

I spent a ridiculously large part of the afternoon looking for a decent and adequately contextualized source for that quote, which originates from an especially poorly made and poorly documented WikiQuotes page), and ran along the way into a good deal of stuff that might be interesting beyond the usual spectacle of me throwing a pie in Dinesh's face, on the issue of what we're to do with these awful old terms of "right" and "left" and "fascist", especially relevant in the age of Trump.

The best source was a chapter, "Von der amerikanischen Sklaverei zum bundesdeutschen Kampf gegen Rechts: Metamorphosen des Rassismus " (From American Slavery to the Federal German Struggle Against the Right: Metamorphoses of Racism), from a 2008 book by Joseph Schüsslburner, quoting in turn from a 1987 book by the journalist Wolfgang Venohr, Stauffenberg: Symbol des Widerstands ("Stauffenberg: Symbol of Resistance", on the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler):

Time's not on my side.

Fake Liechtenstein via entrepreneur.

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

I worked at Time mag for 15 years. Doesn’t work this way.
1. Time tries to interview/shoot several possibilities
2. Agreeing to shoot/interview not a condition of being picked
DJT probably angling to set up “I didn’t want it” when he doesn’t get picked (2x/row would be unusual) https://t.co/3Vh43BdKD5

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 24, 2017

Well, that explains that. Trump called Time to ask why they hadn't reached out yet to schedule the interview/shoot, and they told him, nicely, that it PROBABLY wouldn't happen twice in a row.

It's a tidy example of my semiotic theory of lying, according to which the function of a lie is to hide some particular truth by occupying its proper semiotic space. Here, with some elementary transformations: he called Time, so in the lie Time called him, and they were forced to acknowledge that he PROBABLY wouldn't receive the honor, so he said he PROBABLY would.





I can't get over the instrumentation on this, which I just learned about recently, with Keith Richards on piano, Bill Wyman on cello, and poor Brian Jones, the composer of the song, in his ridiculous hat, on alto recorder (treble recorder, they say in England).

Fundamental and astounding

Presidential nominee, 1860, via The History Place.

David Brooks has finally come up with an idea for that new national narrative he's been talking about, I think, and it's a doozy ("America: The Redeemer Nation"), custom made for Thanksgiving: just as he's suggested in the past that Jews ought to celebrate Shavuot on Passover instead of Passover, so on Thanksgiving he's celebrating Lincoln's Second Inaugural address.

The story of America, then, can be interpreted as a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts. Look at the mottos on our Great Seal: “A New Order for the Ages” and “Out of Many, One.” In the 18th century divisions between the colonists were partially healed. In the 19th century divisions between the free and enslaved were partially healed. In the 20th, America partially healed the divisions between democracy and totalitarianism. In the 21st, we have healing fresh starts still to come.

The great sermon of redemption and reconciliation is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

That's such a bizarre picture of the Revolution, in the first place, "divisions between the colonists", as if the British government had nothing to do with it. It's true that some 15%-20% of the Americans nominally supported the Crown, though they never came out to fight in anywhere near the numbers the British hoped they would.

Talking of You Know Who

In the room the women come and go

Thanksgiving Cheap Shots: And Farewell to Mark Halperin

Reconstruction Thanksgiving, Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, 1869. Uncle Sam carving the turkey, self-government and universal suffrage on the menu, and everybody, a Native with a feather in his hair, Germans, French, Spanish, African Americans, Chinese (the Chinese woman looks more Japanese, but the child she's admonishing is wearing a Qing-dynasty queue), even a disreputable but hopeful-faced Irishman at far right, among the guests. Identity politics used to be a thing Republicans approved of! Image via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm grateful Trump's too busy watching TV to do all the harm he might otherwise be doing, glad to have a voice and wonderful readers, happy to have a big extended family to go have dinner with, and schadenfreudig that the exodus of famous but bad men from social respectability includes Charlie Rose, Leon Wieseltier, and Mark Halperin.

Following Dylan Byers awful tweet (since deleted) about the catastrophic loss of talent in the media industry because all these sexual assault victims keep telling their stories, Jeet Heer:

RIP Dmitry Hvorostovsky

The great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky died, of brain cancer. He was 55 years old. I think I only saw him once, at the Met, as one of his trademark Verdi villains, the Count di Luna in Il Trovatore; wish I'd seen the Don Giovanni.

Trail of human wreckage

David F. Brooks looking for something cutting-edge to condemn that has nothing to do with sexual assault, tax cuts for the rich, or Russia, asks "How Evil is Tech?"

He's not talking about 3D printing, gene therapy, or cancer vaccines, of course, but the Internet of Kids, who are spending too much time on their damn phones, making them sad and suicidal:

Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the N.F.L. — something millions of people love, but which everybody knows leaves a trail of human wreckage in its wake.

Surely the people in tech — who generally want to make the world a better place — don’t want to go down this road.

Who are "some"? And don't call me Surely. But that sounds pretty scary: how many kids are dying, on average, from their habitual phone use?

Inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt

Kenneth Starr, via Daily Beast (check out the story!).

What

asks Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street,

if Ken Starr Was Right?

Wait, right about what? On why Congress ought to impeach Clinton?

F. Summary

In this case, the President made and caused to be made false statements to the American people about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. He also made false statements about whether he had lied under oath or otherwise obstructed justice in his civil case. By publicly and emphatically stating in January 1998 that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and these "allegations are false," the President also effectively delayed a possible congressional inquiry, and then he further delayed it by asserting Executive Privilege and refusing to testify for six months during the Independent Counsel investigation. This represents substantial and credible information that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.

No, Ross thinks he should have been impeached for not resigning:

Pissed off by Kristof

There was an old Timesman called Kristof
Who just got me royally pissed off
   By fudging his points
   With invidious joints
That I couldn't quite follow the gist of.

Discussing the "paradox" according to which "Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach":

The liberal impulse may be to gloat: Those conservatives thunder about “family values” but don’t practice them. But there’s also perhaps a measure of hypocrisy in the blue states. As Cahn and Carbone [Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, 2010] put it: “Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Annals of derp: Have mercy on me!

Update below

It was FDR, not @realDonaldTrump , who cut deals with virulent racists & courted Italian Fascism while in the White House #TheBigLie pic.twitter.com/ucOxylOf7V

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 18, 2017

I guess it's perfectly true that Trump has not courted Italian fascism—yet. I mean, there's not as much Italian fascism kicking around for him to deal with. Other fascisms, from Britain to the Philippines, are another matter, as is Stephen Bannon's apparent interest in the "radically anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal, anti-democratic" writings of Baron Evola, but I think it's a more lively question whether Silvio Berlusconi, currently making some kind of comeback, is courting American fascism with his frequent praise of the most Berlusconian of US politicians. Anyhow where was I?

By the way, was Winston Churchill a leftist? Is that why he admired Mussolini so much? https://t.co/v0PoValcB7 pic.twitter.com/3LOH8Je3Ks

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 19, 2017

So somebody shows up with an ambiguous message. Not sure what it meant, but thought it might be a teachable moment:

David Brooks thinks a new national narrative is his mother

David F. Brooks clinging to the conservative interpretation of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. Image via Simply Psychology.

Funny thing happened to David F. Brooks on the way to writing his column on the Republican tax bill, which is what the URL (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/elites-taxes-republicans-congress.html) suggests it was meant to be: he got lost in the woods of a completely new argument, beginning with the great British psychiatrist John Bowlby:

John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives. The most famous Bowlby sentence is this one: “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Actually that's not the case, though it may not add up to a Radio Yerevan joke: first of all, the last word of the quote (from his 1988 collection A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development) has a parenthesis in it, "figure(s)" (along with definite articles with "cradle" and "grave"), and as we'll see that's not a trivial mistake.

Sparing you the sarcasm

Senator Hatch at the keyboard in 2006. Photo by Cameron Craig/Associated Press via New York Times.

So Orrin Hatch (R-UT) lost his temper with Sherrod Brown (D-OH), for saying, "That whole thing about higher wages, well, it’s a good selling point. Just spare us the bank shot, spare us the sarcasm, and the satire."

Mr. Hatch, who had wearily tolerated hours of debate on a bill that Republicans have always planned to push along party lines, had heard enough.

“What you’ve said is not right,” Mr. Hatch said. “I come from the lower middle class originally, we didn’t have anything, so don’t spew that stuff on me.

“I come from the poor people, and I’ve been here working my whole stinking career for people who don’t have a chance, and I really resent anybody saying I’m just doing it for the rich,” he said. “Give me a break.”

Well, OK, I'll spare you the sarcasm for a change, more or less.

I hate everything

Alicublog on Friday afternoon, before the women show up.  Actually Pompeii around 60 C.E. Via Early Church History.

I really hate everything. I certainly hate Al Franken, though I obviously hate Roger Stone a lot more.

CHECK IT OUT: Roger Stone knew about the Franken scandal LAST NIGHT before midnight. Somethin' smells mighty fishy, don't it? pic.twitter.com/k5N7YuVvLi

— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) November 16, 2017

"Stone Cold Truth" is Roger Stone's Twitter account that he uses because his other Twitter account was "permanently suspended" after he called CNN's Don Lemon a "dumb piece of shit", "dull witted ignorant partyboi", and "ignorant, lying covksucker" (that last word must have been short for "covfefesucker"). Because being permanently suspended from Twitter doesn't mean exactly what you'd think.

I'm guessing same way he knew "Podesta's time in the barrel" was coming in August 2016? https://t.co/2OOdM1kj5k i.e. ratfucking he was personally engaged in, with or without Assange and the Putinist mob.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2017

Nevertheless, Franken has made it possible. Roy has made me feel a little better, and it looks like a great party could be getting started over it his place, follow the link.