For the Record: For the Win

Weird result of searching for an image of Planē, Goddess of Error: John Collier, Clytemnestra After the Murder, 1882, from mollyoyo's Pinterest.

1. Obama admin didn't wiretap anyone in Trump campaign. They used section 702 surveillance.
2. They didn't surveil the candidate, only ppl in campaign caught directly conspiring with surveilled foreign persons; maybe Manafort, Page, certainly Flynn.
/1

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2018

Not 702, that's a serious error—702 and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are used only for the surveillance of non-US persons; warrants on Page and Manafort (issued in 2014) and Flynn would be under section 1803 of FISA under the jurisdiction of a seven-judge panel appointed by the Chief Justice.

5. It's hardly likely Obama "did" any of this. He had a great staff capable of acting on this important stuff on their own. I suppose they kept him informed.

Five gross errors in 23 words! Are you shooting for a record?
/3

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 11, 2018

A Handful of Bad

The following, improvised in response to a question on immigration from The New York Times's Michael Schmidt, December 28 ("So you’re not moving. You’re saying I’m more likely to do deals, but I’m not moving."), dark dystopian fantasy reads like the nightmare of a man nodding off to Lou Dobbs Tonight on the Fox, though I thought Dobbs's timeslot at 7:00 was more or less cheeseburger time in the Trump White House. Trump tries to imagine what immigration is like in terms of unfamiliar but ominous words, "chain", "lottery". Note the haunting beginning, in which he seems to divide himself from himself as these apparitions of chains approach:

Song

Pablo Picasso, "The Tragedy", 1903. Via Dominicana.

Song of the Clean Bill

by Donald Trump

I think a clean DACA bill,
to me, is a DACA bill,
but we take care of the 800,000 people...

But I think, to me, a clean bill
is a bill of DACA, we take care of them,
and we also take care of security.

Text from Trump's immigration meeting with members of Congress, January 9 2018, as reported in Vox.

A Tale of Two White Houses

George III, anonymous contemporary etching, British Museum, via StreetsOfSalem. 

Longer™ David Brooks ("The Decline of Anti-Trumpism"):

I'll just start off with some observations that may startle you if you haven't been spending time at Washington dinner parties, think-tank lecture-recitals, and early-morning Stairmaster gym sessions with a lot of Republicans in the course of the past year (as I implicitly have, though I'm not giving you any details):

Bannonished

Update at bottom 1/8

Image vis dollarandsense.sg.

Looks like Rupert Murdoch is a little sorry about all the rude things he said about Trump to Michael Wolff: Not that this Michael Goodwin column in Murdoch's New York Post mentions any of them (for instance, "'What a fucking idiot,' said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone"); Goodwin focuses more on Stephen Bannon, and it's all good, anyway, because Bannon has only wrecked his own career. Trump will be more popular and successful than ever!

Bannon’s decision to go out in a blaze of personal attacks on the president and everybody else in the White House does Donald Trump and the GOP a giant favor. Bannon may live to fight another day, but, thankfully, Bannonism is dead.

But what of Trumpism? Is “Fire and Fury,” the Michael Wolff book where Bannon [not to mention Rupert Murdoch—ed.] leaks and vents, the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency?

Maybe — but probably not. After all, every previous media-hair-on-fire moment has come to a forgettable dead end.

And think of how much worse things would be if Hillary Clinton were president! Sorry, Trumpism is Bannonism is Republicanism; they may fight among themselves, because power is the main thing, but the main theme is taking down the New Deal and the Great Society and the Obama presidency

Trump comes out a bit later to salute Goodwin's brave work:

No Stalinist! No Stalinist! You're the real Stalinist!

Article from Moskovsky Komsomolets, 2011, cited by Rachael Allen, "Stalin and the Great Terror: Can Mental Illness Explain His Violent Behavior?" which has a pretty good bibliography. Translation of this material welcome.

In the Soviet Union, people with unpalatable views were accused of mental illness. I wonder if those Stalinist tactics are still used today pic.twitter.com/ehgJtyLz6h

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 7, 2018

Now that you come to think of it, how many people has our Leader called "crazy"? Mika Brzezinski, Bernie Sanders, Jeff "Flakey", "Wacky" Frederica Wilsoin, "Psycho" Joe Scarborough, "Crazy" Megyn Kelly... Looks like @realDonaldTrump can't stop calling people mentally ill.

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2018

In Stalin's USSR it was the dictator who GOT AWAY WITH calling people mentally ill and "locking them up" for real. Looks like our Fearless Leader would like to do the same. Because he's a paranoid psychopath too. Hopefully he will fail in that as in everything else.

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2018

Hmmm, sort of like this Toady? Not sure Trump is going to be happy being called a Stalinist if he understands the term. pic.twitter.com/Q2rMK12HD3

— Man in Black (@kevinbkelly) January 7, 2018

Mr. President, please, we don't need that much backing

Joan Mirò, Animaux (lithograph, 1956, from a series of illustration for poems by Jacques Prévert), via Annex Galleries.

Wolff runs a much longer excerpt from the peroration of Trump's address to the CIA employees in January 2017 than I'd seen before (full transcript here; "Witnesses," says Wolff, "would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop"), where he tumbled into the discussion of the tragic events of Inauguration Day, when Zeke Miller of Time took almost as much as 50 minutes to correct his inaccurate tweet alleging that Trump had had the bust of Martin Luther King removed from the Oval Office, an hour that will live in infamy. At least as long as Donald Trump draws breath.

I've published his Black History Month poem touching the same subject; in the five chatty septets of the CIA poem, below the fold, the pain is fresher, and Trump works harder to ground it, establishing first how much Time owes him, for all the times he's furnished his face for the magazine's cover, 14 times altogether, or 15 this year alone, as the case may be, certainly more than the Patriots quarterback, and then broadens it out to the wider human issue, not that he's personally offended by Miller's journalistic malpractice but that "I like honest reporting."

Then he moves on to declare his love for the CIA, contrary to news reports of a "feud" between Trump and the US intelligence community, even though he had compared them to "Nazi Germany" a couple of times earlier in the month ("I am so behind you,“ Trump has told the CIA workers earlier in the address; “you’re gonna get so much backing, maybe you’re gonna say, please, don't give us so much backing, Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.")

Referring perhaps to the fact that the appearance was scheduled for a weekend, so that only some 300 agency workers managed to attend, he seems to invite himself back to give the same speech again, for a bigger audience—perhaps so big that the CIA will need to build a new auditorium, just to accommodate the crowds of CIA workers yearning to look at him, and with no limited-view seats, and he seems to hint he might build it himself.

As editor, I'm very pleased with the relaxed lope in the stanza breaks, and the way I've used parentheses to mark the way his digressions are really interiorities or intergressions. The brackets in the third stanza represent the fact that he used a finger gesture instead of an oral word.

The Wolff is at the door, but is that inside or outside?

Wolf attack. German engraving, 1517, via Wikipedia.

In March 2017, Kellyanne Conway is telling Olivia Nuzzi what she meant by the peculiar term she'd used in January to explain her contention that Donald Trump was right to claim that a million or million and a half people had attended his inaugural address in the National Mall, compared to a million for Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009, though aerial photos clearly showed a much smaller audience for Trump—the "alternative facts":

“Two plus two is four. Three plus one is four. Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty. Those are alternative facts,” she said, further defining the infamous phrase as “additional facts and alternative information.”

Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The expressions "3 + 1 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 4" aren't "alternative facts", they're alternative ways of stating a single fact. The numbers Sean Spicer proposed, 250,000 plus 220,000 plus another 250,000 for different regions of the Mall, don't add up to a million or more no matter how many times you calculate it, and the total 250,000 of the Vox estimate based on the photographs isn't an alternative way of saying "one million". It's a different number.

In April, Conway had refined the explanation, in an interview with Molly Ball:

Brooks on Trafficking

No, not that kind of trafficking, that would be too controversial.

Image via YoungInRome.

We may or may not have skirted the danger of war on the Korean peninsula, the situations in Yemen, Ukraine, Myanmar, and other places continue to degenerate, President Macron is trying to take over the Middle East peace process, Congress is about to attempt to provide a real appropriations process for the first time in well over a year of living from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, news is out that Donald Trump tried to shut down the Russia investigation about eight separate times, fearless federalist attorney general Jefferson Beauregard is declaring war on the 29 states where some kind of marijuana use is legal, and a new book is out (four days ahead of schedule after Trump's advance denunciation of it increased demand to an irresistable level) providing credible evidence of the president's diminished cognitive capacity, so naturally David F. Brooks ("How Would Jesus Drive?") is writing about how grateful we should all be that some people have good traffic manners.

Moreover, Pope Francis agrees with him on that, in his homily for the New Year's Eve Vesper service at the Basilica of Saint Peter:

Not too scared

Moon goddess from the Ohoe tomb no. 4, 6th-7th century, Goguryeo (or ancient Goryeo). via Wikipedia.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I'm going to say it again: as you know, there's no button, and the procedure you need to follow to order that strike is a fairly complex one, which I think Donald Trump in his current psychological state might have a hard or even impossible time following:

From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. (Michael Wolff)

And whatever they tell you, our military are trained carefully that they must not follow an illegal order, and I don't think there's any doubt about this one, as Marjorie Cohn was explaining a couple of months ago at the HuffPost:

Fire and fury like the world has never seen

Good times! The "fucking liar", as Ivanka calls him, and the "queen of leaks", as Bannon calls her, photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters via Telegraph.

On today's Guardian story pre-publicizing Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which certainly looks like it's going to be fun, when Stephen Bannon is quoted as saying the Trump Tower meeting between Junior-Jared-Manafort and Natalya Veselnitskaya in June 2016 was "treasonous", "unpatriotic", and "should have called the FBI immediately" and "bad shit"—

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

—don't think he means that like it was a bad thing or something. He means they did it wrong: they shouldn't have gotten caught, and Bannon should preferably have made some money out of it:

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

And while hating Jared and Ivanka is fun, Bannon still hates them because they're Jewish. That's what "globalist" means ("Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.'"). Enjoy them squabbling and trying to knock each other off as they skitter down the ropes, but they're all bad people.

The Oppressions of David Brooks

17th-century English print via May Morning Oxford.

So it looks like David Brooks ("The Retreat to Tribalism") went to this lecture Jonathan Haidt gave, "The Age of Outrage", at the Manhattan Institute last November. It was a big deal, Haidt was wearing a tux, and said that society is like a maypole, or kids dancing around a maypole, but in an especially odd way:

Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.

No, that's Brooks; Haidt just has an ordinary pole. Brooks's mistake is funny, too, because Haidt unlike Brooks knows exactly what a maypole is and uses the image more than once to make what I think is a kind of Straussian argument about the value of religion: gods are maypoles, the ribboned ones where at the end of the dance the maidens have twisted a colorful pattern around the pole as a byproduct, and in the same [?] way the worship of the gods "weaves" or "binds" the members of the community together, into a social coherence that's just as valuable as a newly decorated pole, though that seems a little confused: are the community members the ribbons, which are indeed bound together, or the maidens, who aren't, but move to some other activity when the dance is over?

Anyway with this pole it's the three kids who constitute the community, and the centripetal force that makes them hold tighter on to each others' hands is typically the wartime threat of external enemies, and what makes them keep running faster is the media, immigration and diversity, and the deadly dialectic of the "more radical Republican party" and the "new identity politics of the Left", which is different from the old identity politics of the Left, operated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which brought people together, because of the "high social trust" that existed in the Jim Crow era—

Frenzy in the Times (spoiler: there isn't much)

Speaking of narratives about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right, this year's White House interns. Via DiversityInc.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute welcomes the Heritage Foundation's naming of a new president, Kay Coles James, after the turmoil ending the reign of Jim DeMint:

If the new Heritage president had been a white male, the Times would likely have gone into bean-counting frenzy, tallying up all the other conservative think tanks headed by white males. But not only is James female, she is black. The Times [article here] buries this fact in its ninth paragraph, after characterizing James as a “safe choice.” A conservative organization opting for a black female as its “safety” candidate does not fit the Times’ narrative about regnant white supremacy and misogyny among the Right.

I'd like to point out that when DeMint was named to head the foundation in December 2012 the Times did not mention his race or gender at all. They did mention that DeMint was one of the least wealthy members of the Senate and could look forward to a significant boost in his standard of living. The only reference to race in the story was in mentioning that Governor Nikki Haley might pick South Carolina's first black congressman since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, to replace DeMint as Senator (which she subsequently did). Nor did Andrew Rosenthal's op-ed give any attention to DeMint's race and gender.

The most recent appointment of a new head to a conservative think tank I can find out about, when Thomas W. Gilligan became director of the Hoover Institution in 2015, was not covered in the Times at all, in spite of his white and male identities. The same goes for Arthur Brooks, who is also white and male, being named president of the American Enterprise Institute in 2009. Heather Mac's shop, the Manhattan Institute, has been headed by white guy Lawrence J. Mone since 1995, whose only mention in the Times, in 1997, also left the race question blank.

So the evidence is that when a white man is appointed to head a conservative think tank the Times never goes into frenzy, bean-counting or otherwise.

Which Hunt

Kensington Wine Rooms, Notting Hill. Via Britain Magazine.

Here we are again, trying to figure out which emails we're talking about.

The new Papadopoulos episode in The New York Times, in which young George, in the Kensington Wine Rooms with Australian High Commissioner to Great Britain (which is the Commonwealth equivalent of ambassador, that's bonus info that even Matty didn't have) Alexander Downer, drunkenly informs his excellency that Russians are in possession of thousands of emails that could sink Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, in May 2016, which the high commissioner then shares with the FBI after an interesting delay, launching the FBI's investigation of a possible conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, raises some questions for people with a better understanding of the big picture than I have, like Marcy at Emptywheel:

the few GOPers who have responded to this news raise another question: did the Aussies even know what emails Papadopoulos was talking about?

As I noted in October, we actually don’t know what emails Joseph Misfud [recte Mifsud] was talking about when he told Papadopoulos had dirt on Hillary. Trumpsters are now suggesting these emails might be those Guccifer 1.0 stole from Hillary, but they could be a range of other emails.

This story would be far more damning if the NYT knew for sure that the emails were ones freshly stolen from DNC, John Podesta, or the Hillary campaign itself, but they don’t.

But I think from the standpoint of my own little patch in the garden it's not all that complicated. Not that I've got a story that meets the evidentiary standards you'd want the Times to apply, but we do know enough for a reasonable person to speculate with.

Performativity

Via Zenpundit.

NY Times: You mentioned chain immigr—
Trump: Chain a-rain on the big plane flying to the sun on a burger bun fun fun fun. (inaudible) Biscuit hat.
Twitter: Why didn’t the reporter push back on that answer?!?

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) December 30, 2017

I think that really gets it about right. I'll go further: I think the Michael Schmidt interview of Trump at the Palm Beach golf club isn't pure-stenography enough. I can't understand why they don't print the entire, unedited transcript, as with the one with the Washington Post editorial staff, Frederick Ryan, Fred Hiatt, Ruth Marcus, back in March 2016, where we could have learned everything we needed to know, as Taylor Dibbert blogged at the time:

The Song of Dershowitz

Pablo Picasso, "Old Man Seated", Mougins (1970), via Artchive.

The Song of Dershowitz

by Donald J. Trump

He’s been amazing.
And he’s a liberal Democrat.
I don’t know him.
He’s a liberal Democrat.

I watched Alan Dershowitz the other day, he said,
No. 1, there is no collusion,
No. 2, collusion is not a crime,
but even if it was a crime,
there was no collusion.

And he said that very strongly.
He said there was no collusion.
And he has studied this thing very closely.
I’ve seen him a number of times.

There is no collusion,
and even if there was,
it’s not a crime.
But there’s no collusion.

Cross-Posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Annals of Derp: The Gallup Most Admired

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gypsy girl with Basque drum. Via Enigm-Art.

You know who's really the most admired woman in the United States? Somebody you've never heard of. I'm not even kidding: that was the answer 13% of the respondents in Gallup's 2017 survey, "friend/relative". The most frequent answer, given by 27%, was "don't know". Hillary Clinton only came in third, at 9%. Or maybe she was more like 13%, or 5%, because there's a four-point margin of error.

Puttting it another way, this is a really dumb survey, and always has been. It may tell you how many Americans say they admire Hillary the most of all women, around nine in a hundred, or around 94 of their 1,049 respondents (the given number is some manipulation of the raw numbers of those who named her as first and as second choice both). It doesn't tell you who America admires the most—that would take a different kind of poll, maybe taking the top 50 names on these lists and asking a second sample to rank them all.

It doesn't signify nothing. There is some kind of meaning to the suggestion that Barack Obama is more admired than Donald Trump (though only 17% to 14%, well within the margin of error), or that Hillary Clnton is still definitively on the women's list (9% to 7% for Michelle Obama). But it isn't much.

And down below the scale, where Condoleezza Rice and Melania Trump are tied for seventh place at 1% each, about the same as Bernie Sanders (7th place) and Bill Gates (8th place) on the men's list, it's really meaningless. It's comical and a little pathetic when the Free Beacon calls attention to the prime minister of Israel:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is America's most admired foreign democratically elected male leader, according to an annual Gallup survey.

Netanyahu was ninth overall on the list of most admired men by Americans, with about 1 percent of respondents naming him. He is currently the second-longest serving prime minister in Israel's history after David Ben-Gurion.

The Dalai Lama was 11th on the list.

Fewer than one in a hundred think of naming Netanyahu, and fewer still of the Dalai Lama (who's actually tied for 10th place, with Mike Pence and Jeff Bezos). What differentiates him from Justin Trudeau at 13, Theresa May (14 on the women's list), Aung San Suu Kyi (much further down), Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela and Benazir Bhutto, the last two not even alive though the questionnaire specified that they had to be, is pretty much random error.

It's fun to talk about these numbers, but you should avoid thinking you learned anything from them,

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Profane and Rambunctious

One disadvantage of a largemouth. Via AnimalSake.

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, celebrated military historian and literary stylist, in the National Review Online, on Harry Truman ("The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership"):

Harry Truman talked too much. He swore. He drank. He played poker. He was petty to the point of stooping to spar with a music critic who dismissed his daughter’s solo performances. His profanity was an open secret, as well as his temper. His advisers constantly cautioned him to tone it down.

As a Missourian who had once gone bankrupt and recouped with a political career though the help of the corrupt Prendergast machine, Truman carried a chip on his shoulder throughout his political career on the East Coast.

Yes, he's arguing here, on a somewhat circuitous path, that Truman (as compared to reticent, non-swearing, non-drinking, non-gambling Eisenhower) is pretty much the same as his alphabetical neighbor Trump.  Or "Think Andrew Jackson of [sic for "or", no copy editing at NRO] Teddy Roosevelt." (Disregarding the other cliché possibility of reminding us that TR advised everybody to "speak softly".)  Or William Tecumseh Sherman (as opposed to taciturn, but hard-drinking Grant, who was also, Hanson informs us, "naïve about the scoundrels who surrounded him"), or General Patton as opposed to General Bradley (who was "steady if not, on occasion, obsequious to his superiors in public and haughty to his inferiors in private", glad to hear he was occasionally not obsequious to his superiors, that's certainly praiseworthy):

Mercurial Is Not Always Wrong

Not saying Trump is exactly like Truman. "Yet":

For all his first-year achievements, an unpopular Trump is hardly yet an accomplished Patton or Truman. Nonetheless, we need to take a deep breath and concede that sometimes past mellifluous appeasement is more dangerous than present flamboyant deterrence — just as the sober and discreet can be more adroit in warping the Constitution through distortions and corruptions of the Justice Department, the IRS, the FBI, and the FISA courts than are the profane and rambunctious.

He's such a terrible writer. Lovely how he unlashes himself there from the mast of cliché ("take a deep breath") only to tumble into the rough sea of senselessness ("sometimes past mellifluous appeasement"). Glad to hear that Trump will be less adroit than some at warping the Constitution. I personally find the past to be always less dangerous than the present, but maybe that's just because I don't live there.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2017

Image via WeAreTeachers.

This is the time of year for one of blogdom's sweetest traditions, the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, curated by Batocchio, where dozens of bloggers submit a favorite piece of writing from the previous year to a wildly varied, hilarious and horrifying feast for readers, founded by the great satirist and friend to the little blogger Jon Swift/Al Weisel, who died in 2010 at the age of 46, and carried on as a commemoration and celebration of his life and writing.

Everybody gets a trophy, because we all brought our own. There's always some terrific writing from somebody you've never heard of and would like to know better, as well as friends you might have been neglecting over the previous year. So check it out.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

American Visigothic

A conservative mark = wrecked a lot of things and hurt a lot of people. @nytimes https://t.co/WwxZMzCenD

— Lance Mannion (@LanceMannion) December 26, 2017

After a chaotic start, the Roman Senate—sometimes working with Emperor Honorius holed up in Ravenna, sometimes against him—racked up a solid record of conservative accomplishment in 409, firmly letting their British colony know that it would have to defend itself from here on (Italia First!); improving troubled relations with Alaric the Visigoth by making him commander-in-chief of the Western Empire (magister utriusque militiae), paying him a substantial bribe, and naming an alternative local emperor, Priscus Attalus, more to Alaric's liking; not to mention passing an edict forbidding anybody to wear trousers within the city walls.

Actually the edict on the trousers dated back to 399, but you see what I mean.

Evariste-Vital Luminais (1821-96), Alaric's forces in the sack of Rome, 410.