Bad

This is...inexcusably bad. Period. Bye, Eric. https://t.co/AlewFJLp8f

— Zandar Wakandar (@ZandarVTS) May 7, 2018

OK, I'm really sad now. I've long had a kind of personal thing about Schneiderman, in that when he was a state senator and I was a harried househusband our kids were in the same public school, not that I've ever met him, and I've loved watching him fight the good fight in our national emergency, suing the Trumpery right and left and stopping evil in its tracks. That will go on, obviously it's the staff that does all the work, not the attorney general himself, but he was just not supposed to be like that; he was supposed to be on the clear right side, as Mayer and Farrow write:

Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”

Now he's denying the very persuasive, and awful, stories that are being told about him. My kneejerk partisan first thought was like the first thought I had about Al Franken, that he must be the victim of some kind of conspiracy (I still kind of hope it's in some sense true of Franken) but you can't—at least I can't—sustain the thought for even a page of this story (here's a link to the Times coverage). It's really very bad. Damn.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

For the Record: Three Fifths

Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael in 1966, via Wikipedia. I just learned, apropos of almost nothing, that he was a classmate of Samuel R. Delaney, of all people, at the Bronx High School of Science, where as it happens my son studied some decades later, when it was a far less diverse school, though still pretty good. This post is dedicated to the kid, who thoughtfully said, "Please don't blog about Kanye," which was surely good advice.

I just learned something totally new to me about American history, and specifically about the origins and significance of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which, as all literate Americans are expected to know, was the arrangement in which enslaved persons were counted as part of the population of the individual states, along with other people without full civil rights such as women and children, but at the rate of three fifths of a person, splitting the difference between the North, which didn't want to count them at all, and the South, which wanted to count them entirely, not because of differing opinions as to whether the African American was in fact a person or not but because the count was going to be the basis of deciding how many representatives each state would get in the financially powerful Lower House and the Electoral College, and counting the enslaved would give the Southern states more members and the Northern fewer.

Only it turns out that this story is actually completely wrong, almost as wrong as the view of the lunatic to whose tweet I was responding:

Just the opposite. The 3/5s compromises was established because the slave holders wanted their slaves to have equal votes, which could have given enough representation to keep slavery legal.

Oh my God. https://t.co/Wd5XI6F4qB

— The Red-headed Libertarian (@TRHLofficial) May 6, 2018

Oh my god.

Inner Nixon: Update

The story is getting somewhat wild today: Colin Kahl, the Biden national security adviser named in the Guardian story as one of the people being spied on in a Trump-sponsored effort to discredit the Iran deal, initially reported, like Ben Rhodes, that he hadn't noticed anybody spying on him, but then, as he and his wife talked it over, they remembered something kind of untoward (you should read the whole thread):

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) May 6, 2018

The brilliant Middle East expert journalist Laura Rozen (who some older Netizens may remember as blogger Needlenose, one of the most reliable voices on the Iraq War) was struck by a strange echo in Kahl's story of something you'd think was completely different, the story of the persecution of actress Rose McGowan, as reported in Ronan Farrow's New Yorker story on the Harvey Weinstein sexual violence cases; McGowan was spied on by an Israeli private intelligence agency, called Black Cube—

Trump Unleashing His Inner Nixon

Filing Cabinet of Dr. Lewis Fielding, with markings where Hunt, Liddy, Martinez. and the others broke into it in the hopes of finding out something nasty about Daniel Ellsberg, a patient of Dr. Fielding's, in 1971; Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, via Wikipedia.

Progressives who'd rather we stop talking about Russia Russia Russia and Trump's criminality might take a look at this story, just out in The Guardian, which has nothing to do with Russia: It seems that a year ago, just after Trump's visit to Tel Aviv (when he promised Netanyahu that he would ensure "Iran would never have nuclear weapons"), his people hired a private Israeli intelligence agency to "get dirt" on the personal and political lives of Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Colin Kahl, former national security adviser to Vice President Biden, which they hoped "would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it."

Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

This is pretty clearly Nixon-level skullduggery, reminiscent of the original Plumbers burglary when they attacked Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, with the added weirdness of using a foreign agency, and similar to what the Trump people are alleged to have done with Russian agents and a British firm trying to "get dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the campaign period. It's also similar in the tie-in of allowing foreign leaders to dictate US policy—Netanyahu for the Iran deal, Putin for the Ukrainian and Syrian issues, not to mention old Flynn offering US cooperation to the Turkish authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

"Stormy news won't move the needle on Trump". And you're surprised?

Oxford-Cambridge goat race, 24 March 2018, via londontown.com.

This sequence goes from dismal to somewhere productive:

Democratic pollster on why Stormy news won’t move the needle on Trump: “people have concluded he’s a liar. he lies every day. people know it. the world hasn’t come to an end” https://t.co/ClKEujrm3t

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) May 4, 2018

This is true and has wide political implications. Because knowledge of Trump's dishonesty is baked in, there's no more marginal votes to be gained from emphasizing it. His lies should be corrected but Democrats need to focus on issues. https://t.co/ESQGr01jt4

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 4, 2018

The composition of the electorate is not baked in. Attacks on Trump are less about getting people to go from Trump in 2016 to Dem in 2018 than:
Trump->Don't vote
Third Party->Dem
Clinton+R Sen/Cong->Dem
Clinton+Dem->turnout higher than normal in midterm elections https://t.co/yWlWz8c7wv

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) May 4, 2018

I've never understood arguments in the form "People shouldn't talk about how X is a bad person, they should focus on the issues" or the other way around. Obviously candidates and editorialists and partisans of all varieties should talk about the issues as much as they think their audience can stand, and they can probably stand more than your average campaign manager thinks they can, but if your opponent is a genuinely bad person and you can make some use of that, you might as well.

But in the present situation, I really can't understand why anybody should think it's a problem, as if laying off Trump might get Democrats some of those votes from people who've decided they don't care if Trump is a liar or a fornicator or criminal or traitor as long as that wall gets built or Trump is on the air demanding that the wall get built. There is nothing that is going to change their minds. You can talk about the issues until you faint. You will not get that vote by insulting Trump and you will not get it by not insulting him. It really doesn't matter either way.

Peeping into the future

Georges Méliès, Le Voyage dans la Lune , 1902, via Business Insider.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Future of the American Left", New York Times, 4 May 2018:

If the Democrats were smart, they would take advantage of their electoral edge to pursue an agenda devoted to redistributing wealth and ensuring economic security for all—like that of Dean Baker, enchanted with radical idealism, which I would strongly disagree with but nevertheless praise as positive, humane, and universalistic. Readers will remember how I always praise liberals when they adopt my recommendations. Unfortunately because of tribalism and identity politics they will not do this but instead offer a North American version of the Bolivarian socialism of the late Hugo Chávez, so I won't have an opportunity to praise them at all. Politicians on both sides no longer care about thinkers. This is a historical inevitability and it makes me sad.

Obviously unclear what he's trying to accomplish with this peculiar thesis. It could be a kind of Dr. William Kristol wish-fulfillment effusion, where you use the prediction format to describe your deepest and most implausible desire, in this case the hope that there's a a way for Republicans to hold on to Congress if Democrats can manage to out-crazy Trump. Or possibly a kind of bait-and-switch concern trolling, in which he employs the terrifying specter of chavismo to frighten us into the arms of Dr. Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and that's what he thinks will preserve Congress for the Republicans, kind of sneaking the Overton Window into the back yard.

Adding incels to injury

Illumination by Loyset Liédet for the Roman de la Violette of Gerbert de Momtreuil, 15th century. Pinterest.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, once again dipping his toe into the waters of crazy, monarchists and Falangists, unreconstructed bigots ("What happens if the bigoted sometimes get things right?"), and now ("The Redistribution of Sex") the involuntary celibates, basement-dwelling boys who have been going all Martin Luther King about their civil right to get laid ("I have a dream tonight, that my two little balls will be cherished not for the smoothness of my dating profile but for the smartness of this interesting argument I just came up with...") and on a couple of occasions literally murdering people to express their disappointment that others don't see things the same way:

Which brings me to the sex robots.

Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

It's a "provocation"! Not saying the killer did the right thing, just saying he had an interesting point?

Literary Corner: What the president was thinking is an outrageous

Pablo Picasso, "Glass and Bottle of Suze", 1912.

In this remarkable experiment, Trump seems to have found an analogue to the Picasso collage, appropriating a text, apparently extracted from Di Genova's arguing on the Fox that the presidential power of firing executive-branch employees extends to cases in which the firing is a criminal act (obstruction of justice), from conspiracy theorist Joseph Di Genova, who was on his legal team for some negative number of days last month, and cutting it up in such a way that it no longer makes any sense, but preserves and memorializes the emotion the poet-finder (trobador/trouvère) as TV spectator felt on discovering it.

Unfettered Power

by Donald J. Trump

“The questions are an intrusion into
the President’s Article 2 powers

under the Constitution to fire
any Executive Branch Employee...

what the President was thinking
is an outrageous.....

as to the President’s unfettered power
to fire anyone...”

Joe Digenova, former US
Attorney

Note how the first two couplets add up to a full sentence, though a difficult one to understand outside the context, and an idea that gradually fragments in what follows, into nothingness.

Alzati, pezzo di merda!

Piero della Francesca, early 15th century, The Flagellation, via.

David F. Brooks is visiting sunny Italy! Lago di Como, apparently, and like so many artists from grayer climes, giddy with the freshness of the air and the musicality of the voices, and working with a lively Italian-primitive palette in his new narrative work, "The Loving Place for Children That Assumes Beauty", for which he finds the bright, naive tone of a nursery tale or late-medieval saint's life:

Thirty-five years ago, the two Figini brothers,
Erasmo and Innocente, were living in Como
with their wives, Serena and Marina.

Erasmo was a famous fabric designer. Innocente
was a prominent eye surgeon. They were successful,
but along with their wives, spiritually unfulfilled,
unable to understand the meaning of
the suffering they saw and felt. Erasmo went
to see a renowned priest, Father Luigi Giussani,
who saw faith not as an intellectual system,
but as an encounter with beauty, a love story.

Erasmo returned to his wife and reported: “God exists.
I have met someone who is a witness to his reality.”

Serena was intrigued: Erasmo was the last
person you’d call religious. But eventually
both couples met with Giussani and all found faith.

One day in 1986, Innocente
reported that there was an H.I.V.-infected
baby at the hospital whose mother was dying.
Erasmo and Serena had vowed to each other that they
would never have children, but they felt a swelling
of gratitude and said they would foster the baby.

Breitbart Fail

Stockholm street food, via.

New poll: Strong majority across Europe believe integration of migrants has failed. 73% in Sweden say it has gone badly. https://t.co/jWD4Yb03nL

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 30, 2018

Well, wait a minute. In what context? Failed how? What do they want to do about it??

I thought I'd go straight to the report of this survey (28,000 respondents from all 28 EU countries, held October 2017), just issued by the European Commission, instead of giving Breitbart a click, and quickly started seeing a story in which that's not the headline.

For example, the first thing you notice is that the number of people who are worried about it is in steep decline: those who list immigration as the most important issue facing the EU are down to 39% from a peak of 58% in fall 2015. That's higher than it would be if people were adequately informed, but they aren't in their own view—

For the record: Happy birthday Uncle Karl!

In 1861, via Wikipedia.

The old boy's turning 200 in a few days (May 5), and this guy called Jason Barker, who has written a piece of historical fiction in which Marx is the protagonist, got an op-ed in the Times to celebrate:

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right! https://t.co/iEPenRz6GC

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Right, this philosophy professor (in South Korea!) and novelist (https://t.co/8J1oUWZqCY) argues, in that everybody now knows the basis thesis, that capitalism is unsustainable over the long term, is correct. pic.twitter.com/KOJz1XrO14

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

I'd add that since that 2002 statement the research of Piketty and Saez on longterm tax collection has demonstrated empirically that it's true, as continues to be corroborated https://t.co/6UeGKFbbGk

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Also gratifying to note somebody agreeing with me that Marx's work represents a definitive break with the Enlightenment, in his rejection of idealism for materialism, a leap comparable to Darwin's in natural science. pic.twitter.com/j9ln3QBTvj

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Communism is long dead, thank goodness, and there's not going to be a revolution, but Marx's critical spirit is alive, and more needed than ever, pic.twitter.com/KYfovsVjW1

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Comedy

"Mother Nature is a woman because she’s trying to kill us in the most passive aggressive way possible. She’s like, ‘What? I raised the temperature a little. Maybe I wouldn’t have if you had taken out the recycling like I asked.’”

OK, so I love Michelle Wolf. Let's just come right out and say it. I think she's the best thing on the current iteration of the Daily Show—I like the whole thing fine, and I'm especially fond of Roy Wood Jr., but I think Michelle Wolf is truly gifted, funny, and original, deeply daring on subjects of sex and race, with a range from Gracie Allen ditzy to Stephen Colbert brutal, sometimes within the compass of a single clause, and always with that that Pennsylvania bray and  lunatic smile, like an overmedicated ten-year-old narrating the school pageant.

So in the first place I can't imagine why the White House Correspondents' Association offered her the gig at all, if only because she's so unpredictable. This is somebody who can start off sounding scholarly, though silly, on the Second Amendment, and veer into what seems like an approbation of "slave sex" before you know it. Did they watch any of her work? Or did they just Google "woman under 40 because #MeToo", the way Jared Kushner discovered Trump's expert on the China trade, the unspeakable Peter Navarro?

So if you think the routine wasn't her best work, I'm OK with that. I really think she's at her best in short bits with a straight man like Trevor, and I think she was creatively inhibited by the rigorous form of the thing, with its mandatory one-liners for each of 40 or 50 of the more famous guests.

Colbert in 2006 managed to break that thing, in a way that can never be repeated. Just watched it again for the first time in quite a while, and found myself unexpectedly very moved at the bit toward the end in his "audition tape" for the press secretary's job, where the late Helen Thomas chases him out of the White House demanding to be told why the US invaded Iraq. That's surely one of the greatest pieces of television in the history of the technology. But just don't blame Michelle Wolf, OK?

Is the United States Necessary?

With all respect, don't see why they expect me to think this picture represents something real.

I don't know why I let it happen, but I keep getting enraged by the emerging consensus that Emperor Trump did something positive to bring about whatever is going on on the Korean peninsula, from the wingnuts calling for him to be given the Nobel Peace Prize right away (don't wait for the Norwegians to do it, just steal Obama's and give him that one) to Mr. Magisterial David Sanger offering his balanced appraisal to readers of The New York Times:

President Trump insists that his own actions are responsible, that his threats of “fire and fury” and, more important, his intensified sanctions, forced Mr. Kim to this moment. He is partly right: Mr. Trump has shown an energy in confronting North Korea that President Barack Obama never did.

But disarmament experts who watched the Korean leaders meet in the DMZ agreed that Mr. Kim had been driving the events.

"Shown" being the operative word there: Obama certainly didn't tweet threats of nuclear war or offensive nicknames to the wider public. He did what he did quietly, without checking with David Sanger first, and Sanger still can't forgive him for that. He prefers a White House like that of George W. Bush or the current occupant flooding the press with 50 or 60 lies a day to one that puts him on a low-calorie diet of truth, in modest quantities.

But it isn't even the implied insult to Obama that bothers me: it is, once again, the continuing inability to recognize that South Korea has anything to do with it, or even exists.

For the Record: Psychopathy

Via obviously psychopathic expert guy.

I felt we got somewhere interesting in the following:

It's the psychopathy. He's not cognitively incapacitated but can only think about something to the extent it immediately pains or gratifies him. What he learns about "issues" is what it takes to get the rubes to applaud or get a rise out of us.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

That's easier. The expert's doing all the work, he just has to make a serious face and the expert feels understood.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

Well, sure, but I don't think he's doing it to please the person, he's doing it to display to the next person that he has an interesting opinion. "A lot of people don't know this, but..."

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

You bet. One thing I still don't get is, people (and T himself) say he wants people to "like" him. And yet he is easily the most despised person on the planet. Maybe that desire to be liked is rooted in psychopathy, with appropriate results.

— Ellis Weiner (@EllisWeiner) April 28, 2018

As it happens, I ran across something relevant in an old thing, from The New York Times's David Sanger, from November 2016, on Trump's campaign interview with Haberman and Sanger the previous March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

(My bold.) That's so Trumpy. He's got the crowd-pleasing condemnation of the JCPOA, which he's going to stick to, but no knowledge of what the JCPOA is or what it's supposed to accomplish to explain what it is he objects to, and he gets Sanger and Haberman to feed him a reasonable-sounding answer, giving Sanger a quote he's still working six or seven months later.  Not cunning enough that Sanger doesn't notice it, but enough that Sanger will just hint at it, with Church-of-the-Savvy obliqueness, not risking his access.

Literary Corner: I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist

Mainstream media are concerned, inevitably, by the eccentricities of President Trump's call-in to the Fox & Friends show yesterday morning, in which he seemed to be growing more and more out of control as the half-hour wore on, and Doocy, Earhardt, and Kilmeade looked increasingly alarmed, until he finally began complaining, "I have a phony cloud over my head that doesn't exist."

Upon which they decided they'd better get him off the line, eventually shoving him away a little brutally when he didn't get the message ("We could talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do") and Trump was able to hang up, turn his own TV back on, and crawl under the covers.

Worried about health of Pres Trump. C/S John Kelley needs to get him off-line and get a week rest. Phone call to FOX News very troubling. Has three years left in Office. POTUS has immense legal authority. An unstable Pres is not good for the American people.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) April 27, 2018

But here at Rectification Central we have another way of looking at it, of course, taking its point of departure with the form of what Trump says, as in the bit two thirds of the way in or so after he's moved on from North Korea and "Sleepy Eyes" Chuck Todd to the discussion of CNN and its "council of seven people and of the seven people every one of them is against me," and this startling exchange:

The Silence of Kevin Williamson

Effie Deans, by John Everett Miilais. Lillie Langtry is said to have been the model. Via RubyLane.

Anti-abortion freak Kevin D. Williamson continued today to be silenced (in Lemieux's conception) by the thought hegemony of the international cultural Marxist left. This morning he was silenced in a full-length column in the Washington Post, "The Punishment I Favor for Abortion", in which he suggests that he's finally going to tell us whether or not he thinks women who have abortions should be executed by hanging, as would have happened to poor Effie Deans in the Edinburgh Tolbooth Prison in Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1818), if her brave sister Jeanie hadn't walked clear from Dumfriesshire to London to beg the queen for her life (though Effie was charged not with abortion, which wasn't covered by criminal law in Scotland in the 1720s or anywhere else, but with killing her newborn, and indeed turned out to be innocent of that as well, somewhat to her own surprise).

Which was a question of some suspense, for Williamson followers (see Roy), because he's been teasing us for a while now, not saying anything about it in the piece Wall Street Journal published when he was being silenced over there last Friday, refusing to tell Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine unless New York agreed to publish his essay on the subject, which he explained to us this week when he was silenced at The Weekly Standard:

Stressed

Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale. via Historia Magazine. 

Weird from Marc Thiessen at Wapo in defense of Ronny Jackson's nomination as head of the Veterans Admimistration, starting off with a headline that really sounds like something that might mean something—
VA doesn’t need a manager. It needs a leader.
Until you ask yourself, well,  this guy certainly doesn't seem to be a manager, but, um, wait maybe it does need a manager.

Of course Thiessen seems to have been writing when this story was at a fairly early stage in its evolution,

Jackson’s nomination hearing has been postponed because of last-minute allegations that he created a “hostile work environment.”

before we started hearing about the misbehavior on overseas trips with President Obama, and the passing out of Percosets and writing prescriptions for himself, and the hostile working atmosphere turning out to be on the Game of Thrones model,

‘flat-out unethical,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘100 percent bad temper,’ ‘toxic,’ ‘abusive,’ ‘volatile,’ ‘incapable of not losing his temper,’ ‘the worst officer I have ever served with,’ ‘despicable,’ ‘dishonest,’ as having ‘screaming tantrums’ and “screaming fits,’ as someone who would ‘lose his mind over small things,’ ‘vindictive,’ ‘belittling,’ ‘the worse [sic] leader I’ve ever worked for.’

or he might at least have devoted some time to suggesting the stories might be fictional.

But I think he goes wrong in a somewhat less silly way here:

Cheap shots

I got nothing but this junk going on. There's a slightly new Dinesh angle at the bottom.

If it's secret, what's your source for the numbers?

— Per Aspera Ad YAStra (@Yastreblyansky) April 24, 2018

Also somebody who was supposed to destroy the earth by fire, like God promised, but that guy was aborted too. You can't count on people any more.

— Per Aspera Ad YAStra (@Yastreblyansky) April 24, 2018

Muddling

From the I Naibi Tarot deck of Giovanni Vecchetta, 1893.

Here's another big idea about what's going on since the 2016 election, and how it ends, from Dylan Matthews at Vox: that it doesn't end, or not in any satisfying way: maybe we get rid of Trump relatively soon, that is, and maybe we don't, but the dysfunctionality of our poor old model of government, the lameness of it, isn't going away any time soon. There's not a happy ending, or a cathartic ending, or a redemptive ending. The lovers' misunderstanding won't be resolved, the wicked will mostly remain unpunished, no new king will show up out of exile.

There's no reason to think Adam Davidson is wrong, particularly, in contending that the Trumpery itself has come to the top of the wheel of Fortune and has begun its inevitable trajectory to death. There's no special reason, in Matthews's view, to think he's right, either, or, at least, to think it's such a crucial question:

Jew know what I mean?

12th-century German painting of two Jews for which I'm not finding a helpful source. Is the one on the right a little on the sleepy-eyed side?

I don't know if everybody's heard about the theory that Trump calling an NBC newscaster "Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd" is an anti-Semitic slur. Like a lot of people, I'd never heard of such a thing, but this thread from Stonekettle (who had also never heard of such a thing) made me take it seriously:

I did not know "sleepy eyes" was an anti-Semitic slur.

When I was told such here on Twitter, I went and looked it up.

It is. And it's much worse than that.
1/ https://t.co/jZmMplHrtE

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) April 22, 2018

Dinesh D'Souza, of course, didn't believe a word of it. Show me some evidence! I couldn't resist the challenge and gave it about five minutes of Dr. Google: