Joe

Valedictory: 2017 Cornell University Convocation; photo by Michael Suguitan for the Cornell Sun.

I think Steve is 100% right when he accuses old Joe Biden of Trumpiness in this game he's playing at the moment, hugging male persons up on stage and grinning his sweet open-hearted grin and telling the audience, "I want you to know I had permission to do that," as much as to say "unlike some of these new-fangled ladies who for some unaccountable reason think they feel threatened by my goofy and harmless old self," which as any fool can see is insane and perhaps insanely self-regarding. He's almost the Trump who says he couldn't possibly have assaulted some given woman because she's not hot enough, but makes it about what a silly old good he is.

Then he turns around and says some proper words about understanding that he needs to listen etc. etc. But he's winking, not in the obvious clown Trump way—he's a million times smarter than Trump anyway—but winking nevertheless.

Then blogfriend Lance Mannion comes out to do some handicapping, which, like me, he rarely does, and suggests that Biden's going to win the nomination, because he's kind of "our" Trump:

Literary Corner: Mr. President, tear down those hotels!

A year ago, Ishaan Tharoor at Washington Post was using the most famous windmills in European literature as a metaphor for Mexico (I think that's the Mexican flag in upper left, though the color process has made the green bar awfully blue), and our president's other fantasy enemies, but no, he's really got a serious issue with literal windmills!

Which goes back at least in part, as is well known, to his long war with the Scottish government over his golf course and resort near the village of Balmedie in Aberdeenshire, which he bought in 2006 under what he believed or claimed to believe were assurances from then chief minister Alex Salmond that no wind farm was going to be constructed within sight of the course (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds opposed both the proposed wind farm and the golf course, but Salmond helped Trump out with the permitting for the latter, I assume in the name of job creation). But by the time the course was ready to open in 2012, the wind farm had been more or less decided on, and Trump was threatening to back out of his own commitment (Salmond would be "known for centuries" as "the man who destroyed Scotland", he threatened, and when RSPB withdrew its objection to the energy project, since the number of birds killed by wind turbines is minuscule compared to the vast numbers that die or are never born because of the effects of fossil-fuel energy production, he said it should change its name to "Royal Society for the Killing of Birds"). But the threat was empty, like most of his threats, and he opened the place anyway, and lost his last appeal, during the presidential transition, as it happened, in December 2016.

So we know he never forgives or abandons his hope for revenge at all costs against those who give him a defeat, whether it's the NFL thwarting his longing to own a team or Mrs. Clinton not inviting him to her daughter's wedding, and that ought to be enough to explain his feelings about wind power, but I can't help feeling it's somehow more than that, that windmills truly creep him out in some irrational way, as you could hear in the tone of his remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday, where the tone mounted to the macabre, with a childlike hardness, a little Christina Rossetti:

Brooks on Poverty

Town Square of Waterloo, Ontario, via Hogg Fuel and Supply.

Some really remarkable goings-on in the current David F. Brooks, I mean qualitatively different from the usual dishonesty we like to tax him with over here, presenting a truly original view of, of all things, poverty reduction in his native Canada, which Brooks claims is being handled better up there than down here on the other side of the border, which doesn't sound surprising at all, since they have a much more effective government than we have, but that's not what Brooks is saying: he's claiming that Canada is doing a better job of poverty reduction than the US because they're thinking more like, not to put too fine a point on it, David F. Brooks ("Winning the War on Poverty"):

According to recently released data, between 2015 and 2017, Canada reduced its official poverty rate by at least 20 percent. Roughly 825,000 Canadians were lifted out of poverty in those years, giving the country today its lowest poverty rate in history.

How did it do it?.... They begin by gathering, say, 100 people from a single community. A quarter have lived with poverty; the rest are from business, nonprofits and government.

Well, on the other hand, at first blush the reality doesn't look anything like the way David Brooks thinks, according to the available online information, which I have access to, no thanks to David F. Brooks, who provides no links, but because I own a Google, where they tell how they did it, in the following terms:

Got Paranoia? Barr's Narratology

Would you buy a used funeral from this man? Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Time.

I should be writing an "I told you so" post on the revelation showing up in The New York Times last night that Mueller's staffers are starting to complain that Barr's letter made Trump look less implicated than he actually is:

WASHINGTON — Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations....

The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation.

But it strikes me as coming a little late. Barr has already succeeded in shaping the discourse in a way that may end up being really hard to remedy. I'm talking about that that weirdly incommensurate treatment of the two chosen aspects of the criminal investigation:

Psychopaths on Parade

Feral Britain. Forest of Dean, 2008, photo by David Slater/Alamy via Times Literary Supplement.

Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry in the New York Times:

“When it came down to it, she was just too sensible,” said Rosa Prince, the author of a biography of Mrs. May. “She’s got to be thinking of her legacy now, and if people are dying for lack of medicine, if there are food shortages, if Britain goes feral, that’s not how she wants to be remembered.”

It's not such a big deal that Britain might go feral, but that might lead to people saying unkind things about Theresa May.

All the Dems in this hipster Applebees are nuts about Mayor Pete

Via Thundra, vintage 2011. Requires some mouse hovering.

It's the world's greatest concern troll David F. Brooks, jumping on the Buttigieg train ("Why You Love Mayor Pete"):

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked on Monday. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out now.

If anybody has the stats on correlation between campaign biography sales 14 months before the conventions and nomination success, @ me.

International Fact-Checking Day

Ceci n'est pas un cigare volant, this is not a flying cigar, by Bonny Doon Vineyard, via Vincent Pousson.

In honor of International Fact-Checking Day, I would like to check a fact:

In 1998, Rep.Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton. No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2019

One of the signal differences between the Starr report and the Mueller report is, in fact, that while Attorney General Barr is intent on making redactions in the Mueller report before allowing members of Congress to see it, of

grand jury material, sensitive intelligence, matters that could affect ongoing investigations, and infringements on the privacy rights of “peripheral third parties.”

Attorney General Reno gave the Starr report to every member of Congress with no redactions at all (it was over his own grand jury testimony that Clinton was accused and subsequently acquitted of committing perjury, or, as I would prefer to call it, gentlemanly obfuscation of the unpleasant facts), and what Nadler was talking about was something he'd been allowed to read.

April Fool: I'm glad with that

Big Donald did an excellent April Fool funny, that unfortunately not too many people noticed:

Unless, you know, Donald still hasn't found out what Obamacare is or what Republican senators are up to and isn't joking at all, which is a possibility, I guess. Senator Rick Scott (FL-Death Eaters) had showed up on NPR in the morning to provide some of the evidence:

Untitled

For the Record: Channel Your Paranoia

Not waving but drowning, via Dr. Sophie Hay.

I went to a lot of political meetings in my youth, which is as I've noted somewhere one reason I can never truly get behind Bernie (every meeting had one, barking a bit, a few years older than the rest of us and deeply convinced of his rightness, never entertaining an idea he hadn't already had, dismissive of the hippies and shouting down the women), and it came to be a personal signature thing I would do to tell the others to "channel your paranoia"—limit the range of things you're going to be panicky about to those you've got a plan for, not that you're accepting the other awfulnesses, but you're not going to look as if you're desperate and drowning.

Nobody really paid any attention, usually. But while I'm up, I want to post a little experimentation I've been doing on the Twitter on the tone with which one talks about Trump, meant in the first place to sound less "hysterical" without minimizing the horror of what's going on:

#EmperorTrump https://t.co/DsqNSqlQc8

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Nevertheless the harm he can do while failing is immense, to children https://t.co/ensN2ySpEp https://t.co/QAr48vdfVr, environment https://t.co/EWVbGzTwiJ, farmers https://t.co/khE3cscimK really appalling

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

It's Kairos time again, you're gonna leave me

Outtakes from yesterday's Brooks that I can't process but can't quite let go of.

1. More on kintzugi:

I don’t know about you, but I feel a great hunger right now for timeless pieces like these. The internet has accelerated our experience of time, and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.

Please don't eat the teacups.

"Timeless" has to be one of the most vicious words in the advertising lexicon. I remember especially from my magazine days how it used to be applied to watches. You'd be talking about this grotesquely ugly $30,000 diamond-studded time-keeper and the copy would be gushing over the "timeless masterwork". The hell you say. And there's nothing more time-ful than a kintzugi bowl, with all the vicissitudes of its life literally glowing through its body like streaks of pure pain.

Literary Corner: The Internet Cleanse Cycle, Part I

Korean tea bowl, 16th century, with gold kintsugi repair work, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, via Wikipedia. 

From David Brooks, "Longing For an Internet Cleanse":

Kintsugi¹

By David F. Brooks

They look like they have golden veins
running through them, making them more
beautiful and more valuable² than
they were in their original condition.
There’s a dimension of depth³ to them. You sense
the original life they had, the rupture and then
the way they were so beautifully healed.
And of course they stand as a metaphor⁴
for the people, families and societies
we all know who have endured their own
ruptures and come back beautiful,
vulnerable and whole in their broken places.⁵

¹ The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer colored with the dust of precious metals, so that the break remains visible as a gold or silver seam, and the associated philosophical view that an object has its own life, of service, which is not ended by breakage, and can be restored.

² In the first wave of its popularity in the late 15th century, it's said collectors often smashed valuable pieces for the opportunity to turn them into kintsugi bowls, the way our wealthy philanthropists vote against a government-run social safety net in order to ensure a supply of broken people they can fix.

³ Unlike unmended bowls, which are always two-dimensional?

⁴ Of course! In reality, making the thing into a metaphor is the most un-Japanese thing you can possibly do with it. The deepest idea of the kintzugi philosophy is that of the mono no aware, the poignancy of things, in themselves, not as representatives of something else; as deserving the same tenderness we want for ourselves.

⁵ "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Most, I think the point is, aren't. The old tea bowl is in fact as strong as ever after the kintsugi work, though the Japanese beauty of the gold seam consists in its reminder of past suffering; the damaged human rarely is. You can send your broken human to the shop to see what they can do, but it really would have been better if it hadn't happened.

Designed to Lose

Ten-minute drawing by Bonnie-Hop/DrawCeption, November 2016.

Piggybacking on Steve's post yesterday on the new Trump Justice Department policy on the Affordable Care Act—and the ongoing appeal process over the December ruling by federal judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth in a suit brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general announcing that the whole law, including mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage of children up to age 26 on their parents' policies, regulations requiring insurers to give some kind of value for money, and health insurance for some 17 million people through the Marketplace and expanded Medicaid programs, is invalid—

That was OK with President Chucklehead, of course, who thinks consequences are for little people—

President Donald Trump was quick to take a victory lap, and pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the presumed incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to fix the problem. The president tweeted Friday night: "As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!"

—but the DOJ announced it would be defending part of the law, though not the pre-existing conditions part, presumably under the advice of lobbyists for insurers anxious to get around the Obama regulations against junk insurance that doesn't cover much of anything.

Now they've changed their minds and decided not to defend any of it at all, which seems like a pretty weird move from the political standpoint; healthcare is the most important issue on voters' minds, and they like what the ACA provides, though most of us really wish there was more of it. They showed it pretty clearly in the November elections, too, as seemed instantly clear the day after the elections:

Scandalmongering

Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger, 1927.

David F. Brooks wishes to inform the public that it's another bothsides case: "We've All Just Made Fools of Ourselves—Again".

Democrats, or at least former congressman Beto O'Rourke and former CIA director John O. Brennan, need to make a public apology to the president for calling him something like a traitor (and O'Rourke said he did the treason "ham-handedly", which is just mean) when they "lacked the evidence". Republicans need to apologize to Washington for calling it a swamp. Everyone concerned should adopt "an attitude of humility and honest self-examination."

I love it to death when David F. Brooks starts talking about honest self-examination. He, of course, is the exception, regarding himself as having no self to examine, an affable, ego-free void.

Also it's all because of Watergate:

Mueller Said to His Man. II

Image via Xavier High School Xpress.

In a progressive meaning-degeneration like a game of telephone, Robert Mueller:

"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

William Barr:

The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

David Greene/NPR:

The investigation did not find any like evidence right I mean there wasn't any collusion I mean do Democrats really sort of want to keep sort of beating this I mean dead horse?

That last one may not be verbatim, but the network really does keep saying the investigation "found no evidence" of collusion or of "conspiracy and coordination" if they're being a tiny bit more careful and "there was no collusion" (Rachel Martin at 6:09 repeated at 8:09) when they throw caution out the window, and that is absolutely not the case, and Barr absolutely did not say anything of the sort.

Mueller Said to His Man

Tony and John, encountered at many folk festivals in days gone by, the greatest.

Honest to god this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Barr's letter to the judiciary chairs and ranking members, Graham and Nadler, Feinstein and Collins

to advise you of the principal conclusions reached by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to inform you about the status of my initial review of the report he has prepared.

You've heard the conclusions by now, that the Special Counsel "did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election" and was unable to decide whether Trump obstructed justice or not. They might as well have put it the other way around, that it didn't find that Trump obstructed justice and couldn't decide if the campaign conspired, because it amounts to the same thing, or for that matter that it didn't find that the campaign didn't conspire or coordinate and couldn't decide if Trump was innocent. Or you could say Barr has been unable to determine what the Special Counsel did at all, which I think is unlikely, but he'd rather that's what we thought, but the evasiveness of it is just amazing. There are literally zero conclusions!

The only positive findings are the things we've known since the indictments of the St. Petersburg troll farm Internet Research Agency in February 2018 and the GRU email hackers in July. As to whether Trumpies had anything to do with these, at first you get the impression that they were looking for signs of the Trump campaign helping out with the trolling and hacking—"Hey Donald, you weigh 400 pounds and you're always on a bed, you should be good at this"—

If you've got the Mueller, I've got the beer

Backlit photo (is Trump trying to stop us from seeing his eyes?) from Kid Rock's Twitter via People.

OK, on reflection and some reading around, and an unbelievably tedious fight with a Greenwald acolyte (Glenn called it a "simple fact" that "not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election" by the Mueller team or, so far, in any of the spinoff cases, and I pointed out that until we saw Mueller's explanation for his declination decisions we could not know how simple the fact was and the acolyte called me a "conspiracy theorist"), I'm inclined to keep working on that bone we got thrown Friday night, by way of preparing myself and anybody who wants to join in for what is clearly not going to be a great big catharsis moment, but will be something nevertheless, when we start learning what's in the report.

One thing that fits in my normal frame of mind is a tweet from Richard Nixon's Michael Cohen, the ineffably proper and wholly rehabilitated John W. Dean:

Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion — only a recurring though — that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) March 23, 2019

The Idiocy of Rural Life

Mary Pickford in Sparrows (1926), by William Beaudine. Via Fritzi.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "What Rural America Has to Teach Us", New York Times, 22 March 2019:

What rural America has to teach us is that we should all live in a county with under 1,000 residents, or so few people that everybody has to double up on official functions in government and civil society and amateur sports as well as being bank presidents or owners of a Michelin-star bakery, which fortunately takes up no more than half your time, which will go along with an insane work ethic and "intentionality", which means having a pervasive civic mind-set. Then everybody will be just about perfect, leaving their doors permanently unlocked and going to meetings all evening, except the kids who get good grades and have to leave town to find something to do, and the local immigrants who dismember our hogs, who won't go on Facebook for fear of what they might find out about our political views.

Honest. I made up the Michelin star (in the column it's a James Beard Award), and the town he's visiting has 7,700 people, it's a bunch of other Nebraska counties that have fewer than a thousand, and the hogs are an educated guess, but other than that it's pretty much all in there: even unto

Mueller Lite? Or Mueller Heavy?

Drawing via English Update.

Took a personal day to attend to some business, leaving a quarter-finished post on some boring topic or other, and spent a few hours not looking particularly at any news, and this thing happens in the most unsatisfying way it could, of course, with a notice that there are no further sealed or forthcoming indictments from the special counsel's office, which doesn't mean nobody else is going to get indicted—ongoing investigations by the various US attorneys' offices and state attorneys general will certainly yield something—but does mean that The Report or the Principal Conclusions we might be invited to look at this weekend probably don't include any statements of culpability on the part of Junior, Kushner, and the Emperor in particular; as Rosenstein has written,

"Punishing wrongdoers through judicial proceedings is only one part of the Department's mission.... We also have a duty to prevent the disclosure of information that would unfairly tarnish people who are not charged with crimes."

If they aren't charged, we won't learn about the stuff they aren't charged with.

On the other hand, attorney general William Barr notes, the report is specifically supposed to be a report "explaining the prosecution and declination decisions", meaning that it's supposed to explain why they decided not to prosecute some cases, and a confidential report, that is one that may disclose such matters on the understanding that they aren't intended for the public, and Ari Melber (I'm live-blogging TV at this point) suggests that what actually gets released is negotiable: Mueller's gig is over, but Barr will consult him (and Rosenstein, who seems to have put off his widely reported plans to leave DOJ for at least some weeks) as to what confidential information can be revealed, with a preference, at least that's what they're saying, for revealing more rather than less.

And the congressional chairs, most notably Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee and Jerry Nadler of Judiciary, are very determined.

There's this long list of questions that look like they aren't being resolved at this point, anyhow, starting with Trump's long series of lies about his Russian business interests—the Papadopoulos behaviors, the Manafort attempts to cash in on his relation to Trump, Junior and the 9 June meeting, the inexplicable anti-Ukraine Republican platform change, Kushner and the Erik Prince matter, Manafort and the Tony Fabrizio matter, Kushner and Trump and the Mike Flynn matter, the lies of so many Trump staffers about their Russian connections, Trump's in-plain-sight secret meetings with Kislyak and Lavrov and so many times Putin himself, the endless Trump efforts to defy Congress over Russia sanctions, and so on. Are we seriously not going to learn anything about these? Just not ready to believe that. But we're not learning it today.