Rice and Fall: Postscript

Guatemala, last year, photo by Moises Castillo/AP via Washington Post. You may have missed the story, as I did. Ivan Velásquez is a Colombian human rights and anti-corruption activist who has served since 2013 as head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, and this is a demonstrator protesting against it on behalf of President Jimmy Morales, who, like many presidents, dislikes being investigated, and announced in August that he was canceling the commission's mandate, while "surrounded by soldiers and police, a powerful image in a country that endured four decades of brutal military governments before transitioning to democracy in 1997. Meanwhile, a column of Jeeps — some with roof-mounted machine guns — rolled through the city, pausing at the CICIG and passing the U.S. Embassy and homes of human rights activists, according to news reports and videos". Supported by people like the demonstrator in the photo and celebratory firecrackers. The Trump administration responded by sending the Guatemalan defense ministry 38 more J-8 Jeeps, which disturbed Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), then ranking member and now chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee: "It is difficult to understand how such a transfer would be made without a resolution of the threatening action by the Guatemalan government against U.S. personnel on Aug. 31." While people who run away from Guatemala because President Morales refuses to protect them are treated as criminals by CBP at the Mexico-US border. And the president of the US who indulges Guatemalan corruption this way isn't so indulgent to the population and cuts off humanitarian aid because he's having a temper tantrum. 

A little more of that colloquy I posted earlier: what led up to the "white nationalist" debacle, on the issue of hate speech:

If you stereotype a group of people this way--they think there's nothing wrong with rape, murder, etc. as long as they're safe from it--I would think that's pretty dehumanizing. If I was a member of such a group I'd feel threatened.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

But I don't know if I'd report it unless it was clearly e.g. aimed at Jews or the like. If you mean Democrats, I'd probably just laugh at you and write a blogpost about it.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

He didn't mean Jews or Democrats. And he's consciously dehumanizing, like it's moral choice he's proud of, which shocks me a little, and I'm pushing back:

For the Record: The Rice and Fall

Updated

John Podesta's creamy risotto as reconstructed by Julian Assange and Food & Wine. No, Assange had nothing to do with the culinary part. To paraphrase Count Dracula, "I never cook... food." Photos by Tara Fisher and David Becker/Getty Images.

LEAKED: Wikileaks hack reveals John Podesta's secret to creamy Risotto pic.twitter.com/A5dW4mG9c6

— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) October 11, 2016

Sour, sour day. I see Podesta doesn't know the difference between "its" and "it's", but I can assure you he's right about the risotto. I find it's also necessary to add grated cheese, even if it means contradicting the laws of Italian cooking by combining cheese with mushrooms or seafood, to endow the creaminess with body.

Democrat logic right now:

1) Hillary Clinton deletes thousands of emails from a private server.
- Dems: “Nothing to see here!”

2) AG Barr releases an entire 488-page Special Counsel report with only light redactions.
- Dems: “It’s a cover up!”

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 5, 2019

link for FBI judgment on email deletions: https://t.co/ocfK5penRs
link for FBI judgment on Trump obstruction: https://t.co/3sUTI2AmY8 pic.twitter.com/7QM9COhENn

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) May 5, 2019

At Long Last

To the tune of:


This is a marvelous recording of a Cole Porter song I didn't admire that much before hearing this interpretation, spiriting ordinary cabaret into jazz heaven.

My lyric is inspired by that great line in today's telephone story, as in the NBC version:

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Friday and both agreed "there was no collusion" between Moscow and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

as if it was a kind of mystery to the two men whether they had colluded together or not, but they checked their calendars and neither one of them could find any.

"Vova are you colluding with me?"
"I'm not sure, does it matter?" https://t.co/jMCm9wbhU9

— I Feel Snitty Oh So Snitty (@Yastreblyansky) May 3, 2019

Is this a tour de force
or only a tour
is it like grabbing pussy
or more like garroting the poor
Is it a Marx Brothers script
or just Bud and Lou
is it an inaccurate refrain
or merely untrue

Is it some juicy gossip
or is it the math
Is this a golden shower
or am I taking a bath
is it petty financial fraud
laced with confusion
or is it at long last
collusion?

Horse race stuff

David Brooks name-checks our BooMan ("The Revolt of the Democratic Elites")!

The Diploma Divide among Democrats this year isn’t as stark as the one between Republicans in 2016. Joe Biden is popular among all Democratic groups. For example, according to a recent CNN poll, he’s just as popular as Bernie Sanders among people who call themselves “very liberal.”

But, there may be a growing Democratic Diploma Divide. As Martin Longman points out in Washington Monthly, less-educated, older voters are more likely to support Biden. Bernie Sanders, with his more outsiderish, disruptive campaign, is more competitive with more educated, younger voters.

To demonstrate that the the party's elites are revolting against the inevitable Biden nomination. People under 45 are now defined as "the elites", apparently, or something, although that's kind of an upside-down version of what Martin points out

Mueller Blogging

Dahlia Lithwick on my radio said something I was starting to think in my own half-assed way on Kamala Harris's questioning of the attorney general yesterday, that it was kind of weird when she was browbeating Barr over whether he had looked at the original evidence on which Mueller's failure to decide whether Trump had obstructed justice or not, because do people at that level really listen to all the tapes look at all the canceled checks and so forth?

And what was important, which Harris apparently missed: that his lack of familiarity with the evidence materials was the least of it. He didn't seem to be very familiar with the report itself, or even the executive summaries. For example, he didn't know who Konstantin Kilimnik was (quoting from Philip Bump/WaPo's survey of some of the stuff Barr didn't seem to know)—

“What information was shared?” Barr asked.

“Polling data was shared, sir,” Booker replied. “It’s in the report; I can cite you the page.”

“With who?” Barr responded.

Booker continued with his questioning.

And more significantly, he didn't seem to know that Mueller had explained why he didn't make a ruling in the obstruction case, leaving it to Congress:

And not to the attorney general. It's almost as if Barr decided what he was going to say first, and looked at the report afterwards, and it doesn't look good.

Left Behind

Kevin Kühnert. Photo by Tibor Boz/Redux/laif vie Die Zeit.

In a nice piece on Kevin Kühnert, leader of the youth organization of Germany's Social Democratic party, who is trying to bring back socialism into the party's conversation, Jochen Bittner in The Times reminds them that our DSA politicians really aren't:

Forget the wannabe socialism of American Democrats like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old Mr. Kühnert is aiming for the real thing. Socialism, he says, means democratic control over the economy. He wants to replace capitalism as such, not just to recalibrate it.

In the United States, policies frequently branded as “socialist” — health care for all, a national minimum wage, and tuition-free universities — have very little to do with actual socialism. Big government, yes — but all of them fit comfortably in a traditional free-market economy.

In contrast, German neo-socialism is profoundly different from capitalism. In an interview with my newspaper, Mr. Kühnert took specific aim at the American dream as a model for individual achievement. He said he questioned a system “in which millions start a race, very few make it over the finishing line and then shout back to the others, ‘You could have made it, too!’”

Kühnert wants collective ownership of industry—by the workers, not the state—and an end to the home real estate investment market:

Breaking

Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC.

Looks like Mueller read Barr's four-pager the same way I read it:

After Barr's four-page summary-not-a-summary. Don't think Mueller response to the spin conference is going to be available this soon. https://t.co/kHxlnSrNxO

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2019

It's the way Barr report was written ("did not find") specifically in order to be misread by the press ("there was no evidence") and to ratify Barr's own (wrong) conclusion that there should be no obstruction charges

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2019

Barr didn't tell any lies in the letter, but he wrote it to be misunderstood. And it looks as if he held back the summary reports after Mueller asked him to release them—

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and made some initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials....

Barr said he did not want to put out pieces of the report, but rather issue it all at once with redactions, and didn’t want to change course now, according to officials.

—in order to make more time for the false impression to settle into popular belief. As I said when Mueller investigators first began airing their discontent, in the Times story of 4 April. Now I'm watching Chris Hayes reconstruct what I told you all a month ago.

For the Record: Planked Salman

Once you've done a sword dance with a guy, you just can't stay mad. Screenshot from video by AP/Reuters via The Guardian.

Trumpy getting applause for tough talk aimed at the Saudi monarchy:

What Salman really said: Thanks for vetoing that nasty bill to cut off helping out with my Yemen war, Donald! You've been such a great little friend! Want to come over and touch my orb again? https://t.co/PdMlHXybTu

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2019

But impunity for the murderous Crown Prince (Salman, the father, is 83 and has been developing Alzheimer's dementia for a few years now and doesn't in fact rule the kingdom) who masterminded the killing of Jamal Kashoggi, and this (via news.com.au):

More Than Mere Anarchy

Couldn't find a decent illustration for "mere anarchy", which has been taken over by Woody Allen and Moby (in separate efforts), but here's a fabulous widening gyre, by Hiroshige.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, introduces his version of a take we'll be hearing a lot of, I'm sure, on the Mueller Report ("The Mueller Exposé")

Roughly four thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven Trump-era news cycles ago, there was a rather famous book called “Fire and Fury.” The author, Michael Wolff, used an interesting tactic to gain access to the Trump White House: He allowed his subjects, the president included, to believe that he was going to write a positive account of the Trump administration, and then used that access to produce an account of an administration in constant chaos, and a president who was understood by everyone around him to be unfit for the job.

One way to approach the Mueller report, if your sense of civic duty requires you to approach it, is to see it as a more rigorous, capacious version of “Fire and Fury.” Mueller's exposé was backed by subpoena power rather than just sweet talk, but ultimately it delivers the same general portrait: Donald Trump as an amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness.

Sure he's disgusting, but his quick-witted staff (as opposed to the corrupt staff that "surrounds" him, apparently he's got both) stops him from committing all the crimes he's inclined to commit, so we ought to be able to live with that for another four years. And what an "interesting" unethical slob that Michael Wolff was, allowing Trump to think he was going to tell comforting lies about the president when he was secretly planning to tell the truth the whole time. Now let's get back to the horse race!

New York note

Dumb picture, making the seats look much more partial-view than they actually were. Metropolitan Opera waiting for the 11:00 curtain of Götterdämmerung, the final part of the Ring des Nibelungen, which I've been watching on Saturdays over a lengthy (two-month) iteration of the cycle. Overheard a gent saying "Wagner's the only opera where the line's longer for the men's room than the ladies' room", which while not actually true is meaningful in some way—I guess in it's really more lines oriented to preparing for the future (Act I of this one is two hours long, as is Act III of Meistersinger) than dealing with the present.

Anyway the fact is that it got out at five but I'm still kind of wrecked and beginning to recognize I may not put out a post before midnight, so just saying hi.


I've heard four different Brünnhildes live, believe it or not, all in New York of course and all of them very good, but this one, Christina Goerke, an American who used to be an early music specialist singing Händel before her voice went nuts in her 30s, is by far the most what-you-need with a voice of extraordinary beauty that makes it over the gigantic orchestra without straining and the deep emotional engagement you can hear and see in this little excerpt—she's a real actor—and even a real trill, something hardly any Wagner soprano achieves, kept from her Händel days for the "Hojotoho" in Walkure. I can't begin to tell you how great she sounded today, but take my word for it.



And sexy Siegfried finale! Though the tenor's voice is a little tired.

Brooks on Biden

I may be pissed off with Biden, but I'll defend him to the death against the woozy admiration of David F. Brooks, who sees the Biden candidacy as part of the battle against meritocracy ("Your Average American Joe"):

Other people may claim to be populist in their policies — and because they are “right” on those, they are allowed to be contemptuous toward those who are less enlightened. Biden is a populist in his person and makeup — where he comes from and how he relates.

Joe's just a creature of intuition, not thought—a lovely, sweet-natured beast who will never make David Brooks feel ill-educated or inferior, as some unnamed person apparently does (Warren? Is that a backhanded reference to Warren?), piping his native wood-notes wild. You might think policy kinds of things would be important to somebody who's interested in governing, but then you might just be one of those elitists; simple-minded Joe understands that governing isn't a matter of gathering a bunch of extrinsic ideas but of being the right sort of person:

Inevitability

This is a pretty weird opening pitch from Biden, if you look at it:

The core values of this nation… our standing in the world… our very democracy...everything that has made America -- America --is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. #Joe2020 https://t.co/jzaQbyTEz3

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019

Wait we're supposed to vote for him why? Because the stakes are high? There's a missing premise there, which would answer why Joe in particular, what is his skill set that is more appropriate to a high-stakes election than a low-stakes one, and I think I know what it is and why he's not saying it aloud but hoping we'll imagine it:

For the Record: Lindsey

Illustration by Ben Wiseman/New York Tiimes.

To me, the Mueller report is vindication of President Trump:

* No collusion between Trump campaign and Russia.
* No underlying crime.
* No obstruction.
* The president and administration overwhelmingly cooperated with the Mueller investigation.

Time to move on.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 23, 2019

I sent a message to Senator Lindsey Graham:

Clear examples of obstruction are all over the Report. Here's a few from vol. II p. 5 pic.twitter.com/qyXienfwWl

— 100% Accurate Sentiment (@Yastreblyansky) April 24, 2019

Befriend your interior life!

Blackfoot nation camp ca. 1900, photo by Edward Curtis via Steven Draper's Pinterest.

When David F. Brooks says he's been doing something "recently" ("There Should Be More Rituals!")—

Recently I’ve been playing a game in my head called “There should be a ritual for. …” For example, there should be a ritual for when a felon has finished his sentence and is welcomed back whole into the community. There should be a ritual for when a family moves onto a street and the whole block throws a barbecue of welcome and membership.

There should be a ritual for the kids in modern blended families, when they move in and join their lives together. There should be a ritual for when you move out of your house and everybody shares memories from the different rooms there.

—it's a safe bet he's trying to suggest he thought independently of the thing he actually bumped into in the book he'll reference in paragraph 6, in this case Creating Rituals: A New Way to Healing for Everyday Life by Rev. Jim Clarke, Ph.D. (also the author of Soul-Centered: Spirituality for People on the Go),  2011.

Scapegoating the Collective

Update: Welcome Cowpokes from Mike's--Thanks Batocchio!

Via The Root.

Well hello, it's Chris Buskirk of the ultranationalist blog "American Greatness" (who's increasingly getting normalized on NPR's Morning Edition in the slot of representative conservative as they cast around more and more for Trump supporter journalists who sound as if they're educated) showing up on Good Friday on the New York Times op-ed page (last time was Guy Fawkes Day) with a piece denouncing the way

members of America’s ruling class, especially those in the media, the academy and government, have operated on one central, unquestioned assumption: orange man bad. This stifling orthodoxy led to a blind, counterfactual faith in the theory that Mr. Trump had somehow colluded with “the Russians” (never well defined) to win the election.

Actually it was the word "collusion" that was never well defined (which is why William Barr quoted Trump's use of it, "There was no collusion," at the press appearance Thursday morning, because it's not meaningful enough to count as an outright lie and he knew Trump would enjoy seeing it on his TV). "The Russians" is pretty simply defined as the government of federation president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the military intelligence service GRU, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, and a handful of supportive billionaire boyars dependent on Putin, with names like Prigozhin, Agalarov, and Deripaska, and the "faith" was that the Russian perceptions and the Trump campaign expectations, as the Mueller team would eventually summarize them—

Literary Corner: I'm Sorry I Wasn't a Robot

Gorilla Rescue Machine Brooster robot by Kelvin/PaperCraftSquare.

From a conversation with George Stephanopoulos:

Why I Said That Countless Members of the FBI Had Lost Confidence in the Leadership of James Comey Before He Got Fired Although That Was Not True

By Sarah Huckabee-Sanders

I said the word I used, ‘countless,’ and
I also said, if you look at what’s
in quotations from me, it’s that and it’s that
it was in the heat of the moment, meaning
that it wasn’t a scripted talking point. 

I’m sorry I wasn’t a robot like the
Democrat Party that went out for two-
and-a-half years and stated time and time
again that there was definitely Russian
collusion between the president and his
campaign, that they had evidence to show
it, and that the president and his team
deserved to be in jail. That he shouldn’t be
in office, when really they were the ones
that were creating the greatest
scandal in the history of our country.

It's not lying if it's in the heat of the moment. Who among us has not, in the throes of some strong emotion, said things were countless when they were in fact eminently countable? In fact when you think about it pretty much nothing is literally countless. Just because it hasn't been counted yet doesn't mean it won't be.

Good Impeachment Takes Time

Via.

There's some really interesting news out of the Reuters-Ipsos poll (h/t Scott Stedman), which has found, in polling conducted Thursday through this morning, that Trump's approval rating has dropped 3 percentage points since the Mueller report was released, to its lowest level of the year to date in that poll, 37%. Although—and this is important—support for impeachment remains pretty weak.

The really startling thing is the share Republicans are taking in the result, with the total number approving Trump at 75%, down from 83% in late March. That's a lot!

And it's pretty reminiscent, once again, of what started happening to Richard Nixon in February 1973, when the Senate Select Committee began its hearings, and continued on to October, and the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon's approval rating somewhat stabilized at very low levels; note particularly how the Republican vote, the red line in the chart below, sinks from 90% at the beginning of the plunge to hover around 50% for the duration.

Mueller Blog: Trump's 86% Memory Loss

Trump's responses (or rather the responses issued by Giuliani, Sekulow, et al.) to Mueller's written questions in lieu of a proper interview, submitted under oath 20 November, are included somewhere in the Mueller report, and can also be seen separately in various venues, like CNN, but haven't attracted a lot of attention, presumably because they are really not very informative, about 86% "I do not recall." Seriously: as Philip Bump reported with admirable precision at the Washington Post,

They covered four primary topic areas: the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, the Russian effort to interfere with the election, the proposed development project in Moscow and contacts with Russia or Russia-related issues during the campaign and transition. In total, the Mueller team asked 38 distinct questions with 37 follow-ups.

Trump offered 22 distinct answers. In 19 of those answers, he claims not to remember or recall some particular issue. Often, those failures to remember what happened constitute the entirety of his response.

Maybe it's true. He's certainly suffering from some kind of memory problem; in a tweet yesterday he didn't even seem to remember answering the questions at all:

Mueller Blog: The establishment

Photo by Picpedia.

From the executive summary to Volume I, in the cuttable-pastable version supplied by The New York Times:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

But

when substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence, the report states that the investigation established that certain actions or events occurred. A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

And a bit later

the investigation did not establish that one Campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia. The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Kislyak and Sessions in September 2016 at Sessions's Senate office included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.

Looking more like my first thoughts on "did not establish" as it was quoted in the Barr letter in March were right—that it means "I know this happened but I can't prove it, yet." Especially obvious in the case of the platform change, which was so bizarre at the time (as I said recently, it was the first thing that started me imagining a Trump-Russia conspiracy, at a time when the idea was barely a gleam in Josh Marshall's eye). There was just no conceivable reason why that would have happened—the campaign clearly had no interest in any part of the platform other than this exotic bit of foreign policy and who on earth cared about that? Except the campaign manager Paul Manafort, who'd been working for the pro-Russia faction in Ukraine for what were soon to turn out to be many undeclared millions of dollars, and Ambassador Kislyak, attending the Republican convention in Cleveland for reasons that haven't been explained. And yet—how would you go about proving that they were doing it basically because Putin wanted them to?

Immediately after that bit the authors move on to talking in very general terms about the evidence they haven't got and why they haven't got it

The investigation did not always yield admissible information or testimony, or a complete picture of the activities undertaken by subjects of the investigation. Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity. The Office limited its pursuit of other witnesses and information — such as information known to attorneys or individuals claiming to be members of the media — in light of internal Department of Justice policies...

and

given these identified gaps, the Office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.

Mueller seems to me to be saying pretty nearly explicitly, "Please follow up on these items, Chairman Nadler."

Quick note: Barr lies

Barr certainly lied in a very material way in the press conference when he said "no evidence":

the Special Counsel’s report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its hacking operations. In other words, there was no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion” with the Russian government’s hacking.

Rather, as I and others have been explaining since the four-page letter came out a month ago, there may not have been enough evidence, but there was definitely some. This is confirmed in the first-volume executive summary:

p. 9

Especially since the insufficiency is tied to ongoing investigations (the redacted matter, evidently related to Gates and Stone) and to false testimony (by Flynn, Papadopoulos, etc.), or evidence that was destroyed or otherwise denied to the investigators

p. 10

They might have had sufficient evidence if the report had been delayed until the investigation of Gates and Stone was finished, and/or if suspects hadn't withheld it or concealed it in one way and another. (Or I'm totally convinced they would have; it's way too much evidence to ignore.)