Jessye Norman RIP

The great soprano, maybe the greatest musician I've seen, who died yesterday. I never saw enough of her, and I think this is the performance that I regret missing most, in the 1988 Ariadne auf Naxos with Tatiana Troyanos (who died really young) and Kathleen Battle and James King. I saw her in the part in 1993 but in a hateful, silly, too-busy production where she got a bit buried.

Literary Corner: That Hat

Photoshop by the Brazilian artist PSHoudini via Tom Banwell, 2011.

This enchanting piece from the president's remarks at the the US Mission to the United Nations, last Thursday, on the release of the whistleblower report:

That Hat Wouldn't Work For Me

by Donald J. Trump

I say, “Steve, what happens when
you come off a vice presidential
plane, it’s called Air Force Two,
your father’s with you, you walk
into a room in China and they
give you a fund of $1.5 billion,
billion, you make hundreds of
thousands of dollars and millions
of dollars off that. And that’s probably
not all they gave him. They gave
him plenty more, I’m sure.
We might never find out."

Hi It's Stupid: Concern Trolling

Troll, via.

Hi, it's Stupid to tell Republican senators they'd be smart to join Democrats in sufficient numbers to convict Trump or even better send that delegation over to the White House in the next few weeks if that had a chance of getting him to move out.

Not that I do concern trolling, and I don't think I have any Republican senator readers anyway, but I think one could make a pretty solid Brooks-style argument that Speaker Pelosi has just offered them the best deal they're likely to get:

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, and Republicans Ignore That at Their Peril

This political brawl could permanently break the party.

I don't mean it could split your party leadership into irreconcilable factions of Trumpers and anti-Trumpers as if the latter, an insignificant minority, could pose an existential threat to the former, instead of just slinking out almost unnoticed like Kristol or finding a way of getting along like Brooks. I mean it could leave the party voted nearly out of existence in November 2020 and unable to reconstruct itself, like the Whigs in 1852. But before I get to that, senators, let me appeal to the better angels of your nature.

Self-Dunk

Via.

Required reading, the best thing I've ever seen on Trump's speech style and its relationship, if any, to his belief system, by David Roth for Deadspin:

It is a problem for President Donald Trump that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell he’s talking about. This is not one of those signature Trump defects that can readily be spun into a secret strength or as a subtle bit of advanced dealcraft that only experts and initiates can appreciate. His mind is a television that changes channels every three seconds and where every channel has an infomercial on it; it cycles day and night without ever quite cohering into a signal. There is plenty of noise, though, and because Trump so utterly lacks discernment he is constantly interrupting himself with some new bit or blurt. As a result, his average sentence is a parade of wild upstage moves in which whatever thought he’s had most recently is forever blundering into and past the one he had just begun to express—imagine one of those halftime shows at a NBA game in which people throw down wild dunks after leaping off trampolines except there’s a new guy jumping on the trampoline every second and there are frequent midair collisions. Trump also only knows about a hundred words, about a third of which refer to volume or size....

And much, much more.

Longer™ David Brooks: Impeachment

Organ grinder and girl, Rosh Hashanah card from Brooklyn, early 1900s. I may wish you another Happy New Year later but Brooks almost certainly won't. Image via The Blog About the Postcards.

Opinion

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, but Is That Any Reason to Get Him All Riled Up?

This political brawl will leave Trump victorious.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• Sept. 26, 2019

Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense on that call with the Ukrainian president. But that doesn’t mean Democrats are right to start an impeachment process.

Remember, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. Some people say that means the definition of what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors isn't a question for lawyers like in a court proceeding but politicians like in Congress which is where impeachment takes place, but I have a quirky original take, which is that it really means nobody's required to impeach anybody, it's just something you can do if you think it's a good idea, like passing appropriations bills, which used to be regarded as a must, but nowadays you just put through a continuing resolution and save yourself all the agita, and don't even think about budgets.

And in local decompensation news...

David Rothkopf mentioned Captain Queeg, but Queeg was far more in touch with reality than this. Our president, who does not even know the word "apostrophe", wants the world to consecrate his misuse of one.

Unless...

Tin sign from Desperate Enterprises, $10.56 down from $14.99.

I'm really shaken by this, via NPR:

Americans are split, 49%-46%, on whether they approve of Democrats' impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and independents at this point are not on board, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds.

But the pollsters warn that the new developments could change public opinion quickly, especially with 7 in 10 saying they are paying attention to the news.

You bet it could. The number favoring has never been anywhere near this close to 50% before, let alone higher than the number opposing. It looks like a really new world, and your congresscritters, who either are or aren't seeing similar developments in their own constituencies, know if it is or isn't. This was taken Wednesday night, after Pelosi announced the formalization of the impeachment inquiry, before the whistleblower complaint was released. It could move very fast indeed.

Or it could be just more statistical noise—one poll never tells you the truth about anything, don't get too excited—but if it's a real phenomenon and sustains itself, I'm seriously starting to imagine we could end up removing Trump from office, in the way I was suggesting last March, a month or so before the Mueller Report arrived, when I discovered this chart:

Attempting to extort one Ukrainian president may be regarded as a misfortune, Mr. Worthing..

...attempting to extort two Ukrainian presidents looks like carelessness.

David Suchet as Lady Bracknell at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, 2015.

Here's Junior:

🚨🚨🚨 We should impeach them all. That's how this works, right? Given their rules its a no brainer since there's an actual ask, unlike anything they're coming up with.

Their rules not ours! https://t.co/tHVArf1sq0

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 25, 2019

Actually there's a bit more here going on here than just laughing at Junior for thinking it's a thing that you can impeach senators; something that sheds a good bit of light on the current case (of which I was reminded a day or two ago by our friend Boswood).

Not that the allegation he's retweeting is true. The letter of 4 May 2018 from Senators Menendez, Durbin, and Leahy to the Ukrainian prosecutor general Yurii Lutsenko did not ask him to "investigate Trump"; it asked him not to stop its cooperation with the Mueller investigation in its investigation of the criminal Paul Manafort, as they appeared to have done "to avoid the ire of President Trump":

The gun is smokin, it's really smokin

...come in spies and blink your eyes I say this gun is smokin

Quickly, some key excerpts from the "transcript" (not a diplomatic-phonetic transcription but clearly pretty well done) of the Trump-Zelensky phone conversation of 25 July, with comments from me:

Zelenskyy (apparently that's how his name is spelled on his passport) has clearly been briefed on how Trump likes to be talked to.

Nice little country you got here...

Hi It's Stupid: Impeachment

(No Bruckner, a composer I really can't stand, but this Wagner, conducted by Levine to last a full minute longer than Wilhelm Furtwängler's version, illustrates the kind of agonizing drawing-out alluded to in the reference below.)

Hi, it's Stupid to say I've been completely wrong about the dangers of moving into full impeachment mode over the past few days, because I could probably change my mind again in about 20 minutes, but my main objections to the way it was going forward seem to have been answered: we are not moving to impeach the president over a single phone call where he probably acted like a gangster, and we're not going to rush to get it over with before the New Hampshire primary.

The phone call, or rather the whole effort from the Ukrainian election in April to now to put the squeeze on President Zelensky to do something to harm Joe Biden or risk the US funding of the Ukrainian effort to hold off Russian conquest, which I still think is more Giuliani's baby than Trump's, is important for a couple of genuine reasons, as veteran Carl Hulse puts it at The Times, not just because of the exceptional clarity of the case itself but also because of the exceptional illegality of the White House response to public questions about it:

Got Paranoia?

Via.

Just thinking out loud here:

What if he used a fake charitable foundation for self-dealing, committed tax fraud and bank fraud in equal measure for decades, sold foreign policy for cash to Saudi Arabia and UAE?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 24, 2019

Why do you and some others seem so intent on limiting the case to this tiny tip of an iceberg of criminality?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 24, 2019

I'm with Steve. In 1974, the HJC and John Doar worked to narrow the offenses behind the articles.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 24, 2019

Well, they didn't narrow them that far. Three articles were approved, on obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress (the one Trump and Barr are so busy committing at the moment with their refusal to obey Nadler's and others' subpoenas), and two rejected, on the administration's falsification of records of the secret Cambodia bombing (we could have jailed Kissinger!) and Nixon's own failure to pay taxes on government-paid improvements to his places in San Clemente and Key Biscayne, which was characterized in the Article as taking unconstitutional emoluments (Nixon must be laughing hysterically in his grave over what Trump gets away with on this score).

Government of men

What -Gate is it going to be? I was thinking maybe we should call it Greatgate, i.e., the Great Gate of Kiev. Btw if you only know these pieces in the stylish orchestration by Ravel, you will be surprised by the mystery and emotion of Musorgsky's original piano suite.

Very depressing post from Steve M warns us not to get our hopes up because this thing of Trump putting pressure on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky is not going to go anywhere, with which I agree, though for somewhat different reasons—I don't see the use of putting so much blame on Democrats, especially Speaker Pelosi, as they maneuver their way through an inconceivably strange situation.

It was on 25 July, the very day after Robert Mueller's less than devastating congressional testimony, note Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Rachael Bade in a useful WaPo piece, that Trump, having declared himself totally exonerated of any attempt to collude with a foreign government to influence a US election, made that phone call in a different attempt to collude with a different foreign government to influence another US election; "Trump's Ukraine call," say the headline writers, "reveals a president convinced of his own invincibility."

Longer™ David Brooks: Moderate Utopia

If you haven't read Steve's take on this singularly awful Brooks column, or that of Eric Levitz at New York Magazine, you might want to look at them first.

Edmond van Daele as Robespierre in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927)

Opinion

Reflections on the Late Revolution in America

Or, 'Tis 30 years since: A look back at the Warren presidency from the imaginary future.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• Sept. 19, 2049

Few could imagine in the second decade of the 21st century that our divided country would ever find peace and unity under the beneficent rule of the Moderate Liberal Party that has now held power for 25 years, though one of them was certainly me, I mean one of the imagineers, for I had always retained my faith in the essential goodness of Americans. 

For others, however, there was a crisis of legitimacy. Many people had the general impression that legitimacy was not what it had once been and was now something different. Others felt that there was too little, or too much. It can't have had anything to do with the United States for the first time electing a president with African ancestry at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, although undoubtedly some people said that other people thought that was illegitimate, because that's how divisive and hurtful they used to be, and then the ones it was said about felt bad.

Non-humble brag

Image via Wikipedia.

Just realized I predicted all this two and a half weeks ago:

Translation: (a) Ukraine government refused to tell whatever lies about Biden Giuliani asked them to tell, (b) Putin had some special orders for Trump on Ukraine in that last phone call https://t.co/h6ETeuCICt, or (c) both https://t.co/IpVuyunOBz

— Liable Suit (@Yastreblyansky) September 2, 2019

Third Thoughts: Narratology

I hope I'm not getting repetitive here, but it's driving me nuts the way the journalists keep losing the thread and getting themselves manipulated from a significant development

The potentially incendiary whistleblower complaint that reportedly involves President Trump, also at least partially centers on Ukraine, the Washington Post and the New York Times reported Thursday evening.

While the contents of the complaint are still largely shrouded in mystery, multiple reports indicate that the complaint focuses on President Trump and an apparent “promise” he made during a phone call with a foreign leader. (Nicole Lafond/TPM; my bold)

to a completely unwarranted formulation

The DNI whistleblower case Josh has been tracking blew up Thursday night, as Giuliani gave an interview on CNN during which he admitted that he asked Ukrainian officials to look into Biden before quickly denying that he ever said such a thing. This bombshell comes amidst news that Trump made a promise to the Ukrainian president so alarming that it triggered the whistleblower’s complaint. (TPM staff; their bold)

There is no witness claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky is the foreign leader to whom Trump "made a promise". To the extent that anything about this story is true, and I suppose a lot of it is, that doesn't even make any sense.

What we know about the Giuliani strand is that

A Second Thought

Photo by George Marks/Retrofile/Getty Images via Vanity Fair.

Re yesterday's post. Not my thought, but that of some Twitter persons, which I can elaborate:

And then Sept 12, after Schiff asked for the whistleblower report, the aid to Ukraine was unfrozen by the White House.https://t.co/1n7tUeGaj0

— KC Murphy 🍑 (@klcmurphy) September 19, 2019

The Trump-Putin mystery call was 31 July. It was almost a month later, 28 August, that Politico reported the White House "seriously thinking" about refusing to renew its military aid program to Ukraine, which expires at the end of September, just after Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend with the G7 in Biarritz:

A Thought

Photo by Grigory Dukor/Reuters via Al Jazeera.

What did Trump say to a foreign leader on the phone to a "foreign leader" a couple of months or so ago that

included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Well, our source, the Washington Post, takes us through a list of Trump's contacts with foreign leaders in the weeks before the complaint was filed on 12 August that includes exactly one phone call:

A Pious Fraud

Bearded dragon, via Big Al's Pets.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Abortion Mysticism of Pete Buttigieg", New York Times, 17 September 2019:

According to Buttigieg, there are passages in the Bible claiming that human life begins with the baby's first breath. This proves that the pro-abortion position is the most mystical, least scientifically defensible of possible positions, and anti-abortion absolutism is the simplest and most scientifically coherent one. Indeed, the reason most people reject my view is that it leans too heavily on scientific definitions and biological-philosophical rigor, in contrast to ordinary people's muddle of moral intuitions on the status of the embryo and the requirements of female equality. So in fact I'm much smarter than Mayor Pete and he's much more fogged by medieval theology.

No. I'm not sure Buttigieg understands this quite as clearly as he might, either. And I may have worked through this argument before somewhere, but here's a pretty new approach:

The Monsignor's position isn't in fact scientifically rigorous at all. It's merely the kind of half-educated scientism that makes conservatives insist that gender fluidity isn't real, arguing that you can reduce a fundamentally social question to biology and not even aware of what the biological facts are or have become since St. Thomas Aquinas learned them from reading Aristotle—which in the case of sex is pretty baroque:

Another reason to impeach

T-shirt (apparently no longer available) by The Beehive. 

Now that the impeachment proceeding in House Judiciary has really taken off its mask at last—although there are people outside the committee (*cough* Steny Hoyer *cough*) continuing to deny it, and others (78-year-old freshman Donna Shalala) complaining that it's distracting from all the great work the House has done passing bills that Mitch McConnell will never allow the Senate to consider (you know, I'm a bit of a Shalala fan from 25 or so years ago when she was HHS secretary, but somebody needs to intervene to explain to her that your constituents don't get all that excited by bills that don't become law)—another possibility for how it could game itself out is occurring to me with more urgency, related to the fact that it's going on during a presidential election campaign, which has bothered me from the start.

What has bothered me being not so much that I object to it as that I don't know what it means: for example, how exactly does an incumbent president campaign during the impeachment process? This has never happened before, in the very short history of presidential impeachments.

There's a partly obvious answer, in that Trump will love telling the rallies about the victimization he's enduring from the Judiciary Committee, and they'll surely respond with perfervid passion, but is that really a good idea? Or will it attract more attention from the normal and not fully engaged to notice that he's accused of quite a lot of crimes, some of which he clearly committed?

This is not the way to bring an end to class

This is not the way to bring an end to the class system.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Meritocracy Is Ripping America Apart: How Savage Exclusion Tears the Social Fabric", New York Times, 13 September 2019:

Hey, guys, it turns out inequality is really bad! Not only for you and me and the rest of the great mediocre majority who never get a chance to rule the world, but even for the brilliant Ivy-trained wizards who do rule it! They have to work too hard, and it's ruining their lives! Meanwhile, I've learned that there are these things called state universities! They have one in Arizona! I got to visit it last spring and it knocked my socks off. Instead of doing all they can to keep people out, they keep trying to get more people in, and instead of getting worse from letting all those mediocre people in, it gets better. This could be a game-changer!

He's come to some clarity on the subject of what it is he hates about meritocracy, thanks to the book Brooksy has read the first 20 pages of for Friday's column, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor who is, according to the publisher blurb, "well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within." Well, speak for yourself, pal. If the rest of us peasants only know if from the outside, then we're not trapped within it. And if we're all trapped within it, then his experience isn't that special.

As a matter of fact it sounds like a pretty fierce indictment of something. As Thomas Frank writes, reviewing the book for The Times,