For the Record: Weak

Little Marco. Photo by Greg Nash/Getty via David Frum's impeachment piece from Wednesday in The Atlantic.

One of the things really striking me in the course of the impeachment proceedings was the appalling personal weakness of those tough-guy pro-Liberty Republican senators, which we often don't see because they have so much ability—I won't call it "power"—to make everything worse. It may sound like a paradox, but it's an ability born of failure, and impotence, and inability to rise to an occasion, and it got me ranting:  

Then what the fuck is it good for. Congress should be the branch that guarantees democracy. I don't want soft legislators like you getting pushed around by loony dictators because oh the Constitution didn't give me explicit permission. Jesus Christ you're pathetic.

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

"I'd love to do something about the psychopath who drove a murderous mob to trash my building and kill people who work here but oh my stars I'm not sure if the Constitution wants me to so I'd better play with my fucking phone instead."

How can you be so little and not ashamed?

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

And then there was Mitch McConnell, explaining how he knows Trump is guilty but doesn't think it's proper for him to do anything about it. Of course we know (I think Steve was the first to clarify this for me) what he really means, which is that his political position requires him to say both that Trump is guilty (for the suburbans) and that he's not guilty (for the rustics) and so by God he'll say both regardless of the contradiction, but the logic he used in his remarks showed what a loser he really is, and got me going:

If It's Really the End of Trump

Uncredited image from CityWatch Los Angeles, July 2020.

Commenter BradleyKSherman writes re the end of the impeachment drama:

On 8 September 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. That was the anticlimax to two years of built up tension. My hate was pure but my rage had no outlet. So I was prepared for this exact denouement. That was no more the end of the GOP than is this. It was the end of Nixon and I think this is the end of Trump.

Some thoughts from me:

That's at least half of a pretty happy thought IMO, but if it really is the end of Trump (of which I'm more hopeful than a lot of really smart people), I'm having a little trouble putting together the other half.

Getting rid of Nixon had two very important political consequences:

1. it created the space for big reforms in the system, to prevent the Nixonian abuses from happening again, which didn't in the long run work too well, either in stopping (GOP) presidents from manipulating CIA and FBI and DOJ for political ends or in curbing (mainly GOP) corruption through campaign money, and 
2.  it created the space for the GOP to be taken over by movement conservatives, which worked out all too well for them, creating this whole neoliberal era and the end of postwar social democratic prosperity.

The consequences of the end of Trump ought to have a similar shape, and I can imagine them being very positive indeed, though I don't quite know how to bring them about.

Schrödinger's Poker

 

Tubalcain Alhanbra, via Shine.

The Senate impeachment trial was suddenly thrown into some kind of turmoil by the surfacing of some sort of new detail on the 6 January siege, from Rep. Jaime Lynn Herrera Beutler (R-WA and one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach in the House), on the story Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told her of his call that afternoon to Trump to beg him to call off his thugs and stop the assault.

It wasn't going to change the outcome of the trial, though it probably should have, but it could have prolonged it beyond bearing: the House managers wanted to call her and, I thought, McCarthy as witnesses, and Trump's lawyer Michael Van der Veen threatened to come back with a call for 100 depositions, just for starters—effectively, to turn the impeachment into Benghazi hearings. 

In the end they made a deal: Herrera Beutler's story will be added to the record, but suppressed from the closing statements, and won't be part of the case on which the senators vote. 

I'd like to spend some time on it all the same. The story also does offer some important clarification for our understanding of what happened, alongside the reporting of Tommy Tuberville's conversation with Trump of around the same time, in which Trump had been urging him to do something to delay the certification of the election results after Pence's announcement that they would be certified in spite of Trump's complaints. In the call Tuberville is said to have told Trump he had to go because the Capitol police were evacuating the Senate chamber as the Senate's president, Mike Pence, was being whisked out of the room.

Which Side Are We On?

 

As the tweeps were quick to note, McDaniel's Brooksian assumption that Lincoln must have been talking about "bringing our badly divided country together" is stupid. Lincoln's speech, with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination to run against Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1858 election, was a radical which-side-are-you-on moment of reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (allowing the residents, meaning the white male residents, of each of the newly organized western territories to decide whether or not slavery would be legal) and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that somebody who was a slave in a slave state remained a slave in a state where slavery was illegal, without a right to defend himself against the demands of his "owner".

The Republic, Lincoln maintained, was one decision away from making slavery legal in all states, regardless of the desires of the citizens:

Literary Corner: The Defense Rests

Jean Arthur and Jack Holt in Lambert Hillyer's The Defense Rests (1934).

Rampant in January

by Counselor Bruce Castor

Article one, section three says,
“Judgements in cases of impeachment
shall not extend further than
to removal from office, and
disqualification to hold any
office of honor, trust, profit
under the United States: but
the party convicted shall
nevertheless be liable and subject,
to indictment, trial, judgment,
and punishment according to the law.”

So this idea of a January amnesty is
nonsense. If my colleagues on this side
of the chamber actually think that President
Trump committed a criminal offense, and
let’s understand, a high crime is a felony,
and a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The
words haven’t changed that much over time.
After he’s out of office, you go and arrest him.

Joe Did What? Abolishing ICE

This is very cool. Biden doing surprisingly awesome things and I'm here for it.

Making Chapo and Greenwald look like idiots is just icing on the cake. https://t.co/VK7tgAltET

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) February 5, 2021

All respect to Atkins, but as I say keep saying I don't think we should be that surprised. It's the mistake of taking the ideological spectrum, left to right, as a literally existing phenomenon with an unambiguous place for every politician to inhabit, and then trying to predict what Biden is going to do on the basis of his place—as measured, say, by his DW-Nominate score as a senator, which put him well to the right of Senator Obama, who was well to the right of Senator Clinton, who was well to the right of Senator Warren, who is to the right of almost nobody—and it just isn't a smart way to look at Biden, because it's so distant, I believe, from the way he thinks.

As illustrated perhaps in one of my favorites so far in those "Joe did what?" moments, the rules he's imposing on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), requiring them to stop hounding basically harmless members of the undocumented community

First Amendment Follies

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte, New York Times, February 2017.

If you're confused about the First Amendment argument, that poor Donald can't be punished for exercising his free speech rights, don't be. Rand Paul's argument

Paul also noted that Trump was within his First Amendment rights when he addressed a crowd of supporters before the attack on the Capitol that led to the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.

“People are going to have to judge for themselves … are we going to potentially prosecute people for political speech?” Paul ​questioned​.

H​e said if that becomes the case and speech is criminalized, then Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, could be impeached over ​their fiery rhetoric against Trump​, his allies, as well as the lawmakers who stirred up protesters last summer.

in addition to showing some remarkable ignorance (he's been in the Senate how many years and he still doesn't know that impeaching a senator isn't a thing that the Constitution allows for?), is a pure red herring, and it's starting to smell, because in the first place the president doesn't have free speech rights. No government employee does, if they are speaking in their official capacity: 

Note on Yemen: Joe Did What?

Old City of Sanaa, 2019, screenshot by France 24.

I'm enjoying the same sense of relief as everybody else at waking up not asking myself what Trump has done today, but at the same time excitement, anticipating what the new guy may have come up with, and lovely surprises every damn day, like the announcement on Thursday that the US is withdrawing support from the Saudi war of attrition on the civilians of Yemen, not only canceling the $478-million sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia that the State Department approved last December over Congressional objections, which was expected, but also halting the US direct assistance to the Saudis with targeting data and logistical support, which goes back to 2015 and the Obama administration (I referred to it in October 2016 as "the worst single failure of Obama foreign policy"). 

Not that this is going to end the war! But it puts the US in a far better position to help with this terrible catastrophe (still the world's worst humanitarian disaster after six years) it we detach ourselves from the party that has the airplanes:

Dream Piece

 

Photo via Hilgersom Landscaping.

Woke up before 5:00 with this ridiculously bloggy dream, giving me unusual time to structure it in my mind before the alarm rang. It features a character I actually don't know at all except online, the blogger known as Thers (of the the very funny old Whiskey Fire, defunct two or three years ago, but still a welcome presence on Twitter, and, this may be relevant, an English lit instructor in the CUNY system with a specialty in Irish writers); but I'm somehow at his house, in an improbably ritzy suburb, socially distanced in a driveway lined with a flagstone wall and a little round lantern faintly glowing on the pavement. There are women around, but in the background.

I'm there to show him a thing I've written, in a magazine that he's holding, but neither of us has a clear sense of why I'm doing it—I 'm under the impression he invited me for some reason, but he's confused and asking, very courteously, what I'm expecting him to do. A sudden inspiration: what I want is for him to submit something, a "critical essay", I suggest, to the magazine, which I'm apparently the editor of. He smiles.

I'm looking at the lantern, and it's the head of the newscaster Dan Rather, with a green growth on the top like a Chia pet. I'm perturbed by the apparent violence of this, but reassured when Rather himself looks completely comfortable, and he's smiling too. And then that's about it, I'm awake.

Legislative Dada

 

Jean Tinguely, Ballet des Pauvres, 1961, via WikiArt.

Now that the budget reconciliation process is pretty much inevitable for the passing of the Covid relief plan, and the Senate's version of the bill has passed the Senate (at about 5:30 this morning), it's time to stop whipping up enthusiasm for this blow against Republican obstruction and start thinking about how disappointing and dispiriting it's going to be in actual practice, or, as Ezra Klein tells us from his new perch at The Times ("The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare")

The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” [Steven] Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.

In fact it's the king of kludges. The only other time the word "kludge" has ever been used as something other than a joke (a 1993 Russell Baker joke) in The Times was by Paul Krugman, in 2013 columns about the greatest of all reconciliation maneuvers, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and a reference to the same Steven Teles paper:

It's Complicated

Liberty Tree, corner of Essex and Washington Streets, Boston, undated, via history.com.

I've been wanting to go back to the piece on historiography last week, and to correct something misleading I said, that led Redhand to comment

At this point in my life, I really am beginning to wonder what the hell the American Revolution was about, to begin with. "No taxation without representation," or as Yas suggests, no taxation at all, at least if you're part of the American meritocracy (or is it, actually, aristocracy?) Or, more darkly, (pun intended) was the revolution intended to enshrine under the banner of "freedom" the privileges of those "urban and urbane" white elites who were happy to see "the embattled farmers" do the real fighting at Lexington and Concord?

I didn't mean to try to substitute one categorical statement (the liberal postwar consensus view of the Revolution as a movement of pure idealistic principle) with another one (a strawman picture of the revolutionaries as purely selfish and self-interested actors). What I really wanted to praise in the older, cynical history of the early 20th century and by implication in the critical history of now is the possibility of not insisting on categorical judgments at all, of not requiring a decision on who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, of recognizing that it's complicated.

Look For the Union Libel

 

That's where David F. Brooks was yesterday, too, though he didn't sound quite as much like QAnon as the Senate Republicans do, but with the same child sacrifice theme, in his Times column ("Children Need to Be Back In School Tomorrow"—don't know if he was aware tomorrow was Saturday). In fact, his tack is to explain that the AFT is exactly like QAnon, anti-intellectual:

There’s a wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping America. There are people across the country who deny evidence, invent their own facts and live in their own fantasyland. We saw it in the Republicans who denied the reality of the Biden election victory and we see it now in the teachers unions that are shutting down schools and marring children’s lives.

Which is really kind of libelous, I think, especially if he means that progressive present verb ("are shutting") the way it's usually used in English, and is complaining specifically about approximately one local, the Chicago Teachers Union, which is not currently shutting down anything but rather fighting against Mayor Lightfoot's plan to reopen K-8 schools that were closed 10 months ago by order of Governor Pritzker, and not with the intention of marring children's lives, which I believe most people who have devoted their lives to the not very remunerative occupation of elementary and middle school teaching would not want to do, but in the interest of making the environment safe for themselves, with a more satisfactory testing regime, PPE supplies, adequate ventilation of school buildings, and priority for vaccination for teachers and support staff, much of which the city says it's now ready to do (Lightfoot won't bend on the vaccination, at least outside the hardest-hit zip codes), but that's a genuine matter of dispute:

Why I Hate The New York Times Redux

Via Mrs. Kilburn's Kiddos.

That said, this drivel from the Times Editorial Board

Ease Up on the Executive Actions, Joe

President Biden is right to not let his agenda be held hostage, but legislating through Congress is a better path.

is hard to take, you know. As if Biden's flurry of executive actions were in opposition to some legislative work that he and the congressional Democrats are unaccountably refusing to do.

That's just not the case. Congressional Democrats are working on a lot of important stuff, including the Covid relief bill which it is hoped will be passed through reconciliation, possibly within the next couple of weeks, to spectacular effect (again, permanent things the public is eager to see like the minimum wage hike and the paid leave), and the huge pieces of democracy reform, the For the People Act (HR1) and John Lewis Voting Rights Act (it's hard to see these getting the needed 60 votes in the Senate but at least the provisions of the first are hugely popular, including among Republican voters, so it's worth forcing them to vote on it). The executive actions are, rather, making up for things that Congress can't do for one reason and another, which is why Biden's been promising to do them for months:

Why I Love The New York Times

10 February 1897, via Cincinnati Enquirer.

 

The most important thing I had to say about The Times the other day wasn't said by me, but the editor who was so rudely dismissed:

Please don’t cancel your subscriptions to @nytimes! It is an incredible paper filled with talented journalists. We need them and we need a thriving free press. Thank you!

— Lauren Wolfe (@Wolfe321) January 24, 2021

This is a feeling I've been kind of working on for a couple of years, especially in Twitter conversations with our old pal formerly known as Thornton, who has his own thesis on the subject of the US press with a foundation I don't totally disagree with—that the solution to the problem of papers that are terrified of looking partisan is to have them be partisan, for which we have contemporary models from The New York Post (bad!) to The Guardian's US edition (good!) as well as the whole history of North American journalism going back to the 18th century until after World War II, when this concept of rigorous institutional objectivity arose along with the concept of special professional qualifications for journalists, who mostly hadn't even gone to college before and now tend to be from Ivy schools and are expected to get advanced degrees from J-school and in some cases getting paid correspondingly, in six- and even seven-figure incomes, and are so abstracted from the world the rest of us live in that they often seem to have no sense of what is and isn't important.

But we need newspapers even if they're bad, and there's something about The Times in particular that is different, for me, not that the critiques don't apply—they do!—but that my relationship to it is different. I don't think of it as a company of which I'm a customer, but like Lauren Wolfe as a kind of community of which I'm a citizen.

Lectiones: American Historiography

 

Stamp Act riots, Boston, 1765. Can't find a decent credit, but I think it's from Britain.

Reading a truly remarkable essay in The New Republic by William Hogeland, "Against the Consensus Approach to History" taking on the lofty historians after World War II who developed the myth of the revolutionary founding of the United States as a unified product of the Enlightenment and the belief in innate rights; in particular Edmund Morgan:

Throwing out elder historians’ prevailing focus on the founding generation’s self-interest (Clarence Alvord had said that George Washington became a patriot to defend speculations in Indian land) and on its class conflicts (Carl Becker had said that the Revolution was not only over British rule but also over the rule of elite Americans), Morgan sought to identify the grand principles that the revolutionary generation agreed on. “What the colonists had to say about Parliamentary power and about their own rights deserved to be taken seriously,” he explained later.

As the U.S. began to exercise new power around the world, Morgan set out to show that the protests in the 1760s and ’70s against the Stamp Act and other British policies offered slam-dunk evidence of a founding American consensus on principles of rights. Inherent to the American character, that consensus unified the colonists, he said, inspired the Revolution, and brought about the United States. In the larger context of his work, and the work of similarly minded colleagues, the lesson was that the founding American commitment to rights persisted in postwar U.S. commitments to modern liberal democracy.

I.e., something that sounds as if it had been designed by the CIA, in contrast to the more cynical and materialistic views, whether leftist or conservative, of the period from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (and views, I would add, that also recognize the diversity of the North American colonials, not quite the way we'd want to do it today with a focus on oppression and intersectional identity, but more compatible with that than the postwar picture).

Reconciliation is Real

Peter Paul Rubens, The Reconciliation of Henri III and Henri of Navarre, 1628, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ezra Klein's dour Times piece last week ("Democrats, Here's How to Lose in 2022: And Deserve It") put it in pretty distressing terms, though he didn't seem quite aware of what he was saying: he knows how Democrats can hold onto the Senate in 2022, by quickly passing some legislation that makes a difference in people's lives, which has already been basically written—

The good news is that Democrats have learned many of these lessons, at least in theory. The $1.9 trillion rescue plan Biden proposed is packed with ideas that would make an undeniable difference in people’s lives, from $1,400 checks to paid leave to the construction of a national coronavirus testing infrastructure that will allow some semblance of normal life to resume.

—and doubling of the federal minimum wage to $15, that's pretty popular too. All they need is to abolish the Senate filibuster, which is unfortunately not going to happen:

For the Record: Why I Hate The New York Times

Photo by Money Sharma/Getty Images via Wired.

But first, Pompeo's farewell. Only a few short years ago I thought it would be safe to say there would never be a worse secretary of state than Rex Tillerson, and I was wrong. But in his departure, he really transcended himself:

It's kind of an alternate to "saying the quiet parts out loud": the silence of where they belong is even louder. Indeed it's monoculturalism, the suppression of difference. Everybody's supposed to be Mike Pompeo. Or in the original German, "Ein Land, ein Volk, ein Führer."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 20, 2021

Literary Corner: Everything on the Field

Piet Mondrian, Dune Landscape, 1909, via Piet-Mondrian.org.

By unpopular demand, the versification of some of President Trump's valedictory address at Joint Base Andrews on 20 January:

The History of Sitting Presidents

by Donald J. Trump

I

You're going to see, you're going
to see incredible numbers start
coming in, if everything is sort of
left alone. Be careful, very complex,
be careful, but you're going to see
some incredible things happening.

II

And remember us when you see these
things happening, if you would,
remember us because I'm looking at--
I'm looking at elements of our economy
that are said to be a rocket ship up.

Literary Corner: Noir

Photo by Mark Coggins/flickr.

Do not underestimate how many congressional Republicans would like to send checks to their people. Recently, I was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators. I was struck by how passionately these Republicans and Democrats are committed to one another across party lines, how deftly they used the evenly divided Congress to restart the Covid-19 relief effort in December, how fervently they want to break the partisan logjam.

If this doesn’t work and Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster. (David F. Brooks, "The Case For Biden Optimism", 21 January 2021)

The phone rang, a familiar number. I let it ring, long enough to take a shluk from the bottle of Waldweben Peach Schnapps and shove it back in the upper left desk drawer, then picked up. "Brooks here."

"Hello, David. How's married life?"

"Suits me. What can I do for you, outside of something I can't do for you?"

"You can do us a favor."

"Where have I heard that line before?"

"It's just a little thing."

I sighed, probably audibly, and tried to gather my wits. "I'm out of the game, pal. I don't do it any more. I just have to do one column a week, I have a gig at Aspen. I have a nice new wife, she doesn't like politics, she likes religion, go figure. I like religion too. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside."

Radio Yerevan on Blue-Collar Ted

 

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that today's Democratic party represents rich, angry Hollywood celebrities like Seth Rogen better than it does blue-collar union workers in the energy and manufacturing sectors like Senator Ted Cruz?

Answer: Yes, but...

First of all, Rogen is a union member (Screen Actors Guild) in an industry that is arguably a kind of manufacturing in structure, and certainly supports 2.6 million jobs including 927,000 in direct production and distribution and consists of 93,000 businesses in all 50 states, 87% of which employ fewer than ten workers, and generates $17.2 billion in exports with a trade surplus of $10.3 billion, four percent of the total U.S. trade surplus in services; and three other unions, according to him, which I have no reason to doubt. Which Cruz is not, having spent his entire working life, after a couple of years at a private law firm (1997-98) and a stint with George W. Bush's successful first presidential campaign (1999-2000), in government jobs. 

Inaugural

 

Candle stand, 1830s, from the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing ("Shakers") of Mount Lebanon, New York, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I take the same general feeling from the inauguration festivities, watching TV all day, as so many of us, of immense relief and consolation, of reassurance that we have a working government again, with kind and caring and reasonably truthful people at its head, which doesn't mean they're going to fix everything but that we're back in a place from which it's possible to navigate. We all found ourselves in unexpected tears at one point or another, and for me one of the oddest points was that first normal press briefing in four years from Jen Psaki, State Department spox under Obama and now Biden's press secretary.

There's a concept from the British ordinary language philosopher Paul Grice of the four "conversational maxims" that make discourse possible: you must assume that your interlocutor will try to be informative, truthful, pertinent, and clear. These are things that you don't get from arguing with Gish-galloping conservative trolls, and we didn't get them from the communications of Trump or his official representatives, of course, and the freshness of Psaki, just being well-prepared, level-headed, on point, freely admitting to not knowing what she didn't know, and having no reason to lie about anything, seemed miraculous and somehow out of the nowhere, and it really did fill my eyes with tears. I think it's a kind of PTSD: like Londoners in the Blitz, we've been living disoriented and fearful from the constant bombardment of gaslighting language, and as welcome as the silence is it's filled with our own emotions, the ones we haven't been able to listen to for such a long time.

Literary Corner: My Favorite Crimes

Among raft of pardons Trump issued in his final hours was one to former GOP Rep. Rick Renzi, who was convicted for extortion, bribery, insurance fraud, money laundering and racketeering. Rep. Paul Gosar, one of the Rs who tried to overturn election results, lobbied for the pardon

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 20, 2021

To the tune by Rodgers and Hammerstein:

Bribing, extortion, insurance and bank fraud,
Jobs for your family down to your Aunt Maud,
Skim from your charity, multiple times,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Scheming with foreigners for your election,
Paying off chicks who have seen your erection,
Propping your business on taxpayers' dimes,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Bribe for pardon!
Wrecked Rose Garden!
When he's feeling low,
Trump pardons some crook
Who reminds him of him,
And then he is gooooood to go!

Cheating at golf and delinquent in taxes,
Fooling the people with alternate factses,
Pelting your betters with slanderous slimes,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Claiming a right to whatever he pleases,
Caging up kids and ignoring diseases,
Pumping his shares as the stock market climbs,
These are a few of Trump's favorite crimes!

Constant lying!
People dying!
When it gets him down,
Trump pardons some crook
Who reminds him of him,
And then he gets ouuuuuuuut of town!

The kid is Indonesian pianist Joey Alexander (b. 2003), in a recording from 2015.

For the Record: The Arc of Impeachment is Long

Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. Photo12/Universal Images Group, via New York Times (and a Bret Stephens column of last August, "Why Edmund Burke Still Matters").

Why, yes. Yes, you are totally wrong.

Hastings had returned home from India in 1785, but the famous conservative thinker and MP Edmund Burke had been determined since 1786 that he should be brought to justice. pic.twitter.com/ZEyOIzOUIQ

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 18, 2021

Pardons Я Us

 

Brother Johann Tetzel on the ass, right, dispensing indulgences to the wealthy in a German broadside poster, $32.83 from Amazon (the poster, not the indulgence). 

In the couple of months after the 2000 election, some scandal emerged over the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by outgoing president Bill Clinton, starting with the news that Democratic superdonor and Friend of Bill Ron Burkle had been agitating for a pardon for the junk-bond fraudster Mike Milken, and climaxing with the one given to the tax cheat and sanctions-violating commodities trader Marc Rich, who'd been evading justice living in Switzerland for the previous 17 years, in which the deputy attorney general—a guy you may have heard of called Eric Holder—and the president himself had shown extremely poor judgment at best (Rich's ex-wife Denise was a big-time donor to the Clinton Presidential Library, for one thing, and there's a 200-year-old rule that it's improper to pardon fugitives), allowing themselves to be manipulated by the lobbying of Rich's lawyers including Jack Quinn, who, having been White House counsel from 1995 to 1997, wasn't allowed to lobby for anybody at all until 2002. Also, Clinton issued some 31 pardons and commutations that hadn't gone through the normal processing, because the applications had arrived so late, and First Brothers Hugh Rodham and Roger Clinton had been taking some serious money to lobby the president themselves. Nevertheless Milken didn't get his pardon, and the applications the First Brothers had worked on weren't successful either, and Clinton went on to a very successful post-presidency, Holder eventually became attorney general, and even Quinn (whose Wikipedia bio doesn't even mention Rich) is now a legal analyst at CNN.

All of which seems extremely different from today's news reported by Michael Schmidt and Kenneth Vogel in The Times that there's a regular pardons market in the outgoing Trump administration:

Literary Cornyn

 

So I wrote a poem

A Poem About John Cornyn

Cornyn's hands are clean.
He hasn't got anything
to do with the problem,
whatever the problem is,
ever. It's all those
bad people.

Cornyn shines
like a planet in his own right,
a planet of rectitude. https://t.co/QKQYcinPGG

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 17, 2021

Paul Klee, Error on Green, 1930, via paulklee.net.

For the Record: Biden's Proposal

You wouldn't fuss about moving the Overton window if it was a big enough window. You wouldn't even want to. Photo via.

Incredibly impressed with myself over this tribute from my favorite moderately famous economics professor.

That started with a quick Twitter version of an argument I feel like I've been making forever, attached in this case to the Biden Covid relief proposal-package, which is pretty amazing:

Whig measures & Tory men!

— Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' (@delong) January 15, 2021

Well, sort of. Lovestoneite measures and Whiggish men and women, more like, in my case, but it's the same principle, where you might talk about widening the Overton window instead of moving it.

But I do feel tremendously justified by the radical character of this Biden package, with its demands for

Perfect

 

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty, via Center for American Progress, December 1980.

A year or so ago Rectification Central was exercised about the meaning of the word "perfect" as in 

“It was a warm, friendly conversation,” he said, referring to his conversation with Zelensky. “There was no quid pro quo. There was nothing. It was a perfect conversation.”

In what sense was it "perfect"? Without fault or flaw? Is a quid pro quo an "imperfection" that you should avoid, if conversational perfection is your aim? If you're an artist of conversation, would perfection be the standard you aim at? Perfection in some particular aspect, or overall? Who says something like that, about a phone call, and what do they have in mind?

Anyway this morning somebody on NPR—I think it was my girl Nina Totenberg—gave me the clue to what Trump actually meant, by comparing it with the incitement speech Trump gave to the Capitol rioters before their rampage on 6 January, as he described it 

So if you read my speech --
and many people have done it,
and I've seen it both in the papers
and in the media, on television --
it's been analyzed, and people thought
that what I said was totally appropriate.
And if you look at what other people have said --
politicians at a high level -- about the riots
during the summer, the horrible riots in
Portland and Seattle, in various other --
other places, that was a real problem --
what they said. But they've analyzed
my speech and words and my final
paragraph, final sentence and everybody,
to the T, thought it was totally appropriate.

(The theme in the middle section there is the official bothsides line with which the Republicans have approached the achievement, according to which the looting that took place on the edges of the Black Lives Matter marches in Minneapolis and New York in the first days after the murder of George Floyd and the occasional trash fires around the federal courthouse in Portland. were exactly the same as the murderous assault on the Capitol building—"you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM," said Louie Gohmert on 1 January—though if you don't recall Governor Kate Brown advising anti-fascist agitators to march down to the courthouse, telling them "if you don't fight like hell you don't have a country any more," I think your memory is accurate.)

Whoever it was said it was "a perfect speech", the way the Zelenskyy call was "a perfect conversation", and I realized he meant he thought it was unindictable—that he'd delivered his illicit message with such perfect subtlety that the cops would never be able to finger him for it, with the majesty of Don Vito and his perfect quid pro quo message

Area Republican: "Donald Trump never even mentioned violence!"

Don Vito Corleone: "I just made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2021

That he'd committed the perfect crime. He hoped.

Bad Mood

 

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Ballroom, American Hotel, Detroit. Via failedarchitecture.com.

Not to excuse them, but they're stupid, and they're psychopaths. They're bad children.

“Many of Trump’s followers are living in a fantasy world,” said Eric Foner, an American historian and author of the book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.” “They don’t appear to have given any thought to the consequences of their actions.” https://t.co/IYYGbb8EDR

— Judith Weisenfeld (@JLWeisenfeld) January 12, 2021

“We were just playing, having fun,” one history professor who resigned tells @LindaSoReports

“I’ve been making Facebook Live videos for years. They’re meant to be lighthearted," said.

In his video he pledged to "run out" all the Congress members who betrayed Trump.

— Heather Timmons (@HeathaT) January 12, 2021

These are the people who beat up so many cops and broke such a lot of furniture and came so close to murdering the speaker of the House and the vice president and who knows who else. Overprivileged white toddlers who can't imagine being in trouble, some of whom were apparently shocked at the way it seemed to get out of hand. And then there was Jake:

For the Record: Unite the Country

 

Anybody else think this is kind of significant? The vice president effectively saying, "Behave yourself, Donald, or I'll have you fired."

Gotta say I'm a little impressed. Of course when Trump made clear he didn't care if Pence was murdered or not it prolly got Pence thinking. https://t.co/iJtpNGpijb

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 10, 2021

Not really sure it's sunk in for anybody else that Pence could be in a legitimately tetchy mood about this:

Confidence

Unidentified Nigerian bank. Photo via WEE Tracker.

REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE-STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

Dear Mr David Yastreblyansky

I am Dr. Omatayo Barron, the Nigerian cousin of John Barron, who has served as a communications assistant, ghostwriter, and speechwriter for the American billionaire Donald Trump since 1979. Because of the confidential nature of his work, it has never been publicly acknowledged and, in order to avoid inconvenient questions, his compensation has always been paid through a Nigerian subsidiary, Trump Tower Lagos LLC, for direct deposit in the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association, where he has over the years accumulated a small fortune of some $20,000,000, meanwhile in the course of the Trump presidency his existence has necessarily become a closely guarded official secret, the breaching of which is subject to legal sanction under the Espionage Act.

Now Mr Trump's unexpected loss in the 2020 election has placed John in a serious dilemma; as the appointment of his (fictional) identity comes to an abrupt end, so does the identity itself! This has raised almost insuperable difficulties in his ability to access his Nigerian bank account. But curiously enough you, Sir, are in a position to help, because by an almost incredible coincidence the name under which his cheques have been deposited is identical to yours, Mr David Yastreblyansky. All my cousin needs is to process an electronic transfer of the funds in the Lagos bank to your chequing account, and the money is repatriated! In gratitude, he would be prepared to offer you a transfer fee amounting to 25 percent of the total, or approximately $5,000,000.

If agreeable to this simple plan, please transmit to me your Social Security number, bank routing number, and chequing account number. And permit me to say on John Barron's behalf how impressed we both are by your kindness, unparalleled discretion, and sophisticated financial savvy.

Yours most faithfully

Dr Omatayo Barron

So We'll Walk Up the Avenue

<

The Feast of the Epiphany started off with a bang just a little while after midnight when it became inescapably evident that not just Reverend Raphael Warnock but also Jon Ossoff were going to be elected to the Senate, though the networks weren't calling it yet, and I went to bed in a fog of sleepy triumph, only to wake up around 3:30 with an appalled sense of how high the stakes had just gotten: in the sense that we—I mean Democrats, speaking for myself—have just lost our biggest excuse for not getting our agenda done, but it hasn't gotten practically easier almost at all.

I'll get back to that eventually, but it got completely overshadowed by the other big epiphany of the day, that afternoon, with the two thousand participants or so in the Million-MAGA March, after Trump gave them the signal they were waiting for:

Literary Corner: And They're Going to See What Happened

Francis Picabia, Ideal, 1915, via Khan Academy.

Give Me a Break

by Donald J. Trump

So what are we going to do here, folks?
I only need eleven thousand votes. Fellas,
I need eleven thousand votes. Give me a break.
You know, we have that in spades already. Or
we can keep it going, but that’s not fair to the
voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what
happened, and they’re going to see what happened.

Some Republican operative was telling BBC that Trump wasn't asking the Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote, but he certainly was advising Raffensperger to say he'd recalculated and doing whatever it was Trump was asking him to do in the Saturday call:

there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated. Because the 2,236 in absentee ballots. I mean, they’re all exact numbers that were done by accounting firms, law firms, etc. And even if you cut ’em in half, cut ’em in half and cut ’em in half again, it’s more votes than we need.

Why would he want them to recalculate? Every time they do that it just nets more votes for Biden. 

He wants them to invent a number larger than 11,779 and then claim to have recalculated. For instance, they could choose any or all of 2,236 absentee ballots, 4,502 voters who were not registered, 4,925 voters from out of state, 5,000 dead voters, 18,325 "vacant address voters", between 250 and 300,000 ballots "dropped mysteriously into the rolls", and "at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged", and between 300 pounds and 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots, and then, as he says, divide the total by two, divide it by two again, and divide it by two a third time, and if that's more than 11,779, as it probably is, tell the world "I recalculated" and we're cool. Or if that's too much math, make it easy on yourselves, boys: "All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state." 

Hi, It's Stupid: Weekend Sedition

Hi, it's Stupid to say you should stop calling it "sedition".

Because what other word would you use to describe what does appear to be an attempt, on the part of a lot of Republicans, to subvert the Constitutional order, overturn our two-and-a-third-century tradition of building electoral democracy, and install some kind of emergency dictatorship, half-assed and certain to fail, but ominous in the lesson it seems to be drawing for that very big minority of discontented white people who are unhappy about the way the presidential vote turned out in November, the ones who "feel disenfranchised", that they don't have to put up with electoral democracy—that they can demand minority rule if they feel like it and, if they get enough shady lawyers and thugbois on the case, maybe one day succeed? How is that not sedition?

Dr. Google's first suggestion, credited to Oxford Language.

Well, in the first place because it's not, in those simple terms. It's not "against the authority of a state or monarch". It's on behalf of it, in favor of the desires of the pseudo-monarch who is in power and his party, currently in control of half the legislature, against a regime or administration that doesn't exist yet, to stop it from being born, and only secondarily against the constitutional authority that guarantees this regular succession.

David Brooks is Right

Image from Shutterstock via.

No, I'm not even kidding ("2020 Taught Us How to Fix This'): he goes (superficially, of course) through the evidence on techniques for overcoming racial bias (diversity training videos and the like) and finds that they mostly don't do much of anything good and sometimes do harm, putting up the backs of the biased and making them want to resist. The only thing that's effective, he concludes, is the idea that used to be pretty popular around 1963:

The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.

That's demanding integration. That's mandating affirmative action that's not afraid to name people by their races. That's saying, "We need some black folks in this school" or apartment building or suburban tract or law firm or architectural firm or factory floor or police force or boardroom. And South Asians and East Asians and Caribbean Islanders and Pacific Islanders and of course many people from the vast and hugely diverse land of Hispanophonia. And even then it will be iffy because there will be white people who can't get with the program, and moving them out or firing them will certainly make those individuals worse, and sending them out for diversity training won't make them better, so there will continue to be conflict. In a way it means giving up on much of a generation of white people—the Generation X-ers who formed the backbone of Trump support in the recent election, as Monsignor Douthat was predicting in September—as a bad job rather than continuing to hover anxiously over them and their whining about "reverse discrimination" or "identity politics" and treating them, as David Brooks has been doing for the past four years. as precious but terribly vulnerable flowers whose delicate emotions need to be protected at all costs:

As the articles I just tweeted out make clear, @HawleyMO is all about speaking up for those who feel disenfranchised. That’s what he’s doing right now for millions of Americans. Our republic needs people to feel bought in & heard.

— Elbridge Colby (@ElbridgeColby) January 1, 2021

Really? As opposed to the people who actually are disenfranchised? I thought facts didn't care about your feelings. Maybe those whose votes are suppressed and residences redlined and job prospects hemmed in by invisible walls and ceilings could teach them some coping strategies. 

Or, as Brooks doesn't quite manage to put it, you need to stop trying to fix racists and start trying to fix systemic racism. (He does recognize the existence of the latter, which puts him several thousand miles ahead of most of his old friends: "Part of the problem is that a lot of discrimination is structural; not in people’s attitudes but in organizational practices and the way society is set up.") Though he can't bring himself, in the course of the column, to use the words "black" or "African American" or "race" itself. That's part of the problem too.

Too bad Republican politicians and Supreme Court judges and opinionists like David Brooks over the past 60 years have worked so hard to make that illegal.

Lift a Finger

 

Had an interesting kind of New Year's Eve colloquy, or maybe I should call it an obloquy (he was nice enough to respond to me on several points, but I was mostly just bouncing off him) with the writer Noah Berlatsky, who posted a fun list of 99 unpopular opinions on the Twitter, on all sorts of subjects, one of which was this:

agree on the whole, though I think it helped prevent certain horrors like bombing Iran or North Korea. On the other hand if he had been competent he wouldn't have wanted to do those things.

— Gluten4Punishment (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2021

Coincidentally, it turns out this morning that this is a less unpopular opinion than you might think, in part because of some terrific reporting by the New York Times White House gossip department on Trump's handling of the pandemic and his inability to understand that it involved the needs of anybody other than himself:

Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?