What Could Go Wrong! department

White House source, via.

I'm told by two WH sources that Pres. Trump does not plan to put down Twitter on Thursday. May live tweet if he feels the need to respond.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) June 6, 2017

"Dishonest James Comey says I begged him to stop investigation. WRONG! I ORDERED him! #MTGA" https://t.co/isgcNylAxK

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 6, 2017

Global Tepiding

Via Guardian, where there's more on global lukewarming as the third stage of denial

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate"), illustrates an emerging reactionary approach to climate change, the non-denial denial of the "lukewarmers": sure it's happening, but do we have to make a federal case out of it?

Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO₂ emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Shorter:

1. It's not "unique"—my goodness, we have lots of problems, so why should we try to solve this one?
2. The proposed solution might not work, so surely it's better not to try it! That smallpox vaccination sounds like a far from decent operation, putting some sort of pus in my arm, and you're not even 100% sure it will keep me from getting the disease!
3. Dark forces (i.e.,  my political opponents), may benefit from these efforts, so that even if they did save the human environment from destruction, as I just acknowledged they might, that's not the real reason. Better to burn than to allow those dreadful people to gain some advantage from putting the fire out.

Followed by a very Douthatian denial non-denial critique of the position he just laid out:

So we don't have to fight them here

Palace of Justice, Damascus, March 15, photo by an anonymous stringer for AFP/Getty images, via Chicago Tribune.

Nobody should ever have to undergo the kind of horror Britain has been undergoing with the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22 (killing four and injuring 50), the Manchester bombing of the Ariana Grande concert May 22 (killing 22, many children, and injuring 116), and last night's London Bridge incident (killing seven and injuring some dozens, 21 critically).

Nor should it happen in Baghdad, where over the same period 23 were killed and 45 wounded by a car bomb in the suburb of Hayy al'A'amei on March 20, and a suicide truck bomber killed 17 and injured at least 60 at a police checkpoint in the southern part of the city March 29; seven people were killed and 12 injured in three bombings, one in a fish market in Yusufiya, one in a construction site, on April 5, and two more killed and 11 injured by bombings on April 6 and 7,  and a suicide car attack on a traffic police compound in the center of the city killed five and injured six on April 28; one killed and two wounded in separate incidents of May 3, two killed and three wounded in bombings in western Baghdad on May 6, one killed and three wounded by a bomb in southwestern Baghdad on May 9, and another killed on May 10, an employee of the education ministry, four killed and ten injured by a booby-trapped vehicle in Al-Sho'la on May 11, one killed and five wounded by a booby-trapped car near a bridge on Al-Rubaie Street on May 14, one killed and two wounded by an explosion in the north of the city on May 16, two killed and eight wounded in two shopping-district incidents including one at the market in al-Nasr wal Salam region in Abu Ghraib district of May 18, one killed and three injured in a blast near a market on May 19, 35 killed and 45 injured in four suicide attacks around the city on May 19, and three more injured on May 22, also near the market in al-Nasr wal Salam, and then on May 30, four days after the fasting month of Ramadan began, at least 30 killed and 40 wounded by a car that blew up outside the al-Faqma ice cream parlor.

Great Moments in Brooksology

From the Buch der Natur of Konrad von Megenberg (1308-74) as printed at Augsburg in 1481, via Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Symbolforschung.

That was an exciting week, when Tuesday Brooks's clannishness column gave me an opportunity for a hard-boiled dick parody and Friday Brooks for a Full Driftglass, as they say, and Drifty himself went Full Yas, with a cunning argument that the Brooks column as a literary form should be treated as genre fiction in its own right. Speaking of literary forms, an actual great novelist stepped into the Brooksological arena: Gish Jen, a wonderful writer, in a letter to the Times on the Tuesday column:

Mr. Brooks’s conflation of clannishness with “family-first devotion” and “loyalty to kith and kin” is also problematic. In fact, clannishness is only a subset of family-based social orders; a great many people believe in self-sacrifice and putting family first yet feud with no one. And does Mr. Kushner’s family even fit Mr. Brooks’s definition of clannishness?

Are we to conclude that Mr. Kushner’s family built “a barrier between family — inside the zone of trust — and others, outside that zone” when Mr. Kushner’s uncle maneuvered to have Mr. Kushner’s father jailed and when Mr. Kushner’s zone of trust appears to include the Russians?

On the subject, commenter Jumpin Jehosephat was complaining, not without some justification, about all the Brooks the other day:

Why George Will is shocked

1940s college boys, from auburn.edu via Vintage Dancer.

Over at the Frogpond on Thursday, with reference to a weird George Will column of nostalgia for the days when a conservative was always a gentleman, BooMan wrote:

The reason that, in 1950, Lionel Trilling was able to argue that liberalism is “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in mid-century America is because FDR/Truman had effectively led the country out of a depression and won a worldwide war. By 1950, even most of the business leaders who had opposed the New Deal in the 1930s had come to terms with it. The weakness for the Democrats was different in kind. They weren’t just a workers’ party and a party for the business establishment. They were also the party of white supremacy and Jim Crow.

What’s interesting about conservatism is that they didn’t tap into the wedge the way you’d expect. Instead of criticizing the Democrats for their backwardness and vulgarity, they sought to steal the segregationists away from the party and keep them for themselves. This is the course that Buckley pursued. Rather than strengthen the GOP in his home turf in the North by pointing out the Dems' allegiance with the cultural neanderthals in the party’s southern congressional leadership, Buckley chose to make white supremacy respectable among the cocktail set at the Yale Club and the New York Yacht Club.

Kurdish Song

Syrian Kurdish refugee children in Iraq, via eKurd Daily.

"Covfefe", traditional Kurdish children's song

laughing fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe
kov tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe
tiny, laughing fe fe fe fe, laughing tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe
kov tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe, laughing tiny tiny fe fe fe fe fe fe

Leviathan

Michael Sgan-Cohen, "Leviathan" (1983), Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem, from Wikimedia Commons.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks is shocked-shocked to learn that the intellectuals in the White House have a Hobbesian view of the world ("Donald Trump Poisons the World"):

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath....

[This] explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.

Indeed. There's something deeply repugnant about people who think this way. People like, ah, New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Human Nature Redux", February 2007):

The Spy Who Came in from the Covfefe

Update: Welcome Crooks & Liars! And the people who love them. Thanks, Batocchio, for the shoutout.

Poster for the 1928 film, via Google itself.

There's been a great discussion in the comments comparing Richard Condon thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate and more literary spy fiction with particular reference to John Le Carré, who I too am convinced is a kind of great writer of literature, not just a genre writer, and how he would handle the Trumpery as a subject, which I know Jordan for one has been dreaming about for months, and Professor Fate imagines the scene where somebody like George Smiley interrogates the psychopath-in-chief, a scene I'd kind of like to write myself, to tell the truth:

I think his questioning of Trump would shatter Trump to pieces. George would regret doing this, but he would see the need and do it, despite the cost to himself because that is who he is.

But as the Prof notes, Trump himself isn't a good Le Carré character; Le Carré doesn't like to give the high and mighty that much attention, because they don't deserve it, and I don't think he'd put Trump onstage any more than Khrushchev or Ulbricht or Harold Macmillan. Even less, because he's too cartoonish for Le Carré to find interesting to write. He'd be very interested in people like Sater and Epshteyn, and certainly Comey and Bannon and Nunes and Chaffetz with Adam Schiff and maybe Al Franken and Jeff Sessions (who we just learned are actually friends in a weird kind of Senate way).

And you know who else? John O. Brennan for me has long been a true Le Carré hero in the Smiley family, ready to be despised by everybody for the sake of working to take something evil and make it 10 or 15% less evil.

He could also do a wonderful number on Jared and Ivanka, if he wanted to write about them, worming inside their mysterious vacancy and figuring out how they work (best writer for them might be Raymond Chandler, because I expect the best answer to that question is extremely dark and personal). But I think his best option for him would be to focus on the people that never interact with Trump at all, toiling in the shadows and coping with the crazy orders that emanate from the White House miles above them, and their enemies at the same level.

And really the best writer overall could be Graham Greene in his manic phase (Our Man in Havana or Travels with My Aunt) because the funny isn't just relief, it's an essential element.

For the Record: Two Rants

Updated

Jeffeson Memorial after a 25-foot rise in sea level (that's centuries away, but we could see five feet in another hundred years). Image by Nickolay Lamm/Storage Front.

The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 1, 2017

Or the big story that in catching Manafort, Page, Stone, Flynn, and hopefully Trump NSA turns out to be working exactly the way it should.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

Turns out the feared abuse of the system didn't happen. Instead it unmasked Trump minions letting Russia compromise our security.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

And one on this afternoon's big announcement from the Rose Garden:

The Petersburg Candidate. I

Via PressProgress/Canada.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, joining the emerging Serious Conservative consensus on the Russian collusion question ("The 'Manchurian' President?"):

The whole Russia affair might, in other words, just be what it looks like when an inexperienced, incompetent and, yes, sordid presidential apparatus tries to pursue a different foreign policy agenda than its predecessors.

Nothing to see here, folks! Just some of that there rookie naïveté that's been going around, and sordidity of course. It's bound to look as if the Trump administration has sold itself to the pursuit of Putinian interests, because that's the way the incompetent and sordid always roll, but that doesn't mean they actually have.

It's just the same as when the poorly trained Bullwinkle pulls a bear out of his hat instead of a rabbit. You think he must have done it on purpose, but it's really just an accident brought on by his inexperience. And sordidness.

Clannishing Act

Via Gifrific.

David Brooks writes ("The Politics of Clan: The Adventures of Jared Kushner"):

A familiar number on the caller ID screen. I gave it three rings, enough to grab a shluk from the vodka bottle and stash it back in the desk drawer, then picked up. The voice was familiar too, male, patrician, a little weary. "Brooks?"

"It's Memorial Day, for fuck's sake," I said. "Don't you have a parade to go to? I'm writing the column."

"David, David, you sound so hostile. You got something to write about? We could help you."

"I'm good," I said,

"Spiritual marriage? The need to remake the community on the model of Stuyvesant Town in 1965? Dump on Trump?"

"I'm out of the game," I said. "I'm not going to write any nice stuff on Trump. I'm married again, I don't want to be explaining a defense of pussy grabbing over the connubial dinner table. I did your George W. Bush for eight years, that was bad enough. At least he'd heard the rumor that compassion was supposed to be a good thing. Trump makes Bush look like Gandhi."

"We're not asking you to write nice things about Trump."

Memorial Day

Some Memorial Day music, by Roger Sessions (1971), to Whitman's poem:

And I saw askant the armies, 

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, 

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them, 

And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody, 

And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,) 

And the staffs all splinter’d and broken. 

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, 

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, 

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, 

But I saw they were not as was thought, 

They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not, 

The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d, 

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d, 

And the armies that remain’d suffer’d. 

16 

Passing the visions, passing the night, 

Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands, 

Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, 

Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song, 

As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, 

Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy, 

Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven, 

As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses, 

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, 

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.... 

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Modest Proposal

Pope Francis "appearing to make amends" with President Trump. with two unidentified Spanish princesses visiting from 1957.

Washington Post's "The Fix" may be even dumber without Chris Cillizza than with him, as Armando points out:

Trump’s foreign trip didn’t solve his media problem, but it helped https://t.co/ekcHoT1aUE

— Callum Borchers (@callumborchers) May 29, 2017

Helped what? https://t.co/ijjdifvqS5

— Armando (@armandodkos) May 29, 2017

Indeed.

Borchers explains, for one thing,

It's getting ridiculous

Image via Indocop.

It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2017

So they're not leaks coming out of the White House? Or the reporters are in the White House when they make them up?

....it is very possible that those sources don't exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2017

I love the thought that he might have already completed his investigation. Like they got the entire staff together in some Trump hotel ballroom and said, "OK, who's leaking? If you've been leaking stuff to the media raise your hand." And when nobody's hand went up Trump was like, "OK, that settles that. No leakers, the press must be making shit up."

Seriously, though, what happened to the investigation?

(Another long read here...)

It gets worse

Via Erik Wemple, Washington Post, March 28.

Donald Trump, in the press conference (the only formal press conference he has held during his presidency, that's a rate so far of 0.25 press conferences per month, compared to 1.71 for Barack Obama, 2.18 for George W. Bush, and so on, cutting in half the previous record low set by Ronald Reagan at 0.48, I just had to mention that) of February 16, following up on the Times story of February 14 in which it was asserted that the FBI was examining a history of "repeated contacts" between some unknown number of Trump people and Russian intelligence other than General Flynn, including, according to the Times from other reporting, his old friend and fellow Roy Cohn disciple Roger Stone, and Carter Page, the only person Trump had been able to name as one of his foreign policy advisers—"Carter Page, PhD!"—in an interview of March 2016 with the Washington Post—after dismissing Page as "a very low-level member of I think a committee for a short period of time—I don't think I ever met him":

It rhymes

Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, Manhattan. The FBI Field Office is on the 23rd floor. Photo via Zimbio.

On James Comey and the Russian-produced Wasserman Schultz letter—

The Russian intelligence material related to a purported email exchange between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a Clinton campaign operative who suggested then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch would help quash the FBI’s investigation.

According to CNN, Comey used the purported emails in part to justify his decision to publicly announce that no charges would be brought against Clinton, in a remarkable address [on July 5] that also accused her of being “extremely careless” in how she handled classified information on her private server. Comey did not consult with Lynch beforehand, and the speech broke FBI protocol to never comment on closed cases where no charges are brought.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the purported emails originated from a dubiously sourced Russian intelligence document, the veracity of which was never confirmed by the FBI. Officials aware of Comey’s actions told CNN that he knew that the document was bogus, but still factored it into his handling of the case. (Talking Points Memo)

There's a weird little relationship—history not repeating itself but rhyming as they say—between that story and the one from the end of October where Comey sent a remarkable letter to House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz to inform him "out of an abundance of caution" that the investigation wasn't in fact closed, and that the FBI was looking at some possibly fresh material, which turned out to be Anthony Weiner's laptop and emails to Hillary Clinton that Huma Abedin had downloaded there (apparently to make print copies for the boss because, sadly, Clinton, like Donald J. Trump, prefers paper) (that beloved story is actually false; the emails were on Weiner's computer as an automatic backup arrangement with Abedin's phone; h/t Jesse at NMMNB).

In both cases, Comey is said to be making these unusual public disclosures out of fear for his agency's and his own reputation.

(Longish read below the jump.)

The four plus or minus two or three American narratives

Josh Kirby, Discworld.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks writes ("The Four American Narratives"):

In spite of our many differences and the sheer size of the country, Americans have always been connected by a vast network of narrativium fibers, a single unifying story, or as I have called it "The Unifying American Story", also known as Passover without Jews, in which we told each other that all of us had reenacted the Exodus, escaping out of the oppressions of one Pharoah or another and into the wilderness, except instead of going to a land of milk and honey and killing all its people we stayed in the wilderness and killed all the people there and wrested the milk and honey into it with imported cows and bees and African guest workers, thus creating the last best hope on earth, so that when people around the world, similarly oppressed, were tempted to despair, they could always tell themselves, "At least there's America." 

Not that everybody could be allowed to come here, but they could still be glad to know it existed. We were so unified that even when we had a Civil War we were all on the same side, though this was not obvious to everyone at the time.

Annals of Derp: CBO

How crappy is a CBO that can't even guess what Chief Justice Roberts is going to do? What do you mean that's not part of the Budget? Image via Slate..

Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) explaining why there's no need to give any thought to the Congressional Budget Office projections of how many people will be stripped of their health insurance by a given GOP tax cut health care bill, on NPR:

ROUNDS: Absolutely, but there's something else as well. You have to recognize the CBO doesn't exactly have the best reputation for being able to accurately describe 10 years out how many people you're actually going to have insured. And part of their suggestion is that since you take away a mandate saying you have to be insured, that means that people won't buy insurance. And so they're counting or trying to count the number of people who wouldn't buy insurance because they no longer have the mandate. [In fact one of the CBO's most serious miscalculations in 2012 was underestimating the number who would refuse to buy in spite of the mandate, so it's not likely they're overestimating the number who will refuse without it.]

They haven't exactly been accurate in the past on the number that they indicated would be buying insurance under Obamacare. [Most of the people who will lose coverage under "AHCA"—60% or 14 million—wouldn't have been buying insurance anyway but receiving Medicaid.] We don't think they're necessarily going to be accurate in this case, so we're not going to pay a lot of attention to that part.

The CBO failed in 2010 to predict that Justice Roberts and his minions would unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act permitting Republican governors and state legislatures to refuse to expand their Medicaid programs to cover tens of millions of lower middle-income citizens. In the revised forecast of 2012, they did not at all fail to predict how many people would be buying insurance up until 2016, when the effects of congressional sabotage and wingnut propaganda began to take a serious toll on the growth of the individual market Exchange policies; but the overall coverage numbers remained pretty accurate all the same, as Republican states found their voters didn't mind getting some of that free money and many of them expanded Medicaid after all.

If you discount their inability to anticipate the legislative terrorism of a nihilist party in a desperate hurry to destroy the thing before the majority manages to vote them out of office, they did pretty well, and definitely better than anybody else. They may not "have the best reputation" but they should, because they did the best job. NPR shouldn't have let that fool on the air if they weren't prepared to correct his lies.

Required Reading

Rafflesia in Sabah, East Malaysia.

Why I Hate the New York Times, the Rafflesia of media-criticism blogging as I call it, after the Southeast Asian jungle flower that produces its huge and spectacular single bloom once every ten years or so, has just shown up with four months of material, and just as the Rafflesia smells like a corpse, the piece is as funny as hell, if you read it with attention: "How to Resist Trump" as the writers of the Times conceive it.

For instance, by not marching too much, the way the women did at the beginning of the regime:

Those ladies meant well, but they didn’t know what they were doing. “This movement focuses on the wrong issues…. Marchers…were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear.” That was their first mistake, according to known marching tactics expert David Brooks: Never march in a framework in which the central issues are clear. 

Or by being civil:

Alienation of affectations

Of course four-star sheriff Clarke, with his Soviet-style chestful of fake medals and  murderous record as a jail manager, is literally a worse person than Brooks in most ways. Image via Wonkette.

BREAKING: We have a David Brooks Plagiarism Watch situation ("The Alienated Mind"), where former New York Times columnist David Brooks appears, not for the first time, to be committing the same infraction Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke just got busted for.

Paragraph 4:

Alienation, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote, is a “state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

Paragraph 6:

As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age, “Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Yuval Levin, "Conservatism in an Age of Alienation"

“Alienated” need not be a putrid, Marxist designation. The great twentieth-century sociologist Robert Nisbet defined ­alienation as “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” This is precisely how Trump and many of his most vocal supporters frequently spoke about America over the past year.

What Clarke was busted for being, as you'll recall, that he'd lifted 47 passages from other writers without crediting them (in his 2013 master's thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School), even though he did credit the authors for other passages cited elsewhere in the thesis, which he seemed to think made it all OK: "only someone with a political agenda would say this is plagiarism," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but it seems unlikely that the Naval Postgraduate School ethics guidelines were composed with a political agenda). This is precisely what Brooks does when he presents the Nisbet quote early in the column as if he'd picked it up directly out of Nisbet's 1953 The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom and then, a bit later, cites the source he actually got it from, as if turning spontaneously from the Nisbet book to Levin's article. We've seen Brooks doing this before.