General Priapic Lewdness

From a profile of Silvio Berlusconi from 2009, actually, by our new friend Michael Wolff for Vanity Fair. Illustration by Darrow.

David F. Brooks ("The Chaos After Trump") is suggesting we take a look at the Italian election results for clues as to what's going to happen to the US after the Trumpery goes away, presumably because Trump is the same person as Silvio Berlusconi:

What happens to American politics after Donald Trump? Do we snap back to normal or do things spin ever more widely out of control?

The best indicator we have so far is the example of Italy since the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. And the main lesson there is that once the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to re-establish them. Instead, you get this cycle of ever more extreme behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider. The political center collapses, the normal left/right political categories cease to apply and you see the rise of strange new political groups that are crazier than anything you could have imagined before.

Which is as good an opportunity as any to note that Trump is not, in fact, the same person as Silvio  Berlusconi. Berlusconi is, for one thing, extremely rich—his family ranks fifth on the Forbes list for Italy, with assets of $7 billion—though not as rich as he was when he was prime minister, when he often ranked first, because he was very good at using his political situation (originally as friend of the "Socialist" prime minister Bettino Craxi, later as "center-right" prime minister himself) to build up his fortune (it's incredible what small-ball Trump plays in this respect, with his tummler act at Mar-a-Lago and selling of presidential seal tchotchkes—no, I don't believe he's a billionaire). He fathered a media empire (Trump was begotten by one). He managed to avoid getting convicted for any of his crimes until he was too old to go to jail, by Italian law, which was clearly a major goal of his political career. He has surrounded himself at certain times of his life with a kind of harem of lovely young women ready to satisfy his every whim. He never felt a need to call up the newspapers to assure the public that his potency was undiminished, as Trump has done since he was in his forties. He's still beautifully dressed, slim, and cheerful at 81. His hair looks real, though I'm sure it isn't.

Berlusconi has been a shameless crook, deeply dishonest politician, bad prime minister, and monstrous narcissist, but never less than competent in his chosen way of life. Berlusconi is who Trump tries unsuccessfully to play on TV.  Berlusconi is who Trump is in his dreams.

For the Record: Nunberg but the Brave

Sam Nunberg, via blogfriend Featguth.

Mr. Pierce, reacting to that subpoena from Mueller to some mook demanding all his correspondence since November 2015 with practically everybody on the Trump campaign including the emperor-to-be himself, thought it was interesting that Pence wasn't on the list:

Maybe Pence wasn't on the list because it was his subpoena. Just a thought.

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 5, 2018

Obviously I was wrong, it was just old Trump campaign flunky Sam Nunberg's subpoena apparently, perhaps the spur to today's interesting meltdown.

I think Nunberg has been doing this stuff for a while, as a matter of fact. In November, just after Manafort's first indictment (only 12 counts, and not even any tax evasion! those were the days of innocence!), he was calling up Vanity Fair:

 “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

He was also the one who made up the story about Chris Christie being commissioned to purchase the president's McDonald's order (two Big Macs, two Filets-o'-Fish, and a Diet Coke). That was Nunberg's job, and once the campaign marooned him in a McDonald's somewhere because he was taking too long. Now he's starting to get his revenge. Or something. Calling up Jake Tapper and Katie Tur and Ari Melber and telling them how Carter Page is a scumbag (oh and also he definitely colluded with Russia), and Donald Trump "probably did something", at least that's what heard from Bannon (and incidentally knew about the Veselnitskaya meeting a week before it took place, were you interested to hear that?).

So the long and short of it is that I'm probably going to end up watching TV all night. Some of the day's Tweets below the fold:

Literary Corner: Assembled from the Unsaid

Lnadscape by Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), from somebody's Pinterest again.

Poetry about President Trump, as opposed to poetry by him, is inevitably a kind of nature poetry, a study in rapid atmospheric shifts. Here, the Secretary of Commerce, one of the president's Palm Beach neighbors and a former owner of the Bank of Cyprus, tries to capture for press reporters the feeling of wondering whether the United States will be plunged next week into a trade war with some of its closest allies (Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates, one of the main US sources for aluminum, I'll bet you didn't know that, on which a 10% import duty will be imposed, if it is raised at all, unless Trump decides to make it some other number, or make an exception for the UAE in recognition of their generous support for his son-in-law in this time of financial troubles, unless he wants to punish them for doing that because it's made him uncomfortable, or because they failed to cut him in), in delicate and mysterious brushstrokes in a tone that, as always seems to be the case with the Secretary, seems composed out of erasures, assembled from the unsaid.

Prophecy

by Wilbur Ross

Whatever his final
decision is is what
will happen. What he has
said he has said; if he
says something different,
it will be something
different. The president
has announced that this will
happen this week. I have no
reason to think otherwise.

(Text from NBC News)

Democratic senators wrote to Ross in February [2017] demanding that he disclose “the full extent of your connections to Russia”. Ross did not respond. The senators also lambasted the White House for refusing to provide answers to the questions before the vote confirming Ross.

Asked around that time whether Bank of Cyprus [of which Ross led the billion-dollar takeover from Dmitry Rybolovlev, another Palm Beach neighbor, in 2014] had any customers under US sanctions during his time there, Ross told CNN: “That’s a question that is very complicated to answer,” adding that he had never approved any such deals. [Guardian]

Trading Places

Via Indusrtrial Workers of the World.

I dared to address Loomis on this subject, for the first time since the TPP debacle, when he started suggesting that Democrats might be protesting against Trump's proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum for the wrong reason:

Does it strike you how etymologically bizarre that is, objecting to the way "liberals" "start" to defend "free trade"? I thought the simple problem with tariffs on solar cells and now iron and aluminum was that they'd clearly cost far more jobs than they saved, but.....

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 3, 2018

With the thought that whatever "liberal" has meant from the 1850s until now has some kind of connecting thread in it, like the idea that there's an intrinsic value in generosity and offering others latitude, whether it's in poor relief or encouraging people from other countries to try to sell stuff in yours (Hayekian liberalism or neoliberalism in the strict sense being about being generous and latitudinarian with yourself, and the hell with other people).

Face the Music

I want to post every instance of Fred Astaire playing the piano on camera. That's only the first amazing thing in this video, the other one being about how he doesn't dance when he's determined not to. Open thread for aficionados who can tell me what peculiar accent Ginger is speaking in and why.


This is a train of though that started with our friend Lance in a Twitter discussion of Dion Di Mucci, not exactly a discussion, but an objective correlative.

this wonderful video the camera keeps moving to blonde girl in the audience, at first cocerned and then delighted, as if to imply she's Sue ultimately it's all good https://t.co/fC3EH5UsgI

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 4, 2018

Labor stuff

300 of the 430 kids at Beckley Elementary qualify for free breakfast and lunch under federal law, and striking teachers are helping to make sure they get fed. Via Today.

The Federalist's David Harsanyi looking for an even bigger audience at National Review Online, à propos Janus vs. AFSCME, the case, for which the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments, involving the union's right to charge workers who are unwilling to join not dues, but a fraction of the dues listed as "agency fees", to cover the collective bargaining from which those workers have benefited, without contributing to the union's political activities, of which the plaintiff disapproves:

Among many significant problems with this arrangement, the most obvious is that it’s an assault on freedom of association. If there is another organization in American life that has a license to compel workers to participate in their nongovernmental organization simply to secure a job, I haven’t heard of it.

The prime bullshit there is that it isn't the union that compels employees to participate in this attenuated way, it's the agreement between the employer and the employees, who have democratically appointed the union to represent them. As a contract it's no different than the managing agent a coop building hires collecting a fee out of your maintenance checks. Or, if the employee status is so special and sacredly different from other relationships, the health insurance plan and if you're lucky the retirement plan your employer forces you to buy. If you're politically opposed to Blue Cross and that's all they've got to offer, you're stuck.

David Brooks wonders if he's wrong. Just kidding.

Clara Bow in William Wellman's Wings, 1927, via Blueiskewl.

Somewhat Shorter David Brooks, "How Progressives Win the Culture War", March 2 2018:

It's possible that I may have been wrong about guns. Well, of course not wrong exactly, I'm David F. Brooks, but right in a more complex and interesting way than I predicted, when I was reminding the supporters of moderate gun restrictions that they may have the majority of the population on their side but not the majority of state legislatures, and should therefore focus on identifying Republicans who might agree with you if you could just devote more time to making them feel better about themselves, rather than calling in radical tribalist organizations like Planned Parenthood and calling Senator Rubio a mass murderer, which only gets them upset.

I was right to say that this approach would get no legislation passed, but did not realize that it could succeed at a more profound level, by delegitimizing the opponents of progress on gun rights and, indeed, not just gun rights,  and making them unacceptable in polite society, which might lead not just to a ban on assault rifles but vast social changes.

Fits Not Worth Having

From an Italian-language production of the Leben des Galilei at the Teatro Della Pergola, Florence, October-December 2015.

Mr. Bret Stephens discussing "Fights Worth Having", on the heroic opposition to Donald Trump inside the Republican Party or hanging out on the porch:

NeverTrumpers haunt the conservative movement the way Polish or Czech dissident intellectuals such as Czeslaw Milosz and Vaclav Havel haunted that segment of Central European intelligentsia that made its peace with Stalinism after World War II.

I'd say more like Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács, on a number of counts. Mainly, Miłosz and Havel were ideologically opposed to the Communist system installed in their countries, and fled it (in the case of Miłosz, who escaped to the West in 1951) or fought it (in the case of Havel, a paramount leader in the struggle that overturned it almost 40 years later), whereas Brecht and Lukács, in their different ways, remained loyal to the idea that Communism can never fail, only be failed, and devoted their post-revolutionary lives to trying obliquely to encourage the system to be less stupid and embarrassing—and fought with each other, of course—in a way that might remind you of the movement conservatives trying to cope with the embarrassment of having acquired a vulgar and unpleasant Emperor.

Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

Old Ancestor, He Just Keep Rollin' Along

Dr. Franklin flying a kite with his friend Amos observing from the genius's knee, by Robert Lawson, via. It was hard to find a good one, too, amid the truly crappy stills and storyboards from the Disney cartoon.

Screenshot from today's Brooks, "A Generation Emerging from the Wreckage", just in case some editor in the retreating rear guard stumbles across this lost detail and puts it out of its misery:

Brooks reports, speaking of the young people he encountered on his Voyage into the Heart of Millenniality,

They looked at me like I was from Mars. 

And no wonder. They've probably never met anybody from one of those cultures where the ancestors are invisible actors living among us, working their mysterious will. Propitiate them, with offerings of burnt animal fat and alcohol! They'll build that promised land yet!

So what kind of moment is it?

New York Daily News, via Business Insider. May 2016.

A justified complaint from Steve:

If you write a news lede with a transparently false assertion like this, just quit your journalism job and go into PR. You're transmitting talking points, not the facts.https://t.co/DzlYnUxS5I pic.twitter.com/Yz50CMIfJ0

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 27, 2018

"Post-partisan moment" indeed!

But it's kind of interesting all the same, if it's anything at all. This new "Unite America" centrist-nonpartisan-unlabeled concoction is seemingly less oriented to getting itself onto the op-ed pages and more to getting onto the ballot than the usual run of such experiments, and there's something interesting about where it's active, in the first place: states where the Republican Party has been failing in some especially peculiar way, and who they're choosing to do something about it:

For the Record: Monday Outtakes

Via Malia Litman.

Spent a lot of time answering comments to the previous post, and working at the job they pay me for, and tweeting, naturally. Some of the last was fun:

Six GOP chairmen of key panels tell us they see little reason to dig into Trump family finances - or made no commitment to do so. They call it a fishing expedition, or something in Mueller’s purview. Ds say it’s essential to Russia probes. w/ @jeremyherb. https://t.co/U2G0h7RONe

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 26, 2018

Dear Mike Conaway,

Deutsche Bank is a nexus,

I believe there are people on HPSCI who have heard about this.https://t.co/e8xcdemM3g

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) February 26, 2018

More evidence that Deutsche has low standards: they kept loaning to Trump when no respectable large US bank would. https://t.co/odla5DlMlg

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) February 26, 2018

Schiff Memo update: Two conspiracies?

Doom Patrol 96 (June 1965). Via.

Following up on yesterday's post:

1. Marcy has spoken, and she doesn't think there's much new stuff for us to learn from the Schiff memo, except for the one thing, or set of things, about international man of mystery George Papadapoulos, the mook whose boasting with High Commissioner Downer in the Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016, reported by Downer to his government that July, launched the FBI's investigation of Trump campaign collusion with the (already known) Russian efforts to mess up the 2016 presidential election.

The question of what emails Joseph Mifsud and the Russians he introduced Papadopoulos to in April 2016 were talking about, the "thousands of emails" that were going to damage the Clinton campaign; Marcy is now convinced that, as I speculated in December, Papadopoulos wasn't told at all what they were, only that they could be helpful to Trump. He could have imagined it had some connection with the emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server in 2012 when she was leaving the State Department, which in the fantasies of rightwingers would have concealed all sorts of evidence of corruption, but we have no evidence that he did.

This allows me to go on assuming that the Russians were talking at that point about about the emails stolen from the Clinton campaign from John Podesta's computer, which the Fancy Bear team had just concluded with that March (as opposed to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails, which which was mostly from April and May), and which were ultimately published by WikiLeaks (more or less simultaneously with the revelation of the Trump Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing monologue) and weaponized into use as evidence (with material from the transcripts of Clinton's paid speechmaking of 2013-14) of Clinton's supposedly corrupt ties to the banking industry and generally evil neoliberal intentions, as a way to discourage people on the left from voting for her or voting at all.

For the Record: First Impressions on the Schiff Memo

As you know, the Democratic minority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence prepared a response mostly drafted by Rep. Schiff of California to the Republican majority's memo or Nunes Memo released unredacted and against strong objections from the intelligence community on February 2, but President Trump objected to the publication of the response until an unclassified version could be prepared.

That's out this afternoon, and I found myself live-tweeting some initial reactions, and thought I'd lay that out here in slightly better organized format than the one you'll see on Twitter proper, before smarter people get around to commenting on the thing:

Overwhelming overall how much more professionally produced the whole Schiff memo is than the Nunes memo to which it is a response. https://t.co/Cqr8g2DQNN

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

(1) One of the things redacted seems to be the Australian government, and exactly what the High Commissioner said.

(2) "Thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails" always means emails from Secretary of State's private server. But Russians never had any of them, did they? Weird. pic.twitter.com/ZqJpjAC2J1

— (((WaveOfEuropeanStyleSocialists))) (@Yastreblyansky) February 24, 2018

Literary Corner: Do shooters just want to have fun?

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic no, 110, 1971, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, via Wikipedia.

This quirky little piece flashes with odd insights and surreal pictures, like that of a bank where they have armed tellers and loan officers instead of security guards, or of a man so rich he owns everything in the plural, things like banks that people really do own, and things they don't, like schools, and might plan, "I'll do that thing with my schools that I do with my banks." Or of "hardened" schools, I realize he's not making that one up, but when the expression acquires Trump's voice it acquires the strangeness of its literal meaning, of schools in danger of melting or crumbling that need to be reinforced, stiffened, or they could disappear into the natural surroundings. Then it slips into imagining something darker, the mentality of what he's elsewhere called the "sicko shooter", the attacker against whom the banks and schools must be guarded.

They Live For Gun Free Zones

by Donald J. Trump

I

You'd need 100, 150 security guards... But you
could have concealed on the teachers.
I want my schools protected just
like I want my banks protected.

Aflame and Disordered: Supplement

As a point of comparison to Stephen Rose's picture of an "upper middle class" ballooning from 12% of the US population in 1979 to 30% in 2014, discussed this morning courtesy of Steven Pinker and David Brooks, I found a much more directly useful model from Pew Social Trends, 2015.

It shows an upper middle class (defined in terms of a three-person household earning from $126,000 to $188,000 a year) remaining steady in size at about 12% since at least 1981; an upper class growing substantially but still remaining tiny; a lower (under $31,000) and lower middle (under $42,000) class following a similar pattern on the other side, though involving half again as many people; and a middle class gradually shrinking into minority status.

Sounds like three quarters of the growth in Rose's "upper middle" came from people moving up around the $100K barrier but not far enough to make it into Rose's category, and the rest from a small minority getting up from $188K. Doesn't sound anything like the picture Brooks and Pinker like, of course.

Aflame and Disordered

From the Moment Magazine Great DNA Experiment of 2012, which tested the DNA of 15 prominent Jewish-American writers and found that they were literally within zero degrees of separation from one another, i.e. that not only were David Brooks and Steven Pinker third cousins, unbeknownst to each other, but also directly related to NPR's Robert Siegel, freakonomist Stephen Dubner, Esquire's A.J. Jacobs. neuroscientist and actress Miriam Bialik, law professor Alan Dershowitz, and more. I'm probably related myself to Pinker, whose ancestors seem to have hailed, like the Yastreblyanskys, from Kishinev/Chişinau.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Virtue of Radical Honesty", February 22 2018:

The virtue of radical honesty is that it is exemplified in the the new book (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)  by psychologist Steven Pinker, who is radically honest and also optimistic, in defiance of those who feel that, especially on campus, you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous rage. After all, tremendous economic progress has taken place in the world and in the United States since the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong and a third of American children lived in poverty. However he is wrong, because he's lying when he refers to himself as an Enlightenment man rather than as a scientific rationalist, and he only cites data that support his progressive hypothesis, refusing to look at where the real problems lie, which is in the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions, or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres. Still, I'm glad I said he was radically honest, because apparently we're related.

Brooks feels that you should go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity, and righteous sniffing. He's opposed to rage, though. On the relationship, see the illustration above.

The peculiar thing Brooks has been doing with his book report format is getting increasingly irritating, like a tic. As you might represent it with a general Shorter:

Neutrocracy

The famous castrato singer Senesino, with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and alto castrato Gaetano Berenstadt in Händel's Flavio (London, 1723), in a caricature by John Vanderbank. Wikimedia Commons.

So David Brooks was begging Twitter to come and kill him yesterday morning ("Respect First, Then Gun Control") advising, as his title implies, that "we" need to get "our" priorities straight, and trying to stop America's schoolchildren from getting shot up with semi-automatic rifles must come second to stopping America's rightwingers from feeling less than wholly admired. Old white sumbitches have feelings too! If you'd just show them some of that R-E-S-P-E-C-T, effete liberal elitists, they'd ban those AR-15s in a heartbeat!

And Twitter obliged, as you can imagine. Don't know anybody who hit the appropriate note better than this:

other Great David Brooks Columns Of History pic.twitter.com/CkEPABACg5

— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) February 20, 2018

Which Driftglass also felt obliged to reproduce, because what else is there to say, really? But I like mine, to tell the truth:

David Brooks, man of respect: "Cute kid you got there. Shame if anybody was to blow his head off." https://t.co/JYcUNXJZIu

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2018

For the Record: Who's Emotional and Uninformed?

Via EBL News.

Excerpted from the Twitter feed: I think I managed to bring some attention to an important point.

"Parkland students aren't credentialed to talk about the gun debate" is one of the worst takes of all time, especially when it comes from people who don't have very much relevant life experience themselves. pic.twitter.com/JVjckmoSLs

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 20, 2018

Actually these students are experts on something you know nothing about, which is what it feels like to have a lot of friends murdered one day out of the blue and to realize the authorities you trust are unable to protect you.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 20, 2018

What do we talk about when we talk about spreading distrust?

"I said NO PEPPERONI!"

Sometime in the fall of 2017, Russian television picked up an Onion-style story from a French satirical website according to which the Danish government had legalized animal brothels, that there was a place you could go in Copenhagen and pay to have sex with an animal, with a picture of a dog dressed as a prostitute, only in the Russian media it was presented as a true story, pingponging ultimately outside the country to Belarus and Georgia, according to my source, Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, a report from the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued January 10.

That story doesn't seem to have gone too far, but you never know. On November 2 2016, the equally Onion-esque story of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta running a child prostitution ring out of a DC pizzeria, piggybacked onto the FBI's startling announcement of State Department emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, which had blown up out of almost nowhere with a Facebook post not even mentioning pizza from one Carmen Katz—

"My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner's device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend's plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls. . . . We're talking an international child enslavement and sex ring."

—and through thousands of Twitter accounts, made it onto Alex Jones's Infowars show.

The folks from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, as recounted by Amanda Robb in Rolling Stone, which you totally have to read,