Writes Frank Bruni, in the NYT.
What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is: I'm not going to let Trump play me... and yet I just can't resist.
Bruni resolved not to get overly excited, so he's got his loophole. He's sticking with his resolve, but he still can get excited... whenever excitement is appropriate. He's not overly excited. Just the right amount of excited.
Me, I am far more deeply resolved not to let Trump rhetoric excite me. I am a cool and distant observer. To me, the things he says are merely bloggable or not bloggable. I listen to Trump and to the people he plays — one way or another. I'm not one of the many Americans "struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era." How can you struggle to find calm? To struggle is to be uncalm. How can calmness come in scraps?
Back to Bruni and skipping into the middle of things:
If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results? The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one....
Ha ha, I skimmed over the context and, for an instant, I couldn't tell which side was which. Either side, losing, will go nuts looking for some way out, won't they? I lived through the Wisconsin uprising of 2011.
But, of course, I know what I'm reading, what side Bruni is on, and that the general rule in politics is — as we say in Wisconsin — "All the assholes are over on the other side."
Posts
71 comments:
Oh, go bite a pillow, Frank.
If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard
It's bigger than that, I think. "Digging the country's graveyard" implies that it's an idea problem - don't let the communists/fascists win! But the problem is not - or not just - the other side's ideas. The problem is tactics. Many on the left are absolutely convinced that, despite all the evidence that violence tends to come from their side, the right is going to - what is the infinitive form of "insurrection"? Going to insurrect their way into power, and many on the right are convinced, based on a lot of strong if circumstantial and statistical evidence, that the left just doesn't "do" real elections any more.
If the Democrat side would have made even a token effort to show me, in 2020, the security measures that they claimed without evidence made that election so "free and fair," I would be more inclined to believe that this upcoming election might only have usual levels of fraud and interference. But... what we got instead was "How dare you, Deniahhh!" followed by the Twitter files, the Facebook files, the whistleblowers, the lawsuits dismissed on procedural grounds without examining evidence, the documented destruction of said evidence...
I'm still open to being convinced, for some reason. Oh, I'm not open to being convinced that Trump is Hitler - that's just stupid. But I am willing to be convinced that high election integrity is important to Democrats. I will not, however, hold my breath or stand on a hot stove waiting for them to produce their proof of the proposition.
I someday hope to live through an election that isn't the most important election of my lifetime......I don't think my life was radically different under Obama than it was under Bush. Ditto with the change from Obama to Trump (exclusive of Covid) to Biden....Some of Trump's rhetoric warms the cockles of my heart but inflames other cockles, and life goes on. Ditto in reverse with Biden. I do think, however, that there's an outside chance the VP Harris may find some way to irreparably screw the whole thing up. Look what President Gay was able to do to Harvard in less than a year.
"What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is:"
I'm a complete intellectual zero. I haven't had an idea in my entire life, I'm bone ignorant, wildly overpaid, and if people knew the disgusting things I did to get this job and continue to do in order to keep it, they would set me on fire and throw me in the East River. But if you want to get paid eight or nine thousand times what you are worth, at this grotesque parody of a newspaper, you have to scribble some noxious slant on the lie of the week and e-mail it in to your "editor" fairly regularly. So here it is, some more teeth-gnashing about Donald Trump, a man who couldn't be bothered to piss on me, much though I would enjoy it.
"struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era."
"...I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear ..."
So "Donald Trump’s overexcited utterances" are cause for a 24-hour-a-day panic attack, but Joe Biden's steady spate of lies, attacks on half the electorate, and incoherent blatherings are okey-doke?
How can calmness come in scraps?
When you’re the guy that’s supposed to be reviewing restaurants…
In South Korea they have their own version of Trump. Like a businessman he just wants to get along with other countries and has a distaste for war. Of course he has been relentlessly attacked by the media and a guy walked up to him in a crowd and stabbed him in the neck.
The people in control fear democracy and they perceive the stakes as too high to trust the voters, so since the first step when you think that you have to do something that the normies won’t like is to accuse the other side of doing it, so that the normies get confused, they claim to be protecting democracy from some inchoate threat, knowing that the normies won’t think it through, since that is too much work.
It’s based on the old adage that it’s far easier to fool someone than to convince them that they have been fooled, and as soon as they accept your accusation as true, they have a personal stake in defending it and become complicit. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you gadfly. Oh, that’s not fair, there are so many here who fit that description.
If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard, how do they accept and respect the results?
Nearly two years after the 2016 election, two out of three Democrats told a YouGov poll they believed Russia hacked the *election results* and switched Clinton votes to Trump. Democrats, led by Bruni's employer, prodded Americans to not accept and respect the results.
Bruni's understands his readers won't mind overlooking that fact. It's mutual delusion.
He's right, of course, that a nation in which issues are not resolved through the political process is not governable. Right now, that's us.
"Oh, go bite a pillow, Frank."
One made by Mike Lindell.
BTW, stop calling them communists, no way are they going to take away the wealth of their donors. They are fascists, using the money and power of tech oligarchs combined with the power of government to power a one party regime. It’s textbook fascism. Communism is not a threat, it’s all but dead, that’s why they love it when we misidentify the actual threat in this way. J6 was a replay of the Reichstag Fire, the Cyber Threat Intelligence League uses Nazi propaganda techniques. One good thing about communists is that they know fascism when they see it and they see it in the Democrats.
Jupiter has them sussed.
"...I am a cool and distant observer..."
Cruel neutrality. Which, as a fragment of language, is fascinating. There's a strong tension between the two words: if one is neutral, can one afford to be cruel? Is one being called cruel by others, because one has taken a neutral position? For "cruelty" to mean anything, doesn't it mean doing something that is NOT neutral? Doesn't this phrase claim a privileged position to judge everything else, which is tainted by being in favor of, or against, whatever is under consideration?
We could go on.
"The ungovernable"
Remember when Obama was president and he tried to float the idea that maybe America was just ungovernable?
The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one....
The problem is people have lived through Trump's first term.
And they prefer it to Biden's.
If you step away from cable news, it really isn't an anxious era.
2024 is and epic election. I can right the wrong of the 2020 voter fraud which installed Biden.
If it is not corrected, you and your kids and your grandkids will just be living in a pretend democracy. An entirely different country than the one you think you're living in.
And things will get worse.
"Like many other Americans struggling to find scraps of calm and slivers of hope in this anxious era..."
Left out of this is the main cause of this "anxious era", Biden and his handlers...
If Bruni is looking for scraps of calm in the Biden era, I suggest he spend a few evenings hiking on the southern border. Maybe south of Tucson. If that doesn't calm your heart nothing will.
If someone wanted to have become an authoritarian dictator, 2020 was the year to pull it off. And who was President then?
Don't we all have some suspicion what Hillary would have done in 2020 regarding the elections in the face of an unprecedented epidemic? We lucked out with the guy the smart people absolutely hated.
Trump's America will have room for you Frank.
"a governable and an ungovernable America"
Governable, as in, progs rule?
Hey, Frank which is more governable, California or Florida?
Owen,
As I see it, cruel neutrality means that the neutrality hurts. I am not leaning one way or the other for your comfort.
I don't care about personalties, or loose rhetoric, or which party panders the more.
What I want is someone who will generate leadership and policies that will address our government's spending problem. (And, it's NOT a revenue problem. It's SPENDING!)
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-debt-hits-record-34001-trillion
closer to home..
Letter to President Biden
President Joe Biden’s migration has flooded almost 1,000 poor Latino migrants into the poor college town of Whitewater, Wisconsin, according to a plea by the city’s police department.
“Their arrival has put great strains on our existing resources, ” says the letter to Biden by the city manager and police chief of the 15,000-person city...
Finally, our law enforcement staff have responded to a number of serious crimes linked to immigrants in some manner including the death of an infant child, multiple sexual assaults, and a kidnapping.
Whitewater Police officials confirmed they had documented nearly $250,000 was funneled through the City of Whitewater back to drug cartels over a four-month period.
...a follow-up to my prior:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/the-federal-debt-is-even-worse-than-it-looks/ar-AA1moq80
NYeT, never, for a JournoListic free life style without the daily handmade tale.
Ann Althouse said...
Owen,
As I see it, cruel neutrality means that the neutrality hurts. I am not leaning one way or the other for your comfort.
--------
Shorter ann:
Politics is so confusing, like football!
I just don't get it at all, don't bother trying to educate me...
I'll just wait until next November walking to the chruch where I vote hoping God will send me a sign, or I'll have a deep feeling about what to do... Maybe meade will influence me. Maybe I won't vote but just like the social idea of going in and doing my duty, even if I turn in an incomplete ballot.
Girl brain... this stuff is sooo hard. It's not like remembering dylan lyrics from days long past, or getting extra help from my husband and sons on my work. Oh, won't SOMEbody tell me what to think???
You so silly, annie.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
Owen,
As I see it, cruel neutrality means that the neutrality hurts
-------
Hurts who?
It hurts you to think without bias, huh? You're really admitting it?
It never occurred to me before now; Althouse has a blog topic tag for "the Wisconsin protests", but no tag for "January 6, 2021."
Althouse (rightly, in my view) gained something of a national blogging reputation for her work in blogging Wisconsin and Madison political cultures in the wake of the 2010 election. Not that she didn't deserve praise for other blogging work at the time; but "the Wisconsin protests" recieved some of her most incisive critical analysis. Not so much cruel neutrality in that. I confess I was attracted by the fact that I agreed with her so much at that time.
Nearly five years of Trumpism left Althouse in a remarkably different status as to the "January 6 U.S. Capitol protest."
I did some looking, for a "January 6" tag before posting this comment. If I am mistaken and there is such a tag, I apologize. But what my search for a tag revealed (reading ten or twelve old posts on the subject) was just how weirdly detached Althouse has been from January 6 in comparison to "the Wisconsin protests." It's not an unfair comparison; it is the very comparison Althouse makes herself in this post.
Perhaps Althouse could explain the use and meaning of her tag, "the Trump resistance," which seems to be her go-to tag for January 6 subjects. It looks to me as though Althouse generally regards the import of 1/6/21 as revolving mostly around media criticism of Donald Trump; that January 6 is just another point being used to attack Trump personally. And if I'm right about that, that is an amazing thing.
If Trump wins, I think Frank Bruni should take up anorexia as a hobby.
I live in a gentrified area of Dt. Louis city but I frequent a walgreens on the border of gentrification and a large public housing project. In the days leading up to the 2020 election they had placed plywood over all the windows. A couple of days after the election when it was clear Biden was going to win i was waiting in line when a black lady in front of me asked the black clerk why they had plywood on the windows. The clerk said they did it for the election but since Biden was going to win they were planning to take them down. That should tell you everything you need to know about which side is civil and which side is bullshit.
'If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard...'
It's not about thinking the grave is being dug, it's seeing it everyday with my own eyes.
Don't these 'intellectual' liberal fucks get out? Do they shop? Do they pay car insurance? Do they know anyone who lives near our border?
This country as we knew it is dying. Unfortunately, many on the left see this as a good thing, and welcome our slide into a socialist police state...
Delta house really turned to be less ghan met the eye
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/01/03/nyts-mara-gay-rights-racist-claudine-gay-attacks-targeted-diversity/
Sheesh! It's January 3rd and we've already seen a year's worth of crap logic and paranoia from the left. These guys will be curled up in the fetal position by Super Tuesday.
The art of winning elections is to differentiate what you say from what people will hear. Trump says all manner of obnoxious things. Not all voters hear it the same way.
Gusty Winds said...
2024 is and [sic]epic election. I can right the wrong of the 2020 voter fraud which installed Biden...
Run on that in 2024. Run every Republican candidate on a platform of, "2020 was stolen from Trump." I simply cannot wait to get in the grille of every GOP general election candidate this year and demand detailed answers about how the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump. Let's debate it. Let's argue the details. I have a full year's worth of questions.
And not just for nominated, running GOP candidates. I want to pursue the "stolen" election claim with every other leading Republican who may not be running. Mitch McConnell; John Thune; John Barrosso (who actually is running in 2024 to a guaranteed win in Wyoming); GOP Governors Mike DeWine, Chris Sununu, Brian Kemp, Kim Reynolds, Doug Burgum, Spencer Cox; former Trump Cabinet Members Bill Barr, Mark Esper, Eugene Scalia, Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin; former Whote House Chiefs of Staff John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney and (under oath) Mark Meadows; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs; Michigan State Senator Ed McBroom, and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
And most of all, every Republican running in every closely contested state and every contested House race.
motorrad said...
I live in a gentrified area of Dt. Louis city but I frequent a walgreens on the border of gentrification and a large public housing project. In the days leading up to the 2020 election they had placed plywood over all the windows. A couple of days after the election when it was clear Biden was going to win i was waiting in line when a black lady in front of me asked the black clerk why they had plywood on the windows. The clerk said they did it for the election but since Biden was going to win they were planning to take them down. That should tell you everything you need to know about which side is civil and which side is bullshit.
1/3/24, 11:20 AM
Exactly!!
Jamie
If the Democrat side would have made even a token effort to show me, in 2020, the security measures that they claimed without evidence made that election so "free and fair,"...
If the Democrats had made even a token effort to treat Trump as a legitimately elected President in 2016 we wouldn't be where we are today even with Trump losing in 2020.
No "civility bullshit" tag?
Molly Ball’s Time Magazine article about the “fortified” election says that the left was ready to flood the streets on election night if Trump was winning. They’ll be ready again in 2024. Expect rioting if any Republican wins.
Pretty cool how NYT's writers can type while wringing their hands.
I can get "overly excited" about people who get alarmed about Trump being reelected. Really? That worries these ridiculous people and not the state of...well, everything? Our schools and universities have produced a new Hitler youth as just one major example, but sure, Trump is scary. Ridiculous, brain numbed people who totally deserve another Trump term.
Chuck bleated: I did some looking, for a "January 6" tag before posting this comment... how weirdly detached Althouse has been from January 6 in comparison to "the Wisconsin protests."
Before praising you for how special you are for "doing some looking," let's address your weird fixation on J6 and Althouse's interest in "the Wisconsin protests." First of all, she lives in Madison, site of the WI protests and she and Meade did original reporting from there. This unruly riot actually did interrupt the orderly process in the State Capitol. They barred entry illegally but in keeping with the Baltimore protocols, were "given room to riot." In other words they were indulged by the ones in charge. Second, she was not present in DC on J6 and therefore did no original reporting on that mild disturbance. Third, a purely speculative premise of mine that since no official proceedings were interrupted, and the votes to certify the election happened more or less as scheduled, there was no real comparison to the Madison takeover. That would explain why Trump resistance might just be the most apt tab, since people that day were simply using their Constitutional Right to voice displeasure with their Government: seek redress. And they did it "mostly peacefully," by the standards set in 2020.
But now we know so much more than she did when she wisely refrained (assuming you are correct) from generating a J6 tag. Now we know that almost all the violence was urged on and mostly committed by two groups: the undercover FBI assisted by their informants AND the DC Police who gassed people willy nilly trying to foment more violence, after they shot an unarmed veteran for no reason at all. Being from the wierd state of Michigan even you should recognize a pattern by now: undercover FBI and their informants ginning up a plot, trying to pin it on Trump supporters. Yes, the same FBI SAIC that did this in MI went straight to DC to organize the J6 "event." Like the MI prosecutions have mostly fallen apart, we see the overreach by rabid Trump-haters (like you) starting to unravel vis-a-vis J6 "prosecutions," especially the misuse of the Enron "destroying physical evidence" law to claim protesters "obstructed an official proceeding" under that statute. A certain losing proposition. Please review the arguments at stake in the upcoming SCOTUS hearing for Fischer before embarrassing yourself further on this point.
Every step of the way we've told you Crazy Jack is in way over his head and will be set back. And looky here, he is enduring delays already and about to suffer two SCOTUS losses in the very near future. After getting a solid NO from them on fast-tracking the immunity issue, which we also predicted here. Which will also undermine the Atlanta jihad as well. Oh my! In your face.
"I listen to Trump and to the people he plays..."
Well stated, Madam Host! Trump is a bombastic loudmouth, but he knows what buttons to push to get his opponents to reveal how deranged they actually are, which is why much of what he does is so "bloggable".
Of course, the switch from advertising based journalism to subscriber based journalism has had a big part to play in all of this, since readers have become much more siloed as a result. Bruni would probably have to write more balanced pieces back in the days before the siloing happened. Now he just has to assuage the fears of the readership of the NYT. And their fears are growing because they didn't realize that playing unfairly against Mr. Trump by making political disagreements into legal matters -- especially when the last two Democratic nominees did the same as Trump with classified documents but to no comparable legal implications -- would result in the backlash that it has had.
It was the left in Wisconsin that broke the unspoken code and refused to accept the election of Scott Walker. Our hostess at the time felt this was just fine and dandy, minimizing the State Capitol takeover by the Teacher's Union and the other leftist insurrectionists.
"As I see it, cruel neutrality means that the neutrality hurts. I am not leaning one way or the other for your comfort."
It all depends upon whose ox suffers mild discomfort.
Blogger MartyH said...
Molly Ball’s Time Magazine article about the “fortified” election says that the left was ready to flood the streets on election night if Trump was winning. They’ll be ready again in 2024. Expect rioting if any Republican wins.
I was in Chicago for the 2016 election, staying right across from the Trump Tower. I partied hearty in the main ballroom of Trump Tower election night. The streets were peaceful Tuesday night.
Wednesday night, coming back to the hotel about 6, our cab could not get within 4 blocks of our hotel. The police had cleared a narrow lane for people to get to the hotel but we were basically in the midst of the mob and had a cop waling with us. (And my son in back of me chanting "Keep quiet, papi, keep quiet papi...." all the way.)
Not violent but very messy. My son went out about 3 in the morning after the mob had gone and there was grafiti and trash everywhere.
John Henry
Owen. Dave.
The story is presented to see how YOU react to it. To see what you have to contribute about the subject. NOT what you think our hostess is thinking.
That's irrelevent to the blog.
Brüno said…
“If the people on the losing side of an election believe that those on the winning side are digging the country’s graveyard”
That should be digging the country’s grave, not graveyard. The graveyard is where the Democrats go to pad their votes.
"The final battle we may be witnessing is between a governable and an ungovernable America, a faintly civil and a floridly uncivil one...."
Which side spent all of Trump's presidency protesting, rioting and burning things down and which side spent all of Biden's presidency not doing any of those things?
"What I hear him saying in those opening lines to his column is:"
Perhaps using your eyes to read instead of your ears to hear is similar to "struggling to stay calm"
Decades ago in a conversation on this topic, I summarized the difference between successful and unsuccessful democratic elections as "successful: the losing side does not take to the hills with guns."
The four boxes: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. I think we are on the border between jury and ammo, if it has not in fact been crossed already.
+1 Rusty @2:58
What concerns me is one side is definitely behaving as if this is a final battle and getting ahead of doing what they fear the other side might do to them. People tend to ignore warning signs like this.
With a brain trust as luminous as, not just Frank Bruni, but also Charles Blow, Jamelle Bouie, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and the ineffable Michelle Goldberg, how could the NYT ever be on the wrong side of history? As soon as I see any of those bylines, I salivate at the intellectual nourishment coming my way.
Let’s see, we had one term of Trump, the economy rose, peace broke out, the border was slightly less chaotic. How is a reprise so scary? Oh, I know of course: Hitler. Hitler is always stronger in his second term.
"Many on the left are absolutely convinced that, despite all the evidence that violence tends to come from their side...."
What and where is "all the evidence that violence tends to come from" the left? Who are you even referring to by the term "left?"
"If the Democrat side would have made even a token effort to show me, in 2020, the security measures that they claimed without evidence made that election so "free and fair," I would be more inclined to believe that this upcoming election might only have usual levels of fraud and interference."
More to the point, where is the evidence the 2020 election was rigged such that the election was not "free and fair," (i.e., that there was more than "usual levels of fraud and interference"), or that the candidate deemed the winner was not, in fact the winner?
"If the Democrats had made even a token effort to treat Trump as a legitimately elected President in 2016 we wouldn't be where we are today even with Trump losing in 2020."
How did they not treat him as a legitimately elected President? Ms. Clinton conceded the election to Trump, (she did receive more popular votes than Trump, but Presidents are not elected by the popular vote), and there was no attempt by the Dems to disrupt or prevent Trump's inauguration as President. (A fair number of Democrats in Congress refused to attend Trump's inaugural, but that was not a disruption to or an attempt to prevent the inaugural.)
This thread should have stopped after Iman's initial comment.
"How is a reprise so scary?"
Democrats are ideologically opposed to a rising economy, peace and less border chaos being credited to their opponents.
So Cook doesn’t recall the thousands of public appearances by Mrs. Clinton or Ms. Pelosi and many other elected Democrats where they explicitly said “Trump is not a legitimate president” or “his presidency is illegitimate”? Then YOU weren’t paying attention. They said it clearly and said it often. Unlike the Right the Left puts more emphasis on things said than going through the ceremonial motions pretending Trump is president. But even then Pelosi made quite a show of shredding his State of the Union speech on live TV to reinforce the antidemocratic message she had given voice to. Clinton tried to get “unfaithful Electors” to change their vote in the EC. Surely you remember that! Later in 2020 they claimed Trump doing the exact same thing was treasonous and “overturning an election.”
We haven’t forgotten Cookie. There’s plenty more examples if you actually care to examine the record instead of spreading misinformation.
Leland said...
+1 Rusty @2:58
"What concerns me is one side is definitely behaving as if this is a final battle and getting ahead of doing what they fear the other side might do to them. People tend to ignore warning signs like this."
I keep hoping things don't go that way, but the pawl keeps dropping another notch. We are a very patient and forbearing bunch.
Ann Althouse said:
"As I see it, cruel neutrality means that the neutrality hurts. I am not leaning one way or the other for your comfort."
Sorry, I'm with Owen. The idea of characterizing "neutrality" as "cruel" with the purpose of inflicting "hurt" or discomfort seems to be either a non sequitur or a mere linguistic affectation.
If Biden loses, riots in the streets.
If Trump loses, no riots.
All the violence and craziness is on the Left.
I sure hope Vivek wins Iowa.
I told the Omaha Public Power District ($2b in revenue) about cruel neutrality. It went right over their heads or in one ear and out the other. OPPD wants to borrow and spend $2b to lower the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere below 0.045%. The Chairman said I was being disrespectful.
Robert Cook. In DC THE NIGHT OF trump’s inauguration I peered out the window of the Capitol Hilton to observe maurading gangs smashing shop windows and demolishing some poor working man’s limo. People were wandering all over the district fucking things up. They were not the accepting bunch you believe accepted Trump’s win. Nor were the keyboard #resistance that sprang into action nor the sickening women wearing caging hats.
I'd rather see some neutral cruelty.
"Sorry, I'm with Owen. The idea of characterizing "neutrality" as "cruel" with the purpose of inflicting "hurt" or discomfort seems to be either a non sequitur or a mere linguistic affectation"
She's trying to get you to think. To think about the subject that interests her.
Forcing people to think is often hurtful. In my case I think she has exhibited enormous patience.
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